11 Tips for Using the Flywheel Effect (2024)

Remember the phrase, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” The same rule applies to businesses or most things in life.

But I digress.

Imagine graduating at the top of the class at 3.89 CGP in a reputable university, and then someone comes to ask you which of your readings gave you that success. When did you finally decide it was time to write for the highest grade? Was it at your first reading or the fifth?

You wouldn’t know which answer to give in this case because, let’s face it, apart from the fact that learning doesn’t stop, your high CGP is a result of an accumulation of efforts you can’t force apart.

You’ll never know which of them gave you that grade, or maybe it was a combination of the wins here and there, the unrelenting determination to win from the very first day, the decision never to take your eyes off the goal, the realization that you finally built that momentum at some point, and there is no stopping your success now.

That is what the flywheel effect does. The thing about flywheels is that once they’re spinning, it’s relatively easy to keep them turning or make them spin faster. They’ll even spin for a while on their own. It’s a whole business model once you understand its workings. However, before we go further, let’s go over the basics and throw more light on the flywheel effect.

What Is the Flywheel Effect?

A flywheel is a large metal disk or wheel that weighs over 2,000 kilograms. Turning the wheel requires a great deal of effort, but once the wheel is turned, the counterweights on the rim begin to function. When this occurs, the wheel almost starts to gain momentum on its own. The flywheel will then spin faster with roughly the same amount of force.

Introduced by Jim Collins in his book “Good To Great,” the idea behind the flywheel concept was that businesses don’t become outstanding as a result of a single action or initiative.

Instead, organizations become prominent due to a series of small victories that add up over years of arduous work until momentum takes over to long power durations of accelerated growth that vastly outpace the effort being applied at that particular time.

According to the concept, there is always a mix of effort at a firm that, if effectively aligned, will develop a high momentum over time, resulting in a self-powered productive cycle for that organization.

How Does the Flywheel Concept Work in Businesses?

Like the marketing funnel, the flywheel model is divided into stages of a customer’s purchasing journey.

The following are elements that make up the flywheel model:

The Attraction Phase

In the attract phase of the flywheel, you need marketing strategies that grab the attention of your target audience. The goal here is to draw them without being too pitchy.

Draw potential clients to your business with helpful content that is easy to discover. Focus on earning their attention rather than forcing yourself into their line of sight.

You could employ the following marketing techniques in this situation:

SEO content marketing
Social media marketing
Targeted advertising
Live or virtual events

Thankfully, with the rapidly increasing technological advancement in the online marketplace, you now java a wealth of automated solutions at your disposal to help you carry out these operations effectively. For instance, SEO software will assist you in monitoring, researching, planning keywords, and optimizing and analyzing your website.

The Engage Phase

Once you’ve won over a potential customer, make it simple for them to study more about your product on their terms and in their own time before making a purchase. Instead of concentrating primarily on closing sales, focus on developing a solid relationship with the prospect.

This can be accomplished by:

promoted campaigns
Free trials
Personalized email marketing using the email marketing software.

The Delight Phase

During the delight phase, you will assist and equip your customers in achieving their desired outcomes. Provide resource libraries to help customers get more out of your offering.

Gather and act on customer feedback using the best tools, such as CRM software. CRM solutions provide a central location for tracking customer interactions and storing customer and prospect data to build customer relationships. It enables businesses to manage customer relationships, allowing them to grow.

Through online reviews and social media, you want to convert users into loyal fans who will talk about your product to their peers, friends, and even strangers. Remember, word of mouth spreads.

To that effect, you can create your flywheel business by applying the three phases to the following business strategies:

Identify Your Flywheel

Every business already has a model they work on. The first step to building your great company would be to identify this model, analyze it, and confirm or modify it to follow the flywheel concept.

To evaluate the following factors and turn your old marketing approach into a flywheel:

Write down the main KPIs your company already monitors, then figure out where they fit best in the flywheel stage.
Estimate the marketing forces you’re employing to captivate your customers and distribute them effectively during the phases of attracting, engaging, and delighting.
Find out all the possible issues that prevent clients from completing their purchase cycle with your company.
Ensure the process works well for the flywheel concept of attracting, engaging, or delighting stages.

Promote Delight With the Right Touchpoints

It’s time to provide killer experiences by winning over the customers who keep your flywheel turning. What better approach to keep your flywheel spinning forward than by offering above-and-beyond experiences? Inbound marketing is fundamentally customer-focused.

Opportunities abound for late-stage touchpoints that you can tailor to what the customer expects to see. For instance, almost all businesses have a support ticket system for current clients. By introducing chat support, you could make yours more enjoyable.

Remove or Reduce Friction Points

You can take these procedures to eliminate the friction:

Start by selecting content for customers at various flywheel levels.
Hire a dedicated onboarding team for a seamless movement of prospects at each stage of the buying process.
Give customers various ways to contact you, including email addresses, meeting links, and live chat services. As a result, you can learn more about the points in the buying process when your consumers are struggling.

In this article, we’ll talk about eleven tips you can use to build an extraordinary business using the Flywheel concept. But first, let’s examine the Amazon Flywheel effect.

Amazon Flywheel Effect

Amazon’s Flywheel strategy is an excellent example for people who run online stores.

Amazon’s founders wanted a marketing model that gave customers a good experience, so they focused on the following parts:

Low costs.
Customers have a lot of choices.
A great delivery time

Because of this, they get a lot of natural traffic to their website, which significantly helps them.

After massive traffic, Amazon let other people sell their products on their site. So, they can offer their customers a wide range of choices within a single category of products, giving them a rich customer experience.

If we take Amazon’s flywheel apart, we can sum it up with these two parts:

First of all, Amazon has a lower cost structure. The money they make is put back into the business to offer even lower prices, give customers more choices, and better track their inventory.

Second, the customer experience improves as prices keep decreasing and the number of products available grows.

Tips for Using the Flywheel Effect To Build an Extraordinary Business

Optimize Your ECommerce Website for High-Speed Rate

Web site speed is critical to a company’s overall success on the internet. Your web page download speed is referred to as “website speed” when a user clicks on a link from a search engine or social media. If you want your website visitors to have a positive experience, ensure that your site is fast.

Poorly performing sites that render slowly in a browser can drive users away, thus rendering every other good quality about the website useless.

Conversely, websites that load quickly tend to attract more visitors and have higher conversion rates. What crankshaft are you using for your flywheel project? In this case, your web hosting provider is the crankshaft. Are they trustworthy? Can you put your faith in them to run your store without worrying? If you’re unsure of your response, it’s time to look for other options.

Optimize Your Customer Self-Service

Concentrate on offering only high-quality products since they will sell themselves. Let people read articles on your resource page online to learn more about your product. Get rid of most of the paperwork, hurdles, and other informational obstacles that complicate the purchasing process.

Post your prices online so customers won’t go through additional stress trying to find prices from your sales team. Provide complete information for an informed product purchase all at a go.

Promote Top-Notch Content on User-Prefered Channels

Inbound marketing relies heavily on content, which serves as the starting point for your flywheel. You can attract and retain visitors to your website by providing them with valuable and relevant content. Users will be more inclined to contact you if your content is advertised on their preferred platforms.

However, keep in mind that while you are marketing your material, the readers will benefit in some way. Unless your content provides value, relates to your readers, or piques their interest, visitors will ignore it like any other post on the social media platform.

Organized Product Pages

To encourage visitors to take action, you need search-engine-optimized product pages. It’s essential that your product pages are well-written and visually appealing and that you offer discounts and other incentives to encourage customers to make purchases.

A thorough product description will help potential customers learn more about your products or services. In other words, they can make a more well-informed purchase decision when they thoroughly understand a product.

You can improve your product pages with the following tips:

Detailed product content
High-quality product images
use keywords that are closely related to your content.

Use Automation Tools

A business automation tool is a software application designed to address specific, recurring problems in a company’s operations. Automation tools, for example, can help you eliminate the stress associated with repetitive tasks and instead concentrate on more value-adding operations within the company.

They can help you streamline processes, manage documentation, enhance client relationships, and more.

To achieve the ultimate flywheel concept for your business, you can use automation tools such as:

Marketing Automation Tools

Marketing automation tools can help you reduce the amount of time you spend doing the same tasks over and over again. The time it takes to nurture your leads and create reports manually is drastically reduced when using marketing automation software.

Numerous marketing automation tools are available to meet a wide range of requirements. Furthermore, some are superior to others.

Here’s a list of our marketing software that you can select from:

BPM Solutions

When used at the corporate level, business process management software helps to automate repetitive tasks, keep track of basic operations, and keep tabs on logistics.

Use Topic Clusters

You can use a topic cluster to create and organize content to establish your website’s authority on specific topics. Increasing your website’s authority will increase targeted traffic from search engines.

You should incorporate topic clusters to improve your blog’s search engine rankings and reach a wider audience. Making a cluster is as simple as following these steps:

Identify the main topic you want to write about before you begin writing your blog posts. The research process begins once you’ve narrowed your focus. Thoroughly research each topic and subtopics.

Subsequently, create content for each of the subheadings. Organize your content by setting up a dedicated landing page for it. Subsequently, include links pointing to different sections of your website.

Be Consistent

To analyze a strategy and conclude how effective or ineffective it was at the end of its session, you must have used it over a period, which is part of the reasons you must be consistent. Be known in the market as a popular go-to, so when people think of a product, they automatically think of your organization.

Let your pricing be consistent throughout and leave no space for special deals.

For instance, if you provide a free service for a team of five for large businesses, ensure that the same goes for small businesses. Doing this will project you as transparent, and you can use the time you’d have spent negotiating special deals to develop new ways to satisfy your customers.

If you can keep up with brand identification, then it’s best to create one, so people have an easier time getting back to your website after the first visit. With the help of the best graphic design software, you can create the logo and other branding materials to start.

Grow With Patience

Once your flywheel is up and running, increasing sales is the most important thing to focus on. To get your product into the hands of consumers, you should be willing to accept lower margins and higher ad costs. Maintaining the company’s success depends on it.

Get Your Entire Team To Work Together

Keeping your sales, marketing, and customer service teams in separate silos will result in a lack of communication and trust. To increase your team’s velocity, get everyone on the same page.

Think about how a company where everyone works together can help shorten the sales cycle, which is one of the components of the velocity equation.

Do a Regular Follow-Up on Your Customers

It is five times harder to sell to a new customer than to an existing one. As a result, regularly following up with your customers is crucial.

Regular follow-ups with current customers will help you retain them and speed up your eCommerce flywheel. If you want to keep in touch with existing customers, here are some tips:

Thank your clients by sending them a letter.
Send a follow-up email to customers who have purchased from you to inform them of new products and special offers.
After they’ve made a purchase, contact them via phone or social media.

Follow the Hedgehog Principle

The hedgehog principle is essential in building the “flywheel effect.” It states that a business must know what it can do best to excel at the flywheel concept.

Businesses rarely achieve the flywheel effect because they don’t commit to specific goals for the period necessary to achieve their desired results. Then there is the fact that they do not adhere to the hedgehog principle. As a result, they are easily swayed toward new objectives as they lack any business theory.

In Conclusion

According to marketing experts, the Marketing Flywheel strategy is a critical factor in the success of many well-known companies. For example, Amazon is the most relevant. However, they’ve been employing this strategy long before it became popular.

Amazon initially reduced the price of its products to attract more customers. They focused on providing high-quality services in the following stages of the buyer’s journey.

Sales volume, customer loyalty, new leads, and third-party vendor commissions increased as the number of customers increased. The flywheel still serves its original purpose of assisting the company’s growth.

Using the flywheel as a guide, you can make better decisions about how you market, sell and interact with current customers. In a flywheel, customers are at the center of everything a company does, rather than the end goal like they are in a standard funnel. Customers satisfied with a company’s products and services become the driving force behind its expansion.

Fortunately, implementing the marketing flywheel is a simple process that can be accomplished by following the instructions. Moreover, you have the best software solutions to get you there faster. You’ll be able to serve your specific clientele better once you’ve accomplished this.

11 Tips for Using the Flywheel Effect To Build an Extraordinary Business