Speaker answers a question on monetising small communities by drawing on event-organising experience (e.g., a 3,000-attendee Festival of Marketing generating ~£1M revenue) and the CREO Group experiment. Key monetisation routes discussed: community-based marketing to access senior prospects, paid memberships for exclusive peer gatherings, sponsor-funded high-touch experiences (roundtables, CEO-level networking). Examples and estimates include Procurement Leaders/World50 charging ~£100k/year for elite membership, Salesforce as an example sponsor, and roundtable formats (40 simultaneous tables, groups of ~10, meeting ~30 people per day).
Chapters
How does a small community would be monetized and where would it be? The return on investment on that? Do you need to run 10 of those within your vertical or how would that work? Well, I mean there's lots of different ways that it can work but I mean interestingly that CREO Group we started that part the of partly just because wearing my E consultancy hat we still run a lot of events. We had our festival of Marketing event last week which was, you know, that's about 3,000 odd people over the course of a week. So fairly sizable over a million revenue event. So I kind of slightly speak still as an event organizer and we had to pivot quickly and we wanted to learn. So actually I think some of these communities are the best way. If you can tap into experts or peers of yours going through the same challenges, that is a really effective and efficient way to get answers to your problems. A lot of the stuff you can't really Google it. I mean you try Googling some of the questions that come up. It's just there isn't a. Even the information isn't there or isn't public or Google actually isn't very good as an answers engineering still often. So you know, I just genuinely interested in the content and wanted to help and we wanted to get users into the product in this case in guild to give feedback. But interestingly what you know, we have actually won quite a few customers off the back of that CREO Group just because they've gone all right, I kind of see how this thing works now and we can use it for our event and stuff. So it wasn't really meant that way. But to answer your question it's you know, again with some other slides I talked about this idea of community based marketing. But if you can use these, even a small community, if you've got 200 senior people who are prospects of yours and they're getting value from you, you know, you've just got, you've got access to their attention in any shape or form and they believe you can help them. That's massively powerful because it's incredibly hard to get hold of these people otherwise and to build any kind of trust because they're being sold to all the time. So I think just purely as a high end marketing prospecting thing it can kind of work obviously for membership or subscription type models where you might have a broader group, bigger group for certain tiers of members, but for your most senior members who you know and you look at all of them say like Gartner's and Forrester, who we kind of compete with a bit with E consultancy. But they charge an awful lot of money to their sort of CIOs and things. And really what they're paying for is the community is getting to go to the CIO summit or getting to hang out with their peers. You know, there's a certain degree of status vanity even in there. But so if you can bring together those people, you can just charge them for it. I mean there's, you know, Procurement Leaders are similar in procurement. Data Leaders is another one. Procurement Leaders was bought by a business called World 50 which has just bought another business called G100. And these guys might get the figures wrong, but they charge something like 100 grand a year to individuals to belong to. And really all they do is bring them together to meet. No content, no, I mean, not kind of proper events, no suppliers. It's just a sort of, you know, private intimate space so you can just directly charge for it, you know. And then sponsors is the other thing. I mean, I don't think in terms of, you know, there are some sponsors who are. They sell like enterprise software, if you take an example where, you know, the sale value or the lifetime value of a customer is hundreds of thousands, if not millions or tens of millions. So they can, like Salesforce is a customer of ours, for example, they can afford to spend an awful, awful lot on really, really looking after prospects, even flying them to Dreamforce and putting them up for a week. And you know, it's. And so again, you know, that, that kind of. If you have a sponsor who understands that game and isn't. Yes, they want sales, but it's not like a mass market, it's another mass thing. It's a highly experiential, high touch kind of experience. And they're prepared to put their senior people, not the sort of more junior SalesPeople, but their CEO, their product people in with a group of prospects or customers. And they know how to behave. Not just crass selling, but proper networking. They really, really love that. I mean, I mean E consultancy, I still think one of our best, or one of the formats I like best is in events was called Digital Green. But it's essentially lots of roundtables. And its biggest, I think we had 40 simultaneous roundtables going on all on different topics with 10 and the model, you know, you'd have 10 clients there, essentially peers talking about their problems and we'd only ever allow one sponsor to sit at the table. But they got to listen in on the conversation. They got to show their expertise where they could. And they met 30 people across the course of a day. Only 30, but it was massively successful for them. And so if you. And this is not uncommon, obviously, in events, but if you transpose that into a digital, like an online community we're talking about, why can't the same thing be true? Why can't you have a smallish space with a sponsor who's knowledgeable and helpful, adds value and wins big business that way?
