The word 'community' is thrown around in marketing meetings but do marketers know how to build a community? While leaders want to grow and expand their B2B community, they haven't been given the proper tools or know-how to do so. Let’s take a look at why community building is critical in B2B marketing, and how a robust community-building strategy can supercharge business growth and customer loyalty.
The importance of community building
They say ‘your vibe attracts your tribe’. A community, or audience, in B2B, is a space where your customers come together to learn, share and interact with your brand. The more value you provide to your community in terms of educational content, experiences and personal interaction, the more likely your community will grow organically.
Effective community building unlocks powerful benefits to your B2B brand including:
They say ‘your vibe attracts your tribe’. A community, or audience, in B2B, is a space where your customers come together to learn, share and interact with your brand. The more value you provide to your community in terms of educational content, experiences and personal interaction, the more likely your community will grow organically.
Effective community building unlocks powerful benefits to your B2B brand including:
The skills you need to build a community
There are a number of ways you can build a community online. Some of the effective ways we’ve found our clients have achieved success stemmed from integrating core marketing strategy with skills you traditionally see across education, journalism and design.
For example, providing quality, educational and relevant content. In order to attract your community:
It’s this integrated approach that can help attract your audience faster. After all, different people consume information in different formats. In fact, LookBookHQ reports almost 60 percent of marketers reuse content two to five times. Furthermore, 51 percent of companies say updating or repurposing existing content has proven the most effective tactic implemented.
Applied in real life, an integrated approach to podcast production can be an excellent way to build a community. This is because you can scale your efforts considerably by repurposing that content into multiple media formats, including audiograms for social media, and feature articles for web, newsletter and third party distribution.
As an example, we produced a premium podcast for a global martech client supported by an inbound and channel distribution plan, resulting in a fresh media channel to attract the B2B organisation’s new post-IPO community.
The features of a successful B2B community
A great B2B community offers a forum to ask critical industry questions, deep diving into relevant issues and challenges your customers and prospects have.
For example, from an educational standpoint, a series of virtual panels or ‘lunch and learns’ featuring industry leaders can be a great way to attract an audience, giving them a platform to learn, interact and network. A journalistic edge can be added with professional, media trained facilitator, who can help make the experience far more interactive, allowing your audience the chance to deep dive and ask more probing questions.
Finally from a design standpoint, the content from these events can then be repurposed as feature article write ups and video content for channel distribution across EDMs, newsletters, social media and partner channels.
As an example, we produce a series of webinars and supporting inbound and community campaigns for a leading global health client, attracting the interest of thousands of health professionals across the APAC region in less than 12 months.
Using video
Look at any great community and you’ll notice they know how to use video content to educate, engage and attract audiences at scale. Investing in great community-led video content can be a quickfire way to impress your audience and give them a visually accessible way to learn and interact with the solutions you offer.
In fact, Hubspot says 81 percent of businesses use video as a marketing tool, up from 63 percent over the previous year. In 2020, 92 percent of marketers said that video is an important part of their marketing strategy. Forbes reports 65 percent of executives have gone to the marketer’s site and 39 percent have called them on the phone after watching a marketing video.
In B2B, 96 percent of businesses use video in their marketing campaigns.
Even a series of vox pops can be a fun and engaging way to attract a fresh audience to your product or service. For example, we produced a series of interactive vox pop interviews in the lead up of one of Australia’s biggest tax events, helping support 1m+ social impressions within the tax community in only 10 weeks.
Avoiding marcomms rigmarole
Producing a steady, consistent stream of excellent content is a must for community building across various media formats and channels. However, often traditional marketing approval processes, multiple iterations, reworks and too many cooks can stifle content output, meaning the community building efforts become bottlenecked. And we’ve seen this happen all too often, in even the largest $100m+ global enterprises.
This means making sure you have a zero-tolerance approach to marcomms rigmarole and know how to streamline community content production, project management and channel distribution. Plus, producing a multi-faceted owned media channel that can grow organically. If you don’t have this in place, or have the skills to carry it out, hire a specialist who can either lay down the processes and strategy for you. Or, implement and manage the entire community build.
One example is creating your own digital magazine or content hub, which becomes the go-to content source for your customers and prospects in your industry. A few years ago, we produced a content hub for a leading B2B health technology company that contributed to a 247 percent increase in lead generation and reduced PR costs by over 70 percent.
It can feel overwhelming to start building a community from scratch, or even rebuilding one that a legacy marketer left behind in your capable hands. Here are some quick tips to build momentum:
One final tip is don’t skimp. Community building takes time, and it’s a long-term investment. Community building can help generate leads, support inbound marketing and shorten the sales cycle, but it’s still very much a ‘top of the funnel’ activity. It needs to be supported by robust digital marketing capabilities, nurture and ABM campaigns, plus linked to the sales team. All this requires a holistic, integrated approach. Done well, and the potential and possibilities are endless.