Driving Startup Growth with Effective Community Marketing : Three-Party Payment Gateway India

At PayUmoney, we provide merchants with a selection of trends, tips, tricks and advice to help their businesses grow, from payments to marketing. We love it when other experts recognise our content and come forward to share their experience and knowledge with us.Praveen Dorna is one such expert who has excelled in building the Indian startup ecosystem. In his first ever guest post on the PayUmoney blog, Praveen explains how doing community marketing right can help a business grow easily in a short span of time. Let's hear insights from the guru himself!

Here are some shares from Praveen's vast experience ......

Are you a startup founder? If so, then you'll probably agree with us: creating a startup is no easy task. In fact, it's a hard truth that more than 90% startups fail! Community marketing can come to the rescue here, but first, let's find out why they fail.

Most founders believe that waiting for a product to be fully built before launching a marketing campaign is a recipe for failure

According to a study, the main reason startups fail is because there's no market demand, or they produce a product that no one wants

The transition from cause 1 to cause 2 is painful because it starts with the realisation that the product you've crafted isn't really popular in the marketplace!

If you truly believe in your product or service, it's never too late to change the situation. Let's dive into how community marketing can help drive your startup's growth. Reducing the risk of failure requires co-creating a product with your customers!

However, building a customer base on one side can be challenging, as the founder's judgement is often clouded by many internal biases. So how do we achieve this? How can every startup have a community that supports them as they grow and eventually become customers?

Here are 7 community marketing steps that will help you build and manage a wonderful community. Let's get started.

Step 1: Start Community Marketing

Quote: A "community" is a homogeneous group of people with similar interests.

It's important to identify a relevant community that can add value to your startup.

Firstly, define and identify your startup's target customer group. Choosing the wrong group or having everyone join the community may dilute the purpose of community marketing.

Understanding the client is a key part of this exercise. This will help you develop a good engagement strategy. In the long run, make your customers feel involved in the community you are building.

Step 2: Choose the right platform

Once you know your customer base, you need to choose the right platforms to run your community. These platforms can include WhatsApp, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, Slack, Disqus, Ning, Meetup.com, startupbyte.com, and more.

The key is to understand what types of platforms your customers are most active on so you can easily reach them and make the most of community marketing.

Tip: It's good practice to analyse the various platforms to see how you can expand the community for future purposes and choose the right tools.

Step 3: Building Communities

With the first two steps in place, here's what you'll do next:

Understand the purpose of the community you are building

Develop some core concepts and best practices for running and managing communities

Let's say your startup is in the early stages and you're interested in building a community to co-create a product.

Source: Reddit (as an example)

The golden rule for getting any new customer on board is to simplify the joining process and create a set of rules. Make sure every community member gets the same experience and treatment. It's important that anyone joining is clear on the purpose of the community so that expectations aren't skewed.

Step 4: Define an engagement strategy

It's important to establish a solid engagement strategy before launching operations.

"What is the Engagement Strategy? This is a detailed guide for you, your team, or moderators to use as a reference to consistently engage with the community. This helps to keep the community experience consistent as it expands.

To simplify, let's use an example. Let's say you are creating a startup that helps pregnant women. The engagement strategy will be outlined here:

How can pregnant women be actively involved?

Your product development phase to get positive feedback

How you can work to attract them as customers

At a broader level, you can use the following pirate indicator framework:

Acquisition - How you acquire users

Activation - what is your engagement strategy

Retention - maintaining consistency in communication

Referrals - Encourage community members to invite their contacts

Revenue - Ways to convert community members into buyers

Step 5: Access to the community

Now that you're halfway there, start acquiring the community. Let them know the purpose of the community and give them a sense of belonging. This will help community members engage better. For example, something as simple as introducing community members on a regular basis can go a long way!

Tip: If you see some of your members growing as community marketing leaders and want to contribute to the development, don't hesitate to let them take on some of the responsibility for interactive activities.

Use the right mix of online and offline channels to promote your community. Ask for referrals and build your community over time. Here are some warnings:

Avoid radical community building in terms of membership growth

Setting standards for "who" can be a member of the community

This may result in the rejection of some members, but this is to keep the group sane.

During the first few months, the community should grow relatively slowly and should feel close-knit. This helps to establish a nice culture for other community members.

Step 6: Engaging the community

At the tactical level, community marketing is largely about building healthy relationships with members and making them feel part of the community. Some of the best engagement strategies include:

Join members: reach out to members who have joined the community, update their profiles, ask them to introduce themselves to the group, and better understand their needs.

Stimulate discussion: share 2-3 posts a day on social media channels to help the community get relevant information. Ask questions and understand their issues. Share information about your products when appropriate, gather feedback and show progress.

Source: Reddit (as an example)

Encourage participation: Invite members to share their ideas, challenges, knowledge resources, expertise, etc. so that members become more comfortable participating in the group. It is important to moderate posts to prevent them from becoming pure marketing channels full of irrelevant information.

Engagement Events: Planning and executing a variety of online and offline events. These events can include online AMAs (Ask Me Anything sessions), webinars, small gatherings, product demonstrations, etc. Offline events, whether professional or social in nature, keep the community engaged and enhance connections between community members.

Gathering feedback: from time to time, solicit feedback from members and use metrics to measure engagement and understand the health of the community. It is important that feedback is acted upon so that the community feels that their input matters.

Step 7: Integrate your startup with the community

The key point you need to understand is that the community now trusts "you" more than the product. As a result, they will be more supportive and responsive to you as you build your startup.

Here are some ways to integrate your startup stage into your community:

creative phase

At this stage, it is important to understand what the actual challenges are and how you will deal with them. Some of the most productive ways to do this include:

a) Keep the community active, lively and interactive by insisting on questions.

b) Present discussions that can help gain valuable insights.

validation phase

Here, validate your ideas by:

a) Use the community as a source of feedback.

b) Show product demonstrations to those interested in providing feedback.

c) Plan offline gatherings to gather feedback over coffee/brunch.

d) Finally, when you are in trouble, seek help in your community network.

early stage

Once you've reached this stage, your product is in place and you're looking for more targeted feedback as well as an initial customer base. Try:

a) Provide special favours to community members to make them feel valued and empowered

b) Ask for referrals to help your startup gain initial traction and revenue. Read our blog on product pricing, 7 Quick Steps.

growth phase

By this stage, your community will be quite large.

a) Cultivate a number of community leaders in your niche area and get them to start building micro-communities for you.

b) ProductHunt, GrowthHackers, Xiaomi and Yiga are all great examples of marketing that utilise strong communities.

These 7 steps should help you understand how to harness the power of community and community marketing to drive your startup journey. If done right, this effort is definitely worth it! As a special tip, the rewards from in-depth research will be even greater.

The above knowledge, tips and personal experiences belong to Praveen Dorna of StartupByte.If you want to blog as a guest on PayUmoney, please contact us at [email protected]

Along with all the marketing efforts for your business, it's also a good idea to set up a full-featured payment solution. Choose the best payment gateway and grow your business with ease!