July 26, 2010

How to Build & Sell through a Community (Series)

I seem to have a thing for doing courses. I also love building communities, not just because I enjoy interacting but because they convert incredibly well when you play your cards right. Communities don’t have to be huge, I’ve steadily built this blog into a community and the discussions happen over here, Hacker News, Twitter, Facebook and more.

It seems every time I interact with a customer we talk about creating a community so I’ve decided to do a weekly blog series and create a blueprint for a small business owner to create a community. Where possible I’ll leverage my network and give you some real life examples too. It’s going to take a few posts but the end result will be worth it. A final word; I want this to be collaborative. Email, tweet and comment feedback on what I’ve missed, what you liked, didn’t like and what you would like to see more of. I do respond actively to feedback & criticism.

Week One: Introduction

Before we dive into the nitty gritty I thought it prudent to do a quick introduction on the three key areas and concepts that will make up the substance (and I take any excuse to make a pretty graph). No doubt the graph will expand and more will be introduced as we continue creating a blueprint. It was difficult to drill things down to only 3 steps but I feel everything else is easily encapsulated in these three.

Form a Community

You need something to identify leads and interact with people. Be it Search, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other digital concotion a community is an important first step. Within this step it is clearly important to identify Who you want to talk to, Why you want to talk to them, What you will say and How you will close them.

Some of the important stages in this step:

  • Define target market, message and channels
  • Begin design of Sales funnel
  • Competitive Analysis: What is everybody else doing?
  • What is my differentiator?
  • Creating a content schedule
  • Cultivating communities

Generate Leads

Now we have a community with some solid content. People are visiting, tweeting, liking, commenting, emailing or hitting us by search. What do we do next? Use our sales funnel to convert them. Not everybody who visits your page buys. Your competitors will be dropping by (whether they admit it or not is another thing), interested passers-by will say hello as well as those who  may not buy in 12 months. The beauty of communities is once you create content there is a minute marginal cost of reaching new individuals.

Some of the things we will cover in this step are:

  • Filling a sales funnel with real data
  • Tactics to convert community members to leads
  • Tactics to convert leads to sales
  • What works and what doesn’t
  • Creating a non-intrusive promotions schedule

Increase Conversions

Believe it or not, here is where most of my work as a Consultant comes from. Individuals have already created a Facebook Page, a Twitter or an Adwords campaign but do not feel they are seeing performance. Once you have real data it is important to sit down and look at what worked, what didn’t and what can be improved for next time. Perhaps our ‘buy it now’ box was not big enough or we lost 80% of our leads at one step. The data doesn’t lie and can potentially increase your sales by multiple percentage points next time around.

Some of the things we will cover:

  • How to read analytics and identify important data
  • How to act upon important data
  • A/B Testing
  • Re-starting campaigns

What did you think? Do you agree with my 3 key areas? Anything specific you would like to be covered? Drop me a comment below.