A marketing flywheel is a combination of tactics that, once sequenced in the correct order, births a powerful marketing strategy that can skyrocket you to the top of your industry in a relatively short amount of time.
Initially, every marketing flywheel needs some traction, which requires manual labor. If we front-load it correctly, however, it will compound on its own and snowball exponentially to the point where no further input is necessary. It will spin on its own.
These are the steps required, over 3 days, to do just that.
Day 0 — Programmatic SEO
What I used to call the “dapper doorway” strategy, now commonly known as “programmatic SEO”, is the process of creating high quality pages en masse for their corresponding target keywords. It needs to be executed early in order to allow enough time for Google to crawl and index all pages. Since there should be thousands of them, it will take a while to have all pages crawled, indexed and eventually ranking for relevant terms.
Action: Create thousands of relevant, keyword specific pages. Use a tool like SEOmatic, which is both easy to use and integrated with any possible CMS you could be building your site on. Send your XML sitemap to the Google Search Console and ping it to jumpstart the crawling process.
Day 1 — Journalist Outreach
Services like HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Help a B2B Writer allow you to reach a variety of journalists and bloggers who cover your industry. When they are looking for expert commentary, you are now able to chime in with your informed opinion and (hopefully) have it be picked up in a major publication. This helps in a multitude of ways such as traffic, branding and backlinks. Even if your input is not always acknowledged or published, gathering a list of active partners in your field is paramount in the marketing flywheel.
Action: Sign up for journalist outreach services. Set up alerts with certain keywords and combinations in order to be notified when an upcoming story may want your input. Reply with something unique and helpful QUICK before your competitors can. If you’re doing it right, you should get picked up every 3rd or 4th story you pitch for.
Day 2 — Affiliate + SERPjacking
Affiliate programs are more than a referral scheme. It is an effort that can be leveraged in a scalable way. Not only can you build an army of highly motivated website owners who influence a large contingency of your target audience, but if your offer is right, they will do everything in their power to promote you over your direct competition in the HOPE they convert a few of them in the near future. In the meantime, they are driving traffic, links and relevance to you on autopilot. All it takes is creating a good offer, then making it known to the most qualified candidates.
Action: Initiate an affiliate program. Search for websites that rank well in Google for:
- top 10 [INDUSTRY] providers
- best [INDUSTRY] services
- compare [INDUSTRY] companies
- [COMPETITOR] alternatives
Now, email each website owner and introduce them to your website, your affiliate program, and how much you are compensating for each sale/lead (which should be much more generous than every other company listed). The rest will take care of itself.
Day 3 — Statistics Page + PPC
A single page of industry statistics sounds random and oddly specific. However, it is a great source of links and allows your brand to be perceived as an authority on the matter. Compiling different statistics from multiple resources, on top of curating a number of stats of your own (thanks to the array of panels available on the web), will allow you to create an updated version of an industry report which is available for all to consume. Journalists and bloggers love these pages and are likely to link to them, granted the presentation is attractive and the information is valuable – which can lead to future opportunities.
Action: Aggregate an industry-specific statistics page. Make it the most thorough, relevant and presentable resource on the web. Now, we need to promote it. Since you may not have the SEO or an audience at your fingertips to promote the page, you will want to use paid search where you begin to appear for terms like “[industry] stats of 2024” or “[industry] statistics” etc. After a few months, you will begin to garner enough backlinks where you no longer need to be advertising and can rank organically without needing to pay to be there.
Every tactic brings in traffic. Every tactic attracts links. Every tactic builds upon the other and effectively creates a marketing flywheel that can soon be spinning at full force without any extra costs or effort. It will take 3+ days to construct, but by day 300 it can go on its own, leaving you to focus on other things.
