Hey, Dave here. Outside of talking about AI, “community” seems to be one of the hot topics among marketing teams and startup founders these days. And rightfully so: building a community means build an audience of your dream customers. People who know, like, and trust you before they buy. People who will say nice things about your company. Read your content. Show up at your events. And you don’t have give more money to Google or Facebook to reach them. This is why I’ve been obsessed content and community since the early days of HubSpot talking about “inbound marketing” - creating content that attracts people to your business. This will always be the best form of marketing. But there’s one detail that I think gets jumbled together when people start talking about community: Should you build “a” community? or should you “build community.” (There’s a difference — and it has an impact on your marketing strategy). Here’s what I mean:
- Community by definition is “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.” So you can go and build a community - a Facebook group, Slack group, Circle, in-person events, local meetups, etc.
- But you can also “build community” by becoming a resource for people (your ideal customers) that have a particular characteristic in common. In a B2B context this means some shared identity at it relates to work: marketers, sales people, product people, designers, HR pros, developers.
- You attract those people to your brand through content: writing here on LinkedIn, articles on your website, online and in-person events, maybe a book you wrote, a talk you gave, a podcast you created, t-shirts and socks you sent out to VIP customers … all of that also “creates community.”
- I think dedicated community spaces can work (like how we’re using Circle for the Exit Five community) but this is very hard to do and get right and keep people engaged and active over time — and it’s even harder to do inside of a company.
Most often the better “community building” approach for your business is going to be the one that happens through creating content for a particular group of people. I also like this approach first because it then allows you to add on the “private community” piece after. It’s a much easier second step. Just something I’ve been thinking about and wanted to try and articulate for this newsletter. - Dave P.S. What's your POV on community building? Which path are you exploring with your business? Anyone have experience deciding between building a community or investing in "community" here? Reply back and let us know. |
