It’s almost the end of 2019. What do you need to build a great company in 2020?  

Up until now, the answer was: a product ten times better than your competition. But the answer has changed: the secret to build a great company is to provide the best customer }experience.  

Maybe you still use the marketing funnel, but in today’s dynamic buyer-centric environment, the flywheel effect is well underway. While you still make a combination between the marketing funnel and inbound methodology to attract visitors and initially convert them into customers, you now need to consider how these customers interact with your business at every stage. That’s a consideration best made using the marketing flywheel as a guide. Unlike the classic funnel, the flywheel is remarkable at storing and releasing energy — and it turns out that’s important when thinking about the business strategy. 

If you decide to use the flywheel model over the typical funnel your company will have a huge advantage because you aren’t the only ones helping the business grow — your customers are helping also. Why you need a flywheel? A marketing flywheel keeps the tactics focused on a single measurable goal. It forces you and your organization to keep a single purpose in mind as they develop the tactics.  

The flywheel effect centres on generating momentum. When applied to marketing, it helps marketing teams produce a surround-sound effect, creating momentum to generate leads and raise brand awareness. 

Successful marketing is the result of programmatic activities, like pushing on a heavy flywheel. The best marketing results come from integrating marketing activities from different spokes of the marketing flywheel to see success. 

The marketers should have multiple flywheels – one top-level flywheel focusing the organization on a single purpose and then program flywheels for each campaign developed throughout the year. For example, a top level flywheel may focus on revenue generation while program flywheels may focus on customer experience or brand awareness. The key is to choose initiatives that complement each other to create a mini-ecosystem of initiatives that feed off each other and drive growth. 

Many marketers believe they will own the end-to-end customer experience by 2020. Today, the primary task of the marketer is to understand the customer buying journey from beginning to end and create programs to influence them at the right moment. The marketing flywheel will evolve to focus on the customer experience, but the operational tactics will evolve over time as the buying journey becomes more defined and the goals maybe more specific and measurable such as higher close rates or shortened sales cycles.