Welcome to the next episode of The CMA Newsletter where 350+ marketers get better at building Customer Marketing programs and strengthening relationships with their customers in less than 5 minutes.
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In previous episodes, I have written about running Customer Marketing and Customer Advocacy but did you know I also run a Community?! 😅
Yes, I’m being the person I preach about not becoming. For the record, I don’t recommend owning all 3 alone.
Today, I have Mary Green with me. I think we all know and love this Community guru! Mary has been building communities for 12 years at HubSpot, Forbes, Demandbase, and Outreach. 🔥
In this episode we will tackle:
Types of Communities
Benefits of Slack
How to get started
How to keep it alive and fun
Goodies for you - Vendor Eval Gsheet, Survey example, email example
Let’s dig in:
There are 3 types of B2B Communities:
Open community (public)
Customer User Community (closed= invite only)
Advocacy Community (closed + exclusive)
We don’t have time to go into all the benefits of a community but here is a great ebook I recommend. Also, I highly recommend the book, The Business of Belonging.
There are 2 common reasons you might be interested in starting a community; your company is telling you to build one, or you think it would be beneficial for your customers.
If it’s the former, I would first recommend educating execs on resources. A Customer User Community is a MASSIVE undertaking and one that should not be put on a single Customer Marketer.
One more time for the people in the back- This should bot be solely put on Customer Marketing Managers! It’s not fair to do to someone and add on to their existing responsibilities.
If your company is pushing you to create a User Community (this is what happened to me) and you’re looking into vendors like SFDC Communities or HigherLogic, here are some things I lead with:
We will need 1 if not 2 full time people to make this initiative successful
This is a massive cross departmental project (3 months minimum)
Community Moderator (8 hours a week)
1 Implementor (4 hours a week for 2.5 months)
1 Designer (Same look and feel as website)
1 Technical person (SSO/Auth0)
1 Content person (Building knowledge base, help articles,
1 Attorney to review rules and guidelines document
1 Marketer (Content Calendar)
After I educated them on the above, we landed on a slack community due to lack of resources. (I’m taking a virtual bow) Thank you, Thank you!
*TIP* - If you ARE interested in evaluating Online Community Vendors, I got you covered! Check this Vendor Evaluation Google Sheet I created back when I evaluated 2 vendors.
For the episode, Mary and I are going to dig into Advocacy Communities particularly in Slack since they are the quickest and easiest to set up.
Benefits of Slack
It’s free until you need historical data (and that is manageable)
Meeting people where they are - most people use slack at their orgs
Creating public/private channels
DMs (game changer - I add everyone to the community when we enter into the case study journey.) So awesome to DM quick questions and get approvals to move forward.
Decent analytics - via several available tools
Integrates with your tech stack
Mary- Slack is a great option for building a customer or advocate community because it’s free and you are likely already using it (your customers, too).
There’s no learning curve, people are comfortable to jump into conversations, and you don’t have to work to bring them into a new platform.
You can also start very slowly, like in this image:
Starting slow is a great approach because it allows you to test what your customers like, show your management team what you are doing in the community, and invite others once your community is growing smoothly.
Founding members
Mary- I recommend starting the community by finding some of your best/most active/most advocating customers and asking them to join you, as you build the community. This is your founders group and they will help you seed your community.
I ask these members to post by DMing them once a week. You can do this for free with Burb.co. Once members have posted, ping your other members and ask them to comment. I usually say “Hi Leslie, John just posted a question in the general channel, can you share your opinion? Here’s the link (include link).”
Relationships
Mary: I like to get to know as many of my members as possible. I usually reach out (in DM) and introduce myself, ask if they are looking for specific resources or connections, and share that I’m always around to help.
I learn a lot about the members who respond, about their interests in learning, and about their careers. I keep a spreadsheet to help me remember.
As topics, resources, and new people join the community, I’ll reference my spreadsheet to see who is interested in a similar topic, then reach out to connect them, tag them in a post or comment, or ask them to comment.
Overtime, the way that you’ve connected people, mentioned them, and reached out for answers to questions will become the social norm of your community and others will jump in. Soon, you won’t be the only one building relationships, your other members will contribute to help the community grow, and before long, 1:1 relationships multiply to become a well connected network.
Adding Content
Mary- I think it’s fun to plan content and run with whatever members post, too. This way you’ll have some activity for anyone visiting.
In the beginning, I plan content around questions members have, OR things I’ve found that are relevant to the members. You can bring in content from your company blogs or internal resources, too.
Leslie- I run contests in my community. I created a #successfulsends channel and I will ask them to share their recent wins for a chance to win (enter gift).
In my experience, PEOPLE LOVE FREE SHIT! Plus they act fast.
I also have “Tip Tuesday” from the product team so they can expect an interesting platform tip or update that makes them better at their job EVERY TUESDAY.
Advocacy
Mary - Finally, as you learn more about your members, you should notice a natural inclination to participate as an advocate. There will be members who want to educate others, members who want to do reviews and share their experiences (even become references), status seekers (members who want to grow their career) and collaborators that want to work on projects together.
Move your members into advocacy with small asks, and as they seem more interested, continue to nurture their experience.
Invites
Leslie - Once you are ready to scale and let more members in to slack you can start inviting others.
There’s only one way to join a Slack group: You have to be invited by the administrator.
At Sendoso, one of the benefits to becoming a SuperSender is they get access to our SuperSender community. Here is my welcome email after they sign up on this page.
If you do not have a sign up form for an entire advocacy program, you can create a sign-up form.
Here is an example of a company called Buffer type form request . Which is a nice option to quickly collect more folks who are interested in joining your community.
I do recommend tracking all this stuff back into your CRM so you can dig into usage data on your community members. See below for my mic drop metric that I report on!
Want to know what people think of your Community?
Ask em!
**Tip** - Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. Here is my SuperSender Feedback Survey I send out before the end of the year.
I love this question bc its insanely straightforward and exactly what I need to know.
Results: 49% of members said the it was the community that helps them spend more money with our platform. 👏👏👏
Mic Drop Metric: 3 months after joining the SuperSender Community, customers spend 34% more in the platform and that’s compared to the 3 months prior. 💘
It’s so hard to condense a hugely important role in under 5 minutes. Hope this helps you decide if you are ready to launch a community or help you revive an existing one.
BIG thanks to Mary for brining this episode to life!
See you next Saturday!
On a personal note:
Here is my 3 year old Miles at a birthday party last Sunday. It was his first time on a horse and I though he looked like a future cowboy. 🤠
Have a great weekend!
Love your CMA Soulmate,
Leslie