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Why Marketing Flywheels Work
- sdoering 6y agoI 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.
- baxtr 6y agoI really liked his book. A very honest look into a VC backed venture. I also liked the lessons learned in the Appendix section.
- hyko 6y agoThe 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.
- gk1 6y agoI believe the idea is that a flywheel maintains momentum and makes the rest of the process easier, as opposed to starting cold each time.
- hyko 6y agoThat’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.”
- phreeza 6y agoI guess that works if the "stuff" you put in is torque, and the effect is the angular velocity? In linear coordinates, they could have called it the marketing frictionless skateboard - the more you kick the faster it goes!
- rsweeney21 6y agoMarketing 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.
- troughway 6y agoSo then would it make more sense to call it a windmill?
- danielharan 6y agoI'd use a snowball, to convey the growing nature.
- waheoo 6y agoOr just say what it is, compounding growth. You guys always gotta make stuff more complicated than it is.
- hwerehqrw 6y agoSo the hope is to use concepts people aren't familiar with to describe other concepts they also aren't familiar with?
- Jommi 6y agoYeah 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.
- karmakaze 6y agoYes 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.
- threeseed 6y agoNo this is how the marketing industry works. 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jressey 6y agoInternet '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.
- ignostic 6y agoI 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.
- kelvin0 6y agoWhat's the equivalent of cold fusion in the marketing world?
- bredren 6y agoEnterprise marketing automation.
- onefuncman 6y agoROI positive campaigns
- libertine 6y agoCross channel attribution.
- gk1 6y agoOr simply "attribution." 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.
- libertine 6y ago>Or simply "attribution." 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).
- Jommi 6y agoWhat's hard about multi channel attribution? Would love a primer on this.
- redelbee 6y agoA 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
- libertine 6y agoI'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...
- lbotos 6y agoI think this is due to "generational" ideas? 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.
- libertine 6y agoBut 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gk1 6y agoSame 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.
- 0898 6y agoI missed the day of school where we learned what a flywheel was – so these metaphors always go over my head.