c2c marketing

Brittany Caldwell joins us on the podcast to chat about her role as Head of Community & Events Marketing at Webflow. She has over 13 years of experience building communities and has previously worked for companies like GitHub and Atlassian. On today’s episode, we cover her top strategies to kickstart a community with little to no budget, why she chooses to look at community like a product, and how she grew her user community over 114% in less than a year.

Ben Winn of Catalyst Software joins the podcast to discuss his role as Community & Events Manager at the company. Ben recently joined the Catalyst team and we chatted further about his strategy to start making an impact at a new organization immediately, why you should separate growth and success when measuring the health of your community and how he is approaching event strategy during COVID-19.

Valentina Ruffoni joins the podcast from Madrid. She is the Founder and Host of the CMX Connect Madrid chapter as well as the Founder of Eat Out Madrid, a 7000 member community of foodies. We talk about Valentina’s unique strategies for growing a team of community leaders, how to approach event sponsorships, along with how she has adapted her events during the pandemic.

Tina Roth Eisenberg, the founder and CEO of CreativeMornings, joins us today. She currently oversees a worldwide chapter-based organization that brings creative professionals together monthly for community and learning. We talk about the challenges of adapting creative-based in-person events to a virtual platform, consistently maintaining connection and empathy with community members in a time of stress and how reaching new audiences is now possible.

Todd Connor who is Founder and CEO at Bunker Labs. Bunker Labs is a chapter-based organization that helps military veterans start and grow businesses. In today’s interview with Todd, we will talk about the strategy behind different types of events, metrics for community growth and adapting your in-person events during COVID-19.

Our next guest is Mindy Day who is currently the Senior Community Manager at Patreon. She has worked as a community builder for over 7 years for brands like Imgur. Today we are going to talk about how to actually measure trust in a brand through community, the path of becoming an engaged member and so much more. Take a listen!

Nicole Saunders is our guest in this episode, she is the Manager of Community Engagement at Zendesk. She oversees all of its community programs to help set strategy, define policy and promote their support communities to their users. Today, we’ll be discussing how to get support internally for your community, how she looks at growth and how she’s adjusting her strategy during COVID-19.

Adrian Cohn of Smartling stops by the podcast this week. As the Director of Brand Strategy and Communications at Smartling, a B2B language translation company, Adrian started as an Operations Analyst at Smartling almost 5 years ago. Now he oversees brand and creative for the whole company. We’re going to talk about community’s role in growing a brand, adjusting your community strategy with COVID-19 and much more.

The future of education is becoming more and more remote. Few know that more than our next guest, Kelly Neilson who is a Community Growth Manager at Lambda School. Lambda School teaches people the tech skills they need to launch a new career in just 9 months. The whole program is completely remote. We will talk with Kelly about how she grew their C2C community to over 50 chapters and why bringing your customers together is so important with remote learning. Take a listen!

Udemy has over 24 million students and over 100,000 courses, James Dunbar who is the Senior Manager of Community Programs & Strategy at Udemy shared with us how they look at community and support their huge base of online instructors. The instructors on Udemy are key to the company’s success, without incredible courses in areas where students want to learn students won’t use Udemy. That’s why they have focused a lot of their community efforts to support the instructors, that’s where James focuses his efforts. What we’ve seen over all the episodes of The C2C Podcast is the most successful (and most funded) community programs do a great job of tying back to business goals. James shared a way of accomplishing this that we hadn’t heard of before which seemed like it could really be powerful. Most will find a way to tie back metrics like revenue, churn, customer support requests in whatever software is used to track those metrics. Of course, there are many variables that go into making those metrics improve so the needs of the sales, support and other departments aren’t always the same. James will get coffee with key people in those departments and ask them “What are some problems you are running into right now?” and see if the community can help. He figured out after talking with the person who is running social that she needed help creating more content, James knew the community could help. He turned to the community to help create user-generated content and it was a huge success. This method is pretty manual but the brilliant part about it is it allows you to change your focus if a larger area of opportunity arises for the community to impact the company. Another tactic that we talked about that we don’t normally cover is appointment content. This is anything that is scheduled like a live webinar or Q&A that is a great way to constantly activate the community. If it was just a video or helpful piece of content there is no urgency, the fact that it’s scheduled makes the community activate. James is someone who has worked at a 2 person startup and a 500 person company, community helps at every stage.

We usually talk with community managers on the show, the boots on the ground that sadly usually aren’t the decision makers on budgets and what programs get greenlit and which don’t. Luckily for us we’ll hear from Sydney Sloan who has not only built community programs from scratch but she is also now the CMO of SalesLoft giving her the unique vantage point of seeing knowing how to build these programs and knowing what is needed to get approval from the C Suite (which we talk about in the episode). Too Long; Didn't Listen Being a CMO, Sydney knows what it takes to get buy-in from the C-Suite to get funding. She shared how when she was at Adobe an executive wanted to take their Java Developer community from 1500 to 1 million developers. The audacious goal was helpful and she backed it up with strategy, she aggressively tackled both online and offline community. She found local ambassadors and made sure the company equipped them with what they needed to run events and spread the word. When it comes to building your in-person community try to go deep with the small handful of your most passionate ambassadors. If you have 2 amabadours in Japan and London meet with them, understand the differences in their culture and their needs. If you get a large group of ambassadors it’s actually good to focus on your top 5 or 10 before scaling up, better to serve a small group deeply then a large group poorly. When it comes to metrics Sydney suggest first looking at users as a good starting point and then going finding metrics around engagement that are meaningful to the company. She referenced a study from EMC that found direct correlation of community engagement and revenue growth, tying revenue to community engagement is crucial to proving the worth of the program.