As inbound marketers, we’re always trying to learn new things, keep up with best practices, help our customers get what they need, track analytics, adjust our plans, remember to eat lunch – we’re busy folks. As more things are added to our plate, it can get complicated to balance the day-to-day tasks with the most important end goal: delighting our customers.
That’s where technology comes in handy! A lot of tech, like the multitude of plugins that you can add to your WordPress site, is incredibly helpful at knocking out the most time-consuming aspects of marketing.
Whether you need a hand with monitoring your analytics, capturing leads, or boosting your page views, we’ve got the plugin for you! As an added bonus, these plugins work perfectly together to keep prospects moving through the Flywheel, keeping your business running smoothly and your customers delighted with your service.
But first, what is this Flywheel anyway? I’m glad you asked!
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE FLYWHEEL
If you’re at all familiar with marketing, you’re probably also familiar with the idea of the sales funnel. In the basic funnel, you market to people at the top of the funnel – strangers – until they’ve been marketed to enough that they consider your product and move down the funnel to sales, and then, hopefully, they’re pushed out the bottom of the funnel as customers.
This funnel is how marketing professionals – including us! – looked at gaining customers for many years. And that’s because it worked.
But now, customer referrals and worth-of-mouth recommendations have become the driving force of the purchase process. Yelling at strangers on the internet sometimes can get things done, but marketing isn’t really one of those things anymore.
For referrals and recommendations to happen, customers can’t just be poured out of the funnel and forgotten. Plus, as a growth-driven agency, we like to move on forward when the times and best practices start changing! That’s why we’re so enthusiastic about the flywheel.
Instead of forcing prospects through the funnel to the designated endpoint of “customer,” the flywheel’s momentum of happy customers drives new potential purchasers towards your business. It also keeps people who have already purchased from you coming back for more.
It helps customers and prospects by giving them some control of their purchasing experience instead of just being pushed down the funnel to our end goal.
WORDPRESS PLUGINS FOR ALL YOUR FLYWHEEL NEEDS
Now that you understand the basics of the Flywheel, what can you do to help attract, engage, and delight your customers?
Here are some helpful plugins for your WordPress site that can help you along in each stage of the Flywheel.
ATTRACT WITH GOOGLE ANALYTICATOR
Google Analyticator makes it simple for you to view Google Analytics right from your WordPress dashboard. You can adjust how the data displays without any need to do complex edits to your template code.
This plugin is extremely helpful in the Attract stage of the flywheel because Google Analytics is an excellent tool for meeting your customers where they are. By seeing how your customers come to your site, you’ll be able to see how effective your inbound efforts are at attracting customers and tweak your strategy accordingly.
ENGAGE WITH HUBSPOT ALL-IN-ONE MARKETING
This plugin really is all-in-one!
First, it includes a variety of lead capture tools – forms, popups, live chat, email automation, and contact database – right there in the plugin, ready to go. It also automatically captures form submissions from your site, even if they use a different tool. You’ll enjoy the benefits of having all your lead capture and contact information all in one place.
Plus, by adding the plugin, you get access to everything else the free version of HubSpot has to offer, including HubSpot Academy.
This wide variety of ways to contact your leads and store the information they share with you for easy access makes it simple to engage with all your prospects. Whether they need a question answered right on your site through live chat, are interested in a newsletter sign up, want to download your premium content, or something else entirely, this plugin can handle it. And the customization options can help make the forms match perfectly to attract your buyer persona.
DELIGHT WITH RELATED POSTS
This plugin uses AI to suggest posts to your blog visitors that might interest them based on what they’ve already read. It’s customizable, simple to use, and doesn’t slow down your site. You also have as much control as you want over the posts that display – you can prioritize or hide any post. You can even A/B test two different models to see which one performs best for your actual customers. The algorithm is also constantly updating.
The whole idea behind inbound marketing is to provide your customers with the information they need. So, providing them with even more helpful information has got to be good, right? The key word here is helpful though – you can’t just throw a bunch of random site pages at someone and hope for the best. That’s where this plugin really shines.
By providing additional useful information, your prospects will be impressed with your breadth of knowledge on the subject, remember to come back to you with more questions, and, following the flywheel, even tell their friends about how helpful you’ve been! And the added benefit for you is more page views and more site traffic which leads to a higher SEO ranking.
As I mentioned before, all these plugins serve to take some of the less personalized tasks of marketing off your plate so you can spend time focusing on your prospects and making their experience the best it can be. After all, the real point of marketing is to help your customers get what they want. And the more time you can spend on that, the more delighted customers – and more profits – you’ll see!
If you’re not getting as many results as you’d like to see, we can help! Get a consultation and our web experts will help you move towards more leads and more customers.