Digital marketing thought leader HubSpot has always been a step ahead of the game. Their free inbound marketing certificate has become a staple in the marketing world and millions of marketers, executives, and small business owners rely on the company’s wealth of information in their blog series. But now HubSpot is looking to go from making waves to completely turning the tide with their new Service Hub, better known as HubSpot Flywheel.
Replacing the Traditional Sales Funnel with the Hubspot Flywheel Model
Even after making a major shift from traditional to digital marketing, marketers have typically relied on the sales funnel model when putting campaigns together and forming marketing strategies. The four steps of the sales funnel are awareness, interest, decision, and action. It easier for marketers to make each step more well-defined in the past when people relied on advertising to find out about a business or product.
Come the digital age, people come in at different parts of the sales funnel and the ways that they learn about brands can be totally independent of just one campaign. So, HubSpot has proposed ditching the sales funnel in favor of their “flywheel” model that isn’t based solely on levels of awareness, but on street cred.
HubSpot decided to shift to this outside-in flywheel approach after discovering that word of mouth buzz and recommendations from happy HubSpot users were the marketing platform’s largest growth drivers. The sales funnel model may still hold intrinsic value in very basic marketing strategies, but the world has changed since it was first created and deployed. Because the means are there to do so, people do much more research on a product before buying it compared to the past. They’ll definitely consult your proprietary content but also seek out impartial reviews and feedback from trusted publications, YouTubers, and other places around the web. Traditional advertising and PR still has a place in that process but most importantly, people will also seek out friends, family members, colleagues, and influencers they trust to learn more about a product or service.
HubSpot Flywheel uses elements of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) which has also been in use for a long time like the sales funnel, and NPS also one of the evaluation tools that can utilized within Service Hub. Thus, HubSpot’s new model begins with strangers and prospects as the “attract” spokes on the outside of the flywheel then goes inward to customers who are engaged. The very core of the flywheel that propels it are promoters, who are delighted. By placing more emphasis on working with users who are extremely happy and engaged opposed to simply raising awareness, the flywheel approach accomplishes both of those things. The big difference between the old and new model is that the person who’s now aware of the brand can see that street cred that doesn’t resemble a blatant marketing effort.
Powering Customer Happiness with Constant Monitoring and Improvement of the Customer Experience
No business is ever going to make everybody happy. It’s just impossible. But in an age where negative reviews often drown out the positive ones because people feel more inclined to talk about their experience if it was bad rather than if it was good? That makes two things incredibly crucial: finding and elevating the voices of your most satisfied users then making active use of them, and examining the negative feedback to determine how you can improve your customer experience.
Customer experience, or CX, is the intersection of an organization’s technological architecture and their marketing strategy. This includes everything from user experience design in webpages and mobile apps as well as contact infrastructure. That can sound incredibly daunting for marketers with limited resources: but because solopreneurs and small businesses are the heartbeat of HubSpot’s user base, Service Hub is providing more than just a diagram for a flywheel. Evaluating the customer experience is a challenge for organizations of all sizes, usually in that small businesses can’t prioritize it while larger organizations are more hesitant to put additional resources into this area if revenues seem healthy enough. Service Hub’s aim is to provide scalable tools such as surveys, NPS, affiliate programs, and other means to work with happily engaged customers in a simplified “plug and play” manner. More features are expected to be added over time such as chatbots coming later in 2018.
While customer experience is just part of the picture when it comes to loyal customers who are more than happy to promote your business, ongoing monitoring of the customer experience is critical to improving it and keeping those engagement rates up. Something as simple as a chatbot that can consult a knowledge base can save so much time in the long run and also result in happier customers.
Time will tell how many more businesses will adopt the flywheel approach, but HubSpot’s revolution has just begun and you’ll need a writer who can assist with both chatbot scripts and knowledge base construction if you’re going the chatbot route.
Rachel P is an indie game developer, writer, and consultant. She is also a content strategist here at Writer Access and would be happy to help you with keyword maps, customer journey maps, and buyer personas in addition to writing for you. If you would to like to hire Rachel to devise a content strategy for you, please contact your account manager or send a direct message.
