Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
Community playbook: How to build a community and grow your brand
Community is one of the most difficult marketing channels to get right, yet it can be one of the most powerful flywheels for a business and a brand. No wonder every CMO wants it!
I’ve been fortunate to have worked with some excellent community leaders over the years, and the only reason I feel even remotely qualified to talk about community is because of the lessons they have taught me. So I thought I’d pay it forward and share the (very) little I know about how to build awesome communities for your brand.
1 - What even is a community?
Surprise, surprise, people have all sorts of different ideas for what community actually means. If you’re wanting to build a community for your brand, make sure you align everyone with a definition. Here’s my favorite and most basic:
A community connects people to people.
By this definition, a community is NOT:
The comments of your social media posts
That group of customers you invited into your Slack
Your webinar attendees
Your CRM
All of these things could become aspects of your community strategy, but it won’t count as community until people are connecting with each other, not solely with you.
2 - Yeah, but is a Slack group a community?
This is usually what execs mean when they say “we should do community.” In short, no, a Slack group is not a community.
Slack is one type of digital community space, but simply opening up a Slack group and bringing people in does not create a community. Even bringing people into a Slack group and having a community manager post a bunch of fresh content doesn’t automatically mean you have a community, either. Most times, you will need a content plan and some initial grinding to get the community gears in motion, and then once people start posting on their own, engaging with one another, that’s when you can claim the title of community.
3 - The two different types of communities
For tech companies, you typically see two different types of communities:
Community of practice — this is for people to join together around a shared topic or interest
Community of product — this is for people to join together to learn about a specific product and get help, best practices
Lattice and CultureAmp have built amazing communities of practice for HR leaders who are there to learn how to be better at their jobs (and to vent, I’m sure!).
Notion and Figma have built amazing communities of product where people are getting tips and tricks to make the most out of the two products. (This can sometimes bleed into a community of practice when the topic turns to productivity (Notion) and design (Figma).)
The folks at Common Room wrote a great breakdown of the two community types:
4 - Don’t mention the g-word (“growth”)
I make this mistake all the time, including in the headline of this newsletter. But I’m at least aware of it every time I do! (progress)
Trying to fit community into a growth marketing channel is like trying to fit a pineapple into a pencil box. It’s never going to fit, and you’re going to destroy the pineapple in the process.
Of course, community can and does contribute to business success. But starting off with hard ROI goals for your community is going to starve it of the time and space and patience needed to build community right. It’s also just not the proper reason to do community in the first place. If you’re building a people-to-people experience that is at the core a cash grab, it’s not going to be a very nice people-to-people experience. The capitalism smell will come out eventually.
5 - But it’s okay to mention goals
Community is not an overt growth play, but it can — and should — have goals and outcomes. Here are the ones that I’ve been most successful implementing:
Engagement — Total comments or conversations, or you can calculate it as a rate
Weekly active users / Monthly active users
Sentiment
Referrals (a bit more growth-y and only works for more mature companies)
If you’re goaling on something like referrals, it’s easiest to have a signup survey as part of your product’s onboarding. Ask the question, “How did you hear about us?” Then “community” can be one of the options in the list.
6 - Where can community live?
Remember that community is a philosophy. Digital community spaces are where they live. (Told you I’m a stickler for definitions.)
Here are a few favorite spots where I’ve seen great digital communities lately:
Slack
Circle
Discord
Reddit
Facebook Groups (really!)
Content / course communities like Kajabi or Thinkific or Podia
7 - Expand your mind with these community ideas
When many of us think about community, we picture an online forum or messaging app. But there are many other ways that you can connect people to people and build community for your business. Here are a couple ways:
Help center community
Rather than hire a full customer support team to build out a knowledge base and answer questions from customers, some companies turn to their communities to be the ones offering support. Think of something like a Stack Overflow but on an owned channel of yours.
Events and meetups
Hosting events and meetups yourself is a great kickstarter for a future community play where the members are the ones conceiving of and running events on their own. Notion, Canva, and others do this by providing a budget and materials to event organizers, but otherwise the organizers handle all the rest. This makes the potential reach truly global!
Social media communities (#)
Social media can be a tricky space to build community (often, you’re just building engagement and amplification without getting people to talk to each other). But some companies have found the magic formula through community hashtags and topics, which allow anyone to post content that can be liked, followed, and seen by others in the community. #BookTok is an example, although it’s not tied to any particular brand. Check out brands in the B2C space — retail especially — who have tons of people posting about and talking about their products, free from company involvement completely.
Keep reading …
The above just scratches the surface on what community could be. Here are some other great links and ideas and inspiration for learning more and figuring out how you’d like community to look for you.
Community-Led Growth: The Product-Led Growth expansion pack by Corinne Riley
Community is not a marketing tactic by Jon Bonini
How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business by Lenny’s Podcast
A founder’s guide to community by David Spinks
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.