The Flywheel Marketing Model: A Tool for Bakers
I’ll be honest, marketing has been my weakest area when it comes to operating my home bakery. I’m always afraid of coming across too “sale-sy” or pushy and I’m also afraid of being annoying. But, in order to begin earning a consistent, full-time salary as a home baker, I needed to get regular sales. And in order to get sales, I needed to master marketing.
For me, marketing got a whole lot easier and intentional once I discovered the Flywheel Model of Marketing. The flywheel itself was invented by James Watt and is simply a mechanical wheel that’s incredibly energy-efficient and keeps itself spinning with continuous momentum. The amount of energy it stores depends on how fast it spins, the amount of friction it encounters, and its size. The concept of the flywheel was adapted by Hubspot to align to marketing and I adapted it further to align specifically to baking businesses.
It is truly my favorite marketing model because it puts customers, not sales, at the forefront. So just how does the Flywheel Model of Marketing work? Well, there is way too much information to put in one blog post but I will try to give you some general information.
At the center of the flywheel is the overarching goal…business growth. The concept of business growth is focused on exceptional customer service that moves strangers to prospects, prospects to customers, and customers to champions.
Everything described above takes place by getting your flywheel spinning and keeping it spinning. Thus, every action we take with our customers and our business either spins our flywheel or slows it down. Here’s a bit more:
- Forces are programs and strategies you implement to spin your flywheel. The better your systems and processes are, the faster your flywheel will spin. Examples might be:
- Launching on social media, creating a website, determining your niche
- Frictions are components of your business that are not operating well, thus, they cause frictions which, in turn, slow down, clog, or stop your flywheel. Examples might be:
- No one knows about you, your process for ordering might be complicated, your messaging is unclear
- Once we begin to think about our business in terms of “forces” and “frictions”, we then need to analyze how these factors impact everyone who comes into contact with our bakery…strangers, prospects, customers, and champions.
- The entire goal of the flywheel is to move individuals from the stranger phase to the champion phase.
- We move individuals through those phases by continually analyzing both our “forces” and our “frictions” and creating ways to address and improve upon them.
- We also move individuals from stranger to champion by consistently determining what we are doing in our business to: attract, engage and delight all of those groups.
- Once you’ve identified your forces and frictions as well as actions you are taking to “attract, engage and delight” stakeholder groups, you then move into the messaging phase and take steps to ensure each message/caption you put out to the world is aligned back to your bakery focus.
Okay, so that is already a lot of information but this entire concept basically moves your bakery business from an overwhelming “to-do” list to one that will eventually operate like a well-oiled machine, or I guess in this case “well-oiled flywheel”. Nonetheless, it has completely changed the way I think about my business and my marketing strategies and prioritizes what I love…keeping customers as the main focus, not sales (though sales naturally steadily increase through this model).
If you want to learn more, or begin implementing, your own Flywheel model, it is covered thoroughly in my Master the Art of Marketing Course which is free to bakers in the Pink Membership Program and also comes with an analysis planner chart (a blank one for you as well as a copy of mine as a sample) to begin identifying “forces and frictions” and a “message starter” template because messaging and captions also have a huge impact on our sales and our success.
Hope this was helpful!
Love, Tiffany
