Why Marketing Flywheels Work
sparktoro.com
sparktoro.com
In a true marketing flywheel, you’d only ever get out slightly less than you put in. By that definition, I have been involved in many marketing flywheels to date.
In linear coordinates, they could have called it the marketing frictionless skateboard - the more you kick the faster it goes!
This article isn't meant to require an understanding of physics. It's meant to help people not familiar with marketing understand the principal of building momentum in a channel.
You guys always gotta make stuff more complicated than it is.
Actually "snowball" probably makes more intuitive sense to people than "compounding growth."
If you understand what a flywheel is, and I tell you that there is such a thing as a “marketing flywheel”, you’re no closer to understanding what I’m talking about.
A much better physical analogy would be a chain reaction, or something like compounding if you wanted a mathematical one: i.e. anything where the initial investments fuel outsized returns later on.
https://medium.com/aws-enterprise-collection/your-enterprise...
All these examples seem to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding about what a flywheel is and what it can do. They are primarily for storing and releasing energy; they don’t generate their own momentum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel
Flywheels aren’t some kind of academics only term. If you’ve ever touched a mechanical fishing rod, you have used a fly wheel.
Clearly a "marketing flywheel" is something which keeps the marketing momentum going between marketing campaigns, reducing the spiking to something more steady... well at least to me :)
Hubspot gets bored of using the term "inbound marketing" for everything they do. So they pivot to "marketing flywheel" which they popularised a couple of years ago.
It results in a lot of mindshare and searches and so smaller players create their own marketing flywheel content in order to siphon away some of this traffic.
It's all very cynical and contrived.
A minuscule number of new entrants have achieved some form of success, so of course they get a louder and more influential voice.
Marketing done right is basically the 'what people want' in 'build things people want' with a focus on what they're actually willing to pay for. I routinely kill ideas because the market is too small or profitability is too hard to achieve. Understanding your audience then building content and product around it is harder and more valuable than HN seems to believe. I've been very successful by developing this skill and learning how to build things. Good marketers have domain and industry specific knowledge that doesn't go viral in marketing circles because it's too specialized. I'm also not about to get on a public forum and tell my competition how I'm beating them.
Internet marketers who idolize internet marketing speakers are insufferable, I'll give you that. It comes from a good place of wanting to learn by listening to the experts. Unfortunately, these experts spend more time talking about how to be like them rather than how to build something people want. I think this also comes from a good place: let me help you achieve success like I have found.
Meanwhile the more technical marketers roll their eyes, get to work, and quietly make their companies money.
"It's not a "marketing funnel anymore, it's a flywheel!", but when we look into it, it's practically the same thing.
Companies, in general, need to become more buyer-centric and focus less on creating abstract buyer's journeys, as if there was a predefined path to purchase that everyone follows.
After scrolling and scanning the article I realized, it was written by Rand himself. Looked deeper and saw, that it is his (somewhat) new venue this content is doing Content Marketing/SEO for.
I've simply stopped trying to set up multi-touch attribution for my clients because it always, always takes longer to configure than anyone expects, and by the end nobody fully trusts it anyway.
Yes, I think that's enough lol
Just had bad memories of a client trying to have multi channel attribution in place for a campaign (but on the other hand, maybe the agency upper management shoved that in the clients throat and we had to deal with it).
Some people buy. Some of those people have bought before when they lived in a different state before they were married. Some people see an ad on their phone and purchase by telling their spouse to order from Amazon. Some people wait until their paycheck clears the bank two weeks later then buy, but not before they’ve seen the brand an additional 15 times on various channels.
Multichannel attribution aims to attribute those purchases to the correct channels, usually to determine ROI and help with planning.
Keeping track of all those customers and touch points is non-trivial. Assigning weight to each touch point is non-trivial. Modeling behavior accurately is non-trivial. It’s theoretically 100% possible. Software companies and consultants sell solutions that seem plausible. In practice it feels impossible.
Source: A decade of agency and in-house advertising/marketing work for some of the largest brands in the world
Why does this industry keep repacking/renaming concepts just to sound like something new... it's like many get value out of perceived progress, when in reality it's just something that has been done for years.
This makes me want to step away from this discipline honestly. Instead of trying to compact knowledge to try to make actual leaps, it thrives on side steps.
Now here comes the new wave of Flywheel Marketers that are specialized in building Flywheels? God damn it...
Old hat learns a strategy that works calls it X -> next gen explores and find that Y works -> next gen adapts flow X and calls it Z out of ignorance/thought leadership/etc.
It's not like there's lack of records of knowledge.
Maybe it's like you said, out of ignorance/thought leadership/etc, I dare to add arrogance.
All we have are fuzzy concepts that require interpretation and constant refinement, and of course everyone's interpretation and method of refinement will differ.
The laws of thermodynamics don't need to be rehashed every year by some owner of a verified Twitter account. Marketing lacks that kind of foundation.
The same as someone saying that a web developer just copy and pastes code, or that a graphic designer just make squiggles in illustrator, and the list goes on.
I recommend you start by here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
Some people criticize Kotler because he "only studied marketing", didn't practice it. I don't see anything wrong with that, specially after being adopted as a standard for decades.
Your analogies don't quite work, because they lack the self-referential component.
And that's useful. Knowing about a concept is one thing, and knowing how to apply it to your situation is another. Articles like this help with the latter.
> Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believe powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers they needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel… and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated… after five years, they finally understood their business."
Some call it flywheels, others call it engines, others call it funnel.
David Ogilvy didn't name it in 1963, with the Confessions of an Advertising Man, but the concept was there:
>Why did I write it? First, to attract new clients to my advertising agency. Second, to condition the market for a public offering of our shares. Third, to make myself better known in the business world. It achieved all three of these purposes.
My point is that some disciplines look into have closed concepts, marketing discipline doesn't.
A funnel typically represents the customers' journey, with some amount of dropoff at each step along the way, e.g. discover the site --> sign up --> become active --> convert to paid. And although each step of a funnel leads to the next one, the last step of the funnel doesn't loop back around to feed into the first step, which means the funnel isn't a closed loop that feeds into itself.
A flywheel, on the other hand, is always a closed loop. And most commonly the steps on the flywheel are business strategies, advantages, and activities, rather than steps along a user journey, e.g. provide a wider selection of goods from sellers --> make buyers happier --> get more buyers --> attract more sellers --> repeat.
Just Google Image search a picture of a flywheel and a funnel and the difference should become immediately clear to you. And note that you can combine the two concepts. For example, in the flywheel, the arrow between attracting more sellers and getting a wider selection of goods could be represented as a funnel.
Finally, your David Ogilvy quote is neither a funnel nor a flywheel. It's just a list of three distinct benefits, all of which derive from him writing something, but none of which feed into the others (or at least he doesn't describe how they do.)
Flywheel output less than the input is. Why would we use that word?
As for whether or not "flywheel" is the best term, I think it's pretty good. Yes, real-life flywheels lose momentum due to friction, unless outside force is exerted. But the same is true with marketing flywheels, which is why all of them will have at least one step that requires the injection of outside energy, e.g. bringing in new customers.
Like I'd aid flywheels have always meant energy storage mechanisms that don't reach 100% efficiency.
Marketers know very well what network effects and economies of scale are, and the concept of a flywheel is distinct from either. You can have a flywheel without EoS or network effects, and you can have EoS or network effects without having a flywheel.
Also, it's somewhat pointless to debate what the "original" meaning of flywheel is. Language evolves and changes, and people from one field borrow terminology from others when creating helpful analogies. Terms like "funnel" and "flywheel" are hardly the first to receive such treatment, and they won't be the last.
I like the argument, that the main thing thats changed in marketing since the 50's is what everything is called.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/12/everything-the-tech-world-...