What can community marketing bring to the table? with Zapnito’s Charles Thiede

DR: Hi Charles – thanks for joining me today! Before we really get into the deep questions, can you please just introduce yourself and explain to our audience what Zapnito does?

CT: Zapnito is an enterprise SaaS platform, where we power communities for B2B organisations and knowledge hubs, where the client owns the data, content, and we help them with a strategy.  

DR: Clearly, community is not a new concept. It’s been at the heart of humanity for millennia. With that in mind, what can community marketing bring to the table that other traditional forms of marketing (email, social media, direct mail, etc) can’t?

CT: First, it’d be good to share what community marketing is. It’s having a community hub that exists typically alongside a product (or can be the product) to drive acquisition, retention and upsell, so community marketing isn’t necessarily a new idea. A lot of it has happened in the social world, but unfortunately with the noise such as cat videos and Twitter trolls, it’s hard to build a community there.

So, what community marketing is all about is taking over your community, taking it back from social media and bringing it back into your brand’s home, where you can engage with your clients and prospects in a really powerful one-to-one setting, but also share knowledge and leverage your thought leaders and your customer advocates into the community through content and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. Some other things community marketing can do includes:

  • Build a hub of trusted content in a safe space.
  • Internal and external experts can contribute expertise.
  • Create participation, rather than passive consumption.
  • Harness collective intelligence by bringing together different skillsets and perspectives – captured and shared in one place.

DR: This year, utilising Zapnito’s technology, B2B Marketing launched Propolis – our community for B2B marketers to share problems, insights and learn best practices. Of course, for us, launching a community makes sense. After all, we run webinars, events, and training courses for B2B marketers in all different industries and across all different sectors. Bringing people together to communicate more openly is, therefore, a logical move. However, is community marketing feasible for those in industries such as tech or manufacturing? How would it even work in that context?

CT: Wherever you have intellectual overhead – complex products that need communication and education – and customers that are using those products to achieve something that they care about, you have the basis for a community. Any tech sector, healthcare or professional services company that has a product with a need for some kind of explanation has potential for being a complex product. That’s where we find communities really thrive. And in B2B, there is a need from experts and customer advocacy.

In some instances, with whitepapers and webinars, it can feel quite transactional and very ‘one note’. However, communities create active participation with a brand beyond the product or service itself. They allow customers to learn more, to use a product better, to speak to others like them, contribute their own experiences, and even co-create. Community marketing is about the long haul.

DR: Attention is at a premium at the moment. With so much social media noise going on, it’s hard to really get your audience’s attention. How can community marketing help solve this problem?

CT: Community marketing is the antidote to the noise. It’s a safe space – trusted content from brands you know. Learning is a big part of what we do with the platform. It’s about knowledge versus attention. This means a less fragmented marketing strategy – there’s so many conversations and pieces of a brand split across channels today. A community is a home. It means autonomy over your audience, ownership of the relationships and the data – social media restricts visibility and charges money for privilege of reaching your own customers. It’s not possible to build a community here.

DR: Let’s talk business. What can community marketing do for customer acquisition costs, as well as growth and retention? If it positively affects growth and retention, why do you think this is?

CT: The problem with social media is that it’s really hard to derive attribution, in terms of participation and what that looks like in terms of conversion. And I think where we see the most power is not just an acquisition, but the whole lifecycle. So, once a client goes on to the community, they start engaging, they become a client, and they start to have access to more things like courses and rooms and peer-to-peer conversations with the expert’s customer success.

And that’s why we’re seeing the full attribution around not just acquisition, but retention. So, if you have somebody engaged on the community, and learning and participating, then the retention of that client is going to be much higher, so their retention potential is much higher. So, then your clients become your best tool to drive other clients to come in. So that’s where we’re seeing the power and cost reduction in social media. So social media is a channel and the communities are the hub. We’ve seen some cost reduction by pulling some of the budget out of social media, and just treating it like a channel. Don’t build your community in Twitter. Build it in your own platform.

DR: To put it bluntly, what does good community marketing look like? It’s not something that’s exactly widespread just yet, so it would be good to understand what the pillars of great community marketing are.

  • Strong, meaningful, trusted content from experts.
  • Create opportunities for participation. This means events, but also learning and opportunities to contribute.
  • A shared purpose, as opposed to simply being built around a brand. In other words, a common goal shared by the brand and its customers.
  • It must be at the core of what the company does – not an add on, or only a marketing initiative. It is a long-term play.

DR: It feels like community marketing is very much an online phenomenon, but is that true? Does it just look that way because everything has been online in this last year? And can community marketing extend into in-person events and physical meetups?

CT: Covid-19 has increased the need for online solutions, but community marketing existed pre-pandemic and will continue long after.

In-person events and physical meet ups will always matter – you can’t replicate that in an online setting, and you shouldn’t try to. You’re competing with the likes of Netflix and YouTube, after all. But community extends that engagement to be year-round and gives a flexibility and seamlessness to those experiences.

DR: If someone is listening and thinking seriously about starting a community in a given B2B space, where should they start? What factors do they have to look at and consider before going any further?

CT: We find there’s a real tendency to focus on features, which is great. Obviously, I think features are super important, but, to your earlier point, don’t overthink it!

You don’t have to have a huge amount of market research and the perfect strategy. Start small and gather your thought leaders, your advocates and get them going right away. Ask them to start contributing content and get your external people excited. A lot of great brands have their own subject matter experts in there, so get them in there and then you can really start to take risks and own it from there.

I think anytime we see a client that is a little bit hesitant about launch and their strategy, they want to have the perfect features, the perfect solution and the perfect strategy. The best clients just get in there, so start testing it because it is a long-term play. So, get out there and adjust. It doesn’t have to be exactly perfect at launch. It’s a community so it needs time to grow organically.

DR: There are many community platforms on the market now. Where should marketers start when they are looking for a provider? What are the three questions they should be asking?

  1. Don’t fall into the feature comparison trap. What is the ethos of the platform? Does that match with your objectives?
  2. Are they able to guide you to creating an active community? Are they community experts?
  3. Four words to consider: total cost of ownership. There can be sneaky hidden costs, such as onboarding, support hours, etc. Always ask this question!

DR: At the heart of any community is engagement. After all, if you have 30 people in a room, it’s not much of a community if no one is saying anything. Even when people have insight to share and problems to get off their chest, getting people to engage isn’t always easy. Quite often, people are quite happy to lurk in the background without directly contributing themselves. Is this a problem you see frequently, and how can this issue be overcome? Can engagement be incentivised, for instance?

  • It’s important to have plan for welcoming new members during community launch: explainers, content already in place, FAQs.
  • You may need to start a lot of the early conversations by putting questions to customers until they become confident starting conversations themselves.
  • Focus on a smaller group at first. Get your most loyal customers engaged and participating in the community, and then open it up to a bigger audience later. This works really well for lots of our customers.
  • Leverage feedback as much as possible both before and after community launch. Shape it around customer needs.

DR: Community marketing still feels new and exciting. What can we expect to see in terms of B2B community marketing over the next five years? Is it going to be a slow grower, or can we expect to see its use skyrocket?

CT: Social media is in decline. Niche communities are growing in popularity. We can expect to see further growth in community marketing as brands seek to gain easier access to customers and move away from spending money on social media ads.

In addition, customers are increasingly demanding to feel more invested in the brands they use – this has been a trend for the past five to six years and is set to continue, making community marketing necessary in order to build stronger relationships

Social media users still projected to grow over coming years. However, decline in trust and fatigue from too many ads means people less likely to use social media to connect with brands, creating a gap for niche brand communities.

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