Building a community is the new “Growth Hack”

Our presentation yesterday to the University of Oregon Sports Management Program went extremely well! I wanted to share a little bit of information about what we presented on.

The diagram below illustrates our belief that over the next decade companies won't be able to communicate with consumers like they do today. It's no secret that consumers have a growing distrust of any and all forms of traditional advertising/marketing. 

Brands are going to have to either a) build a community themselves (recommended option) or b) partner or pay external communities to reach new consumers. What influencers mean to the marketing landscape today, communities will mean to marketing landscape tomorrow. To elaborate, there's been an influx of capital, time, resources, etc being invested into working with influencers over the past few years. We believe that same movement is going to happen with communities. Communities that are built and nurtured today, will be the ones that have the best chance at succeeding tomorrow.

On another note, we noticed a trend that Community = Capital. From our research, we noticed a trend that outside capital was being poured into businesses that developed a strong community. It makes sense. Communities that build trust, have very loyal community members which ultimately make it easier to convert those community members into consumers.

Here are a few platforms we recommend using to build, foster, and grow your community.

Strategies & tools to build and grow a community:

• Powerful Mission
• Email Newsletter
• Utilize Social Platforms: Facebook Groups, Instagram, Slack
• Ambassador Program
• Shareable & Viral Content
• Community Sourced Stories
• Sweepstakes & Giveaways

Here are some stats we found on communities that show how important it is:

• 86% of Fortune 500 companies report that communities provide insight into customer needs
• 80% of marketers indicate that building brand communities has increased traffic
• 66% of companies say they turn to brand communities for product development
• 53% of Americans who are part of a social brand community are more loyal to the brand

If you have any questions, please let me know. We are working on adjusting the presentation and removing some proprietary information on our brands, so I am hopeful I can share it here in the future.

Thanks,

Chase