How to generate customers 24/7 with “The Marketing Flywheel”

“What’s your favorite marketing campaign of all time?”

It was a simple question.

But I didn’t have an answer.

My brain shuffled through past campaigns like a deck of cards. The seconds passed like minutes, as I considered examples I had seen.

However, none of the marketing campaigns from our SaaS company, our competitors or outside industries stood out.

Occasionally, I’m invited to speak on podcasts. I’m accustomed to answering questions about SEO, content marketing and building marketing teams.

However, in this particular moment, I was drawing an embarrassing blank: What kind of CMO doesn’t keep up with marketing campaign trends?!

Slowly, the reason for my brain failure dawned on me: I’m not a “marketing campaigns guy,” I’m a “marketing systems guy.”

I contemplated naming some random campaign for the sake of having an answer, but that would have been dishonest. So, I risked coming across as boring and said I didn’t have one.

However, I’ve since realized my indifference toward marketing campaigns deserves an explanation:

Why I shifted resources away from one-off marketing campaigns

When I started working as Ahrefs’ CMO, I was a marketing team of one committed to accomplishing the results of many.

Since cloning myself wasn’t an option, I spent some time researching campaign options. Luckily, weekly invitations landed in my Inbox to:

• Run co-promotions with fellow SaaS companies.
• Partner with bloggers to produce content.
• Place advertisements within industry journals.
• Sponsor industry conferences.
• Participate in “SEO industry awards” contests.

Because Ahrefs was already having notoriety within the SEO community when I joined the team, industry leaders were eager to forge partnerships.

And guess what? I tried them ALL.

Except for the “SEO industry awards.” Thanks guys, but we’re doing just fine without your validation. ¯\(ツ)/¯

However, I soon realized these one-off campaigns only produced temporary spikes in traffic, leads and sales.

Doubling my results would have required doubling my campaign efforts — a nightmare for a “lazy marketer” like myself.

Essentially, I was “the kid who kept eating the marshmallow.” FYI: The conclusions drawn from the original study have since been disproven.

I was stuck in a cycle of receiving the instant gratification of small gains in exchange for the delayed gratification of consistent and perpetual streams of new leads.

Every marketing campaign I participated in took resources away from what I was passionate about building: A repeatable marketing system that would deliver increasing returns.

So, I decided to ditch the marketing campaigns and go HAM on content and SEO. Ahrefs would “walk its talk” by devoting the majority of our marketing resources into creating articles that would rank in Google for all sorts of topics that our potential customers were searching for.

Were there moments when I thought progress was slow? Yeah, but I stuck with it. Things only started to pick-up 6 months in and totally blew up after 2 years of hard work:

If you’re an especially astute marketer, you might be rolling your eyes at the sight of my screenshot. I know, I know — website traffic is not indicative of true success.

However, blog content happens to be Ahrefs’ second largest customer acquisition channel. There are two reasons for this:

1. Our content ranks highly in Google for a ton of searches highly related to what our product does.
2. Each article is “a sales page” in disguise that shows readers how to solve the issue they were searching for with the help of our product.

Our content marketing strategy is a somewhat simplified and slightly refined version of what I’ve heard marketer Rand Fishkin describe as The Marketing Flywheel.

With that said, I want to be clear: Building a reputable blog that drives tons of search traffic to your business isn’t easy.

You may even question your sanity as you notice few results in exchange for significant effort, during the early days. However, you will, eventually, reach a tipping point if you stick to it.

This process is called “The Marketing Flywheel” because once “the wheel” starts spinning, it continues with minimal effort. You can even make the wheel spin faster if you choose to do so!

The concept came across my radar about 6 years ago. I stumbled across a video by Rand Fishkin and was hooked.

Ahrefs’ Marketing Flywheel

Here’s how our blogging strategy works:

1. Determine what customers are searching for in Google, as related to a problem we solve. Yep, we use our own SEO toolkit for this.
2. Publish an article on how to solve the particular problem, while demonstrating our product as the ideal solution.
3. Promote that article until it begins ranking on Google for the topic.
4. Receive a perpetual stream of visitors from Google; all of whom may, potentially, become customers after reading about our product.
5. Enjoy word-of-mouth publicity, as our “educated” customers tell others how our product solved their problems.
6. Lather, rinse and repeat.

A single article, that took us anywhere from 10 to 20 hours to produce, can deliver dozens to hundreds of potential customers every month — indefinitely.

Consistently executing upon this 6-step process will deliver steady streams of leads on autopilot. Assuming you have positioned your product or service as the optimal solution, a significant portion of leads will then become customers.

Here’s an extreme example of an article from the weight loss industry:

According to Ahrefs, this one article gets more than 170K visitors from Google every month. That’s nearly 2M visitors in the course of one year — from a single article about belly fat!

Imagine how many additional customers they would get if their article featured a particular fitness product!

You want to hear something even crazier?

That’s not even their most popular article; this one attracts more than 400K visitors per month, according to Ahrefs:

That’s nearly 5M visitors per year, and who knows how many customers!

Compare this compounding ROI to the finite ROI of one-off campaigns — print advertisements, podcast interviews and sponsored podcasts — and the question of where to invest the majority of your resources becomes a no-brainer.

This is why we worked so hard to grow Ahrefs’ Blog from 15K to 250K visits per month, from Google alone, over the past 4 years.

We have created our own “Marketing Flywheel” through the combination of SEO, content marketing, customer education, and strategic product plugs.

The cool thing is you don’t need a huge marketing team to replicate these results. The results depicted on the graph above were achieved by no more than 3 people working on our blog at any given time.

It’s not rocket science, but it’s also not easy

Ready to create your own perpetual Marketing Flywheel?

While there is no better strategy for “lazy marketers,” I must caution you: The concept is simple in theory, but challenging in execution.

Writing educational content that showcases your products and services is easy. A much more challenging task is to make these articles rank at the top of Google for any relevant search queries

In other words, you must learn some SEO. Fortunately, there is no shortage of online resources for learning the basics. The good news?

It doesn’t take much education to gain some “easy wins.”

Chances are, most of your competitors have no clue about SEO. Even implementing very basic steps will, likely, provide you with a strong competitive advantage.

However, I want to hear from you…

Does your marketing team rely on one-off marketing campaigns, or are you building a perpetual Marketing Flywheel?

If not, what’s the biggest factor holding you back from getting started?

Please tell me in the comments below.

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