Seedcamp Marketing Summit: Ashley Friedlein, CEO of Guild, on Community-Based Marketing (CBM)

Penultimate session of the day. Really awesome to see how many of you have stayed with us. So thank you very much. Next up, we've got Ashley and he's going to be talking to us about community based marketing. I love that he's coined this phrase kind of CBM and the new play in B2B.

Right.

We hear a lot about communities in consumer sort of world, but actually like what is the, you know, CBM. God, that's really a mouthful to say. CBM playbook when it comes to B2B. Ashley is the CEO at Guild. They're a private professional messaging app that is easy, as easy to use as WhatsApp. So Ashley, I'm going to hand over to you to kick us off. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you very much, Natasha. Yes, cbm. You see, I'm in digital and I'm in marketing so I have to invent new acronyms. Really. So yes, I'm actually the founder and CEO of Guild, which Natasha kindly introduced. Messaging app for professional groups and communities. Turn off the notification sounds from Guild. But also the founder of E consultancy way back in 1999, which is for marketers learning about digital marketing and E commerce. So I spent over 20 years really building specifically professional and B2B communication. You can link to me on LinkedIn there or even go crazy and link to me on Guild and share the slides or the deck afterwards. So yes, I want to talk about CBM which I'm pitching as the new play in B2B. A little bit about what it is why now and where it fits in the marketing funnel and how to kind of make it work and a few examples. I was billed originally, I think for half an hour, but I'm going to try and do this in 15 minutes. So excuse me me if it's rushed. So you've probably, if you're in B2B, you know of ABM which is account based marketing. But how about CBM in B2B? We've come up with this definition that it's about bringing professionals together around a shared practice or area of expertise to create closer and more valuable relationships with prospects and customers. There's some community people say, who really don't like associating community with marketing because marketing is a dirty word, nasty sort of snakehole salespeople or whatever. But I think if it's done well, it is possible to meet commercial objectives and do marketing but still also have a great community as well. So I'll talk a bit about how to do that. Of course, communities are not New, you can go to this URL if you want to see this chart. We did, but a timeline of online communities going right back to the 1970s with various sort of group chat and messaging things way back when. And then you had all this virtual worlds and obviously forums, web forums still kind of exist. And then the big sort of platforms and actually social media and social networks relatively newcomer to this game. But it's still actually quite rare at the moment I think to see most of these are sort of consumer, they're peer to peer. But so using communities specifically for marketing and within B2B is actually quite new, relatively rare. So why CBM now? Well, partly there's this whole rise of not just the gig economy, but the passion economy, which Andreessen Horowitz Verres writes about. And there's Patreon substack, all sorts and doing really well. And this tends to be more likely to be professional. And so it's professionals with some area of expertise which they are monetizing as a micro business really. But essentially they are building small niche professional communities and turning that into some kind of business. And then in the big businesses they're all talking about digital transformation, including in B2B. And this is often about obviously digital stuff, but as part of that digital mindsets for agile ways of working, its sort of ecosystems, networks and so more fluid ways of working than they did in the past. So professional communities of interest both internally and with suppliers and customers and things are enormously on the rise. A lot of those obviously using things like teams, Slack and sort of startups and various other more enterprise tech, I guess. But the idea of these professional communities I think is on the rise. Impact of Coronavirus obviously we, I think, you know, given we're being forced to distance and alienate and all this stuff, there's a. There's a strong need, like a quite a human need for a sense of connection and belonging not just in our personal lives, you know, with family or local communities and things, but professionally actually as well. So there's again, community is making a bit of a comeback in the professional world, I think, and then finally some sort of saturation and therefore waning of effectiveness in other marketing channels. And this is a quote from Thomas Tungas as a vc, but essentially, I know we've looked at some various marketing tactics in the last sessions. Content marketing, you know, podcast was mentioned and things. But even something like podcasts, you know, that's a mass audio is a growing area. It sort of feels a bit like the early days of the Internet where everyone now, like when everyone's putting up a website and then they were surprised when no one came, you know, podcast, to be honest, feels a little bit like that to me. But there's a billion and one podcasts in every, you know, and so it's, it might work, but you're going to kind of do it well and you know, get in there early. And the reality is a lot of these things, it's just damn hard to get through to people. You know, emails no one's reading or goes into spam, say Web based forums, LinkedIn groups, no one's really using anymore. So you know, how are you actually going to cut through? How are you going to create an emotional connection that basically anyone actually gives a shit about what you're saying. And what I'm saying is if you can create a good community, that's a way to do that. Where does it sit in the marketing or sales funnel? This is a fairly standard funnel. We saw an earlier from Daryl, the awareness area, I think that's more things like LinkedIn, Twitter, you know, social media, blogs, online PR where you're trying to get in front of and be seen by your prospects or target segments. But community based marketing I don't think really belongs at that level. It's sort of a next level down when people are starting to get interested in you or consider what you have to offer and then on to sort of desire when they may be, you know, wanting a demo. Want to find out more. And this is where you can use community to help persuade these prospects that you are the people with the right solution or the right expertise, the right technology, whatever. So you can turn what are kind of warmish leads into sales prospects and sort of move them down the funnel towards sale. But also, and people maybe focus overly sometimes I think on customer acquisition, but once they become a customer, the whole kind of loyalty advocacy piece. Various tech businesses do have customer communities, but they tend to be very focused on sales and service and support. So like customer communities for a particular product, they don't think about them either at that earlier stage as prospects or indeed ways you can super serve key accounts, for example, by creating kind of micro communities might even be just within the same business if it's a very large enterprise customer, quite dysfunctional. Even getting them together with some of your kind of experts and things I think is a great opportunity to reduce churn, increase retention, increase yield and things like that. And obviously if you can get that, the loyalty and advocacy actually it drives awareness again back at the Top of the funnel. So some of the things I think to make this successful, your community needs a clear purpose. Might sound obvious but it's amazing how many communities I get set up, people that go like here you go, here's your community, off you go, get on with it. And people go, well what's it for? Why should I do it? And you know, everyone's overloaded with information and invites the stuff as it is. So you've got to be clear about why, what it's for and why someone should want to belong to it. Small is good. So again people I think obsess over big numbers because maybe it makes them look good. I mean that's, you know, there's more of a reason for that in B2C but in B2B I think it's more about value and quality. It's not about volume and quantity. We should care about the value, you know, the value of the numbers. Not just having big numbers. This in fact again the links there. But we published this model we have on our advisory board Professor Robin Dunbar, who's famous for the Dunbar number which is about 150, which is the maximum people you can really know. So you know, on this model down the left hand end just 3 to 15 tends to be your personal kind of inner networks and then on the far right is more the kind of LinkedIn, Twitter, it's more kind of pre influencer type marketing. But we think the sweet spot for these communities is probably in this fifteen to one and a half thousand sort of territory. And it depends a bit on the use case but a lot certainly on guild of the best communities we see are probably sometimes tens, more often hundreds, but they're not tens of thousands. And sometimes I'm in slack communities or LinkedIn is particularly bad for this and I join and there's 13,412 people and I think well this isn't a community. This is basically a publishing content marketing platform. I don't really feel any sense of belonging and I'm certainly not going to get to know 13,000 other people. So I just encourage you to think that, you know, small isn't necessarily a bad thing, can be a good thing. Particularly in B2B the role of the community leader wouldn't underestimate that. Ideally someone who has, I think Anthony was talking about this earlier but some domain authority and expertise but also is can there is a skill to community management curate, knock, dictate. So the best communities they feel like they own themselves. So even if there's a brand hosting Them to the people in it, it's like theirs, it's not yours. And so your job isn't to sort of tell people stuff, it's to try and get them to contribute. Yes, you have to stimulate discussions, but they kind of take some ownership really. Choosing the right technology platform. I mean actually I think that a good community manager or leader can make a great community using an email list. And actually the technology isn't the most important thing. In the end however, and we would say this as we're a technology platform ourselves, there are, you know, choices that you need to make. And so if you are, you know, got a newsletter that you want to monetize and maybe substack is good if you're a more artistic, creative professional, then probably Patreon's good if you're B2B professional expertise. And obviously you should choose guild Trust. You know, hard to claim, easy, takes a while to earn, you know, quick to lose all those sorts of things. You know, speaking with authenticity and transparency and credibility within your community. If you can build trust, if you can create a safe space and a safe environment and this is all Maslow's hierarchy of needs types of thing, that's enormously valuable. And that people trust what you're saying, they're much more likely to buy off you. Among other things. Consistency. We give sort of guidelines. People often say, well, how long, how much time does it take and resource. You were talking earlier about how much time it takes to create content and who should do that. Community management I think is, we often say, you know, if any One group takes 10 to 15 minutes a day to manage it. So it's not a lot, but you need to, you need to do it consistently. You can't just do nothing for a month or two weeks and then do a sort of splurge of stuff, persistency. So keeping at it. Again, some people think, well, we set up our community a week ago and nothing's happened and it's failed or even a month. These things sometimes take time. These are groups, social groups. They're like to tribes, you know, building that trust, building that respect, building the quality and all those sorts of things. You need to stick at it. So you can't really just do it as a sort of one off project core, not peripheral. Again, see people as having community as some sort of initiative or project. I think if you don't feel it and particularly if the sort of leaders of business don't see the sort of strategic value and commercial value in it, it's probably not going to succeed if it's just evolved as a project to more junior people. And then finally, I think community building isn't under valued skill. I'm surprised sometimes you think that editorial people would make great community managers or leaders. Sometimes they do, but often they don't. Actually they love creating content, they got no interest in managing kind of people and all the social aspects of that. Sales and marketing people you think would be good at it. Some are, some aren't, same as some business leaders. So it's an interesting mix of a sort of commercial marketing, salesy type, but with also editorial writing, communicating skills, but also this sort of social, psychological, you know, bringing convening people, getting them to feel safe and being happy to contribute. And historically it's not, you know, budgeted for. It's not a lot of money spent on this that may stay this way. But obviously I'm interested or hope to see that it'll change and it will be valued more and paid for more. We kind of touched on this business cases for community based marketing. But obviously if you've got a recurring revenue business like SaaS, but increasingly B2B media, professional membership organizations, all sorts are moving towards recurring revenue, then you want to improve retention, reduce, churn. Community can certainly do that. If you're a professional services or anyone selling expertise, then thought leadership is very common. We have white papers and webinars and ebooks and things but community is a great way to nurture inbound sales. Less often you see this say super serving key accounts with real concierge style service through kind of micro communities which could include you, some other suppliers and a customer. I think not done as much as it should be. And then finally market or customer insights. If you can be in a community where you have your customers or prospects talking about their pain points or asking questions, you get this amazing insight. And even the language that they use is really important. So it's a customer listening insight thing which normally you have to pay a load of money to get. And it's sort of not a forced experiment. You can kind of literally listen in on them and that informs not just your product and service development and roadmap, but the language you use in your marketing or at least it should do because that's kind of the way that your prospects, your market are talking about it. Just then to finish off a few examples for smaller businesses. So you know, just to make the point, this is for any scale of business, I think so Guild, we're relatively early stage business. We actually didn't set this up to try and sell. But it's worked surprisingly well. About seven months ago we set up a group for event organizers who are having to pivot towards digital or hybrid events because of coronavirus called CREO which corona response for event organizers has about 700 members in it now. Event organizers all around the world. It's super engaged community and we've actually ended up winning a whole load of customers off the back of it because they go, oh look, this guild thing is actually great. I can, I can see how it works. And we've got, you know, having to do virtual events. We need a way to engage our community year round. We want a way to continue the conversations, continue the networking and this is perfect for it. And so slightly by accident, as I say, as a marketing thing where we are using our prospects, other members of this community, it's worked incredibly well. A similar thing for I belong to this thing actually a community, it's called Community Club which is a sort of a community for community builders and that has over a thousand members, about 1,200 now. But it's actually run by a technology business called Consor. And so they actually sell their technology solutions to the community builders. But they do a great job of creating this environment. They're not sales or anything like that. But you know, I've had conversations with them as a result of belonging to the community as a prospective customer of theirs. So it's working well to drive their awareness but also leads and then if you look to bigger businesses. Adobe obviously has run communities for a long time. Cooper is an interesting one. It's a business spend management technology business, very large and interesting. Their CEO Rob Bernstein, he's just published a book about how communities are shaping the next revolution in business. And they do some really smart stuff with communities. And then sort of finally, and hopefully this is I think a good segue to our final speaker. But another company that does this really well is Drift. And so they have communities where yes, they talk about Drift the product, but they also talk more generally about sales and marketing kind of challenges. So it's a place you can go to to learn, but by being there, you know, obviously you're kind of immersed in the Drift world, the Drift experience and find out about the Drift product. I don't know if there's a case study maybe we can hear next, but I'd be fascinated to know how well this works as a form of sales and marketing. And then just this is my last slide, just some resources in case of use that URL. There we are Publishing a series of articles and research around community based marketing. There are three there, there's two more to come shortly. If you are interested in this, if you want the deck, you can email me. We also actually run a community for SaaS marketing leaders. The URLs there. You can go and find out more and even join it if you want. And that is it.

Ashley, thank you so much. I mean that was the most perfect segue as well for our next speaker. Maybe we should get you to do your talk before for everyone that we introduce in future. Awesome. I'm going to just really quickly just throw one question which was from Dae Chan. He was asking about practically what content do you push to actually keep your communities engaged. It's all very well having a community, but what content are you feeding them? What's the sort of regularity with which you're sort of pushing stuff their way as well? So any best practice tips there?

Yeah, I mean obviously to some degree it depends. But we where we just did some analysis across our platform and it turned out that two to three items posted by the host of the community per week appeared to be the Goldilocks amount much more than that. And people start to get overwhelmed to less than that. And it felt like a bit, you know, not much enough was happening, but that's not a huge amount really. And that doesn't. When we say content, a lot of that is asking a question is sharing a link from a news item. It's posting a link to a virtual event. So it's not like a. This is specifically guild I should say. It's not. That's which is a messaging platform. So message like you know, a telegram or WhatsApp or Signal or something doesn't tend to be long form content. It's not like a blogging platform. So yes, I think web forums, you know, tend to be slightly longer form, pure messaging apps slightly shorter form and there say it's more peer Q and A and sharing of stuff rather than, you know, content in a slightly longer form.

Awesome. Thank you so much. There's definitely an interesting tipping point with like community being amazing, but then also like how many different community groups can you be in and at what point like is it like, oh, this actually has stopped being, you know, beneficial and now is just adding to noise. I wonder if we sort of, you know, and you gave a great example of that with sort of what we've seen with podcasts as well. I wonder if that sort of like every new marketing like perceived channel sort of hits that tipping point, actually. Ashley, thanks so much.