#INBOUND22 Reddit & Hubspot: Community For Businesses In An Increasingly Disconnected World

LIVE FROM #INBOUND22

INBOUND22 kicked off with a great HubSpot Spotlight this morning. Hubspot CEO Yamini Rangan discussed the crisis of disconnection that businesses all over the world are struggling with today.

More than ever, businesses are finding that disconnected platforms, disconnected people and disconnected customers are making lead conversion harder than ever.

Leading the charge deeper into this topic, Erica Yoon, Growth Marketing at Reddit, and Laurie Aquilante Faiola, VP of Community-Led-Growth at HubSpot discuss first-hand how both their businesses have made community core to their organisation’s growth.

This session dives into the benefits of harnessing and empowering a passionate community of enthusiasts, which can bring unique value to your users and your brand. This year the message of Inbound seems very clear: creating and fostering connection is the new way to reach your audiences in a digitally-overloaded world.

Why Is Community So Powerful?

So why is community such a great catalyst for growth in 2022? Back in the day we had companies saying ‘trust us’. Sales focused messaging mixed with a lack of customer understanding. Then in 2006, Inbound marketing said trust yourself. But this has changed today, now we should be saying – trust in one another.

Community allows us to attract buyers in new ways, engage with them more deeply and incentivises and reward your customers, delighting them.

There are 3 types of communities: Product, Practice and Interest.

• Communities of product are often focused on a specific product, where members get tech support, provide feedback and ideas.
• Communities of practice are focused on common skills, profession and trade. Members learn and grow from one another.
• Communities of interest, much like Reddit, allow people to bond over things that matter to them. Companies like Reddit have done a great job fostering this kind of community to bring people together.

Erica Yoon, Reddit Growth Marketing, and customer of Hubspot focuses on advertisers and activating the inbound flywheel to not only increase user growth but enable advertisers to reach the right people through making use of communities of interest.

Most businesses would not exist without community. Whether that’s a community that forms naturally, or a one that is created and engineered from the business itself.

Reddit encourages brands to not focus on sub-reddits (products), but to focus on communities of interest, in order to reach the right people and the right moment.

A business model that can be mirrored in other businesses and industries; to widen their target audiences for an increased reward later down the line, culminating in higher engagement and more conversions.

Erica discusses how Reddit recently created /rplace, a huge virtual canvas that allowed communities and users from all over the world to work together to create an art piece that was then saved after a certain amount of time had elapsed.

Each user could edit one single pixel per hour, encouraging an interconnected master community, formed by different sub-communities (subreddits) to foster engagement and customer loyalty.

The reason for this project?

To foster community and play the long game, generating more user-interest in their platform that reaches far beyond this initial touchpoint.

Erica talks about how Reddit used the inbound methodology for one simple thing: remembering the human.

This is the methodology they use within the company every day to regularly consider the pain points of their users and advertisers. Something that all industries and companies could focus more on – a human-focused approach is more valuable than ever.

You must offer and give value before trying to extract value from your customers.

How Reddit Is Using HubSpot

Long-time partner with HubSpot. They found that sales and marketing were disjointed before HubSpot integration. The first thing they did was figure out the automation tool they would need to integrate both of these disparate systems and create an integral data warehouse, which helps them to nurture new projects and products internally.

Erica says: "Remember you need to crawl before you can walk".

Starting small, they used HubSpot landing pages and workflows, to analyse and manage their customer journey. Lead-scoring, one of the most basic tools in Erica’s mind, is due to be the catalyst for huge growth for reddit, as they are midway through the process of implementing lead scoring to better understand their prospects.

How To Build Community?

Erica shares some knowledge about how they have learned to build communities over time. The paramount piece of knowledge they have learned is to remember the human. Make sure your messaging and brand are authentic and aligned with your customer without over catering to your audience for the sake of compromise.

"Maybe the real MQL’s are the communities your business makes along the way".

Thinking of the flywheel effect, if you’re trying to find customers that offer your business value, you must offer value to them first.

The number one mistake some people make when building community is thinking a blunt force approach can work. You can’t force a community. It must be nurtured closely, being a part of the community you’re trying to build.

What does that mean for you?

Create the community your business needs by targeting wider-interests, rather than products. Also remember you can let things go. Rather than trying to force engineer your business’s audience, learn to adapt and grow over time, which in turn will allow your community to thrive.