In Superside's Momentum Summit, Jasper's VP of Marketing started her presentation on community-led marketing by pointing to the question everyone's been asking:
Is community-led growth the next product-led growth?
Product-led growth is probably not going anywhere, but community-led growth is grabbing more attention by the day.
But why are we seeing a growing interest in community based marketing all of a sudden?
I think it's part of the natural evolution of the brand-user relationship.
Brands are looking to understand and serve their users even better in an increasingly competitive market. Smart digital tools make it possible to get more insight into users and to interact with them in a more meaningful way. Brands are also looking to build more trust through their communication strategy and what better way to do this than leveraging the power of super fans who help distribute the message?
On the other hand, users seek for more than a transactional relationship with brands. They are losing trust in traditional marketing tactics such as advertisements and making more informed decisions using the variety of tools and information available to them. They look into communities and reviews as a basis of trust. Additionally, they seem to want increased support from brands, platforms to share experiences (of the products/services), a sense of belonging and a shared culture with other users of the brand.
Win-win.
First... what is community?
A group of people sharing a common characteristic or interest.
(Communities can exist and gather virtually or IRL.)
And what is community-based marketing?
In my simplest words...
Community-based marketing is a marketing strategy that facilitates an exchange of culture and experiences for a group of people who share a common interest.
This helps to build a deeper and stronger relationship between brands and users.
Now putting theory aside, why do I care about community-based marketing?
Until I fell down the web3 rabbit whole in 2021, I had no idea about community-based marketing.
I knew communities existed, but that's about it.
One of the biggest things I was mesmerized about web3 was the potential of the blockchain and the decentralization movement, but second was how marketing was changing. Web3 marketing was fully centred around communities and brands had (close to) zero power if they didn't have communities before products.
I spent months studying communities and talked to anyone I could get a hold of who was in the space before me and was running their own community of multiple thousands of people. You can watch or listen to some of those conversations and my observations here.
Then I joined a 4,000+ member community as the marketing leader and had to figure it out.
In September 2021, I joined Ninja Squad - a web3 brand with a 8,888 piece genesis NFT collection - as the Head of Marketing and Operations and led everything brand, communications and project management for nearly a year.
This was the official start of my journey into community-first marketing.
The following months was spent exploring for countless hours and experimenting with different tactics to grow and strengthen our community. Eventually, we were able to build and sustain one of the strongest trading communities with a much longer than average holder retention rate of 6-9 months.
Side note: I got so obsessed about community-based marketing and community feedback that I built a review platform for web3 to give community members a louder voice. Check it out here.
Since the day I stepped into web3, I dreamt of having a source to do my research and reading community's opinions.
Even though this is far from the goal, it's a huge milestone that gets us all a step closer to smarter and more informed actions. 🌠 https://t.co/MDSakYOFj7— Elif Hiz (@elifozgecanhiz) September 15, 2022
There are two key things that set the ground for a community:
People need to know each other
There needs to be ongoing shared utility
After this was settled for me, I started to research and think about what we could do for our community and the type of culture we wanted to have.
And I'm proud to say that we had one of the most dynamic and strongest communities in web3 and specifically the trading niche.