The Community Funnel

Also: Repeat yourself.

Marketing Qualified
June 14, 2024

Happy Friday, and welcome back to Marketing Qualified. Let’s get rolling with this week’s topics!

The Community Funnel. The proven process for unlocking value from social media.
Repeat yourself. Try out this marketing principle.

🤝 The Community Funnel.

Many brands struggle to figure out how to monetize their social media.

It’s usually one of two possible problems:

1) The brand has (or is trying to build) a solid social following but doesn’t know how to effectively translate it into net new sales.

2) Their employees have large and valuable personal networks, but the branded social content they’re given all feels too salesy. As a result, employees don’t feel comfortable sharing that content with their personal networks.

The solution to these issues lies in “The Community Funnel.”

The Community Funnel is a concept by entrepreneur and marketer Richard Patey.

It goes like this:

Post on social —> Make a newsletter subscription your CTA —> Use your newsletter to promote your brand’s community —> Drive product sales from community members.

Image credit: Richard Patey

Your marketing team should focus on creating high-quality and educational social media and newsletter content. The key is to deliver value with this content, not sell.

Then, the sales team can focus on being active in the brand’s community. Provide even more value and look for opportunities to build deeper relationships that could develop into sales.

Why this works

There are a few reasons why The Community Funnel works so well.

1) It feels natural to prospects.

It moves prospects towards a sale in a way that feels natural for them. Not like they’re being strong armed into a meeting or relationship that they’re not interested in or ready for.

This means your team doesn’t waste time. You only talk to the people who are genuinely interested in you, too.

2) You get a faster feedback loop.

Most companies have some form of a content strategy. But it can be tough to know if your plan is actually working.

You know you need to get a lot of touches on your audience, but how many and how long that will take before someone requests a meeting or demo is often unknown.

But with the community funnel, you at least have some leading indicators of whether audience members are moving closer to a sale. You’ll be able to track how your social following, newsletter subscribers, and community member metrics are growing. If people are progressing through, you’re probably close to closing some deals.

3) It gets your employees on your side.

Getting your team members to agree to share marketing content on social media can be difficult. This is usually because company-provided content feels salesy and cringey, and people are embarrassed to post it on their personal pages.

However, with the Community Funnel model, it’s agreed from the beginning that social and newsletter content should always be educational and provide value.

Employees are much more enthusiastic about posting interesting and entertaining content than shilling the company’s latest product or feature.

So, when done well, employees will happily post the content because they know it will be useful to their network.