The Power of the Flywheel (Part 2): The Attraction Stage

When it comes to your marketing efforts, you want every interaction with your audience to be a driving force that compels them further down the buyer’s journey. Sadly, many users who are eager to find solutions end up experiencing friction instead.

In part one of this video series, we highlighted the flywheel concept and how your delighted customers are the most powerful force that can grow your business by driving lead attraction and sales. The fastest way to disrupt the inertia of your inbound flywheel, however, is by creating friction. 

Listen to Frank Isca, Inbound Strategist, in part 2 in this video series to hear the best way to make your inbound efforts a force to be reckoned with by creating a frictionless experience for users. 

Click the video chapter menu below and watch Part 2: The Attraction Stage; the transcript to Part 2 is below if you prefer to read (or your headphones are dead; #firstworldproblems).

TRANSCRIPT: The Power of the Flywheel (Part 2) — The Attraction Stage

Hi, I’m Frank Isca, Strategist at Weidert Group. This is the 2nd in a 4-part series explaining the flywheel and introducing you to a better way to achieve ongoing profitable growth.

In the last video, I talked about the 3 stages of the flywheel: Attraction, Engagement and Delight. I want to focus today on the Attraction stage, and how force and friction affect your company’s success in attracting visitors to your website and its content. 

Source: HubSpot

Force are the things that power your efforts, and friction are those things that keep you from being as successful as possible. So what are force and friction in the Attract stage? 

Sources of FORCE in the Attract Stage

The Attraction stage is all about getting people to your website and turning them into leads, so here are some examples of force:

• Helpful content and resources. When you populate your site with plenty of content and resources that are useful and valuable to your best prospects, you’ve got fuel to get found online when they’re searching for answers. The more content you have — and the better that content is aligned with prospects’ needs — the better your chances of getting the right people to your site at the right point in their buyer journeys

• Easy conversion paths. After attracting people to your site you need to capture them as leads. When your site takes advantage of live chat functionality, when it includes forms where visitors can fill out with contact information in order to get content, and when you populate it with a number of calls to action that lead to content, you’re adding power to not only bring people to your site, but to convert them into leads. Without an easy way to capture their information so you can continue to nurture them, you lose out on potential sales

Sources of FRICTION in the Attract Stage

Now for some examples of friction that keep you from getting traffic to your site and being successful in capturing leads: 

• Content that’s not aligned with your prospect’s questions at each stage of their buyer journey — in other words, content that doesn’t answer the questions they’re asking. Don’t think about what you want to say to prospects as you create content — think about the questions they’re asking at each stage of their buyer journey, and develop content around those.

• Poor search engine optimization. If you're not incorporating a topic cluster approach with your content that is aligned with the keywords your prospects are using during their buyer journey, and that are actually feasible to rank for, you're allowing friction to get into the process of attracting traffic and capturing leads.

• Not promoting your new content is another source of friction. When you fail to get your extended team to help share new content on appropriate social media channels, miss opportunities to share new content with your email subscribers, and don’t put effort into getting visibility and quality backlinks from relevant third party websites, you’re removing a quick path that prospects would use to get to your site.

How’s Your Performance?

Now that you’ve learned a little about the Attraction stage of the flywheel, take a look at all the things you’re doing — or not doing — to get the right visitors to your site and capture them as leads. This will help you identify gaps and start improving your performance. HubSpot’s got a handy resource called the Flywheel Worksheet and you can download it free by clicking the link! 

Ready to Engage Your Customers?

Once you’re sure that you’ve eliminated friction from your user experience, it’s time to focus on engaging those users and guiding them down the buyer’s journey. 

And remember, before you can truly engage and delight customers, you need to fully understand their buying process. Access our free Buyer's Journey Worksheet & Template to help.