If you are a small business owner or the person in charge of marketing for a small shop, you have a responsibility to drive sales. Or maybe you are in charge of a nonprofit organization’s philanthropy department with ever-increasing needs for more donations. How you go about earning revenue says everything about you and the kind of impact you want to have on the world. In this post, I’ll make the case for re-thinking how you promote your business or organization and make the case for adopting the Brand Flywheel mindset.

The traditional metaphor we’ve used in marketing to describe luring new customers for the past half-century is “The Funnel.” This metaphor has worked for the most part as it’s easy to understand: fill the funnel with potential clients and go about your work so that a consistent number of them fall through the bottom of the funnel and purchase your good or service. I recently discussed the AIDA Model, which forms the basis for the funnel mindset.

But the funnel metaphor is losing its saliency in today’s marketplace: it views the customer purchase (conversion) as an afterthought, or as a one-time experience happening in a vacuum.

This just isn’t the case in today’s world.

Today’s consumer is fundamentally different from customers of 50 years ago. Back in the day, it was salespeople who had high knowledge that they could leverage in situations convincing people to purchase. Today, customers have all of the information they need at their fingertips. They can hop on Reddit and ask around for advice if they have questions they can’t answer using a search engine.

The relationships you build and nurture as a business are fundamental to your success. These clients will not hesitate to leave you a negative review online if you treat them unfairly. They will tell their cohorts about their negative experience. Instead of becoming an asset you can deploy down the road, they become a liability, creating a roadblock–or even just a pothole–that you must navigate around on your path to success.

On the other hand, when you Delight and Inspire a client, there is a good chance they will share their positive impression of you online and in person.

This Brand Flywheel mindset is designed to offer a better approach–one that embraces every experience you have with every client. Each experience becomes a piece of firewood you can lay on the bonfire that helps ignite your business to build the indispensable brand that people can’t seem to live without.

Building Brand Flywheel Momentum

The Brand Flywheel gains momentum from the following six accelerating forces:

• Define your Mission and Message
• Ground Yourself
• Tell Your Story
• Capture Business
• Delight and Inspire
• Engage Ambassadors

Each of these forces brings your existing customers closer to you and helps you reach new people in your target demographic. You have to exert considerable effort on each step, but once you’ve gone through the process once, repeating that step can be iterative, full of discovery, or just self-affirming. Looking at the process as a cycle is helpful because you need to continue to maintain momentum for your Brand Flywheel.