Community Building: Long-term is all about going direct

TO: Samantha Tan, Community Manager

FROM: Azleen Abdul Rahim, CMO

SUBJECT: Community Building: Long-term is all about going direct.

Sam,

Azleen here. Our marketing strategy is starting to show some tangible results. As you know, most of the inquiries are coming from partners, affiliates, and the latest one is email outreach. Great stuff. You’ve done a great job, Samantha. Thank you.

Now, every marketing initiative, the end journey of it would be the community-building stage. Before we’re flooded with customers and handling them becomes a major chaos, we need to build a proper structure for it as soon as possible. This is one of many ways for us to keep our marketing game simple, yet powerful.

As you can see, we are at the mercy of social media platforms, search engines and AI Assistants to remain visible. In other words, we are relying on their algorithms to reach our target audience. And, we are paying them for it one way or another. We need to do what those platforms are asking us to do. Short-term speaking, this is okay. Medium-term, still okay. Long-term, this is not acceptable. Why? Because it’s expensive.

As we build our marketing prowess, I want us to establish a proper community-building structure that allows us to communicate directly with them long-term. The goal is simple. It enables direct communication with our community members, particularly customers, business partners, and affiliates. We need to own the relationship, without the interference of social media, AI or search engine platforms.

Before we have a thorough face-to-face discussion next week about this, I’m sending you this email to quickly brief you on my expectations and how it should be done.

Well, it all starts with our database of customers, business partners and affiliates. You already have them all in hand. I need you to prioritise the maintenance and growth of these assets. Collecting names, organisation details, contact numbers and email addresses is one thing, but rigorous housekeeping and keeping in touch with all of them is another story altogether. These databases are only an asset if they are relevant, clean and active communications between them and us are being done.

Based on this initial work, I would like us to strategise our outreach initiative through warm email and instant messaging (utilising either Channels or Groups), specifically WhatsApp and Telegram. And please, encourage them to turn on notifications so that when we say something there, they actually get the notification.

Parallel to this, our newsletters must become a primary driver of engagement for those who subscribe to our content updates. This is our third tool. The newsletters cover both our LinkedIn-based newsletter and our web-based newsletter. Every time we publish new content, our subscribers should be the first to know through direct notification. This creates a closed loop where we control the distribution and the narrative.

And Sam, please continue to refine our internal processes so that the community members stay inside our assets for as long as possible. You may propose a handful of customer-first and personnel-first initiatives first for us to go through together. One of them could be a feedback form, digital and physical. A great brand always seeks feedback from its community members.

Speed is our other weapon we have yet to utilise, which we need to. We must respond promptly to complaints and inquiries, and consistently improve the quality of our communication with end-customers, business partners, and affiliates. If we communicate with excellence, we build trust. If we build trust, good words about us will spread, and we don't need to buy ads to get attention.

Kindly include small and medium-sized events too. Nothing can beat meeting them face-to-face. While digital initiatives are okay, being Asians, a physical meet-up will bring the bond to the next level. It doesn't have to be formal; casual ones, such as coffee sessions, are good too. Most of the time, it sparks some new opportunities too. We never know.

If we do not build our community early and make it better along the way, we will be forever at the mercy of algorithms. Direct communications with them will support us in continuing to be relevant to their businesses. Do come up with a structure. We shall discuss this draft once I’m back next week.

Azleen.

P.S. Thanks for reading. If you want better marketing results but don’t know where to start, fill out this form. Let's see if we can help you fix it next month.