The Anonymous Marketer is supported by:
Episode Summary
What is a community? Some will consider the people interacting over social networks, like LinkedIn, to be a community.
But from the perspective of a B2B marketer at a SaaS company, a community is so much more than that.
In this episode of The Anonymous Marketer, our host Nick Bennett welcomes Katie Ray, the head of Community at Metadata. Katie explains what a community is and how you can build a community around a company. Katie and Nick discuss the importance of having a strategy and shared identity in the community and how you can measure if a community is working or not.
Guest Profile
- Name: Katie Ray
- What she does: Katie is the head of Community at Metadata.
- Company: Metadata
- Noteworthy: Katie has had a pretty fun career, learning about communities, sales, marketing, and business. She has been fortunate enough to work closely with marketing to create strategic campaigns and produce content that attracts customers at the right time, and since July 2022, Katie has been the head of Community at Metadata. In her free time, Katie is working on her MBA.
Key Insights
- There must be a shared identity in the community. Building a community around your SaaS can help you not only convert prospects into users but also engage existing ones. And lately, many companies are starting to build a community. Katie explains what a community is from the perspective of a B2B marketer at a SaaS company and points out that it is a group of people with some sort of shared identity. "It's people working towards something. It's some level of action — and this is a big differentiator — whereas an audience is just consuming. There's really no further action from that, whereas, in a community, they're not just consuming, but also they're engaging, and they're responding, and they're sharing, and they're having deeper conversations. So I think that's so important for you to figure out as you're starting out — understanding what you want your community to look like."
- In building a community, you have to start with a strategy. So many companies have tried to build a community but failed. This is because they went into it lightly, thinking it was a simple process. According to Katie, having a strategy is really important for building a community. "Community is so unique, where you have to have executive buy-in before you get started. You're working with people, and people change. People ebb and flow. They come into your community. They come out of your community. They need to know that you're going to be there no matter what step of life you're in. So your strategy has to match with that."
- How can you measure if a community is working? A community can be a key part of a marketing strategy if it works properly. That's why it's important that when you start a community initiative, you measure whether it's working or not. According to Katie, there are a lot of things you should be tracking, and it depends on the type of community you have. She describes what should guide you when it comes to a customer community. "These are really important: is your customer community helping to reduce churn? Is your customer community helping to increase renewal opportunities? Is your customer community taking high-risk accounts and converting them into raving fans or great customers, whatever your terminology is? So get that together, and then, two, if you have support actions in the community, is it reducing tickets? Is it reducing ticket times? Is it getting results faster?"
Episode Highlights
Communities in Different Companies
“For us at Metadata, and in my time at Sales Hacker and Clari, it was always a group of people that wanted to do something different. So, at Sales Hacker, it was a group of sellers that were tired of how we used to do sales and wanted to move into a new era of how we did sales. No more little black books on the golf course but a more team environment. And then, the same thing at Clari. It was a customer community, so the shared identity that they had was they were all customers, and they were all wanting to figure out how to use the platform better. And then, at Metadata, it’s all demand gen marketers who are wanting to get better at what they do. And so for them, every aspect of what we build in the community is built by the community, in the sense of it’s all going towards that one goal.”
Community Building at Metadata
“I had to figure out what I wanted that to look like. And luckily, I had consulted, and I built some from the ground up in smaller communities, so I felt comfortable with that. And there are amazing communities for community managers with so much support, and many tools and methods, and everything that you need — but going in starting with strategy. […]
When we started our strategy, I came in thinking, ‘I’m going to ride it all out. I’m going to build this all out.’ And I started doing that, and the more and more I met with these folks and the more people I talked with — and I come from sales, so I never really spent time with marketers — I just thought they were like weird kombucha people, so I had to change that perspective. And I’m so glad I did, but I learned that my strategy had to be quite flexible and had to shift and change as things were changing as well.”
The Importance of Internal Support in Building a Community
“This is wildly important because what’ll happen is you’ll get in, and everyone’s going to be excited, and everyone’s going to say, ‘Oh, we love the community.’ You’re going through the interviews. They’re so excited. They think it’s so important. You start asking what communities your peers are in and what they like about it, you get all this feedback, and then you finally ask for help, and no one else is going to help you because they have other KPIs that they’re reporting to. And so, while they’re excited about it, they’re not your team, and so they’re not going to help you. So, you have to figure out what is the actual plan for resources from the executive leadership team and from a budget standpoint because they’re going to expect crazy things from you. They’re going to expect you to grow to 10,000 members. And it’s one person. And if you’re anything like me —- you send welcome messages, you send follow-up messages, you have a tracker of everything, you comment on every single post sent in the community —- it’s a lot of work, and so you have to figure out, ‘Do the expectations that they have align to the resources that they’re willing to provide?’”
