Ep. 6 - Uncle Marketing Live - Community Building

So yesterday had a workshop around community building, primarily as it relates to brand building, and I wanted to— I want to follow up with some thoughts around, uh, that workshop. Particularly, I think there are a few things I didn't go into greater detail on because of time, but I thought they were worth talking about. Primarily, that brand building has a One of the things that came out was that brand building does require community actually more than straight-up advertising. And what I mean by that is you don't have a brand if you don't have nobody to Believe in it. And so it itself is a kind of community. You think about if you follow a sports team, if you follow maybe a favorite musical artist, or even let's say, you know, you're, you're a Marvel head, or, you know, you really care about what's going on in that space. The That is a community. You can walk into a place where somebody's wearing those same colors and they're tied to the brand. You know, Spider-Man is a brand, whether you, whether you realize it or not. It is, uh, it is its own thing. And somebody wearing Spider-Man shirt, uh, somebody sees another person wearing that shirt, um, there is an immediate affinity to that. And so when you think about the power that comes from that, uh, how can you— how can you create that for your own business? How can you explore that? Obviously, not every business is a superhero or a sports team, but there are associations that you can build within how you go about telling your story in which thinking about it in those terms thinking about community as integral and the output of what you're doing in terms of branding actually has some— once you start thinking about those things, thinking about marketing in that way, I think it changes how you go about telling your story, How you go about structuring your messaging—it's not always tied to, say, a sales pitch. It can be tied to something much bigger. When we think about becoming, when we think about building like a little army, I think of. Like a Taylor Swift, like that the Swifties are an army. She's constructed this through everything that she's done at that level beyond just the music. Something resonates with her story in which people have attached themselves to it and said, "This is I care about this. I don't want it to stop. I want it to be a part of." My being and taking that in. When see when you have that as a brand, it can be really really you could you do really great things with it if you really apply yourself and think about it in those terms. Somebody asked me today, well, when you are marketing. Uh, because I was talking about how marketing is really hated. Uh, I've used this statistic before. Liquid Death has said that 90% of people hate marketing. I get it. Uh, that the There's a lot to hate about marketing, but when somebody asks me, well, how do I remove that ick factor in terms of marketing feeling gross? The, the thing I center around is that I am not trying to sell you something. I am trying to guide you to the solution that you actually need. And so when you think about it in that term, those terms, Marketing is not really the aggressive get out there and sell aspect that it that a lot of people make it out to be. If you consider it more like a consulting agreement, a consulting engagement in which people are actively. Helping you find a solution. And doing that marketing itself becomes much different, and it doesn't feel as gross. It doesn't feel icky when you apply that kind of thinking onto community building itself. You're now going into a lot of areas where you're starting to build a tight relationship between what the brand is doing and the community itself. Hey, David, great to see you again. Hey, Derek. The David was actually in the workshop yesterday, so that was cool. So thank you for that. Let's see what else I wanted to cover a little bit more about. I think it was this slide. Yeah. So a lot of businesses when they think about community. They think, oh God, it's expensive. When you consider it though, pairing it up against something like paid advertising where you don't actually own and control what happens, there is a lot of— the payback is actually much stronger on the community side. So I showed this slide yesterday, and the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me, actually, because it's about attention. So, you know, in a given day, a human being has only so much attention that they can dedicate to something. And so are you getting quality attention for something you're doing in terms of your marketing? If you, let's say, take a paid ad and it costs you $20 CPM for 1,000 views, basically you have to start thinking about what kind of attention am I going to get with that? Not so much how many views actually, or even how many people I'm going to reach, but what kind of actual attention am I getting from that person? And you really have to start to think about it in those terms. If you are definitely, if you're a small business and you're trying to figure out, well, should I do paid ads? Maybe it just depends. But I will tell you, you're going— what you think you're paying for is less attention than you think you're going to get. And this, I think, is a way of illustrating that. So You say, let's say you spend a $20 CPM. Nope, you know, you're not going to just drop $20 and get 1,000 views. You will, but those views are highly fragmented because they're— they happen in situations where there's so much other content on the screen at the same time. You get a fraction of that. I, I said 10%. In terms of quality, but it's much lower than that, likely. And so the idea being that, okay, for $20 you might get 150 quality seconds of that. And so if you come back to that and say, okay, well, who am I selling to? And let's assume that somebody Makes $75,000. You know, that's a very modest— at least in the Bay Area and, you know, most urban areas— that's a, that's a pretty modest salary. However, let's just take it because it's, it's easy to do the math when it's 1 cent of their attention. Um, sorry, let me turn these notifications off. The so the quality of that experience that you're getting with that ad is so low, and when you anticipate well I want to reach this person and this person makes seventy five thousand dollars a year that's you know a a way to think about. Value, let's just say. So then their attention value per second is— what you're getting is really $1.50 for that $20. It's, it's a, it's a weird number to think about, but when you actually boil it down to why a lot of paid ads just you know, you need to anticipate that you're, you're chunking over money and a lot of it is not going to pay off. I didn't even get into the fact that a lot of digital ads have, have fraud associated with it where, you know, 30% of your advertising is going into a hole, uh, and that's like being generous there too. So not— I'm not against paid ads, I just don't think that they're necessarily the right structure for a lot of smaller businesses, especially if they're cost-conscious and they're worried about taking money and putting it into something and going, well, what result am I getting? Unless you can spend lots and lots of money on it for a lot of attention, and again, you're renting that attention. Unless you can do that on a very regular basis, paid ads are, are not necessarily the way to go. Instead— thank you, Alice. Yeah, no, I get it, it's, it's harsh. So, so when you think about community, however, For the same dollar per dollar experience, let's just say I create an event and it cost me fifty dollars because I I hired maybe I didn't hire I'm bringing food and coffee and getting five people together five people for an hour the quality of that. Engagement and attention is— we'll just say it's 100%, right? Unless everybody's checking their phone. Hard to do with 5 people, but, uh, let's just say it's 100% for that. The quality seconds you're getting for that $50 is 18,000 seconds of, you know, from these 5 people. So If you were to equate that amount with somebody making $75,000, you're gaining, say, $180 worth of their attention for $50 of what you've put in. So that's a pretty strong ROI. Obviously, community sessions are harder— not harder, but they're just more complex than just like, I'm putting a credit card down for paid advertising. But this has to be factored in. The community has to be factored into what you're doing in terms of marketing, because if you can figure that part of it out and you drive business through community, also you're improving your trust with that community. You are increasing the likelihood of referral and virality and word of mouth through that community, that is way better than what a paid ad campaign is going to do. Paid ad campaigns are great if you've got like everything's locked in and you just need eyeballs, and as soon as they click, they're going to convert. Great, do that if you have that. But if you are— if your product or service that you're trying to market is more complex in nature, if you have more to deal with in terms of that sales cycle, there's more obstacles. Somebody comes to your site, they look around, and then they move off. Well, why is that? Did something not work there? For paid ads to work, that has to be locked in. That entire funnel experience that you bring in and convert somebody has to be working really, really well before you even start paid ads. You, you need to solve the, the sales problem, not the advertising problem. That's really key, especially like I said for small businesses and you are you don't have a ton of funds to dedicate to this. Don't go that route unless you're ready. Um, so that was I wanted to go deeper into that. The other thing I wanted to go deeper into from yesterday's talk. Which, by the way, is available if you contact. If you contact me, I'll send you the link. It's a private link on YouTube. You can watch it there. The other thing I wanted to talk about was one area around because we talked about a whole ninety-day plan. I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into. Linking the brand with the community. So this is going back to the idea of how to build the community. Think of it like a sponsorship rather than trying to control. Everything that happens in that community, be the generous brand and offer the resources for that community to thrive. But by being the kind of landlord around, around that community, it's like, hey, use our space, use our resources, Here's our coffee machine. Here's, here's everything you need. We'll send out the emails. We'll, we'll do the connections for you. We'll even set up a social platform if you need it. All that stuff, if you can do that and then hand the keys over for the actual event and connections, obviously with some guidance, right? So you bring in somebody who can help with the churning of the community creating it so that it starts to have a vibrancy, you bring somebody in like that while you provide the resource part, it's going to work out because that community person— by the way, I do that for businesses if you need it, um By doing that, then you are— your affinity for your brand is a direct correlation to the community. And so if the community succeeds, is vibrant, is talked about, is leveraged through the people who need it, then as a As the sponsor of that, you get all that goodwill, and people will start to appreciate why you're doing it, that you are supportive. And people buy from people they like and people they trust. And if you're not there just selling every time, every time, uh, that you're in there, that you are giving more than you're getting, in some cases the get will come. In a much easier sales cycle because they already know who you are. They already know they can trust you. So that part's less relevant. The the real relevancy will come. Hey, is this a fit for me? Um, I'll use the example of let's say you're an auto repair place. And you are trying to create— you're thinking about how to create a community around that. Well, there's a lot of ways you could do that, right? You could do auto enthusiasts if they— if that's your customer, core customer. Maybe it's associated partners within that ecosystem, so somebody who fixes high-end cars could also start to make connections with people who wash high-end cars, who organize high-end car trips, who have a range of other services, and you could create those kind of ecosystems. Or maybe it's, hey, we're gonna create a community within that auto repair place for our employees because we want to do something socially. We want to do some kind of activism. We want to enhance— we want to bring in really good mechanics and staff. And so we want to be able to build off of that. And that's where just thinking about brand and thinking about community, all those things are really kind of interlocked. And they're all part of the same brand story, and they all will have their own yield based on like what your goals are. So that was really— that came out from yesterday, and I think more and more it makes a lot of sense because the whole idea for putting together the workshop was that With AI here and present and completely dominating the conversation, and very likely the next encounter you have with any kind of piece of content or media is going to have some AI involved that was created through AI, that was— that AI determined you were the right fit for. That, uh, there are all these reasons, there are all these mechanisms now that artificially you're being connected to stuff. So what does that mean? It means some computer, some, some algorithm out there thinks you're the right fit, which it could be. You could be the right fit for that, um, piece of experience. Again, goes back to attention, right? They want your attention. So if some AI determines that you are part of that attention, that you need— that we need to connect you with this information, then what is left for businesses to do anything? Do you need to do anything? Yeah, you still need to do a ton of stuff. But the actual meeting of the minds, the actual decision is still happening at the human level. Computers are not deciding things for us yet. It might get there if we surrender to it. We'll get there. But right now, Human beings are still the ones who pull out the credit card, who click buy, who do those things, who sign the contracts. It's still a human being right now. And so you need to be there for that human. And the only way to do that is to make sure that yes, they have all the information they need, but to be there as a source of Trust, because the other thing that's happening will be that there will be so many choices and so much scattered attention that you don't have an— you don't have a real opportunity to show who you are and go deep into the woods about every nuanced thing. So you're going to have to rely on kind of good old-fashioned connection, human connection, one-to-one, even in a community. And in community is like the hotbed for that to happen. Community becomes a, a like a little workshop for everyone, you know. You don't all have to work on the same thing, but you come together because you know you're gonna do something together, and you could do that thing, and I'll do this thing, and that's cool, but we're doing it together. My specialty, your specialty, all work together interlocked. It gives you an opportunity to build those bonds that are way stronger than those cliques, you know, a pass into who your business is, what you're trying to accomplish. I think it's the most important thing that small businesses can think about is how to get your community flowing and working for the goals that you have as a business. Without sacrificing, you know, the cost and, and, and, and brand loss. So that came out. That, that's been on my mind a lot these last few days. So I know Alice is here, David's here. Do either of you have any, uh, thoughts on this? No? Okay. Um, I'm gonna end it here today. Uh, I think that there's a lot to think about if you're interested. In talking more, put some time on my calendar. You know where to find me. And, uh, thank you. Thanks for attending. Take care.