Would you like to know how to create a micro-community for your customers and learn to leverage community internally with everyone working for your organization?
The power and value of a community should never be underestimated! Building a community will allow you to gain more customers from referrals, provide more value and build long-lasting, impactful, and meaningful connections with people.
Today’s guest is Galem Girmay, the Co-founder of RevGenius. Galem built, developed, and cultivated her community from zero to 5,000 in just 3 months! She is joining us today to talk about the value of community and explain how to create a community internally and externally.
EPISODE NOTES
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Building a community for potential customers within an organization will enhance the diversity of the people joining that community.
You can look at building a community in two ways:
- You can do it internally with the people with whom you work, to build a stronger culture within the organization.
- You can do it externally by building strong relationships with your buyers, clients, or prospects.
It is powerful having a community of buyers and various personas all in one room because they learn from each other. They will gain from the value you provide them with, and they will look to you for guidance.
Creating a community will allow you to help people create networks to build themselves up and become impactful leaders within their industry. You will also gain more customers from referrals and provide even more value.
A virtual community is a community that starts online. After creating either an online or an in-person community, you will need to think about switching and creating a program that will also work the other way.
Some things that will help you when you create a community:
- Build out content for your buyers.
- Build out case studies with those in your communities. (That will give you direct access to your buyers or clients.)
- Provide insights.
Creating a buyer community will allow you to give different types of input to a diverse pool of people from various backgrounds and industries with different strengths and skillsets. It will also give you a different perspective that could help expose any blind spots that you might not have even known existed.
One benefit of having a strong virtual community is connecting with people all over the world and learning from them and their different cultural aspects.
Think about who your audience is and where to find them. Also, consider the different areas they are coming from. (Eg. enterprise, mid-market, or entrepreneurship.)
With all the changes that have been happening globally over the last six months, building a community is critical right now because it will help humanize the experiences that people have been having.
Having an online community helps people think outside of the box to find new ways to connect and build meaningful long-term relationships.
Building different programs for people, and providing them with value and additional resources, is a way to become a go-to thought leader and build long-term relationships in your community space.
Continuing education and exploration becomes a lot easier when you are part of a community.
When putting a large event together, you need to pre-plan and think about how you will support the people after the event. When creating a community, you need to get people into the community and also think about what you can do to hold people’s hands, keep them engaged, and convert them into a buyer, once they are in the community. You can continue to keep people engaged with conversations and content, and you can answer any questions people might have after a webinar in your community.
Galem’s suggestions for milestones when creating an online event:
- Find a platform like Slack to host the event.
- Invite all the speakers and create multiple channels within the platform for all the speakers.
- Get everyone who registers for the event to join a community so that they can get all the event resources and hopefully connect with you to have direct conversations and ask questions.
- Continue with your relationships going forward. That will be beneficial to everyone involved.
- Look at the entire online process from a holistic perspective, and humanize it wherever possible. Creating a micro-community is a great way to humanize the process.
To overcome your fears of starting a community:
- Understand why you are doing it, who you are doing it for, and how to make it happen.
- Think about the format (audio, video, or both) and how you want to present it.
- Keep your thought processes aligned with where you want to go.
- Think about how you can scale it in the future.
Galem’s community focuses on sales, marketing, revops, and leadership. When creating their podcast, they wanted to do things differently. They wanted people to engage and come back to their podcast regularly. So they decided to allow people to attend their recordings in person. They also wanted people to be able to jump in with their questions and get a response immediately, so Chalk.com allowed them to create a community room where people can listen and ask questions.
The biggest mistakes that people tend to make when building a community:
- Not fully understanding the mission and purpose behind the community.
- Not fully understanding what they want the outcome to be.
- Not having all their ducks in a row before launching and going live.
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