Marketing Flywheel Guide 2021 – Everything You Need To Know

by Rahul Vij | May 26, 2021 | Tips

Nowadays, marketing flywheel has seen dominating the internet. From Amazon to Hubspot, flywheel has proven to be a successful marketing approach. Many popular and experienced marketers suggest it as a great strategy to increase customers. But what is a flywheel? Is it better than a funnel? How to build it?

Here’s everything that you are looking for.

What Is A Marketing Flywheel?

Image Credit: brandpoint

According to Jon Dick of HubSpot, a Marketing Flywheel is a “circular process where clients feed growth.” It is the upgraded version of the traditional marketing funnel.

CHECK OUT OUR DETAILED GUIDE ON MARKETING FUNNEL IF THIS TERM SOUNDS NEW TO YOU!

If you have marketing funnel awareness, it will be easy for you to understand the marketing flywheel concept. Unlike the marketing funnel, the flywheel does not end after the customers reach the last stage of the buyer’s journey- conversion. Instead, it uses the existing customers to boost new leads and the overall growth of your business.

Practical Example: There’s this guy named Sam, looking to purchase a new pair of shoes online. He searched for “Nike Air shopping” on Google and clicked on the first website on his search results. Sam scrolled through the collection, added his favorite pair of shoes in the cart, entered the payment information, and placed the order. That’s not the end of the story.

He became a loyal customer of the brand and started promoting it to others. But why did he do that? Because he entered the marketing flywheel of that business which encouraged him to stick with them for a long time. That’s how a marketing flywheel uses existing customers to attract new leads.

Things To Focus – How did Sam get attracted to that brand’s website in the first place? Because he saw it on the top of his search results. “Do you know that 56.36% of all clicks go to the top-ranked website”? Either that brand might have used PPC or SEO to achieve that rank. You can do the same.

LEARN TO RANK HIGH USING SEO

AND CLICK HERE FOR AN IN-DEPTH PPC GUIDE!

Now when you know what a marketing flywheel is and how it brings more sales and leads, it’s time to dig a little deeper. Let’s discover what a marketing funnel is made up of- its components:

Components Of Marketing Flywheel

In a traditional marketing funnel, a customer’s journey is described in numerous stages starting from awareness and often ending at conversion or purchase. The structure of the flywheel is quite similar. But it consists of only 3 phases:

Attract- In this stage, potential customers get aware of your business. They develop an interest in your brand, assuming you provide a solution to their problems.

Engage- This phase includes providing education, solutions, and personalized customer services to the visitors.

Delight- In this step, businesses focus on creating a positive shopping experience and strong relationship with the customers so that they become your promoters, helping the flywheel spin back to the first stage.

Let’s unfold these phases from deep and understand which marketing tactics are used in each:

First Phase- Attract

The first step of an inbound marketing flywheel is all about attracting people to enter the wheel. This step is similar to the first step of the marketing funnel. Attracting your potential customers isn’t hard if you give them hope that you can solve their issues. This phase focuses on encouraging the customers to start their buyer’s journey.

Example- Sam was scrolling through his Facebook account when he came across an advertisement for an organic hair shampoo that “controls hair fall within one week.” Sam got curious to know more about that product. He clicks on it, visits the website, and enters the marketing flywheel of that brand.

Real-Time Example: Inshorts

This is an Instagram ad for Inshorts. By asking the question like- “don’t have time to read the newspaper?”, it grabs the attention of the user. And the caption below creates interest, encouraging the visitor to click on “Install Now” and discover if it’s really possible to read a newspaper in 2 minutes. And that’s when this brand succeeded in making a visitor enter its flywheel.

Following are the tactics you can use to gain your target lead’s attention and bring them to your website:

• Content marketing and blog posts
• Social media presence- both paid and organic
• On-page SEO, off-page SEO, and keyword strategy.
• PPC and video campaigns

Second Phase – Engage

After the customer reaches your website or enters the first stage of your flywheel, the next step is to offer them more quality content or information. Your focus should be on convincing them to purchase your product or services. And the only way to convince them is to resolve some of their issues through your content.

Example: Sam is now reading the product description of that organic shampoo. The brand has provided lots of useful content about the product, like how it controls the hair fall, the benefits of ingredients present in it, and much more. But it isn’t enough to convince him about purchasing it. So he watches a few videos of the product, goes through some reviews, and reads testimonials of previous customers, all of which is provided by the seller. Now he has everything needed to make his decision. Sam is convinced to purchase this product because he was suffering from hair fall issues, and he is completely sure that this shampoo is the right cure to it.

Practical Example: Amazon

• The brand grabs visitors’ attention by offering them a great deal.
• Leads get interested to know more about it so they click on the ad.
• The ad directs them to the landing page where they find various products, in our case they are shoes.
• The prices are affordable so users scroll down the collection.
• They pick a product to learn more about it in detail through the description.
• The product was fulfilling their needs so they decided to finalize their choice.

And that’s how Amazon brings their visitor to its flywheel sales model and successfully moves them on to the second phase.

Fill your website with as much useful and quality information as you can. It will help you build a stronger and long-lasting relationship with your customers. The tactics you can use in the engage phase are:

• Segmented email campaigns
• Free demos and gated content like downloadable templates, eBooks, and whitepapers.
• Visual content like detailed explainer videos and webinars.
• Offering a free trial of your services or products.

Example: Amazon

It is one of those brands using the above tactics. In most of their product pages, they include detailed explainer videos to help the user better understand the product. This way they increase their user engagement rate, strengthening their customer-business relationship.

Third Phase- Delight

This is the phase that separates the marketing flywheel from the marketing funnel. What happens in a funnel is-

• Visitors get attracted to your brand.
• They engage with your content.
• They decide to convert into customers.
• Finally, they purchase your product or services and get converted into clients.
• They exit the funnel, and the process starts from the top again.

Do you notice something? The marketing funnel does not give any reason to your clients to come back again. But the flywheel does. If you have reached this phase and helped your visitors gain solutions for their specific issues, all while providing them extraordinary customer services along the way, then you have gold in your hands.

You have successfully created a happy customer that values more than gold. In this phase, your job is to nurture this relationship you have created.

“In The Third Phase, Your Goal Is To Create Promoters For Your Brand.”

This is how the cycle of the flywheel will be completed. By creating the promoters, you can ensure that the wheel keeps on moving, thus ensuring the constant growth of your business.

Example: It has been weeks since Sam ordered that shampoo. He had some issues with the delivery, but they all got resolved because of the premium customer support of the brand. Sam is now recommending all his friends and acquaintances to try products from that company. He has become a loyal customer because that brand offered him superior quality services from the starting itself.

Harriet, the co-founder of CocoFinder says- “one of the biggest and notably the most important advantages of using the Flywheel Model is that it helps focus on enhancing a customer’s journey even after they’ve matured into a customer. Nurture them from the very first moment they become a customer up until the stage when they turn into subject matter experts (gain expertise in our product and/or service) and brand advocates.”

Following are the list of tacts that you can use in this phase to make your customers loyal to your business:

• Hosting networking events.
• Offering exclusive “premium membership only” content in the form of webinars or eBooks.
• Personalized email campaigns
• Creating referral programs
• Inviting the clients to try new products, services, and features.

Just like the marketing funnel, there are various types of marketing flywheels. Let’s give you a few examples:

Popular Types Of Flywheel

Organic Flywheel

In an organic marketing flywheel, you have to publish the highest quality SEO-friendly content on your website and then promote it across online channels like- email, social media, etc. Doing this attracts target visitors who will engage, share and visit your content multiple times, boosting your website’s authority, helping you rank better on search engines.

Why Named Organic?

This flywheel is named organic because it uses organic tactics like SEO to attract organic attention. To keep your organic leads engaged with your website for a long time, you can take the help of a chatbox.

This facility makes it easy to start a conversation with the visitor. There are so many companies that have benefited from the organic flywheel, including Bugger, HubSpot, Moz, Drift, and many more. If they are getting results from it, why can’t you?

PR Flywheel

In the PR flywheel model marketing, creative ideas are the starting point. In this flywheel, you create relationships with the press and media, priming your pitches. The ideas you produce help you become viral and gain media attention. The buzz about your brand increases your visibility at a larger scale and attracts more fans and loyal customers, who will promote your business further.

Freemium Flywheel

In this flywheel, customers are provided free access to limited features of your services and products. If they find your service or product useful, they will promote it to others in exchange for unlocking more features for free or at a discounted price. This flywheel attracts a good amount of paid and free users, helping you increase your business growth.

Dropbox used the same flywheel to propel immense growth. Users could get only 2GB of free storage, and they can increase the limit by inviting their friends to the platform.

Referral Flywheel

You won’t believe it, but famous email newsletters like The Hustle have also used the referral flywheel to drive massive growth. First, to attract new subscribers, they use paid ads. When subscribers invite their friends to join, they get rewards. The more referrals a user generates, the bigger rewards he receives.

You can use the same strategy for your firm. However, to receive maximum results, you can personalize this flywheel according to your needs.

But wait, do you know how to create a marketing flywheel? Probably not. Then let’s learn how to build it:

How To Create A Marketing FlyWheel – Read And Create

If you search on Google, you’ll find numerous bloggers suggesting so many ways to create a flywheel. And yes, there isn’t only one method to do so. Different businesses have different needs, and so their flywheel includes different steps.

To help you understand the basics of building a flywheel, we have put together the whole process into three simple steps:

Step One – Create Content For Your Buyer’s Journey

The first step in building your marketing flywheel is mapping out your buyer’s journey and creating content according to it. Follow the same steps that you did in the marketing funnel. Start by awaring people about your business, followed by other steps- interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase.

At different stages of the flywheel structure, use different types of content. Here’s the content strategy you should follow:

#1 Awareness Stage
The content should aware people about your expertise and how you can solve their problem. Remember- you don’t have to give the whole solution. But just an idea that you have their solution and to obtain that, they have to visit your website.

#2 Consideration Stage
At this stage, the visitor is convinced that you have a solution for their issues. Now you have to provide them useful and valuable content that proves that your product or services can resolve all their problems.

#3 Decision Stage
This is the game changer stage, and the content you provide here directly impacts your sales. Create content that helps your audience decide that your services or products are the best fit.

“Remember- Not Every Visitor Will Become Your Customer. So Do Not Try To Oversell Your Services Or Products.”

Help Tip: Apart from providing valuable content, give your customers something worth making their final decision in your favour. It can be free consultations, freemium tool offers, information regarding new webinars, etc.

Step Two: Use Topic Clusters

In this step we focus on gaining organic traffic from search engines like Google through topic clusters. A topic cluster is a way to create and organize your content to establish your website’s authority on specific topics. An increase in the authority will attract more target organic traffic to your website.

Applying topic clusters on your blogs helps you rank high on Google, giving you exposure to a wider audience. Here’s how you can create your cluster:

• Start with identifying the key topic that you would like to cover in your blogs.
• Once you know your topics, then comes the role of research. Research each topic in detail and identify subtopics for them.
• Then create content for each of these subheadings.
• Build a landing page to publish your content.
• Now place inbound links in your webpage with various topics.

That’s all! This is how you create clusters that will help your website gain authority.

Now when you have created the right content for your website and know which content strategy to apply at which stage, it’s time to complete the wheel.

Step Three – Complete The Wheel

The last step in creating a marketing flywheel is providing your customers a reason to promote you. Flywheel revolves when your existing customers promote your business and bring more clients to your website. Offering quality products or services isn’t enough to convince them that you are worth dealing with more than once. You have to create a positive and long relationship with your customers. And here are some ways to do that:

• By providing superior quality customer support during and after the whole buyer’s journey.
• Give them side benefits of promoting your business like- discounts or free coupons on a certain number of shares.
• Take surveys and ask their opinions about your services. Make them believe their opinions matter to you.

These are a few ways to complete your flywheel and successfully produce customers that will act as promoters for your brand.

Business Owners Views on Flywheel Approach

Let’s see what people who are using this approach in their business says about it:

Rex, CEO of Gadget Review:

“We use the marketing flywheel strategy as a comprehensive means of improving the customer experience and continuously building upon interconnected efforts to achieve the end goal. Marketing flywheel is a solid structure that helps us tie together all the elements of our business. Instead of just focusing on the straight line to a sale, we have taken into account the gradual nature of the customer experience and everything that plays into that.”

Alina Clark, Growth Manager and Co-founder of CocoDoc:

“A flywheel is a system designed to store kinetic energy as efficiently as possible. At first, spinning a flywheel is difficult. However, once momentum is created, this form of contraption can spin and sustain its motion on its own. This concept is the foundation of the marketing wheel.

Companies can best serve their audience by combining marketing, distribution, and customer success departments, which creates momentum and produces both repeat sales and new consumers through word-of-mouth marketing.

You can use the flywheel to push referrals and repeat purchases by using the energy of your satisfied customers. In a nutshell, the company continues to run.”

Simon Elkjær, the Chief Marketing Officer of avXperten, home of Denmark’s most affordable electronics:

“Adopting the marketing flywheel model has opened our business to realizing our full potential and other multiple benefits. Besides making our customers feel more included in the entire process, it has also shifted our focus into further improving our products, service, and the overall experience we provide our customers with. In simpler terms, a marketing flywheel has made it easier for us to reach new customers while also making sure that we meet the demands of our industry.”

Daivat, Director of Operations at Force by Mojio:

“ We use the marketing flywheel as an alternative to the more traditional marketing funnel model. The marketing flywheel guides our decisions on everything from product design to our customer success phone line messages. It gives all of our employees and managers an easy way to visualize the important role that customers play in our company. We aren’t just laser-focused on creating new customers. We want to help, support, and nurture the experiences of our customers.

The flywheel has helped us set goals for our customer success team. Rather than think about customers in terms of retention and churn, we focus on how every aspect of the business can support customer experience before, during, and after they reach out with a concern or complaint.”

Ravi Parikh, CEO, RoverPass Campground Management Software:

“The marketing flywheel is an important part of how RoverPass brings teams together to set and reach common goals. Instead of viewing marketing, sales, and customer success as different stages of a process (like the funnel does), we look at all of these teams as critical for giving the best overall experience possible during the customer lifecycle.

We have found it easier to provide guidance and standards for employees in sales, marketing, and customer success when we take a customer-centered approach.”

After reading all the above comments, clearly, marketing flywheel is a must-try approach for businesses. It revolves around customer relationship management and is the future of marketing. But what is that core element that makes this strategy successful? The answer is:

Compound Effect Of Marketing Flywheels

When you include a marketing flywheel into your client’s buying process, you’ll discover how powerful it is. Flywheel shows a compounding effect in which you start receiving bigger results with the least efforts. Let study this effect in detail:

Learn: How Flywheel Is Better Than Funnel Using Mathematics

** Tip: If you hate mathematics just skip to the case study lines.**

The formula given below represents a business as a whole funnel. The formula determines the new customer growth which further helps to understand how efficiently you are spending your sales and marketing budget to gain new customers.

The Funnel Equation For Customer Growth:

NCfunnel = ((TSE + TME) / CPL) x Conv

Where:

• NCfunnel= New Customers
• TSE= Total Sales Expenditures
• TME= Total Marketing Expenditures
• CPL= Cost Per Lead
• Conv= Conversion Rate(of leads to customer)

So, New Customers= ((Total Sales Expenditures + Total Marketing Expenditures) / Cost Per Lead) x Conversion Rate

K-factor in Flywheel:

The k-factor is a simple and straightforward way to measure how your existing customers will help your company grow by measuring how willing and effective they are at promoting or referring your brand to more customers. It helps to measure a client’s willingness and ability to attract other people to your business. You can also say that the K-factor measures organic growth or “an action-based measure of happiness”.

The formula for K-factor is as follows:

K= (i)(C)

Where:

• i= number of referrals per customer
• c= conversion rate of each referral

Suppose, every one of your customers tells 20 friends (i= 20) about your business and each one of the referrals has a 35% chance of getting converted (c= 0.35). Therefore, K= 7.

The Impact Of K-factors On Your Customer Growth

Remember- Happy customers aren’t good to have, they are a must-have.

Let’s learn how K-factor impacts your customer growth:

So the first formula we learned was: NCfunnel = ((TSE + TME) / CPL) x Conv

Now, add the K-factor for flywheel in it, the formula becomes:

Note: Instead of just knowing only the new customers, we are using (1 + K) to represent the total number of new customers including the existing customer base.

NCflywheel = [ ((TSE + TME) / CPL) x Conv ] x (1 + K)

OR

NC flywheel = NC funnel (1+K)

There the result comes out to be NC flywheel > NC funnel (1+K); as long as k > 0

So with a marketing flywheel, you can find ways to convert your customers into your brand ambassadors who can refer you to new people. And these new people are undoubtedly your new leads. That’s how Flywheel marketing is better than Funnel marketing.

Let’s explain this with a case study: Your firm has a total marketing and sales budget of around $20,000 and you have 100 new customers. Let’s find out how many more customers these new ones will bring:

NCfunnel= 100

Suppose K factors is 1, then

k= 1; NCfunnel= 100 (1 + k) = 100 (1 + 1) = 100 (2) = 200

This means that every 100 new customers brought you an extra 100 customers. This proves the benefit of the k-factor and thus marketing flywheel. A flywheel is the best way to increase the k-factor and thus new leads.

Know The Power Of Compounding From This REAL CASE STUDY of Hubspot

As said above, compounding is the effect when you receive additional benefits or interest from your investment. Here is an example of the Hubspot flywheel that will show you the power of compounding. Look at this Hubspot’s organic traffic growth chart showing the results for compounding of marketing flywheel:

In July 2016, Hubspot was getting around 1M organic traffic every month. They used the compounding effect of a marketing flywheel to increase their traffic. What they did was- they offered their customers interactive live sessions on social media, free eBooks, and other amazing features to make their visitor’s buyer journey more seamless.

And as you can see, From January 2017, their monthly traffic raised from 1M to 2.5M. And after July 2016, they have literally doubled their traffic. And today, Hubspot is getting 4 times more organic traffic than what they were getting in 2016. They have been earning the interest on their investments they have done in the earlier days in the form of increased traffic.

Momentum Is The Growth
The flywheel generates momentum as it spins. The faster the spinning, the more it builds momentum. And with each spin, your brand creates a large pool full of happy and satisfied customers.

Those clients are highly motivated to engage with your brand more- buy more of your services or products and promote your brand to others. This results in more new leads, increasing the momentum of your marketing flywheel.

Just Imagine
Imagine a metal flywheel in a factory. It weighs quite high. You are trying to rotate it on the axle, putting in lots of effort. At first, it moved a little bit. Then finally, it completes a full round. The more you push, the faster it rotates.

Flywheel Multiplies The Marketing Efforts

Each round of the flywheel is the result of the efforts you placed earlier. It’s called compounding your investment of effort. First, one thousand times faster, then five thousand and then ten hundred thousand faster. The huge and heavy wheel keeps on rotating with almost an unstoppable momentum. That’s what a marketing flywheel is known for.

It makes your marketing efforts many times more powerful, effective, and efficient. At the same time, with increasing momentum, it becomes easier to generate results. Hence, the faster a flywheel spins, the more momentum it builds and the greater your business grows.

Final Takeaways

Experts say that Marketing Flywheel is the key strategy behind the success of many popular brands. The most relevant example is Amazon. They have been practicing their version of this tactic way long before it got into the spotlight.

Their wheel looked like this: in the early stages, Amazon lowered the price that increased its customers’ visits. They focused on providing quality services at all the stages of their buyer’s journey.

As the number of customers increased, so did their sales volume, loyal customers, new leads, and commission from third-party vendors. That’s how their flywheel helped them grow back then and serve its purpose till today!

So, that’s all on market flywheels.

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE WAYS TO GAIN IMMENSE TRAFFIC ON YOUR WEBSITE AND INCREASE YOUR NET SALES? LET US HELP YOU OUT!

“Contact Us”

Rahul Vij

Co-founded WebSpero solutions about a decade ago. Having worked in web development- I realized the dream of transforming ideas sketched out on paper into fully functioning websites. Seeing how that affected the customers’ generation of leads and conversions, I wanted to delve deeper into the sphere of digital marketing. At Webspero Solutions, handling operations and heading the entire Digital Marketing Field – SEO, PPC, and Content are my core domains. And although we as a team have faced many challenges, we have come far learning along and excelling in this field and making a remarkable online reputation for our work.

Having worked in building websites and understanding that sites are bare structures without quality content, the main focus was to branch into optimizing each website for search engines. Investing in original, quality content creation is essential to SEO success in the current search climate. Succeeding in this arena ensures the benefits of producing visitor-friendly content. Directing all our teams to zoom in on these factors has been a role that I have thoroughly enjoyed playing throughout these years.

Most Successful Marketing Strategies In 2021

by Rahul Vij | May 21, 2021 | Tips

There are over a hundred different strategies brands use to grow. We’ve decided to narrow it down to the 30 most powerful strategies you could use today.

If you’ve been searching for different types of marketing for your business, we’ve got you covered. Robust and exhaustive, this post contains real-world success stories, trends, and predictions for the upcoming years. Consider it your final guide to understanding various marketing strategies used in 2021 that pay off.

Let’s start…

Account-based Marketing

Unlike traditional B2B marketing, where you target a broad audience hoping to capture maximum leads, account-based marketing (or key account marketing) is a business strategy where you target your marketing efforts and resources on particular key accounts within a market.

Here, your customers (key accounts) become your market. This way, your campaigns are personalized to be effective to that customer.

On the other hand, if an organization is your key account, you direct your campaigns to the decision-makers within that organization.

1. To execute ABM marketing strategies, your sales and marketing teams align, increasing your ROI by as much as 208%.
2. 97% of marketers attribute their growth in ROI to ABM.
3. 84% of marketers report ABM has been their most fruitful marketing strategy.

Example

Snowflake, a cloud computing-based data warehousing company, has been using ABM strategies since 2017.

They partnered with Terminus to run 500 concurrent ABM 1 to 1 campaign through display advertising. They combined their sales and marketing efforts to create strong and personalized campaigns for each key account.

These campaigns weren’t gated for the prospects. Instead, Snowflake built credibility by putting this content out on the open web. Then they increased retargeting to drive through their sales.

CTRs increase as a result of tailoring your content to your customer.
ABM allows you to Target, Engage, Activate, and Measure your campaigns.

Affiliate Marketing

In affiliate marketing, you (an affiliate) will earn a commission for marketing another person’s product. It’s a sales strategy that allows a company to increase its sales. You, as an affiliate, would earn your share of the company’s profit each time they make a sale. Affiliate links allow tracking of sales.

• More than 81% of brands include affiliate marketing strategies in their growth strategy.
• As of 2020, more than 7 Billion dollars were spent on Affiliate marketing efforts.
• Since 2017, Amazon’s affiliate structure offers 1-10% rates on product revenue for its affiliates.
• Jason Stone, the Millionaire Mentor, generated $7 Million in sales within 18 months!
• Affiliate marketing impacts 16% of all orders made online.

Image Credit: AvoidOnlineMarketingScams

Example

The famous product-review website Wirecutter is known for its affiliate revenue-based business model. Every time a reader buys something on the site, the Amazon-based affiliate link allows them to make a commission. Amazon affiliate marketing is Amazon’s affiliate program or Amazon associate program and it is one of the biggest affiliate programs in the world!

The reason why people trust the Wirecutter is because of the reviews posted.
In 2015, Wirecutter made a whopping $15 Million in sales through its affiliate model. In the fall of 2016, The New York Times Co. acquired the company for $30 Million.

Ambush Marketing

Ambush marketing goes by other names like coat-tail marketing or predatory ambushing. It’s the strategic practice where a brand hijacks or capitalizes on the awareness, attention, goodwill, and other benefits of another advertiser’s campaign.

Although it has polarizing views, where certain marketers consider it a parasitic practice and others laud it as creative opportunism, if done tastefully, you can create memorable campaigns that increase product awareness in your consumer’s minds.

Example
Although Ambush marketing has been infamous in the sports industry, automobile industry giants Audi and BMW famously ambushed each other’s campaigns in 2012.

Santa Monica, California, became the battlefield for two of the world’s leading automobile manufacturers when they combated for billboard domination.

It started with a BMW campaign slogan that read, “A BMW rally with two nearby service centers. What’s next, paramedics at a chess tournament?”

Audi didn’t miss the opportunity to capitalize on this campaign. They bought the nearby billboard and advertised their new A4 sedan.

They even taunted BMW to get in on the action with a slogan, “Your move, BMW.”

BMW soon after purchased a nearby billboard:

This went on until BMW purchased a blimp to add to Audi’s billboard reading “game over.”

Images Source: wonderfulengineering

Audi had the final say on billboards with this ad. BMW later moved its billboard elsewhere, and the ‘war’ finally came to an end.

Brand Marketing

Brand marketing is the strategy to personify your brand and communicate your brand’s message to your customers.

Here, you make your product more valuable to your customers by communicating what your brand stands for, your USP, etc. This not only drives engagement but builds loyalty and positions your brand in the minds of your customers.

Brand marketing is a long-term strategy that allows you to build higher brand awareness, trustworthiness, increase your product visibility, expand your market reach, and increase your brand’s overall reputation.

Example

The most notable example is Nike. Nike’s marketing strategy is a noteworthy brand marketing example. Although it was founded 57 years ago, it still brings in over $35 Billion in revenue. Even with all the other options available, customers still trust Nike for their sportswear needs.

Through brand marketing, they address the customer’s emotions directly. Also, they don’t shy away from sharing failure stories, which helps them create powerful campaigns that unite them with their customers.

Buzz Marketing

Buzz marketing is a form of word-of-mouth marketing where you get people to talk about your brand, product, or service. Information travels fast.

You advertise to one person. That person tells four more people, and each of them tells four more people, thereby helping you reach a multitude with your advertising campaign instead of traditional campaigning.

• Neilsen’s study found 92% of people trust their friends and family member’s recommendations over other advertising.
• 88% of people trust credible online reviews just as much as reviews by their friends and family.
• AdWeek reports that 74% of your customers trust word-of-mouth reviews when making their purchases.

Example

Apple is a brand that stands out when it comes to buzz marketing examples. Their product launches are so highly anticipated that people camp outside their stores to get their hands on a new gadget.

According to a job posting for a Buzz Marketing role, the skillsets they look for include:

• Placing Apple products in the creative side of film and TV
• Building and maintaining relationships with high profile influencers
• Understanding the entertainment industry inside out

Something to note here is that because the iPhone is successful and gathers positive reviews, more and more people join the buzz when new products like iPad, iWatch, etc., are launched.

Cause Marketing

Cause-related marketing happens when a symbiotic relationship is built by a for-profit organization joining hands with a nonprofit organization for a mutual benefit.

Here, the nonprofit organization can expand its reach through the funding provided by the for-profit business. And the business, on the other hand, gets a loyal customer base that also supports the cause.

Here’s why cause-related marketing is crucial for your business in 2021:

• According to Havas’ Meaningful Drive report, 77% of brands could go extinct, and no one would care. This is a 3% increase in just two years. Also, brands that engage in cause marketing have seen a meaningful increase in their profits.
• Edelman’s Earned Brand Study in 2018 showed that 64% of your customers would avoid your brand if they don’t trust you have a good social impact.
• If most of your customer base consists of Gen Zers, know that 69% of them are more likely to buy from you if your brand contributes to a social cause.
• Forbes reports that 66% of consumers want brands to take stands on social and political issues.
• 72% of Americans are consciously buying from companies that share and reflect their values.

Example

Dove is one of the prominent cause marketing examples ever. Their “Dove campaign for real beauty” propelled ladies to redefine the beauty standards of the time. It celebrated self-acceptance and celebrated each woman for her individuality.

With the launch of the “Dove Ad Makeover campaign,” 171 million banners with negative messaging were displaced. They had a reach of 5.5 million unique women. More than 50% of the women who visited Dove Ad Makeover created a message, and the viewers’ friends created 82% of the ads seen.

Statistics show that 71% of women polled reported they felt more beautiful.

Content Marketing

Unlike traditional marketing that focuses on making a sale, content marketing delivers relevant, consistent, and valuable content, which drives profitable customer action. Content marketing strategy helps you acquire and retain unique customers.

Content Marketing can help your brand:

• Reach your targeted audience efficiently by offering high-quality content that is very relevant to them.
• Communicate your brand values.
• Attract and retain new customers through social media.
• Rank higher on search engines by optimizing your web content.

Example

A successful example of content marketing would be Gary Vaynerchuk.
With his YouTube series, WineLibraryTV, he shows people how they could pair wines with virtually any food. Rather than promoting his business, he creates meaningful content around how wine pairing doesn’t have to be intimidating.

Even today, as he owns his multimillion-dollar digital marketing agency, VaynerMedia, his blog, weekly newsletters, and content on social media contain only 5-10% of promotional content. The value of content he brings to his consumers results in his multibillion-dollar success.

Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing, a part of inbound marketing, is a strategy to develop customer loyalty and boost engagement and revenue by building trust and relationships with your customer through the power of 1-1 conversations during their buying process. Here’s how brands benefit from conversation marketing:

• According to Salesforce, 71% of customers expect your brand to have real-time conversations with them.
• Thanks to high-quality live chat, 52% of consumers are expected to purchase again from your brand.
• Study shows that 9 in 10 consumers would like to use the messaging option to contact businesses.
• Brands using Facebook messaging in their strategy have seen a 30% increase in their ROI compared to retargeting ads.
• 80% of your routine questions can be answered on chatbots, reducing 30% of your customer service costs.
• According to HubSpot, as much as 47% of consumers are willing to make a purchase completely from a chatbot.

Example

Sephora, a renowned beauty retailer, introduced the “Sephora Virtual Assist” feature on their Facebook Messenger app, and since then, makeup trials have become a thing of the past. Well, we’re close to that reality, thanks to them.

Customers could easily purchase their products from the thread. Not only did they use conversational marketing strategies, but integrating AI and augmented reality softwares has propelled their conversation rate to almost 11% at the time.

The ‘try-before-you-buy’ experience for online shoppers made it easy for people to purchase new products with faith that it would suit them. It also enabled increased engagement with the brand.

Digital Marketing/ Internet Marketing

Marketing that uses the internet to promote and engage with their customers on digital mediums like computers, phones, tablets, or other devices comes under digital marketing. Internet marketing campaigns include mediums like online videos, emails and newsletters, multimedia, texts, display ads, and social media posts.

Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Pay Per Click Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Native Advertising, Marketing Automation, Email Marketing are all digital marketing types that allow you to connect with your potential customer online.

Example

American Express wanted to establish itself as an industry leader, and it used digital marketing to do so. With its site, Trends and Insights, they created an open forum where people could gather relevant information about corporate solutions like financial news, business trends, marketing tips, etc.

Through consistently posting relevant content on such topics and crowdsourcing content from industry experts, Trends and Insights became THE place where entrepreneurs and C-suite executives consumed their information.

Ecommerce Marketing

eCommerce Marketing includes promotional strategies to increase traffic to your eCommerce store, conversion strategies to drive more sales, and lead nurturing strategies to retain customers post-purchase.

A comprehensive eCommerce marketing strategy includes both on-page and off-page optimizations that increase brand awareness, customer loyalty, and sales.

• In 2021, 19.5% of worldwide sales come from eCommerce platforms.
• 81% of your customers trust reviews of friends and family before purchasing.
• 69.6% of customers abandon their carts and that number can be reduced by re-targeting strategies.
• Omnichannel marketing is the future of eCommerce.

Example

Warby Parker, an online sunglasses retailer, started because the founders couldn’t find a pair of stylish sunglasses they liked online. This made them extra mindful of how important user experience can be.

This is why they leverage the power of storytelling and content marketing strategies while shaping their eCommerce strategy. They build customer loyalty by creating content that engages their user. They also showcase user-generated content on their social media handles.

When it comes to eCommerce marketing, since the competition is so high, sometimes it’s the simplest of strategies that can make your brand shine bright.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a valuable strategy when deployed right. A great email marketing strategy connects your brand with your customers through regular emails about new products, discounts, or other services. It’s a great way to nurture your leads and prepare them for opportunities to convert on your website. Here’s why you should include email marketing in your business plan:

• 21% of the emails sent by a brand are opened within an hour of delivery.
• A personalized subject line ensures a 62% open rate for emails.
• You can expect a 96% increase in CTR if your first email contains a video.
• According to the campaign monitor report 2019, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get a boost in ROI of $42.
• In comparison with Facebook and Twitter, Email marketing converts 40% better.
• Brands that send segmented emails have noticed a 760% increase in ROI.
• 90% of users report a video nudges their purchase decision.

Example

Skimm has become the ‘go-to place’ to get short, punchy yet detailed news. Their success in gaining more than 7 million subscribers is a testament to how amazing their emails are. Another thing they do well? Engaging their customers and nurturing their leads. Take a look at the screenshot below for their marketing campaign: subscription anniversary. They celebrated and rewarded their subscribers who have been on a journey with them for years.

A bonus? They asked her if she’d like to become a brand ambassador as a gratitude for her loyalty. Of course, she’d have to share the link with ten of her friends, but as dropbox has taught us, people love sharing your brand if you’re adding value to their lives.

Everyone enjoys celebrating milestones. The best part is that your subscribers needn’t enter any additional information for something as simple as this.

Event Marketing

Brands use event marketing as a strategy when they want to promote their company, product, cause, or service through themed exhibits, displays, or presentations. These events are held online or offline. Brands provide their potential customers with a novel, first-hand experience, and this allows customers to better understand the company’s personality, focus, and vision. Marketers can promote their brand through inbound or outbound event marketing strategies.

• 95% of event creators find experiential marketing to be highly effective.
• 65% of brands correlate their increase in sales to their live events.
• 55% of virtual event organizers say they will continue to invest in the strategy.
• 75% of marketers believe in-person events have been their most rewarding content marketing strategy.
• 8 in 10 marketers attribute their brand’s success to live activations.

Example

Organizers at Google I/O recorded keynote speeches using a 360-degree camera and hosted these videos on YouTube. This way, the experience was not just easy to access but free. While the conference was an offline event, uploading the video’s online allowed people to attend and “experience” the event virtually, thanks to the style of recording.

Experiential Marketing

Unlike event marketing, where the goal is to promote your product, cause, or service, experiential marketing involves face-to-face, offline experiences with your customers, so they experience and engage with your brand and all it stands for.

Here, brand promotion happens as a result of the high-quality engagement your customers have with your brand.

This allows for lasting, memorable, emotional connections with your brand, resulting in better CLV (customer lifetime value), improved brand awareness, and better business opportunities. Here’s why you should use experiential marketing strategies:

• According to a McKinsey report, 50%-80% of word-of-mouth promotion directly results from customers having a great experience with a brand at an experiential campaign.
• As of 2016, 77% of marketers have been using experiential marketing as a core part of their business strategy.
• 98% of consumers attending your experiential event create social content sharing their experiences.
• According to a survey by Bizzabo, 63% of marketers plan on increasing the number of events they conduct a year.
• A Freeman report suggests that CMOs expect to allocate 21-50% of their marketing resources to experiential marketing.
• Since 2020, customer experience has overtaken product and price as key brand differentiators.

Example

Although Volkswagen is known for its cars, they chose to extend their brand image beyond just cars. Thus was the inception of “the fun theory.” This campaign was to swivel people’s unhelpful behaviours but in a fun way.

One of their campaigns took place at a subway stop in Germany. There was a fleet of stairs right next to an escalator. Since people were choosing the escalator to stairs, Volkswagen decided to create piano keys on the stairs. This way, people would have fun and thus choose the stairs. It resulted in 66% of people choosing stairs over escalators.

Our takeaway: you needn’t attach your experiential marketing campaign to the industry you serve in. Rather, connect with humans and resonate with human values. Here, Volkswagen resonated with the human emotion of “fun”. We all love to have fun, and thus Volkswagen, by associating their brand with fun, has already won over their customers.

Facebook Marketing

Facebook has evolved into becoming a prominent marketplace for brands in the past few years. Facebook marketing involves using tools within your Facebook page to target and communicate with potential and existing customers.

Facebook has become a lucrative channel for many brands because of benefits like:

• Precise targeting
• Increased website traffic
• Variety of ad formats
• Customer support
• Positive SEO impact

Here are a few compelling reasons to start a Facebook marketing campaign:

• As of 2021, Facebook has over 2.80 billion monthly active users.
• Facebook is the social media goliath reaching 59% of social media users.
• Facebook reported $27.2 Billion in ad revenue as of Q4, 2020.
• More than 200 million small businesses use Facebook for connecting and engaging with their customers.
• 65% of Facebook users are within 35 years of age.
• Facebook users spend an average of 19.5 hours on the app each month.

Example

Pandora, the jewelry company, wanted to increase their brand awareness in the German market. They were also curious to see if video ads would have the same success on Facebook as other ad formats.
They released a 15-second short clip from the original ad (check here) that shows a man gifting his partner a Pandora necklace.

They then cropped this ad to a square frame for the benefit of mobile users. Pandora targeted German audiences within the age range of 18-50. These ads showed up in newsfeeds as an in-stream video ad.

The insights gathered by the case study are:

• 61% purchase increase in purchases
• 42% increase in new buyers.
• 10 point lift in brand sentiment.

Guerrilla Marketing

Guerrilla Marketing took inspiration from guerrilla warfare and came into existence in 1984 with Jay Conrad Levinson’s famous book: Guerrilla marketing. Today, guerrilla techniques involve creating extremely unconventional marketing campaigns that jolt people into paying attention to them because of their element of surprise.

Guerrilla techniques require just a small budget, and the returns are significant because of the personalized and memorable interactions a customer has with a brand.

Example

We can never forget October 14, 2012, when Red Bull and Austrian extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner shocked us all with that skydive. The death-defying jump at over 128,100 feet into the stratosphere, at an estimated speed of 833.9 mph (1,342.8 km/h), broke the speed of sound AND the world record! He reached earth within 9:09 minutes and was free-falling for 4:22 minutes!

Red Bull allowed viewers to witness this amazing feat live on their Red Bull Stratos website and were actively engaging with users on Twitter and Facebook. They broke social media records by reaching 8 million views on YouTube, and to this day, we talk about it! That’s the power of guerrilla marketing.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing uses different forms of pull marketing (like content marketing, blog writing, online/ offline events, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, etc.) to generate more leads, increase brand awareness and develop better relationships.

Inbound marketing focuses on getting the customers to come to you, as opposed to outbound marketing, where you seek out customers. Here’s why more and more brands are investing in inbound marketing strategies:

• In Jan 2021, Google saw more than 2 million unique visitors just in the USA.
• You can find more than half of the world’s population on social media.
• 70% of brands actively invest in content marketing.
• 86% of brands use video marketing to engage their viewers and attract new leads.
• 18% of CMOs report that switching to a mobile-optimized site has improved their site ranking and performance.

Example

Chewy, a famous pet brand that usually comes up as the first result for keywords like “dog food,” “organic dog food,” and “cheapest place to buy dog food.”

Since the company launched in 2011, they understood how valuable it is to present information to the customers that customers wanted. This is why their product pages look almost identical to Amazon’s!

They provide a detailed product description robust in keywords for all their products. They have photos and videos of all their products. Even the sections within their product page feel intuitive to a customer: ‘Product’- ‘Frequently brought together’- ‘Description & Info’- ‘Reviews’- ‘You may also like’- ‘Upsell/ cross-sell sections,’ etc.

Take a look at how rich the product description for this Blue Buffalo product is. Allowing their customers to feed in reviews and answer questions in the community creates so much user-generated content.

When Google’s bots search through your content, customer reviews show the bots that the information present is valuable to searchers, which results in your site ranking higher, organically.

Influencer Marketing

At its core, influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that benefits from product mentions through brand endorsements from influencers.

Influencers are those people that have a good number of engaged followers on social media because of the trustworthy content they regularly upload.

Influencer marketing works so well because of this very trust their followers have in the influencers. Getting an influencer on your brand improves your social proof among your potential customers. Here are a few other reasons why influencer marketing could benefit you:

• Over the past decade, influencer marketing grew from being an ancillary marketing strategy to a billion-dollar industry.
• As of 2020, the influencer marketing budget across brands increased to 65%, and it continues to grow.
• In 2020, brands spent anywhere from $1000- $10,000 a year on influencers.
• Brands report that 89% of their ROI from influencers either compares to or exceeds other marketing channels.
• Instagram is the #1 impactful channel for influencer marketing.

Example

Hinge, the dating app, when released in 2013, found it hard to differentiate itself from major competitors like Tinder, OK Cupid, and female-empowering app- Bumble. Hinge decided to reinvent and rebranded itself as the “relationship app”.

They took away the swiping model and introduced an Instagram-like format with subscription plans ranging from $5-$13 a month. With their “The Dating Apocalypse” campaign, they could leverage the power of Instagram meme creators like @betches, among others, and generate more brand awareness.

One post from Betches’ Hinge promotion garnered 80,153+ likes and 3,068+ comments. Similarly, they partnered with other influencers and got the world to know their rebranding in a fun, hip, and relatable way. Through this branding strategy, they saw:

• 15% increase in new members each month after the campaign.
• Increased their user base 2X.
• Three hundred media outlets were happily covering the relaunch and the rebranded video.
• Users switched from the free to $7/month subscription model.

Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing is a field of marketing communication that uses data gathered from neuropsychology to drive advertisements, product development, pricing, and other areas of marketing.

Neuropsychology studies the relation between brain function and behavior, emotion, and cognition.

Brain scanning (MRIs and fMRIs) to measure brain activity and physiological tracking to measure eye movement are common ways brands measure neural responses to advertisements/ products/ or pricing. Neuromarketing can help your brand:

• In 2020, the Global Neuromarketing Market was valued at USD 1,158.37 million and is estimated to grow up to USD 1896.1 million by 2026.
• Big brands like PepsiCo, The Weather Channel, eBay, and Daimler are reaping the benefits of neuromarketing research techniques as they conduct market research, run focus groups, and create their campaigns.
• According to trends, we expect North America to hold the greatest share in neuromarketing.
• A Salesforce report suggests that 73% of your customers expect your brand to understand their needs and expectations. Neuromarketing can allow you to predict these expectations.

Example

During their neuromarketing research, Frito Lay, the famous potato chips brand Lay’s parent company, found women weren’t consuming as much of their products as men.

They found that women preferred salty snacks just 14% of the time. About 25% of the time, their go-to was a sweet snack. But more importantly, 61% of the time, women reached for something healthy like fruits and vegetables. Upon further digging, they found out the reason was guilt. Women felt guilty while “indulging” in unhealthy snacks, and therefore no amount of regular advertising campaigns would cut through.

Niche Marketing

Niche marketing is the strategy of tailoring your strategy to target a specific subset of the market. This way, your brand is hyperfocused on catering to the needs of a niche instead of mass marketing. This type of marketing yields high returns as you directly target those that are actively seeking your product. In 2021, you need to focus on niche marketing because:

• You build an inclusive and meaningful community around your brand.
• Higher engagement with customers results in higher brand loyalty.
• You can cut through the competition and carve out a new segment.

Example

Apple is a prominent example when we think of niche marketing. Apple has successfully carved a niche and placed its product: the iPhone, as a must-have. This way, no matter the Chinese smartphone market share, Apple still enjoys a profit share of 66% with just 14% market share.

Outbound Marketing

Unlike inbound marketing strategies that pull in a brand’s customers, outbound marketing strategies include all means a company uses to push its message out to the audience. It’s a form of traditional marketing where a brand uses advertisements like TV commercials, radio or print ads, trade shows, outbound calls (or cold calls), outbound emails, etc., to reach its audience. Here are a few stats you should know:

• Automated messages amount to 29% of all email orders.
• There’s a 102% YoY increase in SMS conversion rates.
• A 500% increase in web push notifications is reported.

Example

BMW, the German car manufacturer, sent out MMS messages to its German customers to encourage winter tire sales. Here, the brand attached a photo of the customer’s car but with the winter tires instead of their own. This way, they showed the safety of the tire in extremely cold conditions.

When you highly personalize, contextualize, and localize your outbound marketing campaign like BMW and use it when it’s relevant to your customers, it becomes hugely successful. BMW reaped $45+ million in sales through this winter campaign. The campaign cost $60,000 (estimate), and at this rate, their ROI was approximately 758 dollars for each MMS.

Product Marketing

Marketers use product marketing strategies to launch a product in the market. These strategies help a marketer understand the market demands and shape the product such that it efficiently communicates with the market the problems the product solves. This strategy drives demand and usage of the product. Product marketing allows you to:

• Better understand your customers
• Target your audience efficiently
• Understand your competition
• Ensure your entire sales and marketing team works as one
• Position your product correctly
• Boost revenue by improving sales

Example

Coca-Cola launched a share a coke campaign in 2014, a great example of product reinvention, an integral part of product marketing. Essentially, they replaced the regular labels with personalized names, so the label read “Share a coke with XYZ.” They started with 250 common American names and grew the list to over 1000.

Share a coke in itself is a CTA, which is why it drove consumers to act upon it. The personalization touch was new and spoke to people individually.

They gained over 25 million new followers on Facebook, and #ShareACoke was used on more than 500,000 photos. This brand awareness campaign boosted their sales impressively, and the engagement and of course, brand awareness created were massive. Here’s a video detailing their strategy.

Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing is a part of CRM (customer relationship marketing). It involves creating a long-term emotional connection with the customer by promoting open communications and providing them relevant information suited to their needs. Here’s why relationship marketing becomes all the more relevant in 2021:

• 86% of consumers don’t mind paying more for a great customer experience.
• 63% of customers are willing to provide more personal information if they have a great experience at your store.
• 32% of consumers are happy to walk away from a brand if they have even one bad experience.
• 49% of consumers have confessed to making impulse purchases because of a personalized experience at the store.
• As of 2020, customer experience has overtaken both price and product as the key brand differentiator.
• 42% of brands invest in relationship marketing to improve their cross-selling and up-selling.

Example

When it comes to relationship marketing, one of the prominent examples that stand out is always Zappos. An eCommerce fashion brand that specializes in footwear is known for its exemplary customer service.

There are countless examples of Zappos providing great customer service, ranging from saving the best man from walking to his friend’s wedding in slippers to having a 10.5hrs call with a customer just because the customer needed to talk to someone.

Even the CEO, Tony Hsieh, has a favorite personal story to share. After he took a few clients out to drink, they all came back to their hotel rooms. It was late at night, and one of his clients called Hsin, saying he was craving pizza.

Hsieh was so confident in his brand that he asked the client to call Zappos. Although Zappos sells shoes, they had no hesitation searching for pizzerias open at 2 am near the client’s hotel. They set a new precedent in wowing the customers by going above and beyond. This level of service is why Amazon bought Zappos for more than a billion dollars.

Services Marketing

Services marketing includes all B2B and B2C services that use human interactions for services that serve as actions, promotions, or satisfactions offered during a sale. Service marketers sell experiences.

More nuanced thought suggests that the separation of products and services was artificially created. Everyone sells services. Here’s why you should include more services marketing strategies:

• Customer centricity has become the paradigm shift in 2021.
• You add more value to your customers, even as you simplify your buyer’s cycle.
• AI can help you create personalized experiences for your customers, thereby building brand loyalty.
• Augmented analytics can help you double your business value.
• Service marketing strategies can influence buying decisions.

Example

WowMakers is an initiative by Hilton hotels where they provide resources and celebrate event professional’s success stories to inspire other planners to create powerful and awe-worthy events.

Planners can find infographics, examples, trends, and other resources that can help them plan and execute events successfully. Planners also get to see which locations are perfect for their new event.

This shows that service marketing need not be just for your customers; rather, you can use the strategies to inspire professionals within your industry, so it thrives as it constantly seeks innovation.

Social Marketing

Social marketing uses commercial marketing techniques to raise awareness and create social and economic changes. We see social marketing techniques in causes like health and safety, environmental issues, and social activism. Here’s why social marketing is important in 2021:

• 46% of Millennials participate in crowdfunding.
• Charities focused on animals/ environmental issues have seen an increase of 7.2% (approx. $11 billion)
• 64% of Gen Z’ers are ready to pay more for an eco-friendly product.
• 89% of executives want to work for a company that drives social change.
• 77% of people prefer brands that support healthy products.

Example

When it comes to social marketing, we can’t forget how successful the ALS ice bucket challenge has been. Over $115 million donations were made to find a cure for the disease.

The idea of tagging the next person and getting big celebrities to participate in a fun challenge brought awareness to people about the disease.

It also allowed people to empathize with those that suffered from the disease, albeit for a short moment. The emotional connection that this challenge created with the sufferers of the disease is what allowed for more donations.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing uses social media platforms to connect brands with their end-users. This powerful strategy helps drive sales, build brand awareness and increase website traffic.

By publishing relevant content, listening and engaging with followers, analyzing results, and running social media advertisements, a brand can grow exponentially through major platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, etc.

Here are a few trends in social media marketing as of 2021:

• Statista reports that currently, 3.78 billion people actively use social media worldwide.
• According to research, Facebook is the most popular choice of social media platform.
• Buffer reports that 73% of marketers believe that social media marketing has been “somewhat fruitful” or “very useful” for their business.
• 54% of social browsers research products on social media.
• Forbes reports that 71% of consumers who had a positive experience with a brand on social media generally recommend the brand to their friends and family.
• Influencer’s suggestions persuade 49% of consumers.

Example

In 2019, Gillette, the popular personal grooming brand, ran a YouTube short film about the modern interpretation of manhood. Gillette spoke about the challenges men face w.r.t hiding their emotions, sexual harassment, bullying, etc.

The campaign was similar to the #MeToo movement. they took to Instagram and posted many male role models to inspire the redefinition of manhood. Additionally, the company pledged $1 million for three consecutive years to non-profit organizers who actively campaigned against toxic masculinity.

This campaign garnered 30 million views. Each month #GilletteAd reached 150 million users. Even their Instagram posts gathered an average of 800 likes and 50 comments.

Targeted Marketing

Targeting marketing involves a brand identifying their target audience by building the right buyer persona and targeting their products or services to that audience group. Unlike mass marketing, targeted marketing ensures companies direct their marketing communications and strategies to a specific group of people. Here’s why targeted marketing is relevant in 2021:

• Targeted marketing has a smaller reach but produces better and more accurate results than mass marketing.
• It results in higher engagement and better brand loyalty.
• It yields long-term results.

Example

Kelloggs is famous for its breakfast cereals. If you take a closer look at their strategy, you’ll find how they target approximately 650 TV ads each year to promote their cereal options to kids. These ads are shown on children’s pay channels during times that they are highly engaged.

Furthermore, sugary cereals are kept at children’s eye line at supermarkets. A study by Yale concluded that this targeted marketing strategy was why 17% of total sales by volume came from sugary cereals.

Video Marketing

Video marketing allows brands to market their products or services, increase reach and engagement, and educate their customers through videos. Here are a few reasons why video marketing is essential for your brand:

• 85% of US adults consume video content from brands.
• 54% of consumers want more video content from brands they follow.
• 87% of marketers use video marketing to accomplish their targets.
• Videos are the favorite type of content for your consumers.
• Marketers get 66% more qualified leads through video marketing. They also achieve a 54% increase in brand awareness
• 8 in 10 people have purchased from a brand after watching their video.

Example

GoPro, a high-def camcorder manufacturer, does video marketing right. They crowdsource a lot of videos adventurous GoPro users film and upload them on their social platforms. This benefits both the brand and its users.

Although the brand generally showcases adventurous videos, GoPro’s video of a fireman saving a kitten had gone viral, raking up 44.8 million views, 555k upvotes, and over 54K comments. Deciding to show the caring side of the brand paid off. This is the power of video marketing.

Viral Marketing

Brands use viral marketing strategies to spread their unique messages/ videos quickly through people. Just like a virus spreads like a wildfire among communities, multiple people share viral content in a short period. This is why social media platforms are the hub of viral content.

Example

The Super Bowl is a time when marketers get highly competitive over the 30-second spots. They are willing to pay upwards of $5 million. However, when the Mercedes Superdome experienced an outage in power that lasted longer than 30 minutes, Oreo cleverly bypassed this system using one simple tweet:

The reason we bring this example today is that it forced marketers to rethink marketing. The virality of this tweet showed marketers that creativity and wit could go a long way in marketing.

Word-of-mouth Marketing

Word-of-mouth marketing influences and encourages organic conversations about a brand. To further simplify this, word-of-mouth marketers create a product/ content that is sure to get people talking, and they further encourage people to have these conversations. Here’s why it matters for your brand:

• Neilsen reports that 92% of your consumers trust reviews about your brand from their friends and family.
• Eric Carlson, the founder of 10X Factory, says Facebook groups where influencers and family and friends all talk about your product can help boom your eCommerce success.
• As little as a 10% increase in word-of-mouth marketing results in a sales lift of 0.2%-1.5%.
• 74% of your consumers buy your products because of WOM marketing.

Example

Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann used WOM marketing strategies to grow the brand from 3000 followers to over 200 million in 2018. He noticed that although the number of followers was small, they were passionate.

By assuring them that Pinterest was serious about their growth, they launched the “pin it forward” campaign. This campaign encouraged “pinners” to create pinboards and share with their friends; these friends would then create a Pinterest account and do the same. This is a powerful and digital example of the need for WOM marketing.

YouTube Marketing

When brands promote their business and products on YouTube, they use YouTube marketing strategies to upload valuable content that generates engagement and adds to their inbound marketing efforts. This can be in the form of videos or paid advertisements. Here are a few trends to keep an eye on:

• As of 2020, people spend close to 100 minutes a day watching YouTube videos.
• Users are consuming videos on all possible devices, including televisions.
• 99% of video marketers are getting in on video streaming content, and 95% of marketers are increasing their YouTube marketing budget.
• More than 100 hours of video content is uploaded every minute on YouTube.
• YouTube is shaping to be the future of advertising.

Example

Blendtec is such a historic example of YouTube marketing done right; we had to talk about it. Blendtec started its “will it blend” campaign in 2006. The company’s founder, Tom Dickson, was curious how durable the Blendtec blenders would be.

The concept was simple: can you blend ANY object using this blender? Right from marbles to even iPads and iPhones are some of the objects the viral videos showed.

This is at the crux of what YouTube wanted for its customers: to have entertaining content. These videos were so outrageously wild that people HAD to share them. This viral sensation gathered millions of views almost immediately, and Blendtec sales skyrocketed: we’re talking about a 700% increase in online sales.

Concluding

We’ve shown you in detail all the different strategies used in marketing as of 2021. Right from ABM all the way to YouTube marketing, we highlighted some of the prominent examples of brands using these strategies to succeed. We hope you find inspiration to creatively use these strategies to boom your brand.

Rahul Vij

Co-founded WebSpero solutions about a decade ago. Having worked in web development- I realized the dream of transforming ideas sketched out on paper into fully functioning websites. Seeing how that affected the customers’ generation of leads and conversions, I wanted to delve deeper into the sphere of digital marketing. At Webspero Solutions, handling operations and heading the entire Digital Marketing Field – SEO, PPC, and Content are my core domains. And although we as a team have faced many challenges, we have come far learning along and excelling in this field and making a remarkable online reputation for our work.

Having worked in building websites and understanding that sites are bare structures without quality content, the main focus was to branch into optimizing each website for search engines. Investing in original, quality content creation is essential to SEO success in the current search climate. Succeeding in this arena ensures the benefits of producing visitor-friendly content. Directing all our teams to zoom in on these factors has been a role that I have thoroughly enjoyed playing throughout these years.

Marketing Funnels – What, Why, How, And Everything

by Rahul Vij | May 20, 2021 | Tips

According to a study carried about by Salesforce, 79 percent of leads never converted into subscriptions or sales. The study also revealed that 68 percent of businesses failed or never attempted to determine sales funnels. The lack of proper guidance made it difficult to convert the leads into sales.

Surprisingly, you might not know about marketing funnels, but you surely have gone through a number of them several times. Marketing funnels are everywhere. They are crucial for the growth of a brand, attracting new leads to websites, and customer retention. Do you want to know how to create marketing sales funnels?

Before we move on to that, let’s first understand some basics about these funnels. So are you ready to enter the world of market funnels? Here we go:

What is a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is a visual representation of a buyer’s journey. It includes stages from how a visitor finds your brand to how they convert into a customer.
Or
You can also say it is a process of trying to convert the target audience into customers and then convince them to become loyal consumers and continue purchasing products from your business.

Throughout different funnel stages, a business needs to nurture their visitor’s needs and use tactics to move them to further stages.

Always remember- a marketing funnel doesn’t need to be complex.

In the starting, go with simple marketing funnels, and once you know what’s working and what isn’t in terms of performance metrics, then you can continue to optimize it.

The most commonly used B2B marketing funnel structure consists of four steps that are :

1. Attention
2. Interest
3. Desire
4. Action

1. Attention: It’s the stage when your visitors get aware of your business and find out that you can solve their problem. These days there are tons of ways you can use to grab your target audience’s attention and move them towards your upper marketing funnel. Here are a few examples:

• By participating in a podcast
• Using Facebook Ads
• Promoting your product on other website’s articles or blogs
• By showing up in your target lead’s Pinterest dashboard
• By ranking high on the Google SERPs
• Getting a shoutout from an influencerExample Of Attention: You are scrolling through your Instagram account. And suddenly came across Flipkart’s ad about their “Big Billion Days.” You find it impressive and decide to visit flipkart.com to know about this deal in detail. The ad was what caught your ATTENTION and encouraged you to enter the marketing funnel of this brand.

2. Interest: At this stage, they assume you can solve their problems, so they start developing interest in your brand. They visit your website and look for the solutions. This is the stage where you are offering them useful information through free and valuable content, developing your brand’s credibility.

“Your focus should always be to appear like an expert.”

When you provide your customers with solid advice and solutions that don’t feel sales-driven and cringy, you develop trust. This way, when you actually start leading them to the further stages of the funnel and bring up your services and products, they’ll be more open to them.

Example Of Interest: While scrolling through the search results of “best marketing company,” you clicked on the first link of the page, as you find it impressive. With the hope that this agency can fulfill your needs, you start reading the information on the landing page. The content was helpful, so you decided to stay on the website to learn more about the agency.

This is the best example of the “INTEREST stage”- when you get interested in learning about a brand, assuming they’ll solve your problem. So you visit their website and read the content, entering the second step in the funnel.

3. Desire: The visitor has read everything they need, and now they want to convert. Every few visitors, compared to that you see on the first stage, reach this step. This is when you can bring up deals that they cannot resist. By offering strong and irresistible offers, you can make them sure about their decision.

Example Of Desire: Carrying forward the example of “Interest”- reading the content they offered assured you that they are right for you. So you decided to hire them. This is when you enter the third stage of the marketing funnel when your INTEREST is converted into a DESIRE to hire their services.

4. Action: The moment you have been waiting for! The last step where your efforts pay off: the purchase. People who have reached this stage are the ones who have decided that your brand is best for them and they’ll surely like to deal with you again.

Example Of Action: You are signing the contract and entering your bank details to pay for the services. Now you are at the final stage of the mid marketing funnel- the ACTION.

Make sure you keep the buying process as simple and seamless as possible. Avoid including unnecessary columns in your purchase form.

Here’s what Miranda, Founder of VinPit, has to say about the marketing and sales funnel they use, covering all the above points:

“The people at the top of the sales funnel see our advertisement. A certain percentage of them decide to tap on it. That’s the next of the funnel. Then one customer sees service at a discount. The thumb through the details, and now they’re at the next step of the funnel. Then the customer decides to purchase that service and proceeds to the check-out. Which is also the last stage of this funnel. If all goes well, they finish the purchase and reach the bottom of the funnel. This same process plays out for every business in one way or the other.”

But is it really necessary to use marketing funnels on your website? Isn’t it possible to attract more customers without it? What’s its purpose? Here are your answers –

Importance Or Purpose Of Marketing Funnel

Image Credit: ligonmarketing

The major purpose of marketing funnels is to gain more sales and attract more customers. But don’t you think that’s the same core purpose of whole marketing? Yes, it is.

Talking more specifically, the marketing funnel’s purpose is to help you create well-defined, measurable, and structured marketing strategies that lead your customers through a seamless buyer’s journey.

With the use of these funnels, you can easily figure out the barriers stopping your visitors from getting converted. Without them, it will be quite difficult for your business to determine your lacking points. Once all the necessary changes are made according to the report of the funnel, you can experience a better conversion rate. The basic idea behind a marketing funnel is to find out ways to push a visitor to the last stage that is action.

Now let’s dig a little deep into marketing funnels and find out about their components:

Components Of Marketing Funnel

Different leads on different stages need to be treated differently. People on the awareness stage don’t have to be pushed directly to the core offer. But instead, they should be provided with content that educated them about your business.

Till now, you have learned about what marketing funnels are, the stages they constitute, and their relevance. But an important topic is still left to cover, without which it’s hard to learn how to create a funnel- the components of a marketing funnel. Here are all of them:

Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are an entry point of your digital marketing funnels. They are initial high-value deals that you provide your target audience in exchange for their contact information like email address, phone number, etc.

The goal of this component is to convince your leads to give you their contact information in barter for useful, high-quality, and valuable pieces of content. That is why all marketing funnels are also called lead funnels.

Remember- the content of a lead magnet needs to be actionable. They must assure your leads that your brand is worth giving their details.

Tripwire

A tripwire is a service or product which is priced at either affordable or at a very low cost. A tripwire must have an amazing value. It can’t just be any low-priced offer or deal that is not worth anything because that will not improve the conversion rate.

“The major goal of this component is to persuade your target audience – that is to make them engaged with your content – to buy this low-cost deal and provide you with their credit card information.”

Your audience should find value in your tripwire. Motivate them to move further to the next step in the buyer’s journey and hence purchase your services and products.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are the house of our tripwires and lead magnets. It is where your audience will stay, read your content and provide their email address, payment information, etc. You have to make your call to action landing page as attractive and value-filled as possible. Leads should feel worth spending their time on it.

In addition to creating landing pages, make sure to build a “THANK YOU” page linked to tripwire and magnets. It’s a page where you can divert your audience, after they give the necessary information, to other valuable content such as your social media accounts, videos, and blogs.

How many types of marketing funnels are there? Jesus! So many people are asking the same question. If you have the same question, the answer is right below.

Different Types Of Funnels

There are so many names of water like- drink, H2O, aqua, and many more. But does having different names mean it serves a different purpose? Not exactly. You can call it by any name, but its main job will always be to quench your thirst.

Similarly, there are many types of marketing funnels, but all of their end goals are the same- to track or map out the steps that visitors take to convert. Following are examples of the top three popular types of funnels, along with how they have been used by well-known brands:

Sales Funnels – Example: Netflix

Netflix follows a 7-stage marketing purchase funnel that attracts viewers with an irresistible offer- a “30 days free trial”. Here’s how the sales funnel stages looks like:

Stage1: Visitors enter their sales funnel through a call-to-action button present on the landing page- “JOIN FREE FOR A MONTH.”

Stage2: Now, Netflix takes its user to the plan introduction page, where it asks to view different plans. “SEE THE PLANS”- is an effective call to action (CTA) used here.

Stage3: In this stage, the visitor chooses a plan from three options- Basic, Standard, and premium. And move to the next stage by clicking on CONTINUE(CTA).

Stage4: It’s an introduction page where Netflix suggests the user to create an account. User clicks on CONTINUE to create one.

Stage5: The user reaches the SignUp page to create their account. They enter their email address and set a password for their Netflix account. By clicking on CONTINUE, this streaming platform takes them to the next stage.

Stage6: In this stage, Netflix asks the user to set up their payment method for renewing their account after the free trial offer. Choosing the payment option takes them to the final stage of their funnel.

Stage7: In the last stage, the user enters their payment information and becomes Netlflix’s customer. After clicking on the START MEMBERSHIP, the user continues using this platform.

Lead Magnet And Email Funnels- Example: Spotify

Spotify uses a 3-stages funnel which is a combination of lead magnet and email marketing funnel. This platform attracts traffic to its funnel with “FREE MUSIC STREAMING” offers through emails. Here’s an in-depth explanation of each of the funnel stages:

Stage1: The first stage starts with the CTA landing page of Spotify. Visitors click on the CTA provided on the landing page- GET SPOTIFY FREE. Clicking that green button moves them to the next stage of the funnel.

Stage2: In this stage, the visitor has to create an account by filling the Sign-Up form. After entering the required information, they click on the SIGN-UP button.

Stage3: Now Spotify directs the user to its Thank You page, which confirms that accounts have been successfully created. After installing the desktop software or mobile application, the visitor can continue using the FREE version of Spotify.

Video Marketing Funnels – Example: Cincopa

Cincopa uses a 5-stage video marketing funnel on its website. Let’s learn about all the stages in detail:

Stage1: While reading the website content or any article or blog by Cincopa, users discover a YouTube video that gains their attention.

Stage2: They click on the video and reach the YouTube channel of Cincopa, where the video starts running automatically.

Stage3: The visitor watches the video, and if he or she enjoys it, they click on the THUMBS UP button.

Stage4: Now, the User reads the description and redirects back to the homepage.

Stage5: The landing page has two good call to actions present on the top – 30 DAYS FREE TRIAL and LEARN MORE.

Stage6: The user clicks on 30 DAYS FREE TRIAL and enters the SignUp page.

Stage7: He fills the form and starts using the free version of this software.

Here’s what Eden, Marketing Director at WeInvoice, have to say about these funnels:

“I have used Webinar funnels, Video sales funnels, and email funnels.

Webinar Funnels helps you maintain a robust relationship with your target audience by promoting various webinars. Two types of webinars are there, free and paid. Well, this webinar funnel provides a list-building tool and a leading scope to engage with your audience.

Video sales funnels are another market funnel example to generate leads using video. Being an automated selling system, it is the best-in-class tool to optimize your online sales. However, the process also makes it hassle-free to identify every side of the video e-commerce sales funnels.

Email marketing funnel helps to convert your email IDs into various event attendees. Therefore, it gives marketers a detailed route to create email for targeted customers to travel from their first interaction to finally convert.”

Now you are ready to discover how to create a marketing funnel. Excited? Here are the steps to create a marketing funnel explained in detail:

How To Create A Marketing Funnel

Building a marketing funnel includes various steps. You’ll find numerous blogs on the internet discussing numerous such steps. But while reading those blogs, there are always chances for the reader to get confused, close the tab and end up wasting their time. To help you understand the technique of creating a funnel, we have summed up everything in the following three steps:

1. Understand Your Audience

The first and most important step in creating a marketing funnel is to understand your target leads. You must first know who your target audience is before creating a marketing funnel to target them and convert them into potential customers.

There are many ways to understand the target audience. These include:

• Surveys
• Social media
• Direct feedback from existing customers
• Web analytics data, etc.

The goal is to understand the behavior of your target leads and how they interact with your content and website. Understanding their behavior will help you shape your marketing funnel correctly.

2. Determine The Total Number Of Funnel Stages

After you are done mapping out the target audience’s pre-purchase journey, it’s time to determine different stages in a funnel. You can create as many steps as you can in your funnel. But we suggest you include only the necessary ones because the more steps you include, the more complex the funnel will become.

If you are creating one for the first time, you don’t need to go complex. You can go with the most common structure, just like the one we have given above.

To make it more productive, you can use the data about the audience behavior you have collected in the first step. When you are creating a marketing funnel, always include those stages that make your buyer’s journey seamline not complex.

3. Apply Marketing Techniques On Each Stage

After determining all the stages in your marketing funnel, the last step is to find out which marketing technique to use in each step. To keep things less complex and help you understand better, we have considered a simple marketing funnel with three stages.

Following are a few tactics for conversion funnel marketing that you can use at different stages of your marketing funnel.

Top Area Of The Funnel

1. You can use social media marketing to divert your social media traffic to your website. For that, you can run ad campaigns on various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, etc.
2. Another great marketing tactic you can use is influencer marketing. It aims to spread brand awareness and helps you reach your target audience on a big scale.
3. SEO is also a very helpful marketing technique to gain more organic traffic to your website.
4. Podcasts and videos are also effective in attracting prospective customers at this stage.
5. You can also host contests and giveaways to reach more target leads and improve your brand’s visibility.

Middle Area Of The Funnel

1. “Product unboxing, trial videos, and product reviews” by popular influencers is quite an effective marketing technique at the step.
2. “Case studies” that reveal how your products and services helped other clients or anything that proves their benefits.
3. Offer “ebooks, B2B products, and whitepapers” to engage more people and increase their purchase intent.

Bottom Area Of The Funnel

1. Provide “discounts and good deals” to encourage your audience to purchase. Go with “limited-time offers”. It’s a great sales technique as it creates a sense of urgency.
2. “Demos and free product trials” are another good way to encourage the audience to try your products before making a purchase.
3. “Create scarcity”- it’s a technique that has worked well for many retailers. Showing your leads that limited stock is left motivates them to place the order quickly.

What’s The Future Of Marketing Funnel?

The marketing funnel visualizes the journey of a buyer as one huge funnel. This funnel attracts a number of visitors to enter from the top with the hope that at least a few of them will convert into customers. But with the expansion of digitalization around the world, the way consumers shop has changed a lot.

In today’s digital age, the marketing funnel is not an effective strategy. Instead, many businesses have seen using marketing flywheel over funnels. The marketing funnel focuses only on revenue generation. Once a customer passes the last stage of the funnel, businesses don’t care much about them. On the other hand, marketing flywheel includes customer support as a major component.

When your business works with the goal of delighting your customers, you’ll create a fast-spinning flywheel that increases the speed by which your company grows.

But this isn’t it. Marketing flywheel is a vast topic. Do you want to know more about it in detail?

READ HERE AN IN-DEPTH GUIDE ON MARKETING FLYWHEEL!

Final Words

Marketing funnels have helped numerous brands turn their visitors into paying customers. Now when you know what a marketing funnel is and how to create it, it’s time for you to try it yourself.

Rahul Vij

Co-founded WebSpero solutions about a decade ago. Having worked in web development- I realized the dream of transforming ideas sketched out on paper into fully functioning websites. Seeing how that affected the customers’ generation of leads and conversions, I wanted to delve deeper into the sphere of digital marketing. At Webspero Solutions, handling operations and heading the entire Digital Marketing Field – SEO, PPC, and Content are my core domains. And although we as a team have faced many challenges, we have come far learning along and excelling in this field and making a remarkable online reputation for our work.

Having worked in building websites and understanding that sites are bare structures without quality content, the main focus was to branch into optimizing each website for search engines. Investing in original, quality content creation is essential to SEO success in the current search climate. Succeeding in this arena ensures the benefits of producing visitor-friendly content. Directing all our teams to zoom in on these factors has been a role that I have thoroughly enjoyed playing throughout these years.