📂 Community connects customers with each other

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Today's newsletter is proudly supported by Sales.co 🎉

Sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin. And there's no better way to generate results tomorrow than through email outreach. I couldn't be more excited to partner with Sales.co to help more startups do cold email well. They handle everything from idea generation to a/b testing. All you have to do is show up for the sales call. Founded by two software engineers, their approach is data-driven and scalable, and they only care about bringing you qualified leads. Make sure to mention "Corey" or "Swipe Files."

Check out Sales.co →

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📖 The following is an excerpt from my work-in-progress book, Founding Marketing. It's a (very) rough draft of thoughts, notes, and research... so feel free to reply with your feedback on what I should expand more on and what needs to be clarified. Enjoy!

Community marketing is absolutely the hardest to master, yet one of the most rewarding strategies for SaaS companies.

Essentially, community marketing is creating brand awareness through managing or participating in an online community. The most popular forms of online communities are Slack groups, Facebook groups, dedicated website forums, and Reddit.

Again, this is where customer research comes in because if you already know where your prospective customers hang out online, you already have a list of places you can do community marketing.

Creating your own community is obviously the most challenging type of community marketing, because there is a fine line you have to walk between promotion and facilitation. You will immediately lose the trust of your members and discourage any more growth if you pitch your community members. It all must be indirect.

The main advantage that community marketing gives you is the ability to own your audience, direct the conversation, and have direct contact with potential customers in an open environment.

One of the other great advantages of community marketing is that members will often ask for recommendations for new products or services, in which case you can make your pitch or hope that someone else in the community recommends your product.

Slack groups are also a great way to connect with potential customers. Slack groups could be either free or paid, and are often pretty exclusive.

Slack, Circle, and Discord are a great way to create your own communities.

Some of the keys to great community marketing are:

Participate:

Comment on posts, ask questions, and voice your opinions.

Contribute:

Share links to articles, events, or helpful content. Share your own content and always give helpful advice.

Curate:

Pull in useful content from other blogs or publications. You could share a “blog post of the day” or pull a company from a database to talk about every week.

Be accessible:

Make sure that your email is on your profile page, be responsive to messages, and don’t ignore people when they’re trying to get ahold of you.

Involve influencers:

Influencers can attract new users, help retain current users, and create buzz around the community. Influencers generally make communities more “sticky” and offer great content.

Consistency:

Set aside time every day. If you’re planning on sharing something on a regular basis, don’t let it fall off your radar. Going MIA from your community for a while can seriously hurt it — even if it’s just you going on vacation. Make sure you’re giving others responsibility and having people consistently contribute and participate.

—Corey

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