A Marketing Guide to the Flywheel: Beating Content Inertia & Building Momentum

Does your content seem to go nowhere even though it’s carefully crafted? Check out this flywheel marketing guide to harness momentum and overcome content inertia.

Key Takeaways

• The flywheel is a self-sustaining marketing model that generates a steady stream of leads and prospects.
• Buyers can fall out of the journey when they hit friction while consuming your content. 
• Eliminating friction allows your flywheel to spin freely.
• Put the friction-free framework into action by defining your flywheel, creating delight-filled experiences, and making your buyer’s journey a no-fly zone for friction.
• Content should focus on each step of the flywheel, since the wrong content at the wrong time is a friction point.

When’s the last time you thought about the friction every buyer has to overcome before they find you?

Finding and viewing your content should be a smooth and natural process. Any bump in the road could send a frustrated buyer backward on their journey.

If you’re struggling to get results out of your content marketing strategy, you could be operating on the wrong framework. The traditional sales funnel limits itself by not considering the buyer’s experience, only the outcome. It doesn’t matter how great the content is if there are too many obstacles to reach and view it.

HubSpot adapted the flywheel model after realizing that the typical funnel was incompatible with their desire to provide amazing customer experiences. The inbound marketing flywheel model advances prospects to promoters using friction-free content that delivers easy-to-claim value.

To deliver truly great experiences, you have to focus on what the buyer wants to take away from your content and eliminate the obstacles in the way. The flywheel model is the only one that considers both factors.

An introduction to the flywheel 

The flywheel is a cyclical model that self-sustains its momentum to generate a steady stream of unqualified leads or strangers, and qualified leads or prospects. 

All leads start out as strangers, leads you attract or who come in on word-of-mouth from promoters (more about that in a moment). Strangers then self-qualify when they rank up to prospects, but you must engage with them to make that happen.

Keep engaging them, and prospects convert to customers. But your work’s not done yet. Delight your customers consistently, and they’ll become promoters or champions for your brand. 

How the flywheel generates momentum 

The flywheel builds kinetic energy to self-fuel its forward motion based on three factors: 

• How fast you spin it: The faster a flywheel moves, the harder it is to stop its momentum.
• How much friction there is: Friction is momentum’s biggest enemy. Any friction can inhibit forward motion.
• How big it is: A bigger flywheel takes longer to get going at full speed, but its momentum is heavy and hard to stop.

What is content inertia?

Every piece of content you produce has an overarching shared goal to move the buyer forward on the flywheel. 

Inertia is the enemy of forward motion. When your buyer encounters friction while viewing your resources, the flywheel stalls. That’s content inertia. 

The flywheel actively fights inertia

The flywheel model can’t operate to its fullest potential with inertiaㅡthey’re mutually exclusive.

In the real world, this invention rotates in a constant circle fueled by nothing but the kinetic energy it contains. As long as it keeps moving, the flywheel maintains momentum. It’ll keep going as long as you let it! 

That is unless it encounters friction. Then it plateaus, slows, and stops.

That’s why the framework focuses on eliminating friction, the biggest source of content inertia. Buyers don’t leave the flywheel for no reason; they leave because they didn’t get the value you promised. If your content’s not performing, it could be that friction is behind the inertia.

How to turn your sales funnel into a flywheel

You can transform your sales funnel into a flywheel in three simple steps, so don’t fret about the resource commitment it takes to switch away from an established framework. Your buyers will respond to the change with gusto, making it all worthwhile when the long-term relationships and self-qualified leads start pouring in.

Step 1: Define your flywheel

Chances are, you have some established processes and programs that can translate to the flywheel without much extra work. Your first step is to comb your former sales funnel and inbound marketing strategy for:

• The core KPIs you already track and whether you can apply them to the flywheel stages 
• The forces (strategies, platforms, and content types) you already use to enthrall buyers, which you’ll apply to attracting, engaging, and delighting
• The points of friction where buyers bounce, whether it’s due to the content, handoffs between stages, or an internal point of friction

When you’re examining your current processes, stop to ask yourself:

• Is this process for my own convenience or the customer’s needs?
• Does this apply to the attract, engage, or delight flywheel stage? 
• How can I update this process so it fits the flywheel stage?

Keep what works and finesse it so it meets your needs. Don’t be afraid to ditch forces that don’t fit the flywheel (or move them to a stage where they do fit).

Step 2: Find touchpoints to create delight

Now’s your time to deliver kickass experiences and truly shine by delighting the buyers who make your flywheel go ‘round.

Inbound marketing is customer-focused at its core, and what better way to keep your flywheel moving forward than providing above-and-beyond experiences? 

Late-stage touchpoints can be tailored to what the customer expects to see, and the opportunities are everywhere.

For instance, (most) every business has a support ticket process for current customers. Could you add delight to yours by adding chat support? If you already have chat support but it’s staffed by live agents who work 9-5, what about chatbot integration for 24/7 availability?

Step 3: Zero in on friction points

Finally, examine your entire process from start to finish with a critical eye for friction. 

You can start by:

• Building your inbound strategy around value-based content for the right buyer stage at the ideal time
• Dedicating an onboarding team to provide a smooth transition at the point of sale 
• Distilling customer communications down to one contact person (or one contact team) 
• Giving customers a choice of paths instead of just one way to opt-in to a purchase, e.g., email, book a meeting, call live agents, or fill out a form

It’s best to do this part last since there’s a lot that can change when you’re swapping around your current processes and inserting new touchpoints for out-of-this-world experiences. Any change could introduce friction if it’s not 100% right, so sweeping for sources of friction at the end catches everything. 

Kickass content for every buyer’s journey

We’ll let you in on a secret: You can get ahead of content inertia by crafting your content around the three phases of the flywheel. 

One of the biggest friction points is providing the right content at the wrong time, so the value’s just not there. 

Keeping a finger on the pulse of your buyers allows you to hone in on what they want. Then get it in front of their eyes exactly when they want to see it.

Awareness: Attract

At the first stage, strangers or leads want to consume content that gives them as much upfront value as possible with no pressure to buy in. The best way to reach these buyers with free content that’s easy to consume (e.g. targeted and concise) and costs them nothing but a few minutes of their time.

A blogging strategy delivers no-cost knowledge to these early-stage leads.

An established blog with a consistent posting schedule reaches leads passively as the same industry-specific questions come up for months or years to come (and your reputation as a subject matter expert grows). 

Consideration: Engage

The second stage is all about your buyer defining their options. Now’s the time to bring out the big guns, since prospects aren’t just looking at your solutions; they’re eyeing up the competition too.

Now is the time to be positioned as the best value compared to the competition by delivering content that compares solutions to a specific problem (and those solutions include yours, of course). 

Content for this stage includes:

• Blog posts
• eBooks
• Guides, either downloadable or meaty blog posts
• White papers illustrating the results of your solution
• Webinars 

Decision: Delight

Late-stage buyers are the most qualified. As customers, they have all the information about their problem and they know what their options are. Now they’re weighing those options and deciding whether your solution is the one for them.

Or, as promoters, they’re already on board with your solution and they’re looking for even more reasons to tell the world about it.

Now is the time to reach late-stage buyers by building intriguing landing pages around resources that are:

• So valuable you could charge for them—but of course, they’re free (except for lead data)
• Based on solving common industry problems with tactics that include your solution (but aren’t just your solution)

That can include:

• eBooks that promise (and deliver) exclusive insights or trends in your industry 
• Guides that provide an expert’s perspective on a common pain point in your industry
• Toolkits, including interactive resources like checklists, templates, flowcharts, and worksheets 
• Use cases and case studies that illustrate new and innovative applications for your solution 

The point is, whatever the stage, you must attract, engage, and delight every buyer who enters your flywheel.

Support with content at every stage

ContentBacon can help with a customer-focused approach that uses premium content as the value that gets buyers to trust and connect with your brand. 

Here’s another secret: masterful storytelling fuels every inbound marketing strategy. 

And that storytelling has to be your buyer’s story, not your own. (They want you to practice reflective listening and show that you hear them!) 

The ContentBacon team creates custom stories for every stage of the buyer’s journey daily, ranging from blog posts to webinars to capture every buyer’s attention when they’re actively ready for you to have it. Imagine a strategy where you don’t have to qualify leads because they qualify themselves.

This content fuels the flywheel’s forward motion with that energy, especially that of promoters who are delighted. This constant movement protects against the damaging effects of content inertia.

Book a (no strings attached) discovery call so we can talk about how content inertia affects your own flywheel and how the ContentBacon team can step in to help.