Beyond Content Marketing: Strategic Referral Networks through Social Learning Communities to Drive Sales and Loyalty
Standing out in the modern era requires B2B brands to grow beyond just offering technical information through content marketing into brokers of communities with members who support each other through adaptive challenges
Content marketing, once vital for B2B brand growth, is now less cost effective due to oversaturation, rising costs, and consumer disengagement, as explored in Part 1 of this series on why B2B brands’ are transforming themselves from “expert educators” through content marketing to “community brokers” of social learning communities.?
Beyond reacting to the declining cost efficiency of traditional content marketing, brands are also beginning to place increased emphasis on the type of challenge that is most important to business leaders. The nuanced and complex issues business leaders face requires a more interactive, personalized, and collaborative approach1. What keeps business leaders up at night is not primarily technical problems but adaptive challenges.?
As first described by Ronald Heifetz at Harvard, adaptive challenges differ from technical problems because they can’t be solved solely by obtaining access to the right information or the appropriate expert. Adaptive challenges involve competing commitments, conflicting values, and the need to change multiple parts of a system at once. They may involve “legacies that need to evolve, people or organizations being pushed beyond capacity,” and “issues or processes that remain unclear or confused over time.”2 The root causes of the challenge are not yet known and cannot be fully analyzed ex ante.
For these reasons, adaptive challenges must be addressed through an iterative learning process involving cycles of organizational experimentation and reflection. When skillfully facilitated, social learning communities empower business leaders to support each other through such cycles over time. Testing different approaches and sharing results within a community allows for collaborative ideation, storytelling, and analysis, as well as the emergence of strong, innovative approaches.??
As the members derive value from new relationships and ideas catalyzed within the community, leaders representing the hosting brand can leverage their facilitation into social capital with them. As participants develop positive brand association with the host, the convening brand serves as a “community broker” or “broker brand.”
An example from Thriver's Circle, an online community I lead for customer and growth-focused founders and business leaders in tech, illustrates both the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges and how social learning communities can help with the later.?
One member is a founder who is building virtual reality (VR) solutions for customers, including local government agencies and healthcare systems. In the process, he was considering a business development partner’s requests for performance-based equity. He faced a number of technical problems related to this request, such as how to create contracts granting equity that will hold up in court, understanding the differences between common and preferred stock, and how to create a capitalization (cap) table easily grasped by potential venture investors.?
However, deciding whether, when, and how to use equity to incentivize and compensate others supporting the growth of the business is an adaptive challenge. It requires more inherently complex considerations, such as the effects of granting equity on the company’s relationships with existing and future partners and employees and how to balance the owner’s desire to maintain control with the additional motivation, accountability, and even credibility that shared ownership might encourage.?
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Responding to the VR founder’s adaptive challenge, others shared their own stories of negotiating relationships with partners. They advised the founder to consider his gut feeling on the situation but also to think more broadly about compensation in relation to his vision for the company. Members’ stories illustrated the implications of having people on his cap table who are not aligned with his vision long-term. For example, one CEO within the community is now more motivated for an early exit because a co-founder who departed from their operational role continues to have an ownership stake.
Regardless of the structure and amount of compensation the founder agreed to with this specific partner, decisions around how and when to grant equity will continue throughout the lifetime of this founder’s business. The consequences of such agreements, both for co-founder dynamics and on the culture of his larger team, will continue to play out as long as the respective parties remain in business together. By regularly participating in Thriver’s Circle, the founder is able to share what he decided, what happened next, and how his thinking about similar challenges is changing as a result. He also benefits from a rich view into how others within the community are making similar decisions and what they are yielding.?
As prospective customers participating in the social learning community associate value they realize with the host company, the broker brand’s investment can yield new sales funnel activity and revenue. For example, an AI company that hired the consultancy Bridgio to convene a certain type of people within the Brain Trust booked intro calls with 16% of 1121 members over a four-month period. From the intro calls, 15% completed a discovery call to learn more about the company’s offers. Seventy-four percent (74%) of the discovery calls resulted in sales-qualified leads. Also, as a result of providing value to targeted business leaders through Bridgio’s Brain Trust, a SaaS company in the HR space generated $1M in revenue within a year attributed to leads originating within the community. The community itself grew 21% YoY from 2023 to 2024.
Given these successes, leaders of B2B firms should consider organizing and hosting social learning communities as a component of their marketing strategy. When a group of people with diverse experiences yet similar or synergistic challenges gathers to support each other, the participants can accelerate their learning to an unparalleled extent. While content marketing is increasingly less cost effective and always limited to addressing technical challenges, social learning communities enable leaders to experiment with new approaches, share successes, and develop new best practices collaboratively, strongly positively exposing them to your brand.
B2B brands' success leveraging social learning communities to connect with, market to, sell to, and support clients hinges on their ability to provide a top-tier experience for participants. Part 3 will explore the core components of an effective social learning community, including member selection, conversational focus, complimentary content, and skilled facilitation.
Citations
Written in collaboration with Paul Jones in and Darren Cambridge, PMP, Ph.D. with inspiration from David Meltzer and John Ivie .