As a marketer, you’ve probably already established a funnel for your marketing efforts and have been drawing it on whiteboards for years. Many real estate businesses have structured their strategies around the funnel and it proved successful. Funnels have helped companies find customers, but overall they haven’t taken into consideration how they can help you grow. The funnel has recently been replaced by the flywheel in modern offices and sales floors. Adapting an inbound marketing strategy that utilizes the flywheel structure will help you attract, engage, and delight consumers, resulting in referrals and repeat sales. The flywheel keeps your business spinning.

The Marketing Flywheel Model

In learning about the flywheel itself, it’s easy to see how this new marketing structure helps businesses move away from a linear approach to measuring growth. Funnels lose momentum at the bottom, whereas the flywheel leverages it to continue spinning. Thinking about your business as a flywheel rather than a funnel allows you to make decisions and adjust your strategy with ease. The amount of energy contained within your flywheel depends on how fast you spin it, how much friction there is, and how big it is. The most successful companies adjust their strategies to address all three.

Customers had been almost an afterthought in the funnel model, but the flywheel places them front-and-center. Focusing on how you can make your customers successful increases the likelihood that they will relay their purchase success to prospective renters.

Attract, Engage, Delight

Using the flywheel and inbound marketing methodology, businesses can build a system that attracts, engages, and delights customers. Creating an amazing experience for customers can be done by applying more force and reducing friction to your flywheel and providing great service throughout the entire customer journey. The flywheel model encourages every team within an organization to attract, engage, and delight, providing a more holistic experience for anyone interacting with your business.

Attract — Attract potential renters with quality, useful content and eliminate barriers as they learn about your company.

Engage — Enable buyers to engage with you on their timeline and favorite channels. By tying sales incentives to customer success, not just conversion rates.

Delight — Delight customers by focusing on their success. Resources should be shifted to be more effectively distributed throughout the entire customer experience.

Marketing affects how quickly prospects move through your sales process. This motion affects how likely it is that prospects will be happy customers. Your support and service whether or not they go on to become promoters and advocates of your brand.

Decrease Friction in Your Flywheel

As you apply force to your flywheel, you need to ensure there is nothing opposing it, which means you must eliminate friction from your business strategy. Look at how your teams are structured, why customers are churning, and where renters get stuck in the buyer’s journey. Turn your gaze inward in order to eliminate speed bumps that add friction to your flywheel. Look at your pricing – do you have confusing fees? How do you connect with prospects? Does your brand show up where, when, and how they want, or are consumers forced to follow your process? Decreasing friction helps you increase the speed of your flywheel and helps you create brand advocates who will promote your business.

Don’t Miss Out on Long-Term Growth

Use the flywheel methodology to connect with your customers along their journey and build long-lasting relationships that encourage successful interactions with your brand. Flywheels were designed to build momentum and build off of the energy it took to acquire a new customer. Rather than expend energy in a funnel and start from scratch with each new customer, a switch to the flywheel model will assist you in attracting, engaging, and delighting customers now and into the future. Inbound marketing structured by the flywheel model helps eliminate missed opportunities for long-term growth and efficiency.

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