For the next post in our expert series, I am thrilled to feature Mary Findley, a community builder with over 10 years experience.
In this post, Mary shares her tips and best practices for effectively involving your community in marketing campaigns. Read on to learn how leveraging your community can compound the impact of your marketing campaigns as well as trends she is seeing as it relates to community building and engagement.
Whether you're gearing up for a major event like Black Friday or simply looking to deepen your brand's connection with your audience, Mary provides actionable tips to help you harness the power of your community.
Tell us a little bit about yourself! How did you start working in community management?
I’ve had the opportunity to work with communities of all sizes, audiences, and goals, from creatives like designers, photographers, and illustrators to vintage and secondhand resellers to traditional brick and mortar owners aiming to transition their businesses online.
Like many people, my career has not been linear! I started working in elementary education and when I set out to transition into something new, I had the opportunity to work with an online learning community called Skillshare, combining my experience in education with my interest in building online communities. While my first role in Community was very entry level, working at a fast growing startup gave me the opportunity to take on a lot of projects, try new things, and get feedback quickly. Since then, I've built a career centered on engaging and scaling online communities across fields like creative, education, e-commerce, and SASS product advocacy.
In your experience, what are some of the benefits to involving your community in marketing campaigns?
Authenticity: By highlighting and heroing community members in your marketing campaigns, you allow your most passionate customers or users to represent your brand. Their advocacy provides more opportunities for storytelling, showcasing unique perspectives, and can help your campaign stand out among all of the other sales and promotion noise. It helps your brand “show and not tell” the value of their products or services.
Builds Customer Trust: Featuring your community in campaigns signals to your wider community or customer base that you value them and their perspective.
Support and Generate Network Effects: Regardless of your current growth stage, every business can benefit from strategies that generate network effects, which is when a product or service gains more value as more people use it. By incorporating community members, you allow them to broadcast your brand’s value to their own community or network, which helps drive organic, low-cost, and long-term growth.
What are some best practices for involving your company's community in campaigns?
Start early and do your research:
Spotlighting or incorporating your community into campaigns takes additional lead time and coordination, so don’t be afraid to start planning even further in advance than normal. If you’re reading this in summer, it’s not too late to get started on your Black Friday campaign for example.
Talk to your members of your community or customers to get a pulse on what they are most excited about, what are they seeing gain traction or perform well for their own channels, like short-form video content, personalized storytelling emails, etc. Lean into promotional tactics that are already working well for them and buy-in from them will be even easier.
Dig into the data:
Not sure what to focus on or who to feature in your company? Dig into your historical campaign data and current or seasonal trends. Then when spotlighting community members, you can narrow your focus to those who fit the brief and use data to back up the projected success of the campaign to them, which creates more buy-in.
Any lessons learned that you can share? Times or examples of companies that do an especially effective job of involving their community?
Here are a couple great examples of incorporating community i’ve seen recently:
Geneva: A platform for community and creator spaces that was recently acquired by Bumble puts their community at the heart of all of their campaigns and content. Here’s a fun and approachable round-up of communities on their platform.
How can marketing and community teams best work together? What tips would you give a marketer looking to get their community involved in their next campaign?
Proactive and Early Communication: Even in the early stages of planning, host a kick off call or brainstorm with key stakeholders, including the Community Team, so they are looped into your vision from the jump. They bring a wealth of knowledge of members or customers that would be a good fit or help you achieve your campaign goals, so listen to their ideas and keep them posted on how the campaign takes shape.
Any trends you’re seeing as it relates to community/community management that you think are relevant to marketing teams?
Smaller, more niche communities, often coined as ‘digital campfires’, are becoming more popular among Gen Z and younger audiences. Consider how you might craft compelling comms or mini campaigns that target specific segments of your audience.
Targeted ads are so prevalent that everyone is constantly being sold to at all times of the year. Sharing the value of your brand, product, or service through a community lens can help you stand out among the salesy climate.
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us, Mary!
To follow along with all campaign planning tips be sure to bookmark this page which will be regularly updated with campaign planning tips from industry experts.
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👋 I’m Anat Yaniv, founder of TAG Marketing
👥A collective of B2C experts, handling 360° marketing efforts
🪴For growing Ecommerce brands who are not ready to hire a full in-house team
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