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Is lack of time preventing you from marketing your small business well?

If so, we get it. Between serving your clients, managing your team, and doing the million and one other things it takes to run a small business, you have a lot on your plate. 

With so many pressing things to take care of, something will inevitably get pushed to the back burner. And, for most small businesses, the first thing to go is marketing. 

While we can absolutely understand and empathize with packed schedules, the fact of the matter is that most small businesses plateau or fail to get to the next level simply because their marketing isn’t equipped to take them any further. As a result, if you want to experience business growth, you have to prioritize and make time for marketing. 

Thankfully, there is a marketing strategy that’s proven to deliver results and save time: the flywheel marketing method.

 

What is the flywheel marketing method, & why is it effective for small businesses?

We’ve talked about the flywheel marketing strategy and the results we’ve seen it deliver in past episodes. However, in this episode, Treefrog Chief Brand Evangelist & Marketing Coach Victoria Rayburn focuses on the fact that in addition to being highly effective, the flywheel marketing method is also a time-saving marketing strategy for small businesses. 

If you’d like a full breakdown of the flywheel marketing strategy, tune in to “Episode 103: The Best Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses: The Flywheel Marketing Method.”

But, simply put, the flywheel marketing method is a marketing strategy where your website and online marketing efforts are in sync and function as a flywheel to continually produce results.

In case you aren’t familiar, a flywheel is a mechanical device used to store rotational energy. A flywheel includes a heavy wheel or disc that’s mounted on an axle that can rotate. 

To understand this analogy, it’s important to know that flywheels are different from regular wheels in that flywheels store energy—allowing them to rotate and function from their built-up energy reserve, even when new energy isn’t being applied. 

For example, think about a hand-crank flashlight. When you rotate the crank, you give the flywheel energy, which it stores. As a result, when you need to use the flashlight, you don’t have to crank the wheel to keep the light on. Instead, the flashlight uses its stored energy from its flywheel to power the flashlight’s bulb. 

With a hand-crank flashlight, if you apply energy upfront, you’ll have light for a long time. And, in the same way, when you use the flywheel marketing method, you or your marketing team will need to put in quite a bit of work upfront. Then, your marketing will more or less continue to work on its own—just requiring minimal maintenance. 

As a result, this strategy is ideal for small businesses that are notoriously busy. 

 

How do you implement the flywheel marketing method?

In this episode, Victoria briefly covers the four phases of the flywheel method to explain how this strategy truly does save time. However, if you’d like to learn this strategy in full, check out our guide:  “The Most Effective Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses: The Flywheel Marketing Method.” 

This guide goes through the entire flywheel marketing strategy step-by-step and even includes examples and checklists you can use to implement this strategy on your own. 

That said, the flywheel marketing system includes four phases:

1. Understanding your audience and creating clear messaging
2. Building a strong foundation with a strategically built, SEO-optimized website
3. Creating content and a sales funnel that serve your ideal client well
4. Promoting your products, services, and content

Note: We’ll briefly break down each of these phases below, but we do want to note that these phases are meant to be completed in order. The flywheel marketing method starts by creating a firm foundation, and with every step you complete, you’ll both increase the effectiveness of your marketing AND enable yourself to create systems that save time.  

 

1. Understand your audience & create clear messaging.

If you’ve listened to/read any episode of Priority Pursuit, you likely already know the importance of understanding your audience and creating clear messaging. This is the most important step in marketing and something small businesses often fail to do. After all, if you want to convert prospects into paying customers, you have to know who you’re talking to and what to say to make them want to do business with you.

To complete the first step of the flywheel method, you need to identify who your ideal customers are, work to truly understand them, and write your Marketing Guiding Statements. 

How to Understand Your Audience

To truly understand your best customers so that you can build your flywheel marketing system around them, you need to:

1. Learn who your ideal customer is.
2. Determine what your ideal customer wants to accomplish.
3. Identify what problems your ideal customer is facing.
4. Understand how this problem makes your ideal customer feel. 
5. Create a clear solution for your ideal customer’s problem. 
6. Define what will happen when your ideal customer follows your advice. 

To learn more about how to understand your ideal customer, please listen to the audio from this episode—which is available at the top of the page or wherever you listen to podcasts—or download our guide: “The Most Effective Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses: The Flywheel Marketing Method.”  

How to Create Clear Messaging

Once you understand your audience, you need to create clear messaging for them—which is simply communication that your ideal customers can understand quickly and easily. This is because people don’t always support the “best” businesses or invest in the “best” products or services. Instead, they purchase the products and services they can most easily understand. 

To ensure your message is clear and customer-focused, you simply need to create what we call your five Marketing Guiding Statements, which include your:

1. Talking points
2. One liner
3. Story pitch
4. Why
5. Sales script

Your Marketing Guiding Statements are part of the first phase of the flywheel marketing method, because they are the GPS of your marketing efforts, meaning once you have these statements written, you’ll know exactly what to say on your website, in your content, in social media posts, and directly to prospects to convert prospective clients into paying customers. 

If you’ve yet to complete this critical step, take our free mini course: “The First Step to Effective Marketing for Small Businesses: Writing Your Marketing Guiding Statements.” 

How does understanding your audience & writing your Marketing Guiding Statements save time?

Before we move onto step two of the flywheel marketing method, we want to explain how taking the time to understand your audience and write your Marketing Guiding Statements will help you save time. 

You see, so often, small businesses fail to complete this critical step. Instead, most try to piece together the latest marketing tactics and social media trends in hopes that something will lead to results. 

However, here’s the thing. You can try all of the marketing tactics and do all of the marketing things you’re “supposed to do.” However, all of these efforts are a waste of time, money, and resources if you don’t know who you’re talking to or what to say. 

As a result, when you take the time to truly understand your audience and write clear messaging specifically for them, you can save yourself hours upon hours of time by giving yourself all of the communication assets you need to write effective web copy, social media posts, ads, email campaigns, and copy for any and all of your marketing efforts. 

When you know who you’re talking to and what they need to hear, you and/or your marketing team will be able to use your time and marketing resources more effectively because you’ll know exactly what to say to convert prospects into customers.

2. Build a strong foundation with a strategically built, SEO-optimized website.

In the second phase of the flywheel marketing strategy, you need to build a strong foundation for your marketing efforts with a strategically built, SEO-optimized website. 

Your website is the foundation for all of your marketing and communication efforts and is your small business’s most powerful marketing tool. That said, it isn’t enough to just have a website. Your website needs to serve your ideal clients well by helping them quickly and easily understand what you offer, how you can help solve their problem, and how they can work with you. And, your website needs to be able to be easily found where prospects are actively looking for your products or services: Google. 

If you’d like to learn how to create a lead-generating, high-converting website, check out “Episode 104: How to Build a Lead-Generating Website.” This episode walks you through every step our team takes to write, build, and design high-converting websites for our agency clients. 

How does building a strategic, SEO-optimized website save time?

While a strategic website will certainly help improve sales, it will also save time. 

You see, when your website serves your prospective customers well by quicking answering their questions and giving them clear guidance, your site can serve as a 24/7 salesperson for your small business. It can help prospects decide if your products or services are right for them. 

As a result, rather than having to spend hours on sales calls, in meetings, or answering emails and DMs, your website can give you quality leads and/or make direct sales day in and day out. For this reason, your website is by far your most powerful marketing tool. 

And, when you take the time to optimize your website for search engines, you can make it even more powerful by getting your website in front of prospects who are actively looking for your products, services, or content.

You see, 97% of people use Google when they’re in need of a product or service. As a result, if you can get your website and business to rank high in Google search results, you can get your information in front of prospects who are actively searching for—and likely ready to purchase—exactly what you have to offer. 

Basically, when your website ranks at the top of Google search results, you don’t have to spend so much of your time going after new leads. Instead, many of your strongest leads will start coming to you through Google. 

There are a lot of moving parts to developing a successful SEO strategy. However, if you’d like to learn more and are ready to take your small business’s SEO strategy seriously, tune in to “Episode 106: How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines.”  

3. Create content & a sales funnel that serves your ideal client well.

The third step in building your marketing flywheel is to create content and a sales funnel that serves your ideal customer well and encourages prospects to engage with your business.  

Getting a prospective customer into your buyer’s journey starts with content marketing, which is a marketing strategy where businesses create and distribute valuable, relevant, and engaging content (e.g. blog posts, videos, podcast episodes, organic social media posts, and any other medium that allows you to share a message and engage with your audience) to attract their ideal clients. 

Then, a sales funnel is a content marketing framework that converts potential customers into paying customers. Essentially, a sales funnel allows you to serve your prospects, build trust with them, and help them see that your product or service is the answer to the problem they’re facing.

To complete this phase of the flywheel marketing strategy, you need to develop five marketing pieces:

1. Awareness content 
2. A consideration landing page (also called an opt-in page)
3. A lead-generating offer
4. An automated, follow-up email campaign
5. A decision landing page

If you’d like to learn more about each of these pieces and how to create a content marketing strategy and sales funnel, download “The Most Effective Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses: The Flywheel Marketing Method.” This guide walks you through exactly how to develop the five marketing pieces you need with examples. 

How does creating content & having a sales funnel save time? 

Now, you might be thinking, “This step sounds like a lot of work. How the heck is this going to save my business time?”

We get it, and while you will want to release new awareness content—such as blog posts and organic social media posts regularly—you only need to complete the other listed elements one time per sales funnel. (If you offer multiple products or services, you’ll likely need multiple sales funnels.) 

For a single sales funnel, you will only need to create your consideration landing page, lead-generating offer, automated email campaign, and decision landing page one time. Then, once these items are completed, you can use your awareness content to lead prospects to these resources, collect their email addresses, and put prospective customers into your sales funnel. Then, once you have great content and a sales funnel in place, you’ll be able to serve prospects well and continuously generate new leads. 

You will need to publish awareness content regularly. 

To clarify, you will need to publish new awareness content on a regular basis. This is where the “maintenance” part of the flywheel marketing strategy comes in. Awareness content is simply content that helps prospects through the awareness phase of the buyer’s journey—the phase where your ideal customer has a problem but doesn’t know what to do about it.

Awareness content can include blog posts, videos, podcast episodes, infographics, organic social media posts, and any other medium that allows you to share a message and engage with your audience.

That said, blogging tends to be the easiest option for small businesses and the one we most recommend—especially for those just getting started with their content marketing strategy.

The more quality content you can create, the better. However, at the absolute minimum, we recommend that small businesses publish one new blog post per month and implement a consistent social media strategy. 

We know that even the minimum can sound like a lot—especially if you aren’t already prioritizing content marketing. However, the good news is that much of your awareness content can be batched. For example, if you or your marketing team have a slower season, you can use this season to write 12 blog posts, meaning you would have one new blog post to share every month for the next year. 

You can also batch your social media content. For example, at Treefrog, our Content Department dedicates a day or two to writing and developing social media content a full month in advance. While we’ll add the occasional reel or something in last minute if there’s a trend or something we want to utilize, developing our content ahead of time allows us to be more thoughtful and consistent with what we’re creating and save time since batching is proven to increase efficiency.

4. Promote your products, services, & content.

The final phase of the flywheel marketing method is promotion. Once you have a customer-focused website, content, and sales funnel, you need to promote these items. 

Now, you might be thinking, “Got it. I’ll just share about these things on social media, and my flywheel method will be complete.” However, organic social media isn’t enough for most small businesses anymore. 

Many small businesses think that simply posting to their social media channels will be enough, but thanks to ever-changing social media algorithms, that isn’t how it works. 

In order to reach and connect with your ideal clients, you have to get your content in front of your audience. Since organic social media is no longer a dependable resource, this phase of the flywheel method includes helping your audience find your website and content through social media ads, Google ads, nurture email campaigns, and targeted email campaigns. 

If you’d like to learn more about running social media ads and Google ads, check out “Episode 126: Why Small Businesses Should Invest in Social Media Ads” and “Episode 115: How to Use Google Ads as a Small Business,” which you can find via the links in the show notes or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

How does promoting your products, services, & content save time? 

Truth be told, the final phase of the flywheel marketing strategy does require ongoing work. While steps one and two are more or less one-time projects and much of step three can either be created once or batched, promoting your products, services, and content will require more regular attention as you’ll likely need to make adjustments. 

For example, it probably doesn’t make sense to run the same ads all year long as you may need to focus on different products or services depending on the season or goals for a particular time period. (e.g. If you own an auto repair shop, it would make sense to run ads for new winter tires in the fall and winter, but this likely isn’t a concern for your ideal customer in the spring.)

Also, because you’re putting money behind many of these promotion options and you want to get the most out of these tactics as possible, you need to be paying attention to the data and likely A/B testing things like ad copy, subject lines, graphics, and any and everything you can do to improve the effectiveness of your ads, emails, and other promotion options. 

That being said, the final step of the flywheel marketing method is the step that most small businesses fail to complete. Many see this phase as overwhelming, so they ignore it, which causes small businesses to miss out on potential customers. 

That said, if you commit to building and implementing the flywheel marketing strategy, the bulk of the work is completed in steps one through three. As a result, you—or your marketing team—can free up your time to focus on step four. This is incredible because step four is typically where small businesses see the most growth.

Can a single person or small business realistically implement the flywheel marketing method on their own?

This episode includes a lot of information, but as a reminder, at Treefrog, we highly recommend using the flywheel marketing method for two reasons:

1. It’s proven to work. Our clients have experienced up to 800% growth as a result of this exact strategy. 
2. It saves time while delivering results. Once your flywheel system is built, your marketing will essentially continue to work on its own. As a result, this strategy is ideal for busy small businesses that want to see big, consistent results. 

That said, with so much on your plate already, there’s a good chance you’re thinking something like, “How the heck am I possibly going to find the time to implement or oversee this strategy?” or, “Is it even possible for a single person or small business to implement the flywheel marketing method on their own?” 

And, if that’s the case, we completely understand. With this in mind, we want to share a few resources and tips with you. 

First of all, can you implement this strategy by yourself? If you have the time, yes. 

Between drag-and-drop web builders like ShowIt, YouTube how-to videos, the resources we’re committed to sharing with you via Priority Pursuit and at treefrogmarketing.com, and all the information available on the Internet—you can implement this strategy on your own. 

In fact, we even have a guide that walks you through each and every step of developing this strategy: “The Most Effective Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses: The Flywheel Marketing Method.” 

That said, as a small business owner or leader, handling every aspect of this strategy on your own likely isn’t the best use of your time. After all, several skill sets and knowledge you may not currently have will be required. And, chances are, the time needed to learn these new skills and the necessary information will take a lot of time, which will prevent you from focusing on other important aspects and inhibit business growth. 

With this in mind, we want to encourage you to do three things:

• Commit to implementing the flywheel marketing method. Again, we are passionate about this strategy because we’ve seen it work for small businesses of all sizes and across countless industries.

• Take the flywheel method one step at a time. There’s a reason this strategy is broken up into four phases. With every phase, you’ll see bigger results. Even if you can only focus on phases one and two for now, you’ll still very likely experience growth.

• Consider outsourcing the development of your marketing flywheel—whether that be in full or just pieces of it. Again, implementing the flywheel method is a lot for a single person or even a small team to handle. That said, you can outsource some of or even all of this strategy. For example, you can hire a web designer to build your website or work with a StoryBrand certified guide to write your sales funnel items. Or, you can use our flywheel marketing service at Treefrog to have your marketing flywheel created and implemented in full. 

Again, we know this episode contains a lot of information, but considering how much time you’ll save and the business growth you’ll gain with the flywheel marketing strategy, we do think tuning in to/reading this episode was worth your time. And, we hope you’ll take the time to learn more about this highly effective, time-saving marketing strategy for small businesses by downloading “The Most Effective Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses: The Flywheel Marketing Method” guide.  

Links & Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• “Episode 103: The Best Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses: The Flywheel Marketing Method”
• “The Most Effective Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses: The Flywheel Marketing Method”
• “The First Step to Effective Marketing for Small Businesses: Writing Your Marketing Guiding Statements” Mini Course
• “Episode 104: How to Build a Lead-Generating Website”
• “Episode 106: How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines”   
• “Episode 114: How to Build a Sales Funnel as a Small Business”
• “Episode 110: A Proven Content Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses”
• “Episode 115: How to Use Google Ads as a Small Business” 
• “Episode 126: Why Small Businesses Should Invest in Social Media Ads”
• Receive 50% Off Your First Year of HoneyBook
• Try ShowIt for One Month for Free
• Learn More About Treefrog’s Small Business Marketing Resources & Services
• Join the Priority Pursuit Facebook Community
• Follow or DM Treefrog Marketing on Instagram
• Follow or DM Kelly Rice on Instagram
• Follow or DM Victoria Rayburn on Instagram

 

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The Priority Pursuit Podcast is a podcast dedicated to helping small business owners define, maintain, and pursue both their personal and business priorities so they can build lives and businesses they love.

You can find The Priority Pursuit Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, Stitcher, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

 

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