Hey there fellow Rocketeers,
Please excuse the lack of my usual pleasantries for today’s post…I’m going to get straight to the point!
In 2024, one of my biggest goals is to help as many founders, marketers and business owners as possible to truly understand and leverage community-building tactics to turbocharge their growth.
Because ultimately, the power of being a community-led business is all there, ready and waiting to be activated – it just needs to be unlocked and executed on to positively manifest itself across your organisation, no matter what your size or industry!
So with that in mind, here are some of my top tips from 20 years of community-building for some of the world’s biggest companies on how to become a more community and customer-led entity that you can use yourself.
Enjoy!
Turn Your Customers into Brand Evangelists
Forget ads; your customers are your best marketers. This year, let’s think about how to nurture your community members into brand evangelists whose word-of-mouth can outshine any billboard or paid content.
Here are 3 of my favourite tactics to develop brand evangelists around your business – enjoy!
🚀 1️⃣ Give your top customers VIP access and perks.
You should offer special discounts, early access to new products, or a status that signifies certain customers are some of your top users.
The beauty of this tactic is that at first, it can truly be a light-touch system where you either create a new WhatsApp/Telegram group for top members or even build one-on-one relationships across email/social to give out these perks ‘behind the scenes’ and off the record.
Once you reach critical mass with engagement, you can then start to formalise this ‘ambassador-type relationship with something more structured, especially as you’ll be able to work out which of your top customers have really engaged with your generosity and extra warmth.
🚀 2️⃣ Schedule meets and engage with your top customers regularly.
Don’t just email when you want something.
Start conversations, ask for feedback, and interact personally to build real relationships.
Speaking of engagement – a chunk of your calendar (and your C-suite/co-founders) each week should be set aside for chatting to your top customers, jumping in quick calls and building up a narrative that gives you insight into why they buy from you, what they like about your brand, what they think of your competitors etc.
Even just by taking the time to engage with them, they’ll feel special and will go the extra mile for you and your business in the long term.
🚀 3️⃣ Involve them in product development.
Get your top users’ input on new product ideas or let them beta test pre-release versions. When they’re part of the creation process, they’ll be invested in spreading the word for you before and after launch.
When community members feel valued and get access to ‘behind the velvet rope’, they’ll happily wax lyrical about you to their networks and will really help you push and pump a new release they’ve been involved in.
You may even be able to use this tactic as a new lead magnet by making product development a part of your growth strategy. Surveying 100 close users and then giving them personal follow-ups and thanks for their input, could generate 1000 people knowing about this new product or feature, helping get that flywheel spinning and your sphere of influence and reach growing massively month to month!
Capitalise on User-Generated Content
Your community could be a goldmine of creativity if you can motivate them to get deeply involved with you. So let’s encourage and harness user-generated content, giving your marketing a genuine voice that brings thousands of similar people (and customers) together around a common interest.
🚀 1️⃣ Crowdsource Product Reviews and Testimonials
One of the biggest things you can do to turbocharge your growth is to build a bank of social proof. This may seem obvious, but there’s a big difference in quality between asking some ‘randoms’ for a quick review and putting the time into building deep relationships with your core customers and members.
If you ask your customers to write honest reviews of your products/services on your website or social media, then you will quickly build and display this trust.
Do this with highly engaged users, and you’ll find that they go the extra mile in terms of adding context and really showcase your products and services in the best possible light (as if a good friend was reviewing you!)
The added benefit of creating a review section on your site, as well as somewhere like Trustpilot is the SEO and ‘inclusive browsing experience’ they can offer, which may just make the difference between someone clicking ‘go to checkout’ or not!
🚀 2️⃣ Encourage Your Users To Share Photos of themselves using your product on social media. Then curate the best ones to share on your channels at the end of each month!
I’ve always loved this kind of UGC because you can encourage your customers and community to showcase your business as a year-round experience.
i.e – Have a physical storefront? Get people to take photos in front of it with a great ever-changing background.
In FMCG? Get peeps to showcase your product in the summer or Christmas as part of their lifestyle.
Run a yoga class? Get people to add a photo each month and share the journey they’re on using your service!
Doing this will really help improve your brand image, expand your reach and offer you free content that is native and natural.
Make it a competition with your unique slant, and watch your sales and social engagement shoot up and to the right!
🚀 3️⃣ Spotlight Your Top Users
People love stories and they especially enjoy them if there’s a way to see themselves or their network fully reflected in them. Build your community and ask your happy customers to share their experience with your brand and what they love about it so much!
You’ll find a few well-told stories will truly help you to build deeper emotional connections, will offer that social proof once again and of course improve your reputation.
In our 5X Growth Program, I always share how important it is to become the master of ‘don’t ask, don’t get’ tactics! Simply get used to being on the hunt all the time and approach people. You’ll probably find they’re happy to get involved 9 times out of 10!
Foster Innovation with Co-Creation
Imagine developing products with a built-in market fit. In 2024, co-creation, and inviting your community to join the R&D process will ensure your next launch is already on their wish list.
🚀 1️⃣ Crowdsource New Product Ideas
Once you’ve got yourself established with at least a basic offering, don’t be afraid to invite your audience to submit ideas for new services, products or product improvements.
You’ll find this taps into their actual needs and desires, plus it will reduce the risk of you spending a lot of time working on something new, only to have it met with a meh.
I’ve done this before by simply setting up a Quarterly CTA, a typeform and a follow-up brainstorming session to go deeper into some of the best ideas.
You can offer prizes and incentives to the best ideas, and of course, invite all contributors to the launch to get further distribution and buzz on what you do.
Pro-tip?? Why not run a day-long hackathon and see where this takes you when you bring a lot of smart people into one room together.
🚀 2️⃣ Beta Test with Your Key Users
This is fairly obvious in tech and software, but why not give your select engaged users early access to prototypes of your product/service and get detailed feedback.
This can really help you identify issues pre-launch, create brand advocates who again get behind-the-scenes access and should, in theory, reduce the failure rate (depending on your market)
Hollywood does test screenings for all their movies – why shouldn’t you too?!
🚀 3️⃣ Actually Co-Create through Collaboration
This is the bit where you may need to leave your ego at the gate (and of course set up your red lines safeguards), but why not directly partner with your customers, B2B suppliers, or industry experts to jointly develop new offerings?
Sharing the costs and risks makes sense, plus of course, you can all share in the benefits of exposure and distribution. Just make sure you pick the right potential partners, run constructive workshops to make it happen and sign NDAs, IP rights and all that sort of stuff.
Gucci x Adidas – loved it!
But I also love my local record shop doing a regular street party and bringing in neighbouring food and drink suppliers so that everyone in the community wins.
So maybe it’s worth starting to think about who you would like to partner with in 2024?!
And why not also send them a message today and start getting the ball rolling on your potential collab…
Gain Market Insights
Stay ahead of the curve with real-time intelligence from the peeps who know best – your customers! Keep your finger on the pulse of your market’s heartbeat by building feedback loops and a strong narrative that will always encourage 2-way communication.
When I think about gaining market insights/intel or whatever you want to call it, there are two ways I like to approach it:
Number One is organic, getting feedback from top users about how we’re operating and what could we do better to stay one step ahead of the competition.
Number Two is all about working with a tight band of top customers to get them out there into the world, actively researching and finding out what our competitors are doing when it comes to products, services, promotions and their social strategies.
It’s a great way to find out who is doing a good job and who we should be paying attention to (or at least getting “inspired” by…)
Does this tactic flirt with the notion of building an ambassador squad? – I do believe it does…(more below…)
🚀 1️⃣ Whatever you call them – AMA’s, catch-ups, webinars or community focus groups…running regular private online forums and get-togethers is a great way to get feedback on new product concepts, ad campaigns, branding etc.
Of course, you’ll want to formalise the process and fully trust the members you have working with you, but you’ll 100% get targeted qualitative insights, high engagement amongst these users, and cost-effective eyes on your market if you make the effort to structure and reward this program in the right way.
Just make sure you identify key customer segments, recruit your absolute most engaged users, and offer juicy incentives to participate.
Oh yeah, and make sure you’re incredibly clear on what you’re trying to achieve with these sessions before, during and after they take place – there’s simply no point in wasting everyone’s time by being wishy-washy!
🚀 2️⃣ Survey your members regularly – deliver community and customer market fit.
Find your customer’s top priorities, concerns and ideas by regularly surveying them.
You’ll get highly relevant data, increased loyalty and an opportunity to serve exactly what their wants and needs are.
The beauty of building a community is that you can co-create the initial survey with a few senior customers and community members so that you know it will land well and make it highly relevant to these customers!
🚀 3️⃣ Build ‘competitor research’ into your Ambassador squad ‘tasks’
As mentioned earlier, this is one of my favourite things to do!
If your top customers are engaged with you and love coffee, music, beer, SAAS, fashion, travel, whatever etc then there’s a very good chance they’ll know exactly who your new and top competitors are and have their finger on the pulse about what’s going on out there in the marketplace!
Activate these users, get them structured with their feedback and get them out there as your army of moles, ready to kick up all that metadata about market and competitor trends that you simply can’t all do by yourself!
Build a Resilient Competitive Edge
It’s fair to say I learned a hell of a lot about startups while running the North UK WeWork Labs accelerator program a few years back.
And one of those things was that investors love to see a business truly embracing community and activating their customers on a deeper level.
Because community can truly be:
A moat – that will protect a business in downturns due to the loyalty of its members.
and..
a differentiator that makes software company A unique compared with software companies B, C, D and beyond (the same goes with loyalty at coffee shops, fashion brands, travel apps and pretty much any product, service or business where people can feel a deep sense of connection to)
I’ve first-hand witnessed the power of community from building them for 20 years for top-quality businesses on both sides of the Atlantic.
Some of the benefits I’ve seen from a solid community program have been a real sense of energy amongst members, evangelism (maybe bordering on cult…) and loyalty, advocacy, belief, belonging and probably all the other reasons you think people would like to join a community which I talk about in this short video here
If you’re serious about building community in 2024 then give me a shout, because I believe that you could be sitting on an incredible opportunity to:
- Engage your built-in audience and massively evolve your product and service validation
- Unlock an incredible community resource full of data and insights
- and most importantly, starting to plant your community seeds that in 2, 3, 4 and 5 years you’ll thank yourself for planting today as your program matures and morphs into something that has the momentum to grow itself with minimal effort from yourself!
Let’s do this!
Ready to make 2024 your year of community-led growth?
1. Consultancy – I can work with you in a number of ways to strategise and execute a growth plan that will help you transform the relationships you have with your customers and community. Book an intro call today
2. Join our growth program and invest in the future success of your business.
3. Tell me what your biggest single customer/growth pain point is, and I’ll send you a quick community-led solution to help!
Jonny
Community Rocket Founder