When and How to Implement Community-Driven Marketing
Lessons from working with startup teams
After over a year working with startup teams, I believe that for any new products, the best way for market interaction is through community building.
To get new users, you may find that community building is the single best tactic if you are familiar with the “do things that don’t scale” mentality. It is clear that community building is the one thing that you should do rather than wandering around asking your first users for feedback that rarely covers everything you need to do. It’s wrong statistically because the sample size is too small and mentally because the job is too boring to carry out.
We also have to retain existing users because getting new users is costly and painful. When your marketing efforts focus on communities, the obvious goal is to strike for absolute loyalty. For early-stage products, the customer journey you want to build should be different, as I’ve long observed. It can be generalized into six phases that are as follows:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Purchase/Install
- Usage
- Feedback
- Advocacy/Evangelism
You can take any app as the example for this journey. Marketers will have to do well on the first task, which is making customers consider using the product. Next is the adoption phase when you let the customer interact with every feature of the product you sell. It is critical to create an effective environment for learning. The third biggest task is the thing that every marketer wishes for, that the customer promotes the product voluntarily. It’s the best way to reach critical mass.
Setting Objectives Is Critical
It is a process of identifying and nurturing social assets for your brand and your company as a whole. Community-building guarantees that you will get feedback from the first source and, more importantly, that you can identify the pain points that are hard to explain with numbers. In fact, you can observe the attitude of your community members rather than making hypothesis out of statistical data only. Rare cases might surprise you with the user insights they carry.
If you are looking for a quick win, community building should not be the main vehicle to deliver your goal. It is about real relationships. Three key outcomes can be generated through this kind of activity:
- Connect existing customers to prospects, to activate sales
- Connect prospects to each other, to enhance product knowledge
- Connect customers to customers, to drive product adoption
Tips for Implementation
- Social media is a must-have channel — It’s clear that your users are very likely to be present on a social media platform. Your activities on social media will represent many things, including your team status, your ambition with the product, and most of all, your attention to customers’ responses to what you’re doing.
- Group features make your target audience feel the exclusivity — Launching a new product is the process of iterations that add more features every release. We often need a group of customers who are willing to wait for the new feature to come. The best way I found is to grant selected members access to special resources. Many platforms allow you to do so, such as Facebook’s secret groups, email lists, etc.
- Design the governance for the community — When it comes to retaining members in a community, it’s safe to say that they won’t leave if they have something to lose, e.g. community leadership titles. At the most basic level, entitlement generated by a governance system will help you keep some of the most valuable members who have a strong interest in and knowledge of your product.
- Partner with other projects to offer more benefits— Collaboration will help you bring more benefits to your customers. If your product solves a few problems in their lives, you can find other projects to form deals that both sides can win.
