TL:DR: There is a shift to community marketing due to the declining effectiveness of traditional marketing efforts and changing audience behaviour. Marketers must use community engagement techniques to influence their audience and grow their brands.
Community Has Often Been A Marketing Dead-End
Over the past fifteen years, many organisations have attempted to build communities to achieve marketing goals, such as increasing awareness, generating leads, and driving sales.
Most have made the mistake of creating a destination community. They launch a hosted community website and try to persuade people to join and participate in these communities.
The problem is that very few people join these communities. Most experience a brief engagement spike before eventually fading into long-term oblivion.
The reason for this is simple:
Most people are reluctant to participate in communities hosted by brands they don’t already purchase from.
(This is why most brand communities are transactional.)
Some organisations tackle this by creating unbranded (topic-centric) communities. However, this approach has two problems.
- The organisation struggles to attract non-customers. Once the community is created, the organisation must invite people. It can invite existing customers, but these customers are likely to begin asking questions about the brand and inadvertently turn it into a support community. Alternatively, you can promote the community to non-customers. However, if the organisation has an extensive mailing list of prospects, why not send them directly to places where they could buy? Why put the community between the desired outcome and the outreach? There’s only so much time an organisation wants to spend marketing a marketing initiative.
- Members don’t expect to be sold to in unbranded communities. When the community isn’t branded, you inevitably create a situation where you need to promote the brand at some point. However subtly you do it, it will be jarring to members, especially if they didn’t realise the community was owned by a brand. Thus, the more you downplay the brand to attract non-customers, the more surprised they will be when you try to turn them into customers.
This is why most efforts to build hosted communities to drive growth instead become costly distractions.
Ultimately, to drive growth in a community, you usually need to engage existing communities rather than build your own.
Enter: Community marketing.
What Is Community Marketing?
Community marketing is a strategy that uses community techniques to achieve marketing outcomes. The key principle is to connect and engage people with shared interests and positively influence attitudes and behaviour.
If you want to reach audiences you don’t already have access to, you must engage audiences outside the platforms you control.
The key difference between community marketing and community building is the communities typically already exist.
People are already there and engaging with one another.
Your role is to improve the quantity and quality of these interactions by enhancing the knowledge and perception of your brand and its products.
For the majority of topics, there will already be an established ecosystem of people who want to discuss them. There will be places people go to learn, get support, collaborate, and explore the topic. The role of the brand is to support, grow, and add value to these places in a positive manner.
In short, it means engaging with and growing the existing ecosystem rather than building something new from scratch.
Why Is Community Marketing On The Rise?
Community marketing is rising due to the declining effectiveness of traditional marketing channels and people’s changing behaviour.
The price of ads continues to rise while their effectiveness continues to decline. The effectiveness of PR and search engine optimisation techniques has plummeted. Google changes its algorithm on a whim (and might be prioritising communities).
It’s also increasingly challenging to stand out by publishing content, especially as we enter the GenAI era.
Almost every channel is flooded with content—some of better quality than others—but all are increasingly tricky to find. Audiences are overwhelmed, and most videos and podcasts are abandoned within seconds.
What makes community marketing so powerful today is its cost-effectiveness. It’s earned, not paid. You build relationships, add value, and gain trust. If you do this well, you get to tell your story to people open to hearing it. Better yet, you will have other people telling your story.
Community marketing is a time, trust, and relationship endeavour.
Moving From A Platform To A Menu of Possible Programs
This talk by Daniel Cmejla (via Evan) gives a good example and breakdown of key activities.
Perhaps the most significant shift is moving beyond a platform-centric approach and instead considering a menu of possible programs. If it makes sense to do this on an owned platform, then do that. If it doesn’t (and it increasingly doesn’t) use different platforms.
Community marketing occurs on both owned, partially owned, and independent channels.
The menu of possible programs include:
- Nurturing brand advocates. This is where you help people already in your orbit to build their following and share positive messages about the brand through whichever channels make the most sense.
- Engaging micro-influencers and opinion leaders. This is where you reach out to those already in your sector to find out how you can collaborate with them. This might involve co-developing products/services, joint ventures, collaborating on research/invites, speaking at events, etc…
- Employee engagement and advocacy. This is where you motivate and help employees build out their audience on social media channels, where they can share key messages and speak directly to people in the sector.
- Engaging and supporting existing groups. This is where the brand participates as a positive contributor to existing groups. No spam, but constant helpfulness and proactively helping support the group.
- Hosting events and activities. This is where the brand hosts events (online or offline) to build relationships, enhance brand sentiment, and foster a sense of community among members. Events also complement other tactics on this list exceptionally well.
- Creating content for audiences. This is where the brand promotes and spreads content that satisfies audiences’ needs. The organisation identifies the top topics, finds the member-created content, links to the best resources, and encourages others to create content. The brand might also create content and utilise community engagement techniques to ensure it is seen. The brand might also make a page to feature the best member contributions.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it provides a good overview to consider when assembling a program of activities.
Generally speaking, you’re engaging in existing platforms vs. creating your own. While there are some occasions when you want to launch your own experience, this is usually best once there’s an apparent demand for it.
This All Begins With Understanding The Ecosystem
The critical step to making this work is to have a profound understanding of the ecosystem you’re engaging with.
You have to participate in the ecosystem. You need to map it out, speak to as many people as possible, and understand where people go today to learn, get support, collaborate, and explore topics with others.
You need to map out the key sources of information, who has influence, and build relationships with these people over time.
Looking at the above, it becomes clear which relationships we can leverage, who we need to strengthen relationships with, and who we need to reach out to.
Once you have mapped out the ecosystem, you can enhance your connections and relationships with each member. You can also identify and satisfy unmet needs within the ecosystem. What do each of these people want? Finally, you can start earning the trust of the ecosystem and leveraging that trust for marketing objectives.
For example, looking at the above, a community marketing approach might:
- Notice a lack of good places to learn in the above, and begin nurturing employee advocates to fill the gap.
- Create a user groups program to offer members a stronger sense of belonging.
- Collaborate with influencers who already have a big audience. Help them build their name and reputation within the community.
- Offer unique access and expertise to those already sharing their knowledge to build a stronger relationship.
These approaches are far from the traditional ‘build and drive people to a forum’ approach, but they’re also going directly to the people you want to reach and using community techniques to engage audiences.
Community Marketing Opens The Door To Community Revival
A steadfast view of community as a single platform primarily for support has led us into community stagnation.
Taking a more expansive, member-centric, and flexible view of community opens the door to reviving the practice of community as a whole.
Much of the above might also sound familiar to anyone who has worked in PR, marketing, and related roles. And there’s a lot of overlap.
The key distinguishing difference is that ‘community marketing’ prioritises connections and relationships with and between audiences. It believes that trusted relationships are the foundation for everything else. If you earn the audience’s trust, you earn the opportunity to communicate with them.
Community marketing also allows for an explosion of creativity that is often absent when we are overly focused on a forum-style platform.
Why not host collaborations with top opinion leaders in your sector? Host an AMA in a subreddit? Strategically organise a member-challenge series? And nurture small geographic or topic-focused groups?
For the vast majority of organisations, building a community is managing and responding to comments on an Instagram page.
There are many more exciting ways to drive positive marketing outcomes using community techniques once you think beyond hosted platforms.
Ultimately, the lesson is simple: if you want to drive growth from a community, you need to engage communities which aren’t your own. This is community marketing.
