{"id":7010,"date":"2022-06-27T14:11:14","date_gmt":"2022-06-27T07:11:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adtek.agency\/flywheel-marketing-explained\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T23:04:28","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T16:04:28","slug":"flywheel-marketing-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adtek.agency\/en\/flywheel-marketing-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"In short: what is flywheel marketing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Updated on October 19, 2026: reviewed and updated figures.<\/em><\/p>\n

In short: what is flywheel marketing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The basic idea behind flywheel marketing is that your customers are your company’s best salespeople. If you keep them happy, they tell their friends. And if you make it easy for prospects to learn about your product and buy it, those prospects will buy. So beyond those two ideas, what other characteristics does flywheel marketing have? Let’s go through them with Adtek in the article below.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The context behind flywheel marketing<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Whether you are a startup trying hard to scale up or an established company looking for a more efficient way to approach the market, the flywheel model is one of the best ways to grow a business. The best part about a flywheel is that once it starts moving forward, you do not need to push very hard to keep it spinning and building momentum. The right flywheel helps a business attract and reach new users 24 hours a day.<\/span><\/p>\n

Spend some time talking with a business owner or CEO, ask how their industry has changed over the past few years, and they will very likely bring up their customers. Customers today are more skeptical, better informed and more demanding than ever before. <\/span>One of those expectations is that a business should care about more than transactions.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

When companies make short-term decisions and neglect long-term relationships in ways that damage the value they deliver and mislead people, customers take that information and use it to spread the bad news, quickly and widely.<\/span><\/p>\n

To grow better, your organization needs to deliver a great customer experience, and this is where the flywheel comes in.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The marketing funnel and its problems<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The funnel model rests on the idea that prospects enter the buying process at the awareness stage, move on to the consideration stage, then to the decision stage, and make the purchase right at that point. This linear strategy does not account for the major changes in how customers learn about brands and buy products in the digital age we live in now.<\/span><\/p>\n

These days, prospects can enter the funnel at any of several different stages of the sales cycle. The internet, social media and other modern technologies let buyers do their own research. They can skip the awareness stage and essentially complete the purchase on their own without ever talking to a sales rep.<\/span><\/p>\n

One weakness of the linear funnel is that it treats customers as an afterthought. Marketers spend months nurturing prospects through each stage of the buyer’s journey until they make a decision. Once the purchase is complete, the customer drops out of the bottom of the funnel and never comes back.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then the marketer starts the whole process over again with a new prospect. All the time and effort that went into building relationships with customers who only buy once involves a great deal of work, yet the only thing it aims at is getting that customer through the door right away.<\/span><\/p>\n

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What you need to know about the flywheel<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The flywheel is a model adapted by HubSpot to explain the momentum you gain when you align your entire organization around delivering a great customer experience. A flywheel is remarkable for how it stores and releases energy, which matters a lot when you think about business strategy. A flywheel is a wheel that stores energy very efficiently. The principle dates back to the Neolithic period (spindle whorls, potter’s wheels), and James Watt helped develop the flywheel in the steam engine during the Industrial Revolution. The amount of energy a flywheel stores depends on how fast it spins, how much friction it faces and how big it is. You can also picture a flywheel as being like the wheels on a train or a car.<\/span><\/p>\n

That stored energy is especially useful when you think about the ways customers can help your business grow. Other models treat customers as an outcome, a result to be reached at the end of the process. Once that result is reached, everything you put into winning those customers is effectively wasted.<\/span><\/p>\n

With a flywheel, you use the momentum of happy customers to drive referrals and repeat sales. In essence, your business keeps moving forward. When you start thinking of your business as a flywheel, you make different decisions and you have a clear basis for adjusting your strategy. <\/span><\/p>\n

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What is the flywheel model?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

A typical flywheel model has 3 main stages:<\/span><\/p>\n