In this episode of The Art of Social Media, Tejas Mehta is joined by Mark Schaefer, Executive Director and Keynote Speaker at Schaefer Marketing Solutions. They discuss the power of community-based marketing, how it can help businesses create an emotional connection with customers, and the three distinguishing factors of a community.
Mark Schaefer is a world-renowned keynote speaker, marketing strategy consultant, college educator, and author with over thirty years of experience in the industry. He built his career by helping business leaders rise above the noise to become the signal in a world of overwhelming information density.
Mark is also an Adjunct Marketing Professor at Rutgers University and HARBOUR.SPACE, community leader for $RISE, and bestselling author of nine popular books on marketing. He hosts The Marketing Companion podcast and is a regular contributing columnist to The Harvard Business Review.
He is one of the world’s most popular business-related keynote speakers and is the only person to keynote the annual Social Media Marketing World conference twice. His blog (grow) is often cited in lists of the world’s top marketing blogs.
Part 1: Unleashing the Power of Brand-Led Communities
Episode summary:
In this episode of The Art of Social Media, Tejas Mehta is joined by Mark Schaefer, Executive Director and Keynote Speaker at Schaefer Marketing Solutions. They discuss the power of community-based marketing, how it can help businesses create an emotional connection with customers, and the three distinguishing factors of a community.
Key Highlights:
- 2:56 – 4:04 – Predicting Influencer Marketing – Mark is known for being honest and making bold predictions about trends that often turn out to be true. One such prediction was influencer marketing which he wrote about in 2011 before it became mainstream in 2014.
- 4:05 – 6:57 – Leveraging a Brand-Led Community – Mark’s latest book, Belonging to the Brand, posits that brand-led communities will soon be a popular strategy. Although communities have existed on the internet since its inception, they have mostly failed because they focused on selling products instead of establishing an emotional connection with customers. Despite this, businesses continue to underestimate the marketing potential of brand communities. Mark’s book serves as a wake-up call to seize this opportunity.
- 6:58 – 11:34 – Community as a New Marketing Strategy – Three megatrends collide so that the point of community becomes important as a new marketing strategy. These are: finding new ways to connect with customers because the old ways aren’t working anymore; customers want to connect with you because they’re lonely; the world is giving you new opportunities to bring people together.
- 15:22 – 21:42 – Community Versus Multi-Level Marketing Schemes – Many people confuse between community, social media connections, and the audience of your blog or your podcast. The three distinguishing factors of the community are: people know each other, and there’s a connection between them; a community is purpose-driven; a community is dynamic.
Part 2: The Science Behind a Meaningful, Engaging, and Impactful Community
Episode summary:
In this episode of The Art of Social Media, Tejas Mehta is joined by Mark Schaefer, Executive Director and Keynote Speaker at Schaefer Marketing Solutions. They discuss the importance of nurturing an emotional connection and continuum with a community, how to form a successful community, and future community trends marketers should start leveraging today.
Key Highlights:
- 0:27 – 4:35 – Emotional Connection and Continuum – Having a presence on social media is good. But it is only the beginning of a process. Mark suggests businesses move their connections to an audience and community to create an even stronger emotional connection. This will result in people buying multiple products, writing reviews, promoting them, and helping the business succeed in any way it can. From here, a brand should form a community, which can be an effective form of marketing with no need for ads, SEO, or content marketing. So the emotional continuum is a process of fostering a connection on social media to nurture an audience into a community.
- 4:37 – 7:26 – Building a Successful Community – Creating a community is challenging and requires a lot of time, commitment, and resources. Its success depends on the culture of your business. If your company has a vision that makes people come together and believe in it, you can form a community. So your brand purpose is the main driver for building a successful community. But there is also the measurement perspective, and the most significant measure in a community is engagement.
- 10:05 – 12:52 – Igniting Communities Beyond One Person’s Presence – The number one reason communities fail is that they try to sell something instead of focusing on the individual. So you don’t have that intersection of purpose that gets people to meet. Another problem is that a community can’t get beyond a cult of personality. Think of some activities that ignite the community and where people can interact and get to know each other.
- 12:52 – 15:30 – The Future Community Destination – More and more new communities are being formed in the metaverse, which seems to be the next big community trend. Mark argues that we already see that happening today in the gaming world. For example, one of the most immersive games that make players’ avatars collaborate and work together is Fortnite. Metaverse is where young people are already going, so staying connected with them requires brands to show up in these spaces.
