Toucan Talks
Toucan Talks is a podcast for Wilmington-area business owners and entrepreneurs who are eager to learn from those on a similar journey. Each week, we talk with an area business owner about their successes, challenges, and experiences in business. Don’t worry – we keep it fun as we bounce from topic to topic.
Toucan Talks
2026 Planning: Set Up Your Marketing Flywheel Before January
If your marketing ends at “closed won,” you’re leaving growth on the table. We turn the funnel into a flywheel and show how small changes to attract, engage, and delight can lower acquisition costs, increase retention, and make every customer add force to the next one.
We start by reframing the goal of content: not just traffic, but momentum. You’ll hear how to find the posts worth scaling, package them into lead magnets, and build clear next steps that convert attention into owned audiences. From there, we unpack the engage stage with segmented drips, timely retargeting, and sales alerts tied to buying signals, all tuned to relevance over noise. We don’t skip the human layer either—cadence, tone, and context are what turn opens into replies and replies into revenue.
Delight is where compounding begins. We walk through onboarding that shortens time-to-value, simple advocacy programs for reviews and referrals, and social proof that feeds SEO and better-fit leads. Along the way we share a concrete example that loops blog traffic into leads, leads into customers, and customers into growth signals that power the next cycle. To keep it practical, we include a year-end audit framework—scale what worked, fix what’s close, and cut the rest—with metrics to watch and small tests to run.
AI shows up as a support tool, not a crutch. Use it to draft outlines, repurpose long-form into clips, and propose nurture sequences you can refine for voice and accuracy. Pair that with smart content repurposing and a clear community loop, and your marketing becomes a steady engine rather than a series of one-off pushes.
Ready to build a system that doesn’t stall at the bottom of the funnel? Follow the show, share this with a teammate, and leave a quick review to help others find it. Want next week’s playbook in your inbox?
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Meet your hosts and learn more about Kickstart Collective at kickstartcollective.co
Kickstart Collective is a creative marketing agency based in Wilmington, NC. We offer our clients a creative advantage through creative content and marketing strategies.
Sales funnels are so 2024. Flywheels are the new thing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, they are. Um, marketing funnels, sales funnels. I think probably anybody watching this video is like, yeah, been there, done that. I know what that is. Whether you implement it or not, that's up to you. But most people will know what you're talking about if you start talking about a funnel. Um, the concept of a flywheel is a little newer, I think, um, which is why we're gonna talk about it today on Kickstart Your Week. Um, and something that you can start thinking through before the new year hits.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, so you know, funnels, they're linear, right?
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Flywheels, I learned, or is some mechanical thing that it just keeps going. Um, we can Google it and pop up a picture of an actual flywheel, if you will.
SPEAKER_01:Sure, here.
SPEAKER_00:The concept is that it's it's continuous. Um, marketing leads sales that keeps going.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Where a funnel, when you think about it, is you know, attract, convert, um, close, and then it's done. Um, whereas a flywheel, you want to keep nurturing your customers, keep sales going. So compounding momentum, if you will, um, not just one and done. Um, ideally, the benefits that you're gonna get is a lower acquisition cost. Um, and then some stronger retention because you're gonna keep marketing to your clients once you've, you know, closed one deal or made one sale with them. Yes. While still attracting new, new clients. Right. Um, so we'll get into kind of what this looks like. But if you what do you think? I mean, start this in January or start this now.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's never too early. Well, we're in November.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we are.
SPEAKER_02:It's never it's never too early to get started for Q1.
SPEAKER_00:True.
SPEAKER_02:Q1 is always there and it's always gonna be ready for your action. So I think it's a great time to start now to get ready for this next year and this next push.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, the next month and a half is gonna be over so quickly. So thinking through what these campaigns look like, budgets, getting things approved. Um, yeah, it's never, never too early. And January is noisy and crazy, anyways. So never too early.
SPEAKER_02:Get ready now.
SPEAKER_00:Get ready now. Um, so what are the core parts of a flywheel, you may be asking? I love this. Oh, the core part, three core parts of flywheel. Um, attract. So here, I'll run through them and then we can explain them a little bit more. That sounds good. All right, attract, engage, delight. Um, so these three things are gonna build that continuous momentum. Um, so attract. Um, this is gonna be content, SEO, paid ads, um, building awareness, really, if you think about it, the things that are at the top of your funnel.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Um, so we're not throwing, you're not throwing all your years of hard work out the window or re-reworking it.
SPEAKER_02:And we're saying like we're on the flywheel, but funnels still have their place. We're not we're not trying to like get rid of them. They are 2024, but we're in 2025, going to 2026. We, you know, yeah, both are good, but we're focusing on it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you're just taking your funnel and just making like a loop. We're really we're looping our funnels.
SPEAKER_02:There it is. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, something like that. Um, so yes, you still have you're still attracting step one. Right. Um, next is engaging. So, how are you nurturing your leads, personalizing emails, um, doing retargeting for people who may have landed on your website and not purchased, but that's also gonna tie into people retargeting customers to keep that momentum going. Um, that again, that cost of acquisition is well, that you've already acquired them, but to re-engage them, re-upsell them essentially, yeah, um, should ideally be lower at that point. Um and then how are you gonna delight your customers? Or like, is it a great onboarding experience? Is it, you know, getting them wrapped into the community of your brand, the lifestyle, lifestyle brands? Look how love them. But I mean, seriously, no better way to delight a customer than get them wrapped into a good lifestyle brand. That's true. Um, but building like advocacy programs, different things like that. Um, what are the little and going back to what we talked about a few weeks ago, like what is that customer experience that's gonna continue to delight your customers so that they one uh continue that customer attention, continue to stay a customer, yeah. Um, and or you know, refer that word of mouth um referral marketing source, if you will. Yeah. Um, so those are the three three parts. Now it sounds a lot like a funnel, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_02:It does.
SPEAKER_00:It does. So how do we make this a flywheel? Let's jump into a little mini example, if you will. Um, so basically, let's say you have a blog on your website, somebody reads a blog post, or they take a next step because in your blog, you have a lead magnet. Yeah. So they put their email address, they download said valuable content. Now you have a lead. Now, how do you nurture that lead? You put them on a drip campaign.
SPEAKER_02:Boom.
SPEAKER_00:Put them on email drip campaign. And it's personalized because you got their first name, you know what they're interested in from what they downloaded. And then that email campaign, it can, you know, be however long it needs to be for your business. I know I'm being a little silly with this, but um, you know, they get an initial email with their download, and then maybe there's a few marketing style like follow-up emails in that drip. Yeah. Um, but you might also throw in some sales emails, whether those are automated or your sales team gets um like a notification and then follows up with them directly. Um, it really is gonna depend on what you're selling and how many touch points a person needs, but you're nurturing that lead. That goes great. They become a client. Yay! That's awesome. You made that client so happy with your great customer experience, they're gonna leave a review on Google. Google algorithm smiles upon you, your SEO improves. Um, more people are gonna land on your blog. Um, and so that is gonna, but really, that the review will drive new leads. It is gonna help with Google. So it's one of those things you take your customer and all the actions to get there is gonna drive more customers and ideally drive that customer to be a repeat, yeah, customer client. So that was a fun little example.
SPEAKER_02:That's a that's a great flywheel example, actually. That's that was engaging. I like that.
SPEAKER_00:That was good. Hopefully, we'll see what the uh drop rate on our video is on YouTube. Speaking of vanity metrics, go back and watch last week's video once you're done with this one. Um, so building out your flywheel again. It's gonna be looking back at this year first off to see like what worked in 2025. Because we are, we're not throwing, I mean, truly, we're not throwing any marking principles out the window. We're this isn't like a groundbreaking thing. Of course. It's just truly taking your funnel and saying, like, okay, how is this experience driving new customers and then driving, you know, repeat customers, building that lifetime value of that one person.
SPEAKER_02:Let it work for you in a way. Kind of get it, this the ecosystem set up so that you it's not like a consistent just A to B, but it continues to cycle through.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, exactly. Um, so yeah, figure out what worked. Um, the things that did work, keep them going, optimize them if you need to. Um, if something didn't work, like scrap it. I mean, you not everything you try, especially marketing, is gonna work.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Um, there's a lot of A-B testing that has to go on, and there's campaigns that sometimes are just gonna flop, and that sucks. But you get better. It is what it is, and you learn things. Um, so yeah, I mean, optimizing it could be taking a piece very practically going into your Google Analytics, looking at if you have blogs or even landing pages, going in and saying, okay, which ones of these have the most time on site, the lowest bounce rate, all those metrics that are important. And then saying, okay, how do we either build more content that is related to this content? Um, or do we need to like tweak this landing page, whatever it is? Optimize it, get things buttoned up, good old reporting for 2025, a good year in report, if you will. And then fill in the gaps. Like, do we need to start email marketing? Because we have all this great blog content that people engage with. So let's get it in front of more people. Yeah. Um so are your leads being nurtured? Like I have, you know, times in the five, six, seven, I don't know how old this business is. I'll look it up. 2019, I think is when we started six years, like six years, six years, I don't know. Yeah. Math.
SPEAKER_01:That sounds right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Um, you know, lead nurturing wasn't always my strongest skill. I did not do this to get into sales. I liked marketing. Um, I wanted the sales to be handed up to someone else. But you know, life of a business owner. Like, what are their automations you can set up? Um, does it need to be, you know, high personal touch, which in our times with you know, some of our services, it does need to be. Yeah. Um, so figuring out like where those gaps were this year, and then how do you improve on that either with your team or you know, systems you can put in place? Um, and then yeah, like do you are you giving your customers a reason to share? Um, was their experience good? Was their results good? Are you making it just easy for them to share? Um, so all those different things come into play. Um do you want to talk about some ways? I kind of briefly touched on it, but some ways you can use, you know, AI to make this easier on yourself as a, you know, as a business, as a if you're a one-person marketing team for a company, um, there's a lot of things you can do to make this a lot more achievable.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, to make this system and like this ecosystem work for you, it does not have to be incredibly difficult.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Like there can be just a couple actionable steps that you take that you look through your stuff, your process, and through through everything. But okay, this can be improved. I can push it a little bit more here, pull it back a little bit more here. And a great way that can also be used to utilize the time that you have that you're giving to this is you know, whip out AI. It's okay. You know, there's there's ways to use it that will benefit you in not the final product that you're trying to do necessarily, but it be it can be a great way to lead you to the right process.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um, there's a lot of information that AI pulls from, and you can kind of see where it pulls from too to verify that, and then use that to um kind of get the the rough draft setup, yeah, and then refine it and make it work for your business and the ecosystem that you're trying to set up.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, I think that's you know, a really good point too. Um, and even just going back to like if we want to just look like at a content perspective, like, okay, say you go to your Google Analytics, one blog post is, you know, performing well. Say, hey AI, add this blog post. It's doing well. How do I make it into a lean magnet? Yeah. How can I, you know, format this into something that someone can download so I can capture their email address? Um, or like, hey, how do I make this content more shareable for people?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, and it can give you quick little ideas so you're not sitting there spinning your wheels. You can take one or two ideas quickly, run with them, test them, again, optimize them. Yeah. Um, but yeah, the easier you can make it on for your customers or you know, your qualified leads to share um to drive more leads, the better. Again, I think we've mentioned kind of word of mouth a lot over the past few weeks, but um that again is kind of an important piece of this as well. So yeah, use AI to like get ideas and you know, for fill in those gaps. Um, don't you're gonna have to test them, but don't spend days upon days trying to figure out what to test. Get some ideas and then roll with it.
SPEAKER_02:There's nothing new under the sun, and it's okay. Yeah, I'm just gonna but even like all the information they pull is from stuff, you know.
SPEAKER_00:It's true, it's all on mentor webs.
SPEAKER_02:Use it to your benefit, don't let it be everything you do, but let it be like the the the rough draft of the blueprint, and then fill in the gaps for what works for you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And tailor it to what you need.
SPEAKER_00:For sure. Um, so yeah, as you're planning for 2026, um, just think about ways to engage your customers um and just to keep that momentum building. I think um, again, kind of going back to previous Kickstart Your Week, um, figuring how to repurpose content and get, you know, lots of shorter video clips from a longer piece of content or shorter little blurbs from a long, you know, white paper that is also in a blog post that says social media clips. Like again, AI is a great way to get some of that. But um, yeah, you know, we're working smarter, not harder. That's right. Changing our funnels into flywheels, folks. That's right. It's 2020, it's almost 2026.
SPEAKER_02:Let it work for you.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. Um, so hopefully you got a little bit out of this. Um, kickstart your week. Um, again, we'll have, you know, speaking of which, this video lives on our blog with a written blog post with some information about the you know, the topics we're talking about. So um, if you want to learn a little bit more about flywheels, get some more kind of definitions and stats in there, head over to our blog. It's under the marketing resources on our website. Um, you can subscribe to our newsletter to have these videos in your inbox every Monday morning so you can kickstart your week with us. Why aren't we drinking coffee in these videos? Talking about talking about customers, looking at the processes.
SPEAKER_02:We need to look at our process and add that into these next videos.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, how great. Monday morning, open up your email.
SPEAKER_02:Man.
SPEAKER_00:Me, you, Alyssa, our smiling faces, and some coffee. Coffee.
SPEAKER_02:Come on now.
SPEAKER_00:Next time, folks. I'm sorry. Next time we'll be drinking coffee.
SPEAKER_02:It's gonna get better.
SPEAKER_00:It's gonna get better. We're always improving, we're always optimizing, always caffeinating. All that to say, you've probably ended this video because I already kind of closed it out. Thank you for joining us on this week's Kickstart Your Week. We will see you next week.
SPEAKER_01:Bye.