Building a community can be an important customer channel for businesses. It fosters connections, builds loyalty, and extends brand awareness to your ideal customers.
And it’s also a good way to build your personal brand, says Justin Levy, former Head of Influencer Marketing and Community at Demandbase.
Yet there isn’t one “perfect” online tool to host a community.
In this clip from B2B Forum 2023, Justin discusses the pros and cons of common community platforms, including Slack and Discord.
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We’re not going to talk about BuildAR, important customer and partner communities that might be on an Influitive platform, or Discourse, which is more forum boards.
They’re important customer communities.
Probably every company here does have a customer community.
But what we’re going to talk about is the platforms such as Slack, Discord, Mighty Networks, Circle. There’s a bunch of other ones, Slack probably being the most popular overall.
Now, the why: it’s a way to engage your brand’s ICP.
So whether that’s a niche target, or it’s something broader like B2B marketing or B2B sales, it extends your brand’s thought leadership. It helps to build brand awareness.
But it’s also good for your personal brand, right? If you’re engaged in these communities, you’re helping to build your personal brand almost on the back of your company.
Now, in 2019, Global Web Index and Reddit did a study on the rise of online communities—private communities, whatever you want to call them—and found that 66% of respondents said that belonging to a community helps them connect with others who have relevant interests, right?
We’re not talking about a big community with a hundred thousand people that just might like sports.
No, we’re talking about something niche.
Let’s say B2B. Okay, now let’s go one level down. Maybe you’re in MarketingOps, so you might be in a community such as MO Pros.
So a couple examples and then we’ll start to really tick down how you would do this.
On the left, that’s Revenue Circle. That’s the community that I lead on behalf of Demandbase. It’s free to join. Our ICP for that community is directors and above in sales or marketing roles.
So we’ve really taken time to drill in on who that is.
At first, we launched it and it was for CMOs and CROs, or “heads of.” And then we zoomed out a little bit more and went to VPs and above. And then, just recently, we expanded it to directors.
We’ll never go below that.
We’ve made that decision consciously because at the director level, you still influence pipeline and budget. You’re still a decision maker, so we always want it to be at that level. So we’ll never bring it down to say, senior manager or manager.
On the right hand side is another example of a brand-owned community.
So this is a community, the Demand community. It’s by metadata.io. Again, metadata is who’s behind it as a company. But the demand community is for B2B demand gen marketers.
So again, this kind of off-brand idea that’s powered by, or sponsored by, the actual company that the community manager works for.
Then you have some of these other communities.
These ones you might be more familiar with.
Pavilion is probably one of the most well-known communities.
Pavilion is an actual business. This isn’t a brand owned community.
Pavilion has a CEO, A founder. They have a head of growth, VP of marketing, the whole nine.
They focus on this broader ICP because they have all these channels. They have 3,000 or 4,000 members, I think. All are paying members.
So they have three levels: associate, executive, or CEO. I mean, I know at the executive level where I’m at, it’s $2300, $2400 a year.
So it’s not cheap to be part of it, but they look across customer success, marketing, rev ops, all those.
RevGenius is really focused on sales.
They do have other areas within the community for marketing or ops, but it’s really focused on those in B2B sales roles. They utilize sponsors, but it’s free. You can go to revgenius.com and get in.
And then MarketingOps, that’s MO Pros.
Now, they really got specific. They want people focused in ops roles: mops, sales ops, or rev ops. That’s it. And you have to fill out a form and they’ll let you in if you fit that kind of ICP.
Lastly, Peak is one example on Mighty Networks.
So we’ll take a look at what that is, but that’s paid. I believe it’s $99 a year right now. It might’ve gone up. Invite only. You have to be invited by a member of the community.
And then Exit Five is another paid community. This one exists on Circle.
So now the platform conversation.
Usually, platform, I would always argue, would be like the last thing you would pick, right?
If you’re going to talk about, “let’s stand up a new website,” great—what do we want to have on it? And you’d walk through all that and “okay, what platform’s going to fit that?”
You have to start the other way around with community, in my opinion, because it’s going to drive your cost, how you’re going to structure the community, things of that nature.
So, Slack, really easy. One of the most popular B2B communication apps. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people at the conference use it.
(Maybe a small percentage use Microsoft Teams or something like that.)
But a con of Slack, it’s not inherently built for community. It’s not why it was started.
So you have to kind of retrofit it to fit a community.
It’s free, but with certain limitations.
And when it comes to building a private community, it’s main limitation in my opinion, is that with everyone switching jobs the way that they are right now or kind of being off of where they are, the free version—and this seems minute, but it really isn’t—you can’t change someone’s email.
So say if you send me a message today and say, “hey, I was just laid off. Here’s my Gmail, can you switch Slack to my Gmail?”
I can’t. Because Slack doesn’t let me on the free version. (They do on the paid version.)
So I have to send you another invite and then deactivate your account.
Not the biggest of deals in the world. But it’s just an extra step, that they don’t allow you to [change account emails].
But if you want to move to the paid version, you’re paying for a bunch of stuff you don’t need if you’re managing a community.
Discord, a super well-known community platform right now. I think Mark just threw out a stat that earlier last year it was up to… 46% of people aged 22 to 34 or so, were on the platform.
The problem with it, and you saw Paul earlier today saying that he’s never been on Discord or never tried Midjourney because he doesn’t want to be on Discord.
It has a steep learning curve.
And so unless you want to take time as a community manager to figure it out, then you also have to take time to try to teach your community, unless they’re on there.
Also, The Tilt, which is Joe Pulizzi’s community, he’s actually in the process of moving it to another platform.
That’s probably the closest to a B2B example I can get on Discord. Most of them… are for gamers or things like that.
Published October 10, 2024
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