 laser-focused on growing your business. And I know how that goes. So you're thinking about user acquisition through advertising. You're thinking about finding new customers with great SEO. And you're thinking about building phenomenal content that wows. And meanwhile, you are neglecting a huge goldmine of existing customers who if you could just engage with them in a more robust way, just engage with them in a more sophisticated way, would help you hit a lot of your marketing metrics and goals on their own. They would help you increase revenue, increase the time spent on your site, decrease your customer support costs, your customer acquisition costs, and a bunch of other things. But let's face it, most marketers have no idea how to truly engage with customers who have already bought from us or customers who have not yet bought from us and are just sitting on our email list and in our user databases not converting. So today, I want to talk to you about how to use communities, gamification, and membership content to take those existing customers that you already have and reactivate them, reengage them, and use that engagement to hit your marketing goals. Because powerful brands have communities. And they use those communities to hit their most important marketing objectives. Now, we're all solving problems for our companies. And so if you're solving a problem for your customer, you can be 100% sure that those customers are online this week, today, this month interacting with other customers, other people who have similar problems to them. This is particularly true in the digital age where there are LinkedIn conversations happening about everything. There are Facebook groups for everything. There are Quora-like channels and conversations Q&A is happening on any topic. And there are Reddit conversations. Here are a bunch of people talking about SEO. Your customers are invariably going online. They're asking questions. And they're finding communities of people who can answer those questions for them. Your customers are going to find communities and form communities with or without you. And so how do you take that natural activity that your customers are doing online, take a little bit of control over it, and use it to hit your marketing goals? So that's what I want to talk to you about today, because it's a particularly tricky territory to navigate as a brand. So I want to start by debunking a couple myths, because there are a couple things I hear consistently that people say and companies say about why they're not focused on building a community. So the first thing I hear people say is, companies in my industry, we don't need communities. It's just not a thing that we do. If you look online, there's not a lot of communities for my industry. It's just not a thing. And so today, we're gonna look at a bunch of case studies from cosmetic companies all the way to healthcare companies. And I'll show you how they're creating really phenomenal, powerful communities. Another thing I hear people say is, we're focused on ROI. ROI is our focus right now. So we're not really doing a lot of community building. It's just not a priority. And so I'm gonna show you some phenomenal numbers and metrics, true revenue increases that companies are seeing as a result of building and fostering communities around their brand. One other thing I hear people say is, my company is small or a service-based company or we're an agency, so it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have a community. There's not even that many people who could be even part of the community. We just have a set number of clients that we take on or a small business. And so I'm actually gonna show you a really crazy experiment that my own company ran. We're a small service-based company. And we did a crazy five-day experiment from idea to actually getting people in the community five days and I'm gonna share with you all the data and the results that we saw from that. And the final thing I hear people say is our company is too large for a community. There's too many people, there's a lot of users, we're gonna have to manage them all, it's just too much. Now a lot of us have heard of a four billion dollar company called Sephora. And in 2010, Sephora launched an online community called Beauty Talk. And so the way that Beauty Talk works is anyone can come on, whether you're a customer of Sephora or not, anyone can log on to their site and become an instant beauty insider. So you create an account and then you can go into the community and ask questions. What do you think about these two products together? You think these products work well together? Or how does this lipstick look on me, right? And then people are going in and answering questions. This is a bustling community, there's a lot going on here. And a lot of people talking back and forth, it's very active. And so Sephora has found some really interesting things and done a lot of really interesting experiments here. For example, they take all of their user profiles and they link them to external social sites. So they're able to get data that correlates interest on social media, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and how it correlates to purchase patterns on their shopping page for community members in the Beauty Talk community. They also link all of the user accounts in the community to Sephora loyalty cards. So they're also able to incentivize their community members to continue making purchases for them and build it into the community system. So Sephora has over 400 different engagement metrics that they track just for this community alone. And they've been able to find some really interesting results, for example. They found that when customers joined the community, they spent 2.5 times longer on the e-commerce shopping pages of Sephora. So not just spending longer time in the community, they're actually spending longer time on the actual shopping pages, which for Sephora directly correlates into revenue for them. The longer people are on their shopping pages to hire their conversion rates. And they found that the top percent of most active community members spent 10 times longer on the e-commerce shopping pages. So this is an example of a big company that's doing this really well and having a lot of success. And so what would it look like for you? If you created a community, a go-to place for your customers and for your clients, what would it look like for you to engage them in a certain kind of way there and use that engagement to hit some of your marketing goals? So if you're thinking about building a community, there are really four questions for you to consider and I wanna walk through these different considerations. And the first question you should ask is should our community be public or private? So that's the four example that I showed you, that was a private, I'm sorry, that was a public community. Anyone can come and join, you don't need to be a customer necessarily to do that. But I wanna show you another example of a private community and this will be particularly interesting to any of you who have service-based businesses. So 500 Startups is a startup accelerator program and what they do is they train new startups and they help them raise money. And they have built a private community for their clients. And so I wanna point out a couple of the core features here in this community. So the core section is the discussion section and what's most popular here is the job board. So companies that are clients of 500 Startups are able to come on and post, hey, we're hiring for this role, does anyone know someone who'd be a good fit? And other people can say, yeah, I know someone who'd be a good fit, let me refer them to you. This is the most popular section in their community and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the service that 500 Startups offers its clients, but the customers and clients are doing this engagement with themselves. There's also an events section so clients can post interesting events they have coming up that they wanna share with other clients in the network. There's a database of people and companies that are part of the network and also very interestingly, 500 Startups has a perks section so they've negotiated discounts on popular software tools and services that their customers use and they get them discounts on it and there's a huge database of all the discounts they've negotiated. So you might be thinking, all right, well, if you're a service-based company, my customers, they really love the service that I offer them, won't it decrease the value of my service if I'm just letting them talk amongst themselves? And the answer is actually no. So 500 Startups finds consistently year over year that when they survey their customers, one of the top things that people say in terms of why they stay around and why they continue to be engaged with the company is because they have access to this community. So it actually enhances, it's a huge selling point for getting clients and enhances the continued engagement for their own existing clients. So in the past year, 500 Startups has had over 100,000 company-to-company interactions happening on this platform and they've also had 8,000 peer-to-peer help sessions. That is a company representative from a company getting on a phone call or a video chat with another company in the client pool and just helping each other out. So the second thing I want you to think about when you're considering building a community is can our community be low-tech? Does it have to be super-duper fancy and we have to get all the developers rallied around this and on board? So I wanna show you an example of a super-low-tech community that a company called Udemy, you may be familiar, is using. So Udemy is an online platform that allows people to buy and sell courses. So if you have some sort of expertise in something, you can go to Udemy's website, you can record a series of videos and classes about your expertise and then you can sell that course. And Udemy has an entire team of people that are dedicated to making sure that new instructors complete the onboarding process. So they sign up and they actually get their course completed and loaded up and ready to go on the site because that's how Udemy makes its money. The course has to be done in order to sell. And so what's really interesting is that Udemy has built this on Facebook. They've built a community for instructors on Facebook. It's just a Facebook group. And this Facebook group has 47,000 members. Now what Udemy has found is that people who are part of this Facebook group, when instructors join the Facebook group, they're far more likely to actually get their courses submitted and completed. So the average course instructor on the Udemy platform makes $8,000. They've got 47,000 members in this community, which means that this Facebook group for them represents $367 million of revenue for them. And they know that when they get someone in the Facebook group, they have a higher chance of completing their course and actually fulfilling and getting this revenue in the door for them. So that's an example of a super low-tech Facebook group with real ROI. I wanna show you this other example. This is the community that my team and I built in five days. We did this fun experiment. I just wanna point out some of the features that we have in here. There's a general post section. People are talking to each other. They're posting videos, photos, text posts, et cetera. There's a leaderboard. So people get points and incentives for doing different things. And then we have prizes every month at the top of the leaderboard. There are challenges and Q and A's. So we do exclusive content, exclusive lessons for our clients and Q and A sessions, and they can access them in here. And there's also a fun toolkit so people can rate and review different software tools that they're using and say how they like them. So that platform that you just saw was built using a software tool called Bubble. Bubble.is is their website. It was built entirely by marketers. That tool that I just showed you, we had no developers involved. And we use this platform called Bubble, which allows us to build fully functioning apps, web apps, mobile apps without writing any code. So again, another low tech example built by marketers in five days. Another thing that you really can think about, this third thing, is should our community be social first or content first? And I wanna show you a couple examples of the distinction. So this is Coachella's community. Coachella is a music and arts festival that happens every year. They have 200,000 attendees. And so Coachella has a social first community that they've built. There are forums and conversation threads happening about the lineup. Who's gonna play? Who's gonna be a music performer? There's fan clubs joining around all the different music performers. They have different social clubs around lodging and accommodations. People collaborating on those sorts of things. There are chat bots and chat experiences going back and forth. But this is primarily a social community. The main thing you do here is talk to other people. Now contrast that to Moz's community, which is a content first community. So when you come to the page, you see Moz and ours and Q and As and events that are coming up. And while, yes, people are communicating with each other, they're talking back and forth, all of that communication is centered around content that either a Moz community members create or Moz the company creates themselves. It's a content first platform. Here's another example of a content first community. So Shopify has this project called E-commerce University and they use it as the centerpiece of their community. So they've got all sorts of lessons and tutorials and downloads for their community. They've got the ultimate guide to drop shipping and SEO for E-commerce, all sorts of things like that. And so you can download these learning packages, these PDFs, these lessons. And while underneath the lessons, people are talking to each other, they are communicating, this is a content first community. So you may be thinking, all right, I get it. I'm interested in this concept of building a community for my brand, but I don't have a ton of resources to get this done. And so I wanna point you to a couple really awesome software tools that you can use to instantly build a powerful community. So if you're thinking about building a content first community, I recommend you check out two tools. One is called memberful and one is called member space. Memberful is a WordPress plugin. So you put all the content that you want on your WordPress site and then you use the memberful plugin to layer on top and create a gated login system where people are need to be members in order to access the content. Member space does the same exact thing, but it's for Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a social first community, there are another two tools I would recommend you look for. So Zendesk Community Software is a really good one for this. People can create different conversation threads, ask different questions of each other, answer each other's questions, and you can also integrate it with your customer support. So your customer support teams can come in and do formal answers to questions, although I do recommend that you let your community members talk to each other because that's really what fosters community. And then if you want your community to have a little bit more of a consumer fun feel to it, I recommend you check out Mighty Networks. Mighty Networks is a really awesome way to create community powered brands and engagement. You can create an app, a mobile app, a web app, et cetera. And so every user that you invite into the community gets their own profile page. Community members can follow each other, unfollow each other, direct message each other. There's a feed of information going on. There are polls, Q&A, events, all those things. And you can have a completely white labeled app for a community using Mighty Networks. So the last thing I really want you to think through is should your community be gamified? So I wanna show you some of the results that we had from this crazy five day experiment we ran just for our own clients. So what we did was we created a private community for about 170 of our most recent clients. And we had a couple objectives. So our first objective was to increase engagement amongst our customers and clients. And our second objective was to increase the upsell rate for new packages or for upgrades. So people were currently in an existing package as a client, we wanted them to upgrade to the next one. And we wanted to do a lot of this through gamification incentives. So what we did was we started by writing down a list of the most important actions we needed all of our clients and customers to take. So for example, for us to work with our clients, we need to first have them upload certain documents. And so we wrote that down and assigned certain points to that, that gets four points, that gets five points. We also needed our customers to hit certain milestones. And so we wrote that down and assigned different points to all the different milestones. And then finally we wanted our customers to communicate with each other. And so we put different points on that as well. So we incentivized the most important actions. And what we found was when we added the gamification piece, we saw 3.2 times the engagement of people in the community talking to each other, busying and active. And very interestingly, we saw a 40% increase in upgrades to the next package. Our customers were just there more, they were around more, they were super, super engaged on a different kind of level. And so we were top of mind for them when they thought about the next service that they needed. I wanna show you one more example of a company that's using gamification in a really interesting way. So Fitbit, when they first launched, introduced challenges. They still have challenges. There are a couple more, they've changed them a little bit. But when they first launched, there were about three challenges. There was the weekend hustle challenge. You compete against your friends for who's done the most number of steps over the weekend. Same thing for daily, you can compete with your friends on who's gotten the most number of steps in physical activity in the day. And so they've got all of these challenges and you get points for completing the challenges. There's a leaderboard and badges and all sorts of fun things that you get to do to compete with your friends. And so there's this community. You kind of create, with Fitbit, you create your own community, you bring your friends in to participate into your group and community, but you can also see everybody on the leaderboard. And so what Fitbit found was that when users did the challenge, they were 84% more active with their friends. In other words, they were saying, hey buddy, I'm doing this thing. Hey family, I'm doing this thing. Come do it with me. We should get you a Fitbit too. And it directly increased and boosted their sales because this challenge, this fun game, requires you to bring in your own community. And so what Fitbit is doing is creating these small micro communities of friends and families inside of a larger community. Here's one final example of a company that's doing gamification really well. So on the Moz community, there's something called Moz Points. And you get points for doing different things. Primarily, you get points for creating content in the community. So you might get one point for every thumbs up, if you write a guest blog post or a guest piece of content, all the thumbs up you get, you get a point for that. And you get four points for doing some other activities on the site, all sorts of different things. You get 30 points if your post is good enough to get posted on the Moz blog. And then there are prizes for each benchmark of points that you get, right? So ranging from you get a free t-shirt to you get a free month of Moz Pro to you get a free ticket to MozCon. So they're playing these games and incentives inside of their community. And how Moz uses it is in order to get new content generated on their site. So users are now creating blog posts, they're positioning themselves as experts. It's creating content and it hits a lot of their marketing objectives and goals for them. They've got new content on the site, helps with SEO. And there's a lot of social sharing that's happening as well. So people are seeing articles that they like, sharing it on social media, finding their friends and bringing them back into the community. So I just want to do a recap because we covered a lot of stuff here. Number one, your customers are forming and finding communities with or without you. And so I hope this talk helps you start to think about the ways that you can start to take a little bit of control around that natural activity that your customers are doing and leverage it to your benefit. You know a lot of times I hear people say companies in my industry we don't do communities, it's not a thing we do. I cross that out, it's just not true. And if they're not, you should be the first. And then there are four things that you should really be thinking about when you're thinking about building a community. First of all, should it be public or private? We looked at two different examples. That's the four example is a public community anyone could join. The 500 startups community or the apps without code community that you saw. Private communities only available to existing clients by invitation. Does the community need to be high tech or low tech? Does that really matter? We looked at examples that were high tech and low tech. Low tech being Facebook groups or custom apps that were built without any code with drag, drop, point click editors that have robust logic in the back end. Should our community be social first or content first? We looked at a bunch of different examples there and also I gave you some software tools you should check out. So on the content first side, memberful and member space. On the social side, mighty networks and Zendath community software. And finally I pointed out communities should be gamified. You get lots of really, really great engagement when you incentivize the right actions. This talk is about building communities but above all else it's about rolling up your sleeves and finding low hanging fruit for you to engage your existing customers and use them to hit your most important marketing metrics because powerful brands have communities and they leverage those communities to hit their marketing goals. Thank you.