Hosted by Araminta Robertson, 'Market like a fintech' is the new podcast for fintech marketing professionals and enthusiasts who want to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry, and level up their marketing knowledge. Subscribe here to never miss an episode.
Community, community, community.
Everyone in the marketing world is talking about it. Even everyone in the fintech world seems to be talking about it.
A combination of the pandemic, going online and even crypto seemed to have weirdly brought us together with the power of online communities.
But what does community really mean? If you’re a founder or marketer, should you be trying to build a community to attract and retain customers? And what does a successful community look like?
Today, we explore answers to those questions with our guest, Graham McBain. Graham is the community manager at Moov, a B2B payments API company. He’s in charge of the Moov Slack community, which currently has over 2,500 members, is super active, and by all measures, a success.
Communities are hard to build. The time and energy commitment is high, but the reward and upside is infinite. In this episode, we dive deep into how Graham went about growing the Slack community, how he maintains it, and his own thoughts on the future of community.
On the topic of community, we’ve just launched our own Slack group for fintech marketers. That’s right, a Slack community where you can meet other fintech marketers and founders, engage in group discussions with industry experts and chat about upcoming podcast episodes. Join us now here.
Listen to Graham's complete interview below.
A huge part of my job is connecting people with either resources or other people.
Key takeaways:
The key to growing a successful community - You can't fake community. If you're really trying to just market and hard sell, it is just obvious, and no one would want to join. In order to gain someone's trust, you often have to sacrifice something...[in the case of community, that might be money (direct sales) or time].
One of the first things I did was create a code of conduct for the community. And big part of this is the "No selling" rule, no DMs. I hid all emails, so that nobody can just click on someone's profile and grab their email. Because that's another channel that I can't control. And then just empowering people to say, if somebody's DM-ing you, let me know and I'll ban them.
Really good quality content, great slack engagement and in-person events are probably our three pillars of what would make our community valuable.
A community requires commitment - I'm the first person to reply to basically everything. And that's a huge deal. There needs to be feedback...as soon as somebody comes in, they need to get feedback. Because if they don't, they'll just assume that it's not for them, or they said something wrong. Joining a community is a scary thing for people. It's like walking into a circle on the playground, and nobody recognising that you're there, right? And so it's important to have someone in that circle whose job is to look that person in the face and go, "Hey, I see you welcome. What can I do for you?", so that they feel like they belong. So that is super important.
It's very important to have that personal human element.
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Pick a fast-moving topic or niche - If you want to build a community around a specific subject or topic, it has to be subjective and fast-moving. Because if not, people will use other more reliable sources.
For more interesting insights, listen to Graham's complete interview below.
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