Meet the Community Growth Experts
Can you imagine connecting Rebecca Marshburn, Head of Community at Common Room and Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing at Clay? Yep, that happened at RevCon 2024! This session is the community-led growth playbook in a nutshell. With examples, strategies, and steps you can take to level up your GTM. Watch the recording or get the full recap below!
Community in GTM
When community efforts align with a company’s go-to-market strategy, it can create a powerful feedback loop that drives customer engagement and directly influences business growth. Clay, a product-led company, leverages its community to enhance product usage and engagement. Their community initiatives aren’t just about building a space for users but about driving active participation that influences the product’s adoption and evolution.
How Clay Uses Community to Drive Business Growth
Bruno provided a detailed look into Clay’s approach:
- PLG (Product-Led Growth) Motion: Clay’s self-serve product encourages users to explore and build workflows. The community’s role is to support these users by sharing best practices, helping solve problems, and showcasing successful use cases. This process not only helps users gain confidence but also fosters a sense of ownership and pride, which naturally boosts engagement.
- Building a Partner Ecosystem: Bruno highlighted that Clay’s community includes a growing partner ecosystem of agencies and freelancers. By empowering these partners—who find a product-market fit with Clay’s offerings—Clay drives deeper product integration and loyalty. Partners who thrive using Clay’s tools often become product evangelists, creating a positive feedback loop for growth.
- Tactical Programs for Engagement:
- Global Meetups: To facilitate deeper connections, Clay launched over 30 community meetups across cities like New York, Paris, and London. These in-person events connect community members who are at similar stages in their business journeys, fostering collaboration and deeper engagement with the product.
- Creator and Expert Programs: Clay incentivizes members to become product experts, encouraging them to build and share workflows. These members can progress through tiers—starting as creators, advancing to experts, and eventually becoming enterprise partners—deepening their involvement and business impact.
Measuring Success in Community Programs
One of the key takeaways from the session was the need for metrics that align with different types of community programs:
- Revenue-Centric Metrics: Some programs, like Clay’s experts and agency partnerships, are tied directly to revenue generation. Clay tracks how these partnerships influence business growth and measures their success through attribution models.
- Engagement-Focused Metrics: Other initiatives, such as the global meetups, are measured by community engagement rather than direct revenue. Metrics include NPS (Net Promoter Score), event attendance, and month-over-month growth. Bruno emphasized the importance of tracking these non-revenue KPIs to assess the long-term impact of community programs.
The Shift From Audience to Community
Rebecca explained the importance of shifting from an audience-focused approach to a community-driven strategy. While audiences consume content, communities engage and participate, creating a more dynamic relationship with the brand. She highlighted how community members not only learn about the product’s “why” but also share knowledge about the “how”—how to effectively use the product to achieve their goals.
Common Room’s Approach to Community Intelligence
Rebecca shared insights into Common Room’s approach to integrating community intelligence into broader GTM motions. Common Room started by centralizing second-party signals—gathering and analyzing data from social channels, community forums, and chat platforms like Slack, Discord, and LinkedIn. The goal was to create a unified view of how individuals engage with a brand across multiple touchpoints.
Key types of signals integrated by Common Room:
- First-Party Signals: Internal data like website visits, CRM activity, and product usage.
- Second-Party Signals: Social media activity, community interactions, and engagement on public forums.
- Third-Party Signals: Additional context, such as job listings, company tech stack information, and company news that could impact engagement and purchasing decisions.
By unifying these signals, Common Room provides a comprehensive view of an individual’s interactions and sentiment, enabling companies to personalize and optimize their engagement strategies.
The Role of RevOps and Marketing Ops
Bruno and Rebecca discussed the critical role of RevOps and Marketing Ops teams in orchestrating these community and intelligence-driven strategies. These teams work behind the scenes to set up systems, automate processes, and analyze data, enabling front-line teams like SDRs, sales reps, and customer success managers to act on insights effectively.
Types of teams using community intelligence:
- RevOps and Marketing Ops: These teams build workflows, automate plays, and centralize data to optimize community engagement.
- Sales and SDR Teams: Equipped with insights from community data, these teams can better understand the context and relevance of potential opportunities, enabling more targeted outreach.
- Customer Success Teams: They leverage intelligence to enhance retention and expansion efforts, ensuring that they have a full understanding of customer sentiment, product usage, and historical interactions.
Strategies For Growing a B2B Community
When discussing actionable strategies for B2B community growth, Bruno emphasized:
- Centralizing Communication Channels: Whether it’s Slack, Discord, or another platform, centralizing communication helps create a hub where users can interact and engage directly with the brand. This approach ensures that the community remains engaged and that communication is streamlined.
- Developing Tiered Programs: Clay’s approach involves guiding users from initial engagement (e.g., joining the community) to deeper involvement (e.g., becoming a creator, then an expert, and finally an enterprise partner). This tiered system allows for growth and recognition within the community, encouraging members to increase their involvement and commitment over time.
Rebecca added that community-building efforts should go beyond digital interactions. In-person meetups provide opportunities for members to connect, network, and collaborate in a meaningful way, helping to solidify relationships and drive deeper product adoption.
The Evolution of Community Roles in Startups
Both Bruno and Rebecca noted that the types of roles involved in managing community-driven growth evolve as startups scale:
- Early Stage: In smaller startups, growth and community strategies are often managed by demand gen or growth marketers who wear multiple hats, setting up systems, testing plays, and directly engaging with users.
- Scaling Up: As the company grows, specialized roles like RevOps, Marketing Ops, and GTM Systems teams emerge. These roles focus on orchestrating community and marketing efforts, ensuring that the tools and data are set up correctly to support growth at scale.
Key Steps for B2B Community Growth
- Centralize communication: Establish a central platform for community interaction to foster engagement and streamline communication.
- Build tiered programs: Develop programs that guide users from basic engagement to advanced involvement, creating pathways for them to grow within the community.
- Leverage in-person engagement: Supplement digital efforts with in-person meetups to deepen relationships and boost product adoption.
- Empower ops teams: Invest in RevOps and Marketing Ops teams to set up systems and automate processes, enabling front-line teams to act on community insights effectively.
If you’re interested in partnering with the RevGenius community, chat with us! If you missed the session, catch the recording and make sure to join our upcoming webinars!