The Last Great Marketing Strategy? CMOs Weigh In on Community
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The Last Great Marketing Strategy? CMOs Weigh In on Community
Last month our CMO luncheon series was held in both Indy and Chicago with a deep dive on the exceptional book Belonging to the Brand Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy by Mark Schaefer
As always, the conversation with the executives was lively, covering not only our deep dive but other topics top of mind to our tech CMO community. As I love to do, sharing a few highlights from our conversation on Community Marketing and beyond:
Community Marketing
This was picked as a topic of interest because as experienced CMOs, we all understand the saturation with current marketing and the dwindling response rates to more mature channels – this includes our favorites like content marketing, email marketing, and even social.
As innovative marketers, we’re always staying on top of emerging channels that can play a larger role in engagement (and let’s be honest, engagement is ideal more so than clicks as this leads to not only an engaged and high quality pipeline but also a road to being customer advocates on behalf of the brand).
Enter community marketing.
We’ve all experienced community marketing in some form of fashion – whether trade shows, online help centers, reddit group – but it can also be a holistic and strategic channel engagement strategy. Why? Community builds on the notion of word of mouth, accelerating the ripple effect of brand advocacy. I mean, who doesn’t reach out to their trusted advisors to gain recommendations on vendors, hires, resources, best practices. This is taking that single trusted advisory interaction and expanding to full engaged experience. A top reason this is the right time for community marketing strategy is the millennials now entering leadership and decision-making roles embrace community, stemming from their roots as digital natives. As a group, they thrive on the importance of authenticity and vulnerability. This creates that organic engagement with customers brands crave.
With that backdrop, here are some takeaways with this innovative group of marketing executives. We discussed the value of “open” communities like Reddit and strategies to engage within these communities, as well as guardrails needed. As example, if a brand wishes to open a reddit channel specific to their products and solutions, there’s no way the brand will be able to police the channel so it stays consistently on brand messaging and is 100% positive to the brand. That’s where self-described ambassadors of the product come in – to monitor if comments are out of line, for example, and close threads that aren’t beneficial to the community as a whole.
We also talked about communities won’t thrive on their own without help. They need fuel to stay relevant, active, a place people want to go to because there’s a FOMO effect (fear of missing out). Getting there is all about creating emotional connections with your peers (hint: authenticity is powerful here!), creating connections with others with or without the brand support, and staying relevant in the conversation. The 1+1 =3 takeaway from this is your brand can organically grow WoM marketing almost on its own!
And last, we talked about the value of micro-communities. There is huge value in 1:1 connections with not only customers but also employee communities. Think personal and professional check-ins that builds connection and trust. This pay it forward strategy can be an outstanding motivator to your organizations.
Other topics top of mind
With this being an open forum for the executives, of course we turned our attention to a few other topics. Top of mind continues to be AI and the discussion quickly turned to how to thoughtfully integrate AI into existing work processes that won’t break or disrupt existing processes (and more to come here as we’ll tackle this in our next luncheon!)
And last, from a management perspective, we talked about ways to remain steady at the helm, reducing stress to hit deadlines as an executive in an unsteady environment – the macro financial environment, AI disruption (one said it’s like the industrial revolution all over), RTO mandates, tight budgets to name just a few.
Whew! Isn’t that a lot to cover? That’s the value of this CMO community, a place where CMOs and other tech leaders can come together and learn from each other, share their struggles, and find a path forward through the 1:1 peer connections.
