Hi there! It’s Matt with MessageUp.
This week I’ve spent time thinking about community, communities, and what it means to be an active community member.
Our Houston neighborhood isn’t as close-knit as the one where I grew up in rural England, but we know and support each other, especially in times of need.
As a business owner working primarily from home, I see a big difference between my work community today and the one I grew up in career-wise, which was office-centric and part of a global corporation.
We connect online more frequently than in person. The total group with whom I interact on a regular basis is larger, but the frequency and proximity of those interactions is much lower.
The software we use to sustain those connections has improved markedly thanks to ever-increasing processing power and network bandwidth—not to mention the pandemic-fueled software development frenzy.
Social media has proliferated and become part of everyday life. This doesn’t have to mean you’re glued to TikTok or Facebook—although we all know people who live like that.
LinkedIn, Slack, and lately, Discord, are business-centric platforms that millions of users visit daily.
But do those software platforms and social media networks really fill the void left by our migration from offices with water coolers to remote desks with cameras and headphones?
Where can you turn to find some communal generosity and social welfare, akin to the Community Chest immortalized in the game Monopoly?
Social media is a noisy, cluttered place flooded with low-quality, inauthentic content. It has become increasingly difficult to spot valuable information and to connect with genuine, helpful people.
To restore a sense of community, we need environments where we are assured of meeting like-minded participants whose interests align with our own. Places where we can build trust-based relationships, exchange ideas, share experiences, and offer help.
Done right, online communities are an effective answer to this call.
As I describe in this week’s post on the Framework blog, The Importance of Community Building to Achieving B2B Growth, a properly designed and managed online community creates intentional proximity between participants with common interests and challenges.
This might mean employees, customers, other company stakeholders, or a network of practitioners from across industry.
Effective communities build trust, increase motivation, reduce employee turnover, fuel creativity, and foster innovation. They also send a strong message that the host company recognizes community members’ interests and issues.
Companies that embrace this approach—especially those operating without large central offices—are going to differentiate themselves from those that don’t.
Which brings me to what MessageUp is formulating in this domain…
Launching the B2B Builders Community
We’ve spent a long time thinking how MessageUp might participate in the community building effort.
Our immediate audience—centered on B2B content marketing—is vibrant but likely too small to sustain an active, value-adding online community.
Expanding our horizon, we see a wider group of B2B growth practitioners as our neighborhood—especially those striving to grow small- to mid-sized B2B companies.
This is the audience that the B2B Builders community will serve.
To learn more about B2B Builders, please read this prospectus.
If you have questions, please email us at b2bbuilders@messageup.com.
Clicking on the links embedded in the prospectus will take you to an online application. If you meet our membership criteria (designed to ensure high quality participation when the community launches), you’ll be added to our priority waitlist.
Once we have enough prospective members on the waitlist to ensure a viable community, we will open the community platform itself. Anyone joining from the priority waitlist will be afforded Founder Member status, which will convey membership discounts and VIP status throughout the life of their membership.
Later this week, we will begin sending the prospectus to a wider group of invitees, so act quickly to secure your spot on the priority list. Founder Memberships will only be offered to those who join the list before the community goes live.
And now we wait with great anticipation to see how quickly the waitlist grows!
On paper, our goal is to launch the community by May 1st but, in an ambitious scenario, we hope it will happen much sooner than that…🙂
Reading and Taking Action
This week, our What We’ve Been Reading collection includes articles on:
How lead generation and marketing automation work together.
Creating an emotive content experience.
Producing different types of content across the buyer’s journey.
Building credibility as a B2B thought leader.
I’m a big proponent of creating content that triggers an emotional response in your audience, so Renae Gregoire’s piece is one I definitely recommend you read. If nothing else, use her guidance to start a conversation with your content team about what emotions you’re trying to evoke and how effectively your content achieves that goal.
To round out this week’s edition, my One Step actionable tip encourages you to evaluate the communities of which you’re a member and the contributions you make there.
Happy Leap Day for tomorrow!
I’ll see you back here next Wednesday…
Cheers,
~ Matt
Our Latest Posts on The Framework Blog
Feb 28, 2024 - The Importance of Community Building to Achieving B2B Growth
Feb 21, 2024 - Our 8 Favorite Tactics for B2B Content Marketing
What We’ve Been Reading
Here are some articles we’ve been reading this week that we hope you will enjoy and find valuable:
Lead Generation and Marketing Automation: How They Work Together
This might sound like motherhood-and-apple-pie to seasoned marketers, but it's important for the wider leadership community to understand that lead generation and nurturing still matter—despite countless social media posts to the contrary. Mike Pastore, editorial director at MarTech, does a nice job of summarizing how marketing automation underpins an effective B2B marketing strategy.
Emotional Resonance: The Secret Sales Weapon of Your Marketing Content
This piece by Renae Gregoire, writing for Forbes Small Business, does an excellent job of exploring how an emotive content experience works. She chose a B2C example, but the principles it illustrates are equally applicable to B2B content—which, after all, is fundamentally human-to-human.
Four B2B Content Types and When to Use Them in the Buyer's Journey
Our friend and fellow Houstonian marketer, Libby Covington, writing for Marketing Profs, articulates the importance of producing different content types for buyers at different stages in their buyer's journey. For those wanting to relate this to the MessageUp content marketing framework, Libby calls the Evaluation Stage "Research" and the Selection Stage "Decision Phase", but otherwise her ideas align closely with the way we coach leaders to approach B2B content marketing.
Connecting with Customers and Building Credibility as a B2B Thought Leader
Writing for the Fast Company Executive Board, Bonnie Moss digs into the LinkedIn/Edelman survey finding that B2B decision makers consistently find thought leadership content more effective at communicating potential value than product marketing. She explores how to develop and deliver authentic thought leadership content.
Books on B2B Content Marketing
Secure yourself a copy of Content Marketing: Mission Critical, a guide for B2B CEOs, and Content Marketing: Making the Magic Happen, a guide for B2B marketing leaders, in paperback, e-book, or audiobook format, by visiting www.messageup.com/books. There you’ll find discount codes as well as details on limited edition boxed sets that include copies signed by the author.
One Step…
Today’s One Step actionable tip invites you to reflect on the communities of which you’re a member and to assess the impact of your participation.
Everyone reading this newsletter is a member of numerous communities—not least, the community of MessageUp Substack subscribers!
List as many communities as you can of which you’re a member.
Think about the neighborhood where you live, the social groups you meet with, groups of co-workers, and any online forums and communities that you’ve joined.
Then, grade your level of involvement in each community. This will be a combination of how often you show up and how actively you participate while you’re there.
Which communities do you give and take the most value to and from?
To which might you contribute more fully?
There are never enough hours in the day for us to contribute effectively to as many communities as we might like. Compromises must be made.
So, be realistic about what you can achieve and make an intentional choice to support the communities that are most important to you, while being honest with others about the way you’re choosing to prioritize your time and effort.
Subscribe Today and Recommend Us To Your Network
If you aren’t yet receiving our latest updates in your inbox every Wednesday morning, subscribe today! It’s completely free, and we look forward to welcoming you to our community.
Then, take another thirty seconds and share this newsletter with some of your network, so that they can sign up too.