What community marketing is and why your startup needs it

Photo credit: Tribesh Kayastha

Jackie is a TIA Star Contributor and publishes high-value content that serves the Asian tech community. Read more from TIA Star Contributors here.

Startup marketing is hard.

While using all your resources on acquiring customers seems like the most sensible strategy, customer acquisition can be costly. But there is a way that many startups can grow their businesses sustainably: community marketing.

If you’ve never heard of it, this is a marketing strategy that focuses on the needs of existing customers (instead of prospective ones) actively and non-intrusively.

Big names like Starbucks and Nike use this approach, but startups have done this too. For example, CommonBond (a startup that helps students cope with their student loans) welcomes new borrowers with a welcome package that contains a handwritten card, a custom T-shirt, and a hand-picked gift based on their interest. The startup also organizes events to connect their borrowers.

MangoPlate (a Korean restaurant information platform) also attributes most of its current growth to community marketing. The startup runs offline events for fans (bloggers and foodies) for two main reasons: to get real and valuable feedback on how to improve their platform and increase exposure through word-of-mouth.

Two types of community marketing

1. Organic: Organic community marketing (or earned marketing) happens without the brand’s help. It works to connect and strengthen relationships between community members to create product stickiness for better customer loyalty.
2. Sponsored: In sponsored community marketing, the company is directly involved. Companies can sponsor time and money into promoting the well-being of a specific community in society. This can come in the form of corporate social responsibility.

As we wrote in a previous article, “The point of community marketing is to identify the natural communities that are attracted to the brand, philosophy, product, or service and then focusing the efforts and resources on nurturing this community to grow.”

Why do community marketing?

For startups with little manpower and capital, not focusing on performance marketing may seem like a non sequitur. But, as is evident by now, customer retention is more lucrative than acquisition.

This has been referenced many times by big names in the industry. According to Gary Vaynerchuk, for example, increasing your customer retention by 5 percent can increase your profits by up to 95 percent.

Bill Lee, an expert on customer advocacy and the author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers, seems to think the same. According to him, after a customer completes a purchase, there are many other customer value propositions. Firms can reinvent their relationship with their customer by transforming them into “advocates, influences, and contributors.”

So, with retention being the new marketing objective, it makes sense (and cents) for startups with small capital to maximize their customer lifetime values.

Since startups also have small teams, community marketing can help you “hire” your customer as your product advisor and sales people. The strategy involves interacting with your customers closely. This means you receive valuable feedback on how to improve your services and word-of-mouth marketing.

How to do community marketing right

Conclusion