From Funnel to Flywheel: How to Audit Your Marketing Engine

(upbeat music) Hey, hey, welcome back to The Systems Family Podcast. I'm Jordyn Gill, your typical host, and if you've ever wondered whether all your market efforts are actually moving the needle or just making noise. Today's episode is your reality check and your rowback. I'm handing the mic back to Megan Gregory of Cubed, a B2B growth consultancy for part two of her mini-series on building your always on marketing engine. In the last episode, Megan unpacked the problem with random acts of marketing. Today, she's taking it a step further, helping you audit your system so you can stop guessing and start optimizing. In this episode, Megan is sharing the key shift from funnel thinking to flywheel strategy and why it matters now more than ever. The four essential drivers that power consistent marketing momentum, brand, demand, expand, and success. Had a spot, the week links in your current system and strengthen them strategically, and a simple framework to assess your marketing rhythm in less than 15 minutes. If you're ready to transform your marketing from a list of scatter to dues into a strategic engine that builds trust and scales growth, this episode is a must listen to. Let's dive in. - Hello, friends. I'm Megan Gregory with Cubed, a B2B growth consultancy. Welcome back. In our last episode, we talked about the random acts of marketing trap and what happens when your marketing is scattered and inconsistent. We also introduced the always on marketing engine, a system that creates growth you can count on with momentum that keeps building. Today, I'm answering the question I get all the time. Well, how do I know if my system is actually working? So that's what we're gonna cover today. I'm gonna show how you can audit your marketing engine. So you can see where you're strong, where you're making missing a few pieces, and how you can fix it. But first, let's step back and let's look at the bigger shift that's been happening in marketing. For years, marketing was taught as a funnel, right? You start, why did the top? You have awareness, you bring people in, they don't know who you are, then you kind of narrow down further to consideration. And finally, to people making their decision. You push people through, some people fall out, but hopefully a few people make it all the way to the bottom and you close the deal and you get a new customer. But of course, funnels are linear and here's the problem, marketing today isn't. And that's why HubSpot introduced in 2018, the idea of the flywheel, where you're actually in a cycle of attracting, engaging those people and delighting those people. And so instead of a funnel that loses energy, you've actually got a cycle where every customer interaction and prospect interaction creates momentum. I love the flywheel concept, but I wanted to take that one step further. And what actually powers that inner cycle isn't just random activity, but it's actually four outer drivers that make the flywheel spin faster and stronger. And so that's what we're going to talk about today is kind of these four drivers and how they interact with how we are attracting, engaging and delighting our prospects to becoming customers and valuable relationships for the future. So brand is one of those drivers, how people know who you are and why you matter, demand, how you consistently create interest and trust. Third one, expand, how you grow and serve your existing customers and success. How do you measure, optimize and keep that system running? So think of it this way. HubSpot gave us the flywheel and I've built the outer ring that powers it without brand, demand, expand, and success the flywheel stalls. With them, you have an always-on end-to-end that builds momentum you could count. So today, we're going to audit your engine through those four drivers. So let's flip the switch and get your engine running. The first driver we're going to drive, dive into, is brand. And this is how you attract the right audience in the first place. And so we want to think about the activities that we're doing related to brand. We oftentimes, when we think about brand, it's like the colors and the tone of voice and the feel on your website and all of those things, which obviously those things are all part of brand. What I'm talking about it related to the engine is where are we sharing that consistent voice, right? So where do we have that content engine that is allowing us to share the knowledge that we have for people? Are we on a block? Do we use a podcast? Do we have a newsletter that we send out or perhaps we post articles on LinkedIn? Do we have videos? Are we doing things on YouTube? Do we have case studies that we're sharing? I have one client that actually does really cool is every case study, they actually have the written form, but they also have a video case study of it. Sometimes it's just the animated video that created of the content, but it's kind of cool. It's just sort of their thing to do every single time. Does our website, when people land on our website, does it clearly show our value, the expertise, our thought with your ship? All of the things that really make up who we are, right? That's what brand is, that's that consistent feeling that when I land a Google call to the website, I know what it means, when I've land on whatever provider I want to look at, I want to have that consistent experience and feel every single time. And so how are we showing up, for example, in search, like not just traditional SEO, 'cause of course, now today we've got gender to SEO and how AI German search tools are surfacing businesses and results and leads for people. So what does that look like? I kind of want to audit and review, like do you have paid ads? Are they a part of your strategy? Should they be a part of your strategy? Are we just trying to get people to even know who you are because you don't have that awareness yet? Are we kind of chasing quick wins where we want to do some conversions to a specific event or activity that you have going on? If your brand signals are inconsistent, then people don't know who you are or why you matter. And without the brand, the flywheel doesn't actually spin. The second driver who I want to talk about is demand. And this is how you engage your audience and create that ongoing trust. So we have all of the blogs, say, for example, we've created that consistent messaging, but then how are we communicating that to, does your newsletter come out, the first Tuesday of every month? Do your articles get published consistently the last Friday of every month? Do you have blog posts that go every day or every Monday? Back when we were very first, everybody was building a pretty, I don't know if y'all did this, but I certainly did this with Pinterest. And I would create pretty beautiful content calendars, right? And Matic Monday and I would come up with those work at Wednesday and have all the different posts on that. But the concept still applies today, right? Is that do we have a consistent way that we're sharing this content with people that helps build that trust, right? So a big thing I'm going with a lot of people is actually nurture programs for email. And y'all still gets a ton of great results with people. And we do nurture programs not just for new leads, but actually for existing customers, or even like people who have closed and they kind of drop off the sales cycle and then how does that actually increase from there? And when you're sending all of that content, it wants to be, it should be educational, right? It should be giving value to people, but staying consistent so that people know that you're there when they are ready to make a decision. And that's kind of the biggest thing, right? That shift happened all the way back in 2018, which feels like a billion years ago now, but really the shift did happen for all of us as buyers. And now it goes all the way even into corporate, right? Where we take this new way of buying, which is, I don't just randomly search for the first time on an internet and say, oh, I want a new email provider. And then I land on the first one I find at the top of the search and that's it and I buy it, right? Like, nobody buys software, nobody buys services, nobody buys tools that way. You're always doing quick research. Nowadays, when you do search half the time, you get generated AI is your answer the first time. So the content and your website still matters or you follow people on Instagram that you really like and you get to know them. And you look at, find, research, read about and do all of this stuff before you ever engage with anyone. And that is very true, whether it is B2C sales, whether it's B2B sales, when we want to be able to provide that type of content for people so that we can share the leadership regularly on LinkedIn and podcasts, things we, you know, guest host episodes, all those different kinds of things, right? We want to really think about our campaigns connected to a bigger system, part of the bigger plan, or are we sort of just one off, right? So these are the kinds of questions that you want to look at. And probably the truth is, most of us are one off or we're moving towards that idea of having a systemic window. I myself, I'm no way judging anybody about, you should do this and be perfect in all ways. Nope, nobody's perfect. But what we want to do is figure out where we at and where can we get to having this type of system. So you kind of think back and look back over the last 90 days, how many nurturing emails did you send? Not just pushing a product or pushing whatever, but how many just educational emails did you send to people where you're just telling them what you do, what you offer? A lot of us probably would say none or a little bit or maybe I got one done but I'm not consistent. Without the consistent demand activity, then your flywheel could lose that energy between campaigns. And so that's really what we want to use the audit for is figuring out what do we have, what is happening and then what could happen. The third driver in our flywheel is expanding. You want to serve and grow the customers that you already have. So of course, thinking about having a structured or onboarding experience for new customers, that makes perfect sense. I mentioned earlier, even just having nurture campaigns for existing customers, why my clients, we do that for them because they have products to upgrade to. And they're like a $50 million software company. So like it's a small upgrade that someone's going to do. But we want to provide them the information that says, hey, when you're ready, here's these other solutions that could be available to you or by the way, we have these other training services or by the way, we have these other professional services or exultic services that we have available to you. So we want to have other ways of being able to communicate with people that aren't just about selling. Sometimes it might be, hey, we just have these educational content that we want to share with you and you'd be surprised. We think, well, we talk to these people all the time, there are customers, they bought our stuff from us. Obviously, did they know all of the things that we offer? No, very much, no, not true. We definitely have opportunity where we can keep telling people the things that we offer. We can keep sharing that information. Also something that I learned is, when you've been in an industry a while, you sort of take for granted that you know all of that. And you're like, there's no, you know, customers 101 coming into this space. Are they, doesn't everyone know that everything that there is to know about that? But the fact is, is that's not true at all. We're always learning, there's always new team members coming on. People leave teams, they move on to other projects within a company, et cetera. So there's always an opportunity to do that and educate new customers that are coming onto a team. We want to share with other customers. This one happens a lot, right? Where people are like, what are other people doing? This software, what are other people doing? You know, when they have this business problem, I would love to kind of hear those stories and hear more examples versus just the way that we use the software or we have implemented this program. Do you have a customer only news that are updates, sort of keep people engaged or what they're doing? Do you have a way of inviting people to events or communities? A lot of times, customer marketing becomes an afterthought. But retention, upsell, referral programs, that really is what takes growth from flat to compounding, right? We wanna get that flywheel moving, so without expand, growth is kind of chasing new leads that set up building on the ones that you already have. The last driver is success. And this one, a lot of us skip. Do you have clear metrics tied to each part of the engine? Do you regularly review results and optimize? Do we know what success looks like in 30, 60, or 90 days? I mean, everybody knows the quote, what gets measured, gets managed, right? If you're not tracking success, you're guessing. And that's a big part of it is that we're kind of going through and documenting what is, what things do we already have that we already have access to? And how can we use what we already have? How can we already document what are things that we can measure that we're already working on? And then where are the places where we can look for opportunities to be better at this, right, improve? Really get that flywheel moving. Have an engine that's built non-guesses, but actually builds on the results and the work that we're doing. So today's episode was really to have a few minutes to go through and audit our marketing engine. And think about what doing one of look at? What can we work at on those four drivers that powers our flywheel? So let's recap. The brand, are you consistently visible and clear? Demand, are you nurturing trust and engagement, expand? Are you serving and growing your customers? And success, are you tracking, measuring, and optimizing? We have all four of those in place. You don't just have the flywheel. You have an always on engine, one that runs with rhythm and creates growth. You can kept them on. So what it did is I created a little audit checklist. You can grab that free marketing engine audit checklist at cubed CUBEEDM, then number three, dot com forward slash always, dash on, dash marketing, dash engine. It's a simple one-page guide. Just takes you a few minutes to kind of go through and give you the lazy land of where you're at so that you can get started creating your always on marketing engine. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon. So good, right? Thank you so much for listening. To this episode of The Systems Aid Me Podcast. If you loved this episode, I would so appreciate a review on whatever platform you're listening on. But also, go live on the guest host. Connect with them on Instagram, LinkedIn, or wherever they suggested to reach out. I hope you're having a great day, and I will see you on the next episode.