[Part 2] A founder’s guide to community marketing: 10 lessons from 15 years in Silicon Valley
If you’re new here, hello! I’m Melissa, a former founder of a community-as-a-product (at Lean Startup Co.), an investor at The Community Fund and ANGELS.vc, and a startup marketing leader at Stripe. I’m distilling a few community marketing lessons I’ve learned over the last 15 years in this post.
Last week, I started writing the founder’s guide to community marketing. What was meant to be a meaty blog post turned into a 3,000-word behemoth, so I decided to turn it into a 2-part guide.
In my first post, I covered Part 1: Building your strategy | Read it here now.
Community marketing is a comprehensive marketing approach that drives business outcomes.
Community marketing keeps your CAC low and increases brand love.
Your community’s “why” is what will keep them coming back.
Share your operating principles or code of conduct early on.
Focus on the format and forum that work best for your members.
In this post, we’ll dig into Part 2: Executing the plan
Events are the default way to build community – learn the basics of doing them well.
It’s easy to get a community started; it’s harder to keep the engine running.
“Passing the baton” to your members is essential to building an enduring community.
Communities will ebb and flow, and can evolve into something unexpected. Embrace it.
Get a community marketing MVP out today! Start testing and learn what works for your users.
Now that you’re caught up, let’s get started.
Part 2: Executing the plan
#6: Events are the default way to build community – learn the basics of doing them well.
Hosting events is a tactic for driving community marketing outcomes. It’s a means to the end-goal – not the goal in itself. I repeat: the event is simply a means to the end-goal. This is what makes a community marketing event different from hospitality events or the weekend gatherings you would host with friends or family. There’s clearly no business objectives for the latter – you do them just for fun.
Learn the basic principles for doing events well:
Start with your user in mind. Ask yourself: Who are they? What do they care about? What keeps them up at night? How can you solve their problems?
Design the program based on shared interests and learning outcomes. Now that you’re an expert on their pain points, what will the attendees learn at your event? Why should they join your community, and why now?
Run the program and delight them.
To double down on points #1 and #2 above, I believe the primary reasons why people attend events are (1) for the network, and (2) for what they can learn. If you get these two things right, you can hit a home run without investing too many resources on the logistics.
Curate a group of attendees with relevance to one another and have shared interests. You can crowdsource topics and questions in your registration forms and by doing user interviews beforehand.
Source great speakers you can find on the topics of interest. Keyword here is “great”. Make sure your speakers are good presenters, and have some credible experience on the topic. Google videos of them on YouTube, and provide speaker training if needed.
Manage your attendees’ energy by mixing up activities and how they engage with each other onsite.
It’s hard for folks to quietly sit through 2-hours of content without a break. A standard practice is for content to be no more than 90 mins for IRL events, and 30 minutes for online events.
The best online events I’ve been to are when the organizers are able to mix up the program with: shorter bursts of “keynotes” or plenary content, interactive Zoom breakout rooms where attendees can chat with one another, and other forms of activities like a group brainstorm, solo writing, or silent reflection.
Decide on the right call-to-action and have a good follow-up plan.
Towards the end of the event is when your attendees are most excited about your product and services. It’s a great time to have a call-to-action to learn more and schedule a follow-up call with your Sales team.
Not having a proper follow-up plan is a waste of your team’s resources, in money and time. Try to avoid the costly mistakes I’ve made, and start thinking about your follow-up plan ahead of time.
#7: It’s easy to get a community started; it’s harder to keep the engine running.
If there are “zombie startups” or “default dead startups” as Paul Graham famously coined, there are zombie communities as well. These are often Slack channels that have hundreds or even thousands of people, but there are crickets. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve started or led a handful of these myself. Even worse, sometimes there’s too much engagement, with members @channel-ing on Slack frequently for non-critical announcements.
In the early days, the community leaders need to drive the conversations and commit to showing up. Hire a community manager if you must, but people will come for the leader and it’s essential that they’re there for the first year or two, until you’re able to pass the baton to future community leaders.
I would encourage giving early community members a “founding member” title to make the group feel more exclusive, keep the quality bar high, and have members feel invested in growing the community.
#8: “Passing the baton” to your members is essential to building an enduring community.
A community provides a forum for members to engage with one another. Start getting your users to connect with each other through your marketing channels, whether that’s at events, on Discord, or your Circle group. Once this motion is in place, you’ll start to notice members who are extremely active and will go above and beyond to engage with other members. These are your future community leaders, and you can harness their energies to grow the community on your behalf.
At All Raise, we had chapters in a few cities such as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles where founders and investors volunteered their time to host events and be a resource for local community members. The full-time employees, or the “HQ team” as we called it back then, were only a dozen people. It would not have been possible to grow the brand and continue the community engagement from coast to coast without our volunteer chapter leaders.
I’ve found that most startup communities will have a lifespan of about 5-7 years. Your community will eventually run its course, and a new community with provoking ideas will spring up. You can turn your community into a movement for the next generation by empowering members to lead and pass the baton to them.
#9: Communities have an ebb and flow, and can evolve into something unexpected. Embrace it.
Sometimes that evolution of your community will be even better than what you imagined it could be. Roll with it! I started a conference for women, allies, and non-binary founders and funders, aptly named “Founders + Funders” back in 2019. My partners and I did 3 iterations of the event over 1.5 years, which unexpectedly gave birth to a more-focused, tight-knit community of female angel investors which became ANGELS.vc.
#10: Get an MVP out today, and start testing what works for your users.
Inaction is one of the worst things a founder can do – don’t get analysis paralysis and overthink it too much! If you’re a seed startup or earlier, trust me, no one is watching, and there’s no right or wrong way to do this. It’s better to try a few things and run low-stakes experiments to kickstart your community marketing efforts than to do nothing at all. Go run a few, light-weight events, measure how well they perform (e.g., registration vs attendees, and CSAT/NPS), then double down on what works.
Community marketing has been the thread that ties my 15-year long career in the tech industry, despite the different roles I’ve had the opportunity to play, and something that I practice and think about daily.
Traditional marketing has been upended with the rise of modern marketing tools, platforms, and techniques, like promotional text messages (via Twilio), TikTok, and influencer marketing. Iconic companies adapt to the market, go where their users are, and invest for the long term. After reading this post, I hope community marketing is another technique to add to your marketing strategy during end-of-year planning season.
Have these tips and lessons resonated with you? What else would you like to know about community marketing? Feel free to share your thoughts (or questions) in the comments below. I’d love to learn from you!
Special thanks to my community of marketers, founders, and friends who were early readers and gave feedback on this post: Sarah Bovagnet, Liam MacCormack, Paulette Jencks, Sruti Bharat, Ana Gonzalez, and Lou Moore.