Community Marketing. Is this the biggest opportunity to drive your sales in 2023?

Community marketing is something that I have always been a fan of, but in 2023 the conversations and trends I am seeing means (I personally think) this will be the most impactful marketing strategy any business can focus on to achieve sales success this year and beyond.

Why? Well, first of all, it is the most human approach you can take to engaging your prospects, and in a world becoming ever more technical, a marketing strategy that focuses on building relationships with your customers and potential customers, is, in my opinion, THE way to go to get real engagement, data and scale to your marketing and sales strategies.

Of course, there are two key approaches you can take here, by either developing your own community or joining others. However, before I talk more about this, let me share some of the benefits that will help you realise why including Community Marketing in your plans is a must, and why those that do it will gain competitive advantage in their sales and marketing strategies:

• Increased brand loyalty. By building relationships with your prospects, you create a sense of community and loyalty that is hard to do via other marketing tactics. This then easily leads to repeat business and positive word-of-mouth marketing from your community.
• Better customer insights. By interacting with prospects in a community you gain valuable insights into your prospect's needs, challenges and preferences. These invaluable insights enable you to understand more about what your prospects needs and enables you to create more targeted marketing content and campaigns. In fact for me taking this approach has also helped me better shape our services, products and business strategy!
• It's cost-effective. Community marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to reach customers as there are amazing communities you can join for free on platforms like LinkedIn and Guild. And even when building your own, it often relies on word-of-mouth, email and social media marketing, which can be far less expensive than other marketing strategies.
• Increased trust and credibility. By engaging with customers in a community setting, you can much more easily build trust and credibility with your prospects meaning sales opportunities not just increase, but they are also easier to convert as you are already known and trusted.
• Builds brand awareness and reputation. This really builds on the above, but getting involved with or building a community of loyal prospects you will naturally improve the reputation and awareness of your business and personal brand.
• You create a sense of belonging. Building a community can create a sense of belonging for prospects. People like to be part of something, and they enjoy feeling like they're part of a group of like-minded individuals that they can learn from.
• You are providing a platform for user-generated content. This is especially relevant when you create your own community as of course you are providing a platform for customers to create and share content, which can you can then potentially use in your own marketing and is a great stamp of approval! That being said, you can also get content from communities you participate in. In fact thank you BIMA (https://bima.co.uk/) for the lovely header image from a community event I attended with them last week.
• You will generate more high-quality leads. I mean all of the above feeds in to this. However, to say it again! Building, or being part of industry-relevant communities will 100% generate more leads for your business as you are creating and engaging with an active group of people who are interested in what you have to say and how you can help them.

This is 100% going to be a focus for me and Street Agency (https://street.agency) this year. Having spoken to some of the best marketing leaders and businesses on my Podcast about their strategies for 2023, this is a tactic that comes up again and again. It is not going away and businesses that adopt it early will gain a competitive advantage. I know it is one of the main strategies for marketing giants Hubspot for this year and my good friends at Guild have some great content on this if you want to dive even deeper into this strategy. So, here is some extra reading if you are interested in learning more so you can define your approach to Community Marketing:

• Guild is a Community Platform itself and enables you to join groups as well as creating your own community. I love this article on Community Based Marketing (CMB) I love that they have coined this phrase! I think they have also created the term CQL's (Community Qualified Leads) a bit like MQL's and SQL's - Marketing and Sales Qualified leads.
• Of course, Hubspot have their own AMAZING marketing community that you can check out here. And in addition to this another really interesting blog article that may further help you realise the marketing potential in communities.

So, I hope I have given you some food for thought on how you can create, get involved and use community marketing in your plans for 2023. As a sign-off, I am going to post a few links to some of my favourite Agency & Marketing communities that you can join:

BIMA - The voice of digital and tech across the UK.

Pimento - A network of Independent Agencies.

Agency Hackers - A community for agency leaders and their teams.

The Agency Collective - Peer support to help agencies with their growth.