Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of Marketo’s user community, and the company has created a full week of activities and prizes to celebrate. I think there are a few takeaways to note around building a community, becoming a central hub of helpful information, and motivating users to promote your brand.
The Marketo Community
In case you’re not familiar with Marketo, it is a company and product focused on marketing automation, or as Marketo refers to itself “Revenue Performance Management.” Basically it is web-based software that manages a lead from anonymous visitor throughout the entire sales and marketing process (registration, email nurturing, sync with CRM systems, workflows, etc.). If you’re a marketing professional for a B2B company that does lead acquisition online, you’ve likely used a combination of tools or a Marketo competitor to do the same tasks.
The Marketo Community was launched last year, and the goals were:
“The online Marketo Community was created for customers and partners to collaborate with each other, learn best practices, share tips and tricks, and forge new relationships,” said Heather Watkins, senior manager of customer communities and programs at Marketo. “We could never have predicted the community’s first-year growth would keep pace with Marketo’s own terrific numbers. Through the Marketo Community, businesses of all sizes learn from one another and help us continue to innovate the Marketo product suite.”
Let’s unwrap that from a couple of different perspectives:
- As a marketer - The community helps answer questions about using the Marketo software and gives marketers the opportunity to exchange ideas about topics broader than simply using the software.
- From Marketo’s Perspective – The community lets users find help in a self-service model rather than simply contacting support, gathers feedback for their product roadmap, and creates loyalty through creating experts on their own community site. Brilliant.
Becoming A Central Hub of Helpful Information
A proponent of the “create gobs of useful content” inbound marketing strategy, Marketo is constantly adding content to their site. And rather than simply creating content that asks the questions that their software answers, Marketo spends a good deal of time on content that doesn’t just explicitly plug their product. For instance, they do studies on email deliverability rates. Sure, that’s tangentially relevant to their product, but it’s not a shameless plug. Instead, it gives data to a question that every marketer wonders “Are my emails getting to my leads?”.
Using the community site, Marketo is then able to quickly disseminate their content to those members that are looking for the data. Rather than looking around for information in many locations, community users simply log in, and the discussion forums and articles are available in one spot.
I think this is a huge takeaway for marketers in early stage and emerging companies: don’t just create content focused on the immediate sale. Think of your own buying behavior. If you’re going to buy a big ticket item, you’ll probably spend some time looking around and doing research. In this phase, you’re probably not ready for the hard sale yet, but you’d definitely be willing to look at content that answers the questions you have that are related to the problem you’re trying to solve.
In the Marketo example, they’re trying to build content for marketers rather than building only content for marketers looking for marketing automation software. Sure, they have that. But they understand that not everyone is ready to buy this second. Because of that, they’re willing to give you information you can use that second, and maybe you’ll come back over and over again. And maybe you’ll remember them when you’re actually looking to buy.
Motivating Users to Promote Your Brand
This is the Holy Grail of Marketing: getting your customers/users to promote your brand for you. And it is so hard to do and so easy to seem manipulative and inauthentic. In fact, the only real way to do it is by creating something they want to share with others.
In general, Marketo has done this by creating content worth sharing and giving users motivation to do so. For instance, in the birthday promotion, they’ve offered prizes to the most retweeted tweet (motivation for viral sharing), the most creative video (users creating content for the brand for legitimacy), and the best blog post (more content talking about the brand). And they’ve got some pretty nice prizes for a promotion that is timed to coincide with the holidays:
To Sum It Up
If you’re a marketer at a startup that is looking to build a community, look at what Marketo has done to build a community, establish expert members within that community, motivate users to promote the brand, and give them reasons to create promotional content.
If you’re a marketer using Marketo’s software, take a look around the community; there’s more than just stuff about using the software (but there’s helpful info on that as well).
Disclosure: this post was submitted as an entrant in the Marketo Community Contest described here.
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