Community Is The #1 B2B Marketing Trend

Community is the most important trend to understand and try to harness for your business today.

Smart marketing teams (and the executives at those companies) understand the value of building an audience of their dream customers.

Community can come in different forms and channels. But for me it’s about building relationships through content with your dream customers — that has nothing to do with selling your product, but everything to do with helping them achieve their goals personally / professionally.

A few companies that I think are getting community right right now (yes I do all my own copywriting):

- Metadata is doing this with DEMAND (their event, their community)

- Goldcast is doing this with Event Marketers Live and their overall content - becoming the top resource for event marketers today

- Catalyst is doing this for customer success pros through social here on LinkedIn

- SparkToro is doing this through their blog/social/office hours and how they are helping marketers

One more example. I am biased. But the best community for B2B marketers right now is Exit Five 👋 and we are not a SaaS vendor. And that’s exactly one of the reasons why it’s thriving. There are no sales goals. There’s no pressure to justify the ROI of it. There’s not a nurture flow to try and create MQLS from it. It’s just me …

Things get messy when you start trying to figure how to budget for it, how to justify that budget, where it fits into the broader company goals.

*And there's no perfect answer for that btw. Usually it comes down to a shared belief. We (as a leadership team) want to become known for X in our industry. And we believe it will be valuable to us over time (long term) to build an audience of Y types of people. At Drift in the early days we were able to build community because David the CEO believed in it and wasn't questioning the short term ROI of it. Hey we should be doing this. Let's invest in it for the long term. And the proof was the messages we'd get every week via email, Twitter, and LinkedIn about our podcast Seeking Wisdom. Since he had the belief, it was easy for us as marketers to execute on it. There was no BS. No justification of "why are we posting on LinkedIn' type nonsense...

Speaking of LinkedIn ... Listen To This

A few weeks ago Daniel Murray (founder of the Marketing Millennials) and I did a live session all about LinkedIn and helping you develop an organic content strategy (fancy terms for "figuring out what the heck to post about"

Search for the episode "Exit Five Podcast" wherever you get your podcasts. Here's the link on Spotify if you're itching to listen right now.

Hiring Marketers? Looking For A New Job?

Reach thousands of B2B marketers every month through the Exit Five job board.

It's 100% free for any company to post a B2B marketing role, plus you can promote jobs to reach more people over 30 days.

There are currently 44 open roles and the job board and I get emails like this a few times a month.

I also added a new option that will allow you to get your job promoted in this newsletter here and on the Exit Five podcast.

Here's where you can post a job on the Exit Five job board.

Event: Build A Media Company vs. Marketing

What does "build a media company" actually mean?

Hire a bunch of video people? A photographer? Have a website? Write content? Spend big budgets on production?

That could be one definition, and you're welcome to disagree. But in my experience, I think about it like this (btw, I didn't have the foresight to see this - it is simply revisionist history; it's what we did, and looking back I now see how it can be compared to this media company idea).

Anyway --> Here's what I mean when I talk about building a media company not a marketing team...

Build an audience of your dream customers not by not thinking like a *marketing team* but by thinking like a *media company*
 
If you're in B2B and your ideal customer is in sales, finance, HR, marketing, ops, recruiting, legal -- how can you become the number one resource and trusted advisor to them? How can you help them do a better job, reduce stress, save time, make life easier, help their company grow faster, get promoted, etc.
 
If you didn't work at a company that had internal goals and metrics to hit but you had to build an audience of your ideal customers in that niche, what would you do?
 
You'd focus on content that is educational + entertaining with the goal of getting those people to your website, on your email list, following you on social media, listening to your podcast.
 
That's what I mean when I use this line about "don't build a marketing team build a media company for your niche."

If you're interested in this topic, I'm teaming up with my friends at Goldcast to do a session on August 30th --> click here to register and get access to this content when it's available.

PS. Still reading? reply back and say hey.. it's always nice to get a few replies from readers.