Laura Zug: Okay, so we're back to me. This is where I'm going to put my marketing hat on for you guys. And I want you to think about your community serving a bit as a flywheel. And here's what I mean by that. Focus for just a second on everything that's on the right side of this graph. So the light blue circle that says community, your community.
is the most powerful voice of customer tool that you have. If you have a product or a typical, global brand, you're paying market for market research and analytics to get that voice of customer. Whereas a community just they're actually paying you. Maybe not if you have a brand community, but you get what I mean.
You, this is so powerful and what you can learn from those community members. I just made a couple of things, feedback, insights, preferences. Expectations, needs, challenges, fears, satisfaction, sentiment, opinions, priority, behavior, all of that. is knowledge that you can use as you're talking with your audience, which is represented by the dark blue circle.
And what will happen is people in your messaging will become more and more fine tuned and your audience will think. How did she know she's in my head. I, this is exactly what I need. No one's ever vocalized my need so clearly. And that's coming because you're literally taking a question that someone may be posing in your community.
And then going out and maybe your social media number two on the blue side and saying. You might be wondering, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, have you ever thought, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you're not calling out that member and from your community, but you're actually using what they're asking and saying to fill your content calendar and create your content pillars.
Does that make, is that making sense? If it's not making sense, please, like someone say something. But. So that's like the overarching message of what I want to communicate here with these two with this flywheel. And then I want to say that there really are some key things that are, I think, are critical that we do to market and advertise our communities.
And they are, this is not an exhaustive list, but having a website. Or at least a landing page, and then once that's going, optimize for SEO. So that's number one, a social media channel, it can be one, it could be two, unless you have a big team. I would recommend keeping it narrow and really drill down on where your audience is and choose that wisely.
Number three, collaborations. These are so important. In fact, this is how the community accelerator and these tutorials came into being that Bri and I met in July about something we noticed wasn't being talked about, which was what in the heck you should do when you want to get your community off Facebook and into the hearth or into an all in one platform.
We were going to write an article and it has led to where we are today. But collaborating with someone else can help your reach and you can tap into their audience. So for example, I'm on podcasts a lot. the people who are listening to those podcasts, like those people are not on my list, but it would take me a really long time or I'd have to spend a lot of ad dollars to find those people.
Whereas I could go in for an hour and give a webinar or serve on someone's podcast to help them and grow my audience. And then the last piece is. Your email marketing. So thinking about how you want to use your email wisely. Maybe you have a sub stack. Maybe you have medium, but think about your blog posts.
And then we're going to transition to the next. topic. But the last thing is I cannot overstate how important one to one reach out is. So you can do all of these things on the dark blue circle, but getting those first 100 members is a bit like dragging people over the threshold. So if you feel like there's a lot of manual effort, In getting those first 100 members, I am here to say, just keep going.
It is going to get easier and it's totally normal for it to feel hard. Okay. We're we are moving right along. Okay. There's some questions on the next, but we're going to flip over these. These are in your guide. And there we go.