Been tasked with creating a community? You may want to take some tips from Matthew.
Corrina Owens and Taylor Young are joined by Matthew Carnevale, Marketing Manager at exitfive. Matthew shares how their founder-led growth has developed into a community-led growth motion with over 4,000 members to date.
If you’ve been curious about where to start or if you’ve been tasked by your CEO to develop a community, this episode is for you.
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Featured Guest
Name: Matthew Carnevale
What he does: Marketing Manager
Company: exitfive
Noteworthy: Matthew is a community architect transforming B2B marketing through data-driven engagement strategies.
Key Insights
Community Building Starts with Audience Demand
Building a successful community isn’t about forcing it into existence. It thrives when there’s genuine audience demand. Before launching a community platform, focus on creating valuable content that attracts an engaged audience. This approach naturally leads to people asking for a space to connect with like-minded individuals. By giving until they ask, you create a solid foundation for community growth. This strategy ensures that when you do launch a community, it’s based on real demand rather than assumptions. It also helps avoid the common pitfall of creating a “ghost town” — a community space with little to no engagement. Remember, the platform choice is less critical than having an engaged audience ready to participate.
Balancing Short-Term Wins and Long-Term Community Growth
Community building requires a delicate balance between showing immediate value and fostering long-term growth. While community efforts often yield results over time, it’s crucial to demonstrate short-term wins to maintain organizational support. Focus on attaching community efforts to existing processes, such as improving sales team emails or revitalizing dormant email lists. These quick wins can showcase the value of community-building efforts while laying the groundwork for more substantial, long-term initiatives. As the community grows, track metrics like monthly active users, post-to-comment ratios, and member retention. These data points help justify continued investment in community efforts and guide strategy adjustments for sustained growth.
Diversifying Brand Voices Strengthens Community Engagement
Relying solely on a founder or CEO’s personal brand to drive community engagement can be limiting and exhausting. A more sustainable approach involves cultivating multiple brand voices within the organization. This strategy helps distribute the workload of content creation and community engagement across the team. It also provides community members with diverse perspectives and expertise, enriching the overall experience. Encourage team members to develop their own professional brands aligned with the company’s mission. This approach not only takes pressure off the founder but also creates a more resilient and multi-faceted community. It ensures the community’s growth and engagement don’t hinge on a single personality, fostering long-term sustainability.
Episode Highlights
Defining Community in B2B Marketing
Matthew distinguishes between building community and building a community. He explains that community is about creating a shared interest that people rally around, while a community is a specific platform where people gather. This distinction is crucial for B2B marketers to understand when developing their community strategies. It highlights the importance of first cultivating interest before establishing a dedicated space for interaction.
“Community itself is just a thing or a place that people have a common interest in and rally toward a similar thing. Building community is really about how do I as a company, or as an individual, talk about something or build something that people can rally around and have a common interest in. Building a community is like a physical space, like a Facebook group, Slack group, where people could actually join behind some kind of gated wall and interact with one another.”
Transitioning from Open to Gated Communities
The discussion explores exitfive’s journey from an open LinkedIn community to a gated Circle platform. This transition was driven by audience demand, highlighting the importance of listening to community members. The success of this move demonstrates that when community building is done in response to genuine interest, it’s more likely to thrive.
“People who were big fans of our content or Dave’s content at the time were asking for it. They’re like, ‘Hey, we love your content and we love this stuff you’re giving us, but we want to chat with one another and we want to meet one another.’ So it was really just people asked for it. Dave kept giving good content and eventually someone just asked and then he went and built it.”
Strategies for Maintaining Community Engagement
Matthew shares tactics for keeping community members engaged, including hosting regular events and implementing a member matchmaking program. These strategies provide consistent value to members, giving them reasons to return to the community regularly. This approach aligns community activities with the billing cycle, ensuring members feel they’re getting value for their subscription.
“Every month we have two events that we do for members only. These events are teardowns. Members can submit their website, and then an expert from within the community will come in and review all the websites and give tangible feedback. We’re giving our members a reason to sign in and do something at least once a month. If people are going to pay us every month, we got to give them a reason to come into the community once a month.”
Scaling Community Management
As communities grow, scaling management becomes crucial. Matthew discusses how exitfive leverages community members to help scale content and programming. This approach not only helps manage the workload but also deepens member engagement by giving them opportunities to contribute meaningfully to the community.
“The community is growing beyond me just being able to manage every single piece of it. What I’m really focused on is how can we lean on and work with members to contribute to the community and hopefully give them some kind of value in return, whether it’s monetary or status or exposure? We’re doing an accelerator for B2B marketers. It’s a program where it’s eight weeks live course style where we’re bringing in experts and we’re paying them to speak, to instruct.”
