The term “Marketing Flywheel” doesn’t really enlighten anyone, because that’s not how flywheels work. Flywheels are a store of energy, not an energy multiplier.
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.
Marketing flywheels power money printing machines, not electric turbines.
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.
That’s not my argument. What I’m saying is that a flywheel is a poor analogy for what is being described.
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.
> 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.
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 :)
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
I'd never heard of it and my best guess based on the name would have been some kind of way of "storing up" marketing effort to release it later, like if you had extra marketing $$$ and needed to use it before the end of the quarter but would prefer to spread it out.
That’s not what is being described though: “You put in the same amount of work (or less) each time, and get more and more out of it the more you repeat it.”
Yes the math does not support the metaphor. This is the kind of thing that would irk me but I'm fine with this one. I imagine a massive flywheel where each input imperceptibly changes angular velocity and in early stages is moving in slow motion like a joke. Keep at it and it becomes an unstoppable beast (neglecting friction of course). This is content marketing. Nothing until it's something.
Yeah I thought this article would be about companies that just barely make back their marketing spend, but then in the long-term reach success from being big/getting brand value.
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.
Internet 'marketing' is a fascinating pyramid scheme, where established players create content to help new entrants create content that will expose them to newer entrants. Somehow this should get everybody paid (not just the big players selling the domains and website creation tools).
A minuscule number of new entrants have achieved some form of success, so of course they get a louder and more influential voice.
I think you're confusing internet marketing with the people who talk about internet marketing.
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.
Exactly. Vendors have a vested interest in promoting these type of concepts.
"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.
I clicked, because I remembered the term Flywheel from Rand Fishkins book "Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World".
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.
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).
A consumer goods company operates two brands that sell the same products to different target audiences. The company works from a database that comprises 15 million+ entries for customers/leads/etc. Each brand sends one email a day, mails 6 catalogs throughout the year on different schedules based on seasonal buying patterns, runs search/display/etc ads across Google and Bing every day, runs Facebook/Insta/Messenger/etc ads every day, posts on various social networks every day, works with hundreds of affiliate advertisers that advertise every day, puts time/effort/money into SEO every day, and just started running TikTok campaigns because the founder’s daughter’s friend is an “influencer” on the network.
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
I just wait for Amazon to come out with some sort of affiliate payments integration with their Just Walk Out tech to know whether attribution is possible at scale...
I'm not here to criticize the content, just the to vent a frustration as a marketer:
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...
Well if you don't know what marketing is, I guess that any concept out of ignorance suits it, right?
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.
Not the previous poster but: I've tried picking up things a cut above random pop books about marketing and haven't found any depth there. If you have any links to somewhere I can actually do a deep dive on marketing, I'd appreciate it.
To this day I still think Principles of Marketing by Philip Kotler it's the best book to give you as close to foundational knowledge you can get, and you can go from there to get depth further into the disciplines that compose it - like advertising, distribution, etc.
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.
If you want "theory" lookup Bernays and read his books about propaganda. Something more practical is anything David Oglivy has written. For copywriting check out "The Adweek Copywriting Handbook" by Sugarman. Unfortunately, I can't recommend any design specific books as I'm a media buyer and trash at design.
I'd go one step farther from "read anything David Ogilvy has written" to "read everything David Ogilvy has written" starting with Ogilvy on Advertising. It's fun and light and valuable even if some of the ads do feel wonderfully retro (they were not retro, however, they were incredibly disruptive innovations that worked so well they redefined how we think about business communication, and this is where they started). The man did invent the notion of modern quantitatively driven marketing, after all. Yes, some of the things he talks about pertain to an earlier era, but all of them remain relevant today and there is value in thinking about how to translate concepts he discussed for print advertising to online contexts.
"Marketing" is a broad term; it's like saying 'what's a good book on software engineering?' What are you wanting to learn about marketing? There are interesting books that give you lots of tactics for early-stage startups (Traction by Gabriel Weinberg, for example); books that tell how to think about Brand Strategy (for example, Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller); books that delve into psychology (Influence by Robert Cialdini); and many other things. Marketing encompasses high-level strategy, brand, research, market sizing, messaging, positioning, product marketing, social media, content marketing, PR and earned media, grassroots marketing, and the list goes on. Within each of these topics there are many different approaches and philosophies. High-level pop books will be fairly light on how each of these work.
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore is a classic for tech companies. It's not about the discipline of marketing, but more of a representation of what marketing looks like in practice. (And, perhaps to the astonishment of many, in practice it does not always look like a pyramid scheme.)
Flywheels aren't a new concept. I first encountered them in Brad Stone's excellent book about Amazon, The Everything Store, which I believe was published in 2014. Stone explained how Bezos and crew discovered their flywheel in 2001:
> 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."
Like I said in the first sentence, I wasn't criticizing the content, neither I'm saying flywheel is a new concept.
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.
Engines might be an appropriate analogy to flywheels, but a funnel is a different thing entirely, as is your quote from David Ogilvy.
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.)
Economies of scale is a distinct concept that's different than a flywheel. Yes, EoS plays an intimate role in powering a lot of flywheels. For example, the section of Amazon's flywheel that allows them to offer lower prices as a result of having more sellers works via EoS. However, it wouldn't make any sense to try to describe the entire flywheel concept using the term EoS, because lots of information would be lost, specifically the entire concept of a flywheel: that it feeds back into itself in a loop. Calling a flywheel EoS would be akin to calling a racetrack a curve.
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.
Same as EoS, network effects can be a component of a flywheel, but aren't necessarily equivalent to the entire flywheel itself. Network effects simply mean that the value of the service increases the more people who use it, whereas a flywheel represents the entire positive feedback loop that may be driven by individual components like network effects, EoS, etc.
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.
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.
But why some disciplines have a solid body of knowledge that's used as a foundation to build new things, yet this discipline is just wild cards after some point?
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.
Same reason the field of behavioral psychology gets new names and explanations for the same concepts every year: It is not an exact science, and there are very few (if any?) first principles that everyone can agree on.
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.
It didn't seem to me that the author is trying to coin a new phrase, or methodology, or specialty. They are just taking a known concept (flywheel) and explaining how they applied it at their company.
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.
I feel this. For whatever reason folks in our discipline have an extreme lack of self-confidence that is only multiplied by everyone only sharing their biggest wins. This seems to have people chasing new shiny objects and secret methods when the reality is that the only thing that "works" is just the fundamentals that we've had a solid handle on for a while. That's super boring to write about though. Not sure what the answer is but it is exahusting.
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.