The Community Flywheel: The Next Marketing Revolution Is Here
Join the Movement: How Community-Based Marketing is Reshaping Everything
“The “big idea” in 2020s marketing is community—reaching consumers in the communities they are a part of and helping them express community membership by participating in your brand.” McKinsey & Co. Sept 2022
We have entered a new era.
Shifts in technology and consumer behaviour have unlocked a new realm of marketing.
That realm is Community Based Marketing.
Definition: Community Based Marketing (CBM)
“Community Based Marketing (CBM) is bringing people together around a shared practice, purpose, place, product or set of circumstances to create insights and closer, more valuable relationships with prospects, customers and other stakeholders to deliver organisational value."
The fastest growing consumer brands over the past decade have already been playing by these new rules.
Think brands like Gymshark, Ganni and Represent who have not just built fashion labels - they have built armies of brand-loyal super-fans.
It’s no coincidence that these brands are using community as the core of their visual identity across social media now.
They did this by turbo-charging the most powerful machine in this new era of marketing, The Community Flywheel.
In today’s newsletter I’ll explain to you why no matter who you are - a digital creator, a solopreneur, a start-up, or an iconic enterprise brand; your ability to build and master this machine will make or break your business over the next 10 years.
The History Of Marketing
First a little history to set the context of where we find ourselves.
There have been 3 main era’s in marketing.
The Mass Media Era - Broadcasting
The Personalisation Era - Targeting
The Community Era - Engaging
1. The Mass Media Era - Broadcasting
In this era, businesses used the megaphone effect - via billboards, TV, film, print and the early internet to spray advertisements into thee world. The spray-and-pray approach. The Mad Men days - iconic, but outdated in today’s modern world.
2. The Personalisation Era - Targeting
In this era, businesses were able to start using targeting through data rich social platforms like Facebook and Instagram to feed people advertisements based on their online behaviours and demographics.
For a while, in the early years between 2010 and 2015, this was an ultra-profitable cheat code.
Ad costs were super cheap, and the cost to acquire a new customer were negligible.
But with the advent of democratising ecommerce platforms like Shopify, and third-party logistics (3PL) solutions, the competition for new customer eyeballs ramped up super fast.
It’s now taken us to the point in the early 2020’s that the cost to acquire a new customer through paid traffic sources like Facebook Ads have become unreliable, non-profitable, and for many small businesses just an impossibility.
So, to combat the rising costs of acquiring new customers, businesses are going to have to look after the other side of the profit equation - lifetime value.
Enter, the third era of marketing:
3. The Community Era - Engaging
We have now entered The Community Era, an era where emotional resonance, will be the most critical factor in determining the success of brands over the next decade.
The AI and broader technological revolution we have seen over the past few years - the main one being ‘no-code’ SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions allowing anyone with an idea, to build a SaaS solution, have removed the massive advantage that the world’s biggest brands have always had.
This revolution is exactly the reason the most famous family on planet Earth - The Kardashians, have become a conglomerate of mega-brands.
So, how does this work?
The Community Flywheel
Brands, retailers and creators must now master The Community Flywheel to remain competitive in a world where ‘attention’ is the most valuable currency.
The Community Flywheel is made up of 4 x Elements:
Understanding your Dream Customer
Hero Products
Stories
Engaging Content
Sprinkle in:
Agile working methodologies (moving fast)
Artificial Intelligence solutions
Cutting-edge marketing platforms and solutions
A deep love for analytics
and those creators, brands and solopreneurs who are able to build this Community Flywheel machine will be the ones that win.
There are BIG gains to be made from mastering the flywheel.
Brands that kill the Community Flywheel Game can expect:
More than 75 percent of content about the brand is user generated.
Influencer engagement rate (the percentage of viewers who go on to like, comment, or share the content) is greater than 2%.
More than 4% of online traffic is converted to sales.
Brand-related posts by either the brand or a consumer go viral at least twice a year (triggered, in some cases, by marketing support).
So now you know how powerful it is, let’s dig into how it works.
1. Community focus: Target the whole, not just the one
Step 1 is to move from segments based on demographics and need states to segments based around communities that have shared interests and relevance.
Brands need to truly understand their priority communities by gathering insights on:
why their members participate in them,
how they feel about the brand’s products,
what their unmet needs are,
how they like to be spoken to, and
what drives them to purchase and where.
Think - Yoga Enthusiasts in London, Vegan Parents, Teenage Beauty Enthusiasts.
One global haircare brand carried out an analysis of its user communities to find a new niche of users who were proactive about preventing animal cruelty, allowing the company to include cruelty-free messaging and content for those users
Achieving this level of understanding requires a strong consumer-insights function with a cultural-anthropology orientation.
A good understanding of the community will help the brand communicate well and generate an emotional response, which is ultimately what triggers a long-lasting relationship between the brand and the consumer; as positive emotions become deeply rooted, consumers develop permanent favorable associations with the brand.
We have seen more and more brands launch communities of platforms like Discord over the past 2 years, giving them a much more intimate and personal two-way communication and engagement medium as opposed to the predominantly one-way broadcast medium of platforms like TikTok or Instagram.
Global brands like Manchester United, Nike, Adidas, Porsche, Lacoste and dozens of others are being able to access a level of engaged consumer analytics that they have never had access to before.
Creating online locations for them to forge much deeper connections with their customers and audience.
If you are a digital creator, an online educator of a solopreneur, the most important thing that you can do right now, is learn how to launch, manage and grow a community that you own.
Currently, the only way you can TRULY own your customer base or audience is via an email list.
Couple an email list with a branded, personalised Discord Community, then you have a foundation of a Community Flywheel set!
We’ve been playing around building Discord communities for the past couple of years now at Unorthodox - in our opinion it is the greatest community building platform currently available.
Once you have your community location set, and have a crystal clear idea of who your ideal community member is, it’s time to make their lives better with your best products!
2. Hero products: Be laser focused on the buzzworthy
Brands should focus their engagement efforts on a few distinctive products that are designed to create buzz.
Having such “hero products” is key, because without them, the online world can be confusing to consumers, who tire more easily of scrolling through online shops than they do of browsing in stores.
Brands looking to promote their killer products may consider a number of actions:
saturating their communication channels (both online and offline) with talk about the product
investing in experiential interactions, such as pop-up stores or events where customers can try out a product
amplifying the product by sharing free products or discount codes with influencers
launching interactive marketing tools through which consumers can sample the product digitally
making sure the hero products are easily discoverable online, perhaps by prominently featuring “what to try first” products or highlighting their most successful products (“what we’re famous for”)
For digital creators or solopreneurs - this doesn’t need to be complex.
You need a middle-of-the-road product, with an accessible pricepoint that has ability to scale with almost no increase in efforts required to deliver the product.
The best example is an on-demand pre-recorded video course - creators such as Justin Welsh (The LinkedIn OS), Dan Koe (2-Hour Writer), Dickie Bush & Nicholas Cole (Ship 30 For 30), are amazing examples of solopreneurs that have driven millions of dollars in revenue over the past 3 years from just a single digital product.
As someone that has paid for these courses, the one takeaway is that you leave the course feeling like you’ve just got a bargain.
If you are a digital creator or solopreneur aiming to package your unique skillsets and experience into an online course - you need to pack that sucker with so much value that it makes you feel sick giving so much away.
Why?
Because once I had finished Justin Welsh’s and Dan Koe’s courses, I IMMEDIATELY told someone else about it.
In the Community Flywheel - happy customers are the aim, and referrals are the game.
So once you have your Hero Product created, packaged, and ready for your new wave of raving customers about to turn into community members, you need to do the next thing….find them!
3. Talkable and credible brand story: Be outspoken about brand values
Your life.
Your path.
Your journey.
Your stories.
Your brand, either as a business or a solopreneur needs to be based around your niche - you.
You are your own niche.
Your products, your reasons, your vision, your experiences, all provide you with something no-one can compete with - your unique story.
Just as the brand’s target community should be specific, brand stories should be targeted, reflect the language the community uses, and be simple yet compelling enough that customers want to share them.
Messaging SHOULD be provocative, tapping into deeply held ideals in specific communities, and the founder or other high-profile executive will likely want to stand at the heart of the brand and communicate with consumers.
So how does one write stories?
If you are a brand, solopreneur or digital creator, what stories should you tell?
Easy.
I learned this from Dickie Bush.
Think back over the past two years and everything you have learnt.
List it all.
Everything.
Now you need to write.
Turn each of those lessons in to long form content (blog and newsletters) and break down those long form pieces into shorter pieces of actionable content in the form of tweets, tweet threads, short videos and carousel posts.
Sounds easy?
It is - but it starts by sitting down and listing stuff.
Once you have stories to tell - you need to position the stories with an aim to take your dream customer and future community member on a journey.
At all times people are on a journey.
Either a journey away from pain.
Or a journey towards pleasure (desire).
Each of your stories much highlight either a clear pain point or a wanted desire.
The story must focus around that pain point, the journey you went on to get over that pain, and end up by painting a clear picture of how you reached your desire (ideally by painting a picture of pleasure).
Now, this methodology can be easily showcased by a common online business creator niche I call The Lambo Boys:
Pain
I was poor
I had a single parent
I masturbated too much
Journey
I learnt Dropshipping
I learnt how to trade Forex
I learnt how to trade shit-coins
Pleasure
I started making $1m per month
I bought a Lambo
I no longer masturbate
It’s a simple formula, but no doubt you will have seen a Lambo Boy on Instagram using that exact framework in either a short video or carousel of images post.
It works.
So once you have told your stories and managed to convert an audience member into a paying customer, now it’s time for the part that is alien to most people used to the one-way conversation of social platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
4. Engaged and active community: Fuel the conversation
Brands need to earn the attention of the communities they’ve targeted through their hero products and their brand story.
But they also need to fuel those conversations with a continual stream of exciting and engaging content that consumers and influencers can latch on to.
This isn’t rocket science though.
What do people want?
They want one of three things:
Entertainment
Knowledge
Access
Online community platforms like Discord are the perfect place to provide ALL of those things.
So let’s break down what that could look like for a Fashion Digital Creator.
Entertainment
Exclusive VIP Content
VIP GRWM LIVE Videos
VIP Behind The Scenes Videos
VIP Guest Videos & LIVES
Knowledge
Exclusive VIP Content
Masterclasses
Q&As
Online Sponsored Branded Masterclasses
Access
Exclusive VIP Access
VIP Only LIVE Video Sessions
VIP Only Discounts
VIP Only Giveaways
VIP Only Raffles and Prizes
I used VIP a lot, but all this is - is an incentive to convert a casual customer or community member in to a super-fan.
Transformative Web3 technology has provided easy solutions to help brands segment audiences or customers into tiers - allowing a seamless way to “token-gate” access to things like private channels in Discord communities.
We are still in the early stages of this, but brands like Nike, Starbucks and Manchester United have already proven how profitable and engaging a “token-economy” can be.
Nike made just under $200m through their digital collectibles ecosystem in 2022, and people have already been selling their Starbucks Odyssey “journey stamps” for thousands of dollars.
Manchester United have crushed it with their ‘digital access key’ economy of digital collectibles which have provided an incredibly engaging and gamified approach to incentivising levels of access to their online community.
The engagement piece doesn’t have to be complex - it can be as simple as creating a few pieces of VIP content each week.
The key is that you have to give your community a reason to stay engaged.
So, now it’s time for you to start building your Community Flywheel!
Understand your Dream Customer - spend LOADS of time understanding your dream customer, their ambitions, their goals, their dreams and their aspirations.
Hero Products - build your core Hero Product
Stories - tell stories from your past that can help your dream customers relate to your journey and want a piece of it themselves
Engaging Content - differentiate casual fans from super-fans by providing tiers of engaging content and experiences.
Have fun!
Tom