
Why Marketing Flywheels Work - bethanvincent
https://sparktoro.com/blog/why-marketing-flywheels-work/
======
hyko
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.

~~~
rsweeney21
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.

~~~
hyko
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.

~~~
lowdose
So there is also no such thing as a business model flywheel like a platform as
Amazon for example?

[https://medium.com/aws-enterprise-collection/your-
enterprise...](https://medium.com/aws-enterprise-collection/your-enterprise-s-
flywheel-to-the-cloud-67127fe4a369)

~~~
hyko
Yes.

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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel)

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Who cares? Seriously, it’s a metaphor that no one has issues understanding, so
why the pedantic nitpicking?

~~~
true_religion
I hadn’t heard of the metaphor before and understood it based on the words
used.

Flywheels aren’t some kind of academics only term. If you’ve ever touched a
mechanical fishing rod, you have used a fly wheel.

------
threeseed
No 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.

~~~
jressey
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.

~~~
ignostic
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.

------
sdoering
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.

~~~
baxtr
I really liked his book. A very honest look into a VC backed venture. I also
liked the lessons learned in the Appendix section.

------
kelvin0
What's the equivalent of cold fusion in the marketing world?

~~~
libertine
Cross channel attribution.

~~~
gk1
Or 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
>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
What's hard about multi channel attribution? Would love a primer on this.

~~~
redelbee
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

~~~
onefuncman
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...

------
0898
I missed the day of school where we learned what a flywheel was – so these
metaphors always go over my head.

------
libertine
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...

~~~
wffurr
"Repacking/renaming concepts just to sound like something new..." maybe
because it's marketing and that's what y'all do?

~~~
libertine
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.

I recommend you start by here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing)

~~~
arkades
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.

~~~
jsonne
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.

~~~
yodon
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.

