The Flywheel Effect of Content: Building Momentum for Long-Term Success

In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collins promoted the “Flywheel Effect,” which suggests growing a business through continuous incremental steps rather than from one-off, big-bang initiatives. This concept has been employed across many industries but applies particularly well to content marketing.

What is the Flywheel Effect?

A flywheel is a machine that stores rotational energy. The basic principle is that a heavy wheel or disk rotates when supplied with energy. That energy is stored as rotational kinetic energy, and once the wheel spins, only small bits of energy are needed to keep it moving.   

Applying this principle to content marketing means that once such a program is up and running, it continues to “spin” with minimal inputs. While this is a simple metaphor, applying it to content marketing requires proper planning and execution.

Applying the Flywheel to Content Marketing

The basic steps for making the Flywheel Effect work for content marketing are:

• Make the opening push: planning and deploying high-quality content.
• Devote consistent effort: keep speeding up the flywheel by consistently delivering content via multiple channels.
• Maintain the system/reap the benefits: the content ecosystem delivers increasing returns with minimal input.

The effect on the target audience aligns with each step:

• Attract: High-quality content brings in new visitors.
• Engage: Consistent content keeps audiences engaged.
• Delight: Exceptional content fosters loyalty and turns audiences into advocates over time.

The Opening Push

The flywheel needs an initial shove to get moving. But before this can happen, a preliminary step includes a thoughtful definition of the target audience followed by a thorough assessment of their needs and interests. Once these are known, then the goals of the program can be set. Will it be creating brand awareness? Is increasing engagement a priority, or is the focus driving conversions? Whatever the goals, these must be clear-cut to effectively shape the content management strategy.

Once these preliminaries have been settled, content design and deployment commence, and the wheel begins to turn. However, the wheel's ongoing speed depends on the content's quality. This consists of two aspects.

First, the content must carefully track the audience’s needs and interests and be written in a style that motivates optimal engagement. The envisioned behaviors would be for readers to open a message, read/view it entirely, and take appropriate action or feel positive about the experience. This requires a rigorous tracking process to record these behaviors. This might include testing differing message versions (A/B Testing) to determine what content works better.

Second, the content should be created with the aim of repurposing material across different media, formats, channels, and timing. For example, the content of a blog could be repurposed as an email message, made into a video, or provide the basis for a podcast script. The same content can be updated over time and republished. The point is to wring as much use as possible from the material to maximize efficiency.

Both these aspects must continue throughout the life of the program.

A final point on the opening push (and for the entire process) is the role of promotion. Look for every opportunity to point the audience toward the content. This can include the organization’s main and other prominent web pages, social media, email, direct mail, and call center scripts.

Devote Consistent Effort

Once the flywheel rotation has started, consistent effort will keep it accelerating. This is an essential component to make the flywheel magic happen. Regular posting with all media in all channels keeps the momentum going. The frequency depends on the nature of the audience, the goals of the program, and the organization’s resources. Whether hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, once the cadence has been established, it should be scrupulously maintained.

Now that the program has begun its long march forward, some other components need to be working as well.

• Interact with the Audience – Successful content marketing programs allow audience members to interact with the publisher and other readers, whether by responding to comments via the website or social media and monitoring comments pages and interactions between audience members. Aside from standard comment moderating tasks, analysis of what is being said and by whom can provide clues about content effectiveness and subject areas that can be further highlighted.
  
  An intended byproduct of this interaction is the designed and organic development of communities like forums, groups, or social media clusters. This results in user-generated content and word-of-mouth promotion that will add momentum.
• Track and Optimize – Measurement mechanisms continue to collect data on content effectiveness. Data like website traffic or shared posts drive content refinements.
• Leverage SEO – Search Engine Optimization naturally flows from consistent content publishing. As the library of material grows over time, it gains search engine authority and draws more target audience members.
• Automation Tools – There are many moving parts in the drive to publish consistently. This is where marketing automation tools excel to extend the organization’s effectiveness and efficiency. Content administration systems, publishing schedulers, and email managers combined with other tools do much to support consistency goals. For example, using email drip campaigns to automatically push content based on audience member behavior will help nurture leads and keep the audience engaged over time. Also, by using these automation tools along with repurposing and optimizing existing content, the content marketing program can scale to larger proportions with lower investment.

Maintain the System/Reap the Benefits

Once the flywheel is in full spin, benefits accumulate:

• Long-term Growth and ROI: The high-quality, consistently produced content organically drives traffic in the form of new visitors, leads, and customers and results in sustainable growth. This contrasts with short-burst, inconsistent, and hit-or-miss successes of one-off marketing initiatives. Also, the formation of deeper bonds with customers pays dividends of sales per capita and retention. The result is superior financial returns over the long haul.
• Stronger Brand Authority and Trust: The constant tide of high-quality content reinforces consumers’ perceptions of the brand’s authority and expertise. Target audiences develop deeper engagement over the long run, fostering deeper connections and increasing purchase likelihood.
• Compound Returns – The flywheel gets an added “push” with a new piece of content. Yet, due to the evergreen nature of the material, the cost and time to produce the “new” content is minimal compared to the returns it drives.
• Improved SEO and Higher Search Rankings: The consistent flow of relevant, high-quality content boosts search engine rankings. Visibility increases as each piece of content targets different keywords and topics.
• Facilitating the Sales Funnel: Consistent content that educates, informs, and engages helps guide prospects through the sales funnel. Leads can be nurtured by the trust built via the content thereby making decisions to purchase more likely.

Tips for Implementing a Flywheel Content Strategy

The benefits of the Flywheel Effect in content marketing are manifold, but how can an organization get started on the road to achieving this?

1. Build a Strong Foundation – Carefully define your target audience and take time to learn as much as you can about them. The quality of the program’s content will largely depend on how well creators know who they are talking to. With this in mind, develop clear goals for the strategy and get buy-in from all stakeholders so all are pulling in the same direction.
2. Create High-Quality Evergreen Content – Based on knowledge of the target audience members, develop content that speaks directly to their core concerns. Consistency over time will depend on disciplined attention to those themes. Nevertheless, audiences evolve, and since this is a long-term program, there will likely be changes in their behavior, attitudes, and interests. Continually examining what works and what doesn’t, analyzing audience feedback, and monitoring social media activity will help keep content relevant. Finally, all content should be created to be repurposed, reconfigured, and updated for all channels and media. Making content evergreen cuts costs while accelerating the flywheel.
3. Invest in Automation – Since constant publishing is essential to make the Flywheel Effect work, the content volume will steadily grow over time to the point where the resources needed to start the flywheel won’t be sufficient to keep it going. Marketing automation tools allow a smaller staff to handle a much larger program than otherwise possible.
4. Measure/Analyze/Adjust Constantly – Establish and track key metrics. Analyze the resulting data and make adjustments to the program. Test content with tools like A/B testing to deploy the most compelling content. Pay close attention to audience feedback, social media chatter, and online community activity to detect new trends in subject matter that could inspire future content.
5. Promote Content in Multiple Channels – With all the competing informational noise, it helps to direct audiences to program content. Avenues for this include SEO, social media, and email marketing.
6. Look for Ways to Build Community – Provide opportunities for audience members to interact both with the content provider and other members. Promote sharing content by highlighting infographics and lists. Include sharing buttons to make extending the content onto other platforms easy. Also, encourage users to create their own content via reviews, testimonials, or social media posts.
7. Be Patient and Persistent – The Flywheel Effect doesn’t work with a short time horizon. The organization must be patient and prepare itself for the long game. As important as patience is, persistence is essential to maintain the consistency of content both in terms of core themes and publishing frequency.