The marketing flywheel changed how I drive real growth.

Let's take things back a few years... I was helping clients drive leads and traffic to their websites but found that my leads weren’t just dropping off; they were disengaging entirely after initially converting. 

The flywheel strategy offered a better model. It gave the brands I was working on a focus on retention and sustainable growth, instead of a quick acquisition.

In this piece, I’ll walk you through why I made the switch and what I learned along the way. 

I’ll share some honest lessons from what didn’t work and the tools that now help me move faster and more effectively. 

I want to start out by saying that I didn’t ditch marketing funnels overnight.

As my work evolved, particularly in building long-term brand equity and community-driven growth, the cracks in the traditional model became too obvious to ignore.

Early on in my marketing career, marketing funnels were my go-to framework.

This began with awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, and a drive towards conversion at the bottom. Clean. Predictable. Measurable. 

But the more I leaned into brand-building and audience engagement, the more the funnel felt a little too rigid for what I was trying to achieve.

I realized that retention wasn’t just a post-sale checkbox; it was a core driver of new growth. However, the marketing funnel treated everything after conversion like a footnote. 

I needed a model that accounted for the nonlinear, reciprocal way customers tend to react with brands today.

I also became aware of a finding by Bain and Company that reveals that a 5% increase in retention can lead to a minimum of a 25% revenue boost.

For more on retention, check out this case study showing how Payload by Ryan Duffy used referrals and valuable content to build its own flywheel strategy.

The shift to the flywheel method wasn’t just about theory. It was about patching real holes in my marketing strategy. The biggest one? Post-conversion drop off. 

People would buy or sign up…and then disappear.

Here’s how I recently used the flywheel to fix this problem.

One of my clients was in the pet industry, selling a range of products from cozy homes for rodents to nutritious dog food. We found that people would generally make one purchase from us, and then we’d never hear from them again, despite them having pets for many years after their first purchase.

Opportunities in my customer base were disappearing before my eyes. While I had some conversions, there were clear gaps that were preventing repeat purchases.

I began fueling momentum with people already in my orbit. By filling those gaps, the LTV (Lifetime Value) of my customers became longer, with each satisfied customer becoming a growth engine. 

My cost of acquisition dropped, and my lifetime value went up – not by pushing harder, but by removing friction and improving customer experience.

The biggest mindset shift in this process was moving from obsessing over stages to focusing on energy.

In a funnel, you fill at the top. In a flywheel, you keep it spinning by removing drag and adding force.

Practically, I focused on blog posts that grew my email list, led to community discussion and user-generated content, and ultimately powered paid ads. Every action had a reaction that fed the marketing loop.

I also changed how I measured success, tracking how quickly users could contribute to growth at multiple parts of the flywheel. 

A user who converts, then refers three friends, writes a review, and shares your product on social media is far more valuable than one who just makes one purchase.

When I optimized for those users, conversions began to snowball. Each happy customer became a mini-growth engine.

Let’s discuss my client in the pet industry in more detail.

The client sold many different products; but, despite having a great product line and an audience with long-term needs (people don’t just adopt pets for a week!), they struggled to generate repeat sales.

Most people made one purchase and then disappeared. The funnel approach we’d been using for them previously focused heavily on first-time conversions, so we shifted gears.

We restructured the entire marketing strategy around the flywheel, focusing on sustainable, momentum-driven growth. 

Here’s the shift I made that unlocked results.

Our first step was to produce content that answered real questions pet owners had.

For example, instead of writing generic product descriptions for rodent cages, we built a mini content hub for a “Rat Care Guide.”

This kind of content served two purposes: it brought in organic traffic from high-intent searchers and positioned the brand as a trustworthy, long-term resource, not just a one-time seller.

More importantly, this content wasn’t built to close a sale immediately. It was designed to spark engagement, earn trust, and create multiple entry points for the flywheel, no matter where the user was in their pet journey.

Taking control of distribution is a key element of the marketing flywheel method.

We didn’t want to rely on algorithms to carry our content to the right people, so shifting our newsletter strategy to beehiiv was one of the smartest moves we made.

beehiiv gave us both segmentation power and cleaner analytics, plus smart automations based on pet type and content consumption behavior.

Someone who read about senior dog nutrition would be added to a sequence that drip-fed more relevant content, like aging dog care tips, product suggestions for joint health, and reminders timed around repeat purchase windows.

Because our content was all on owned channels, we weren’t held hostage by social platform changes or ad costs.

This is where the old funnel really fell short. 

Before, the brand was nothing after the sale – no follow-up, no invitation to come back, and definitely no asking customers to share their experience, so we flipped it.

Every purchase triggered a tailored post-purchase sequence. 

First came a “care and use guide” (educational content from experts in the industry that matched what they bought), then a satisfaction survey, and lastly an invitation to join the pet owner community with perks for sharing reviews/stories.

We gamified referrals by offering tiered rewards, not just for purchases, but also for content contributions. 

If a customer posted a photo of their setup or shared a tip that we featured in a newsletter, they earned points towards a future purchase. 

What surprised me most when implementing this strategy was that, suddenly, the brand wasn’t just a store any longer. It was a community that pet lovers wanted to be a part of.

The final piece -- and perhaps the most important – was building structured feedback loops into the system.

Each flywheel needs force and friction management. We treated each interaction as a chance to learn and adjust.

Our first step in this stage was to run light-weight surveys (two to three questions max) at the following touch points:

We also monitored click patterns and heatmaps to understand where users dropped off or got stuck in the journey.

From this monitoring, we learned that different content was more effective when bundled, such as pairing feeding guides with behaviour tips, and that mobile users didn’t behave so well with long email formats, so we shortened them and saw a 27% surge in click-through rates.

Why Listen to Me? I have been working in the digital marketing space for nearly 10 years, predominantly helping brands with their email marketing and online presence. I now specialize in creating great content for beehiiv to help people nail their email strategies!

Adopting the flywheel strategy in marketing brought in a fresh perspective and a lot of momentum to our strategy.

However, the strategy wasn’t without its bumps along the way.

Here are some of the key lessons I learned, especially around the missteps and missed opportunities that taught me just as much as the wins.

One early mistake I made was not prioritizing engagement enough.

We focused so much on setting up the flywheel – mapping out stages, creating content, and aligning teams -- that we underestimated the power of continuous improvement.

As a result, some of our early flywheel cycles were clunky and less efficient than they could have been. 

Had we built optimization into the flywheel from the start -- constantly testing, measuring, and making changes, our growth would have accelerated more quickly.

Implementing the flywheel also exposed some gaps in the internal alignment of my client’s brand.

The model thrives on collaboration. Early on, we underestimated just how much coordination this required.

Different teams had varying priorities and key performance indicators (KPIs) they needed to hit. 

We found that we lost efficiency and momentum when our goals weren’t unified across the business. I learned the critical importance of clear communication channels and joint ownership. 

We established cross-departmental rituals like shared dashboards to keep everyone aligned and accountable to the flywheel’s success.

Looking back, implementing the flywheel model was transformative, but not without its learning curves.

If I had to start from scratch today, here’s what I’d do differently:

Instead of building an elaborate system up front, I’d focus on one high-leverage loop -- like content → engagement → referrals -- and get it working well before expanding.

Smaller, faster iterations would have helped to validate the model more quickly and would have revealed friction points sooner.

In my experience, the flywheel works best when marketing, product, sales, and customer success are seamlessly combined.

I’d bring those teams in earlier to help shape the model, which would have aligned our goals and reduced issues later on.

I initially underestimated how critical fast feedback is to momentum.

Today, I’d bake in real-time customer insights, performance data, and internal feedback from day one. That way, each cycle will improve the next and so on.

The right tools have made a huge difference in accelerating our flywheel’s impact.

Here are a few that have stood out, especially one that became a core part of our engine:

beehiiv quickly became the backbone for our content and engagement flywheel.

beehiiv isn’t just a newsletter platform. It has become our system of record for growing, nurturing audiences, and re-engaging people with the following tools:

If I could only pick one tool to kickstart a flywheel today, it would be beehiiv.

To keep the content loop spinning, we lean on tools like Descript and Canva to turn one newsletter or podcast into multiple assets.

This means we have social posts, videos, and carousels to send out from just one piece of content.

Repurposing keeps the flywheel moving without constantly needing to start from scratch.

To really fine-tune the flywheel, it’s important to understand not just what people were clicking, but why.

Tools like Hotjar help us watch how users move through our pages, where they are getting stuck, and what changes make the biggest difference.

With session recordings and heatmaps, we can validate assumptions quickly without too much guesswork. This kind of feedback loop makes every tweak we make intentional and results-driven.

Putting a marketing flywheel in place changed the way I approach growth, shifting from one-off wins to sustainable momentum.

Along the way, I learned where it works best, where I stumbled, and which tools truly moved the needle. If I were starting again, I’d move faster, involve more people earlier, and focus on building smart, scalable systems from day one.

If you’re looking for a tool to kickstart your own flywheel, I can’t recommend beehiiv enough. It’s simple, powerful, and built for creators who want to grow.

Start your free trial of beehiiv today!

The flywheel is a marketing model focused on building momentum through continuous customer engagement.

The flywheel focuses on satisfied customers driving referrals, retention, and growth, instead of one-off conversions.

A marketing funnel ends at conversion, while a flywheel is circular and therefore continuous. This puts customers at the center and uses their success to generate ongoing growth.

The flywheel strategy focuses on creating positive, self-reinforcing loops between marketing, sales, and customer experience to build long-term, scalable momentum.

The three main purposes of a flywheel are to attract, engage, and delight customers. This is done by creating a cycle where each satisfied customer helps drive further growth through referrals and loyalty.