What's the ROI of your mother?
It’s been a while since this viral video clip from Gary Vaynerchuk did the rounds where he was addressing a question about the ROI of social media with a sceptical audience member. Gary clapped back "what's the ROI of your mother?" to highlight that sometimes value cannot be measured in conventional financial terms.
The clip sprung to mind as I recently had a conversation with a B2B tech founder about the importance of community building. One of my former client projects was helping NewCampus to build a marketing community (in SEA) from scratch (seachange for marketing).
From what I see, community building is one of the most undervalued areas in B2B startup growth and is constantly overlooked due to that perennial issue of being difficult to quantify business bottom line impact (as well as its perceived ‘effort’) and any tentative baby-steps to create one quickly get tossed on the scrapheap when conventional ROI isn’t there after a few months.
Communities of course shouldn't be measured in 0s and 1s. There are numerous intangibles of their value, from better understanding your customers, helping you build a better product, build trust, build credibility and long term loyalty and fundamentally helping you create better GTM strategies. Even though they might not provide immediate or easily measurable financial returns, too often founders push back with the same narrow minded view, ‘what’s the immediate ROI’?
Founders need to shift their perspective from short-term, numerical ROI calculations to a broader understanding of how value creation contributes towards growth. The true ROI of a community might be seen in long-term customer retention, word-of-mouth marketing and a strong brand presence.
Your B2B community doesn’t have to have the scale of Joe Glover’s excellent Marketing Meetup or Bhav’s cult status CRAP events (with his unapologetic stance on vegan only pizza). Your priority is simple, to make it valuable for your members.
To dispel misconceptions, it’s not expensive and you can start (and stay) small, even a dozen community members in a closed WhatsApp group sharing intel, with a fortnightly newsletter and a monthly webinar is a great start and source of learning.
You also don’t even have to create it yourself, you can sponsor an existing community where your customers and potential customers already are, add value, take the learnings but for the love of God, don't ruin it with your sales-breath stinking out the place with hard sells and ramming your product down their throats.
