Building a Community as a Marketing Team of One

Challenges

Building a community is challenging for anyone, but it is particularly challenging if you are a Marketing Team of One:

• Time-consuming, when you already maxed out
• Hard to show ROI, when everything you do depends on results

The Basics of Community Building

First, before getting into specific tips for these Marketing Team of One challenges, here is a review of the basics on community building:

• Identify the passion that the community is built around
• Determine membership structure such as paid or free, public or private
• Create the community guidelines
• Pick a platform that is easy to use and can support your membership structure
• Engage with the community by welcoming newcomers, creating content, posing questions, and participating in discussions.
• Promote your community to keep vibrant growth

Managing Your Time for Community Building

Building a community is time consuming. It rarely gets to the point of "set it and forget it." If you are a Marketing Team of One, you are already stretched thin. Here are some ways to be most time-efficient:

• Recruit internal community co-managers. Share the workload with others in the company. Look to sales, product, or the leadership team to contribute.
• Enlist your top contributors. Most communities have 10% of the members contributing 90% of the engagement. Enlist your top contributors to help you.
• Automate evergreen postings. You can set up scheduling to post new topics and keep the content fresh.
• Automate celebration milestones. Celebrate your members' anniversaries, birthdays, or engagement milestones automatically.
• Automate newsletter email. Auto-create an email newsletter of the top and newest posts to keep members engaged.
• Set up alerts. If there is a topic that is getting a lot of engagement, set up an alert so you can check in on what's happening.
• Block time out for community. Set aside some time each day that is blocked out on your calendar to check in on the community.

Showing ROI

The best way to show that a marketing activity has value is to point to a positive ROI. Community building does not always have a straight path to revenue, so this is a challenge. One approach is to show the differences in metrics between customers who are community members and non-members. For example, comparing the lifetime value of a member vs. non-member will show you the lift the community provides. Some metrics to show lift:

• Lifetime value
• Average order value
• Cost of customer acquisition
• Churn rate
• Referrals
• Free trial conversions
• Reduction in costs of support resources

Deciding on Community Building

It's an exciting endeavor to build a community. You will create a place where real people form real connections. Good luck!