Overview:

The podcast discusses strategies for building engaged communities on social media through understanding customer pain points and sharing authentic, solution-focused content. Creating customer avatars that capture granular details about audiences allows targeting content to their specific needs. Listening to how people describe challenges on forums and reviews provides an opportunity to frame marketing messages in their own words. Case studies show how hyper-personalized content across stakeholder groups led to significant growth in online communities for various industries. Guests also explore options for activating both pre-purchase and post-purchase customer groups through community engagement and collaboration.

Takeaways:

• Understanding your ideal customer or "avatar" at a granular level is important for creating effective social media content. Looking at places like Facebook groups and Amazon reviews can provide insight into customers' real pain points and language.
• Content should reflect your customers' challenges and problems in their own words, rather than just focusing on your solutions from a marketing perspective.
• Building trust and connections with current customers allows them to naturally lead you to more potential customers like them, fueling organic growth on social media.
• Authenticity is key - sharing genuine, personal content that shows who you are helps build deeper relationships and bypass what can't be bought.
• Customer communities can provide value through customer support from others rather than just the business. But oversight is still important.
• Different types of customer groups (pre- vs post-purchase) may benefit from different types of shared content.
• Finding your ideal clients, even if it means going outside your own groups initially, can be worthwhile for building a qualified community long-term.
• Case studies show success in community building across many industries by truly understanding customers.
• Joint ventures within other influencers' groups can help promote your offerings while benefiting both parties.
• Private high-value groups for clients are preferable to very large public groups where most engagement comes from a smaller private group.

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

The next up we're gonna have Kate.

So Kate is, uh, I've actually known Kate since I was like, we did a, a teenage leadership course called Discovery and I think we were staff, we were attendees and then we were staff on it.

So since I was a teenager really.

And then we recently got reconnected through Julie, which is yeah, a small world.

And yeah, Kate was operations manager back then and she's very operationally driven st still.

And yeah, and she's obviously built, is a master or an expert in the whole community building space.

So she's gonna be, uh, diving into that now and, and sharing, sharing, sharing with us.

So I'll make you co-presenter SC um, Kate and then we'll hand the reins over to, to you.

So Thank you Scott.

I know it's funny looking at some of the people on the webinar of Kitty I used to know as a teenager and Adam I met years ago.

So it's always funny how these networks come around and where we all end up.

Again a bit like Alexi, I'm probably preaching to the converted around a lot of what I'm going to talk about.

But at social meteorology we specialize in community building, organic content, growing and activating customer communities really and finding what the key pieces are that connect people together and amplify the objectives of the company, business, organization, whoever that client might be.

But I hope that what I can bring today is some of the nuances that we use that have been really successful.

And I'm gonna give you a case study at the end to highlight.

But first I wanted to go through some of the fundamental principles of how we work.

And again, some of this is really common knowledge to all digital marketers and there might be some other nuances here.

So we talk a lot about the paradigm shift that really needs to happen for people to embrace social media or digital marketing.

A lot of the work we do with clients is the culture change that needs to happen.

I'm working with a client at the moment who's a healthcare standards is the Australian Healthcare Standards Council.

And they've got, they're steeped in history and they do things the way they've always been done just because of the history of the organization.

And so we're going through, it's a three month kind of consulting process of really shifting a lot of the paradigms, a lot of the thinking, the culture really so that they can start to embrace some new ways of marketing.

But what I find is even I've been doing this for 12 years, even 12 years on, so many businesses are still broadcasting everything that they do on social media and they take their traditional marketing materials and just want to pump them out in a different way on social media.

And as we all know, that really doesn't work.

A lot of what we talk about is the future of social media being hyper-personalization.

And it's interesting, this is a theme that comes up quite a bit in this group and in some of the conversations, kitty was just alluding to it in her in what she was talking about.

But the hyper-personalization of content and what that really means is that when someone is reading the content that they're reading, whether it's really in any digital marketing, but particularly on social media, you want them to feel like they're sitting across the table from you having a cup of coffee and that you truly understand who they are and what it is that's going on for them.

We do a lot of work when we're working with clients on understanding the avatar.

And I know this is an overused term and everybody's talking about it and a lot of people come up with their customer avatar.

But what we do is really help take that down to a more granular level around social media because a customer avatar for a company could be completely different than the avatar they're really trying to reach on social media.

It could be that whilst direct mail is used for their core customer base, that their suppliers and referral sources are their community that happen on social media with the client I was just talking about.

They've got assessors, they've got the medical profession, they've got up and coming medical students who want to get into the industry.

So they've got different communities there of stakeholders and truly understanding who that avatar is allows them to cut out all of the noise and to hone right in.

We all know that if you're talking to a 25 year old male on social media, it's completely different than how you would talk to a 60 year old female.

And even where you would find them, the language you would use, the imagery that you would use is completely different.

So we really help clients zero in on their social media customer avatar.

We've just developed what I think is a pretty cool tool.

I've just done a little screenshot here, which is an avatar generator for businesses.

And so we step them through all of the details.

Obviously the the usual demographics, are they male, are they female?

What's their salary?

Where do they live?

What's their marital status?

But then we go right into their values.

What are their biggest challenges, problems, frustrations, what are their drivers when they're looking to purchase your product, your service, your offering, whatever that might be.

And we go into a lot of detail and then send them a poster that has their ideal customer.

And so I won't let that go all the way through, but it's really around what platforms are they on, which groups do they hang out in?

What we do once we really understand the avatar is we go really deep on content.

What are the, and it right down to the language.

So what are the biggest, I'm just thinking I've put all my slides in different order this time, but again, in digital marketing we all know understanding their problem, their pain point is key.

But what most businesses do is they talk about and market on social media from the the solution and what we wanna do, if you truly understand who the avatar is and what their pain points are, you want the content to reflect the words that they're using, the language they use to describe their own challenges rather than the language that we tend to use in marketing, which is very much about the solution.

And we wanna look at all of the little micro steps that people take.

And it's funny 'cause in a lot of digital marketing when we talk about ads and funnels, it's about scale.

A lot of it is depersonalizing.

But really where we start to see the benefit of this is where you can do the two, you can scale but make things really personalized.

And I'm sure we've already all experienced some of the really creepy personalization that happens in digital marketing and social media at the moment and some of the changes that are happening on platforms like Facebook and making that more difficult to do.

But truly understanding the problem then allows you to create content that helps to develop and build that known trust.

So I wanna talk about some of the strategies that we use to do that.

And this is interesting.

We were just talking in our breakout in our breakout room about the differences with males and females in marketing Facebook groups.

For those of you that are men, Facebook groups are a gold mine of information for really understanding the pain points or the challenges of customers and clients and the language that they use.

And men do this really differently to women.

So there are hundreds and thousands of Facebook groups of hundreds of thousands of women who all gush about their challenges and problems in business.

I can see all the women nodding.

Finding what their challenges and pain points are is really quite easy if you can hone in on your avatar and find the communities that they're participating in on social media.

And so if you go to, this is one group, I hate the name of it, but it's the best one that's out there, the like-minded b*****s drinking wine.

It's about 150,000 women if you go to any of these groups.

So if you can find the groups and if you've got women in your business, get them into these groups 'cause you will find that they're a goldmine in terms of people talking about their challenges but also looking for your products and services.

So if you go into this group and you type in, I just decided to use copywriting, you'll find that there are hundreds of posts from people talking about copywriting and I didn't scroll through and find all of the ones that articulate this perfectly.

I just wanna show you the strategy.

But you'll find that not only the post where they go into depth about what their problem is and the solution that they're looking for, you then find that in the comments.

And sometimes there's a hundred comments on these posts and the language that people are using.

So if you look at something like this post, you can start to use that exact language and take those words out that people are actually using rather than the typical marketing messaging that a company might might use.

So I can't overstate, and a lot of people already do this in other aspects of digital marketing, but these Facebook groups in particular are gold.

One of the other places that we look is Amazon reviews.

So once we truly understand who a uh the customer avatar is, if you go and look at people who've written books about the solutions that solve the problems that your avatar have, the reviews, often people say what their problem was before they found the solution in the book.

And so again, it's a great place to go and find all of that language that you can really use to create content.

And then the other place is Google reviews.

Go and find the biggest competitors that have got lots of reviews on Google and you'll find in a lot of those reviews it might even be, there's just that one word there, polish, that might be a word that you wouldn't necessarily have used if you were promoting copywriting skills.

But if your avatar are using that exact language by you feeding that back to them, that really builds the know and trust.

So they're some of the strategies that we use around the hyper-personalization of content and our team are constantly looking for what are those questions, what are those pain points?

What are those issues that people are expressing on social media?

And then translating that into content.

So whether that's videos, whether that's blog articles, whether it's short form content, it's about translating all of those challenges, problems, frustrations into content.

So at its heart, organic social media growth, which I know most digital marketers don't necessarily focus a lot on 'cause we're very focused on the metrics of ads and funnels and ads and funnels are really important.

We certainly do ads, but it's very much from supporting an organic content strategy rather than just a straight ads strategy.

And then we find it rides out a lot of the bumps that might happen as Facebook makes the myriad of changes that are constantly being made.

But we all know that your current customers, clients, members, donors, key stakeholders, whoever that avatar is lead you to more people like them.

And what we find with a lot of businesses, particularly larger businesses, they wanna set up social media.

They don't wanna test it on the side or they're already running social media.

But the people that they're focused on, they keep their core relationships out of it 'cause they don't want to muddy the waters in some ways.

And again some of these organizations I'm talking about are more old schools.

If you've got your big brands that spend billions of dollars in advertising, they get most of this.

But there's a lot in between that don't.

But if you can truly connect with that ideal customer and truly understand, so I'm a 40 ish year old woman, won't be able to say that for too much longer.

40 ish year old woman, I live in Brisbane, I have two young kids, I'm recently divorced.

If I'm in any way, shape or form your avatar, if you can serve me with good quality content that I engage with, then I lead you to more people like me.

I am connected to.

And I actually was speaking at an event recently, there were four divorce lawyers in the room and I said something about recently being divorced and I said, do you have any idea how many women I'm connected to at the moment who are going through divorce?

And so these divorce lawyers went, oh that's interesting.

Never really thought about the fact that if we can truly connect with our current customers that they're going to lead us to more people like them.

And that's the heart of organic growth.

And organic community building on social media is really connecting in with that customer or that avatar.

So they lead you to more people like them.

What we find a lot of businesses do is they set up their social media profiles, they invite people to the front door but they never really let them in.

And we all know the real benefit of social media is truly showing who you are.

What's the business about?

Who's behind the doors and the windows of the business, how do you do what you do?

Where do you do it?

Why do you do it?

Sharing all of that kind of content is what really works effectively when you're looking at building community and really establishing that deeper relationship.

So a lot of this is about the relationship marketing, but if you can, some of our most successful members in our success circle have just really nailed being authentic on social media.

And again, it's a bit of a female thing.

Some men do this well, but women tend to open up more on social media and those that do this really well connect with their audience in a really genuine way that bypasses you can't really buy that stuff that that really genuine connection and relationship that people can foster through social media.

We talk a lot about getting your logo out of the middle of the conversation.

People are not on social media to connect with your brand.

They don't care about your style guide, your fonts, your any of the the branding.

And whilst we all know that's important, and I don't diminish the value of brand, if the logo and your brand is the center of the conversation, people can't really connect as human beings.

And an example I often give for this, I did some work with a large tech company who wanted to implement a Facebook group as part of their customer support.

And they were a fairly old school customer support.

This was a few years ago now.

They were an old school customer support business.

It was the typical, you ring up, you stay on hold for however long it was and then you'd speak to a human and you may or may not get, get your issue sorted.

And we had a big culture change process to go through to get to just even launching the group.

So that was about three months of consulting with them to really test and challenge their systems and processes so that we could implement this new way of doing support.

And after about three months, it was going far better than anybody expected.

We finished up the contract but I got a phone call about three, four months later, might've been been six months later and it was the head of customer service and he said, you are not very popular Kate.

And I felt sick and don't like to get those phone calls.

And I said, Matt, tell me what's going on.

And he said, we've got a problem.

Our customers are answering each other's questions before our staff have the opportunity to answer the questions.

And so that's a problem we'd all like to have.

There was some more education to happen around how important that was, but the value of customers caring enough about a brand or a product to support each other.

Once you get, that's when community really starts to gel.

But in order to do that, you've gotta take the brand out of the middle of the conversation or that that dynamic never happens.

And obviously there's a lot of strategies in place to make sure that works well and there's a role to play for timely, relevant, accurate information.

But when you're looking at community, you really wanna provide those opportunities for people to connect with each other.

So we all know you can't completely control your message on social media.

That is me jumping out of a plane in a very unattractive jumping suit.

But one of the things that we really talk with businesses about is where do you need to let go of control for greater reach?

So part of that's understanding the risk tolerance of a business.

Where are they willing to go?

Where are they not willing to go?

Uh, but so often businesses are so busy trying to control the conversation that they just don't get the reach.

And we do a lot of challenging clients around that dynamic between control and letting go and allowing conversation to happen.

I still get companies that contact me that say we really wanna do social media or they're already doing social media, but we really wanna increase the the R o I of our social media.

But we've shut down comments 'cause we just don't have time to answer them.

And people are still saying that in this day and age, so often there's conversations to happen around really letting go of some of that control.

We wanna step outside of ourself as the business and really look at what is it that our customers want from us.

I did some work with a small business accounting firm a couple of years ago and he had this fantastic little email newsletter that went out once a month and it was a little talking head caricature of him, but it was his voice and he would talk about the changes that the tax office made that month.

And I said to him, John, I pay you to know what changes the tax office made this month.

I don't care about that.

That's what you specialize in.

And he said, what content would I share if it's not, that's what what we specialize in.

So we really helped them to see that what was more of interest was he had a team of 30 staff who all specialize in small business management, how to streamline your payroll, how to recruit and retain good quality staff.

All of that content is much more relevant than necessarily the specialty that they specialize in.

And again, a lot of businesses are so busy pushing out what they specialize in what they know thinking that's what builds trust and credibility.

But if you can turn that on its head and really look at what it is that the avatar or your ideal customer is looking for, then it completely changes the quality of the content and it changes, it shortens that lead time and the steps that are taken to move someone along in that customer journey.

So Kate, Kate, I might just see if there's anyone at this stage similar to what Alex Diggs.

I thought it was quite a good flow.

Who has Got one more slide and then I was gonna stop before the case study.

Oh you Were?

Okay, I'll let you do that one.

Yeah, yeah, no that's good.

Sorry, I know I get a bit into teaching mode.

No, No, that's that's all good.

Yeah, I was gonna stop just I'll do this one last one then we've, I've got a case study.

Um, so as Scott knows and talks about a lot, what other people say about you is far more important than what you say about yourself.

So we do a lot about building digital champions, brand ambassadors, but they're the micro influencers.

I'm not talking about influencer marketing, but I'm talking about really looking at those customers that you can bring into the fold and create kind of v i p programs around.

So we do a lot of that as well.

So why don't we stop there in case there are any questions.

I wanted to get through that 'cause most of you probably know what I've already been talking about, but just wanted to give you the foundations of how we work.

Yeah, no.

Awesome.

Is there any questions at this stage?

I do.

Hi Kate.

Hi Kitty.

So one of the problems that we come across in our organization is that people don't potentially wanna talk about or are not, they just don't wanna talk about what we do.

Sorry, the problem that we solve, which is getting people out of debt and having that conversation transform out there in the world has been my focus.

Are you okay Dave?

People weren't okay talking about mental health and now they are similar kind of uh, arrangement there.

And to be completely frank, I have been struggling with getting our message out to people and I think it's because I've been coming from a place of what I overcame when I went through it was shame, embarrassment and guilt for being in the situation.

So actually we are now looking at reframing that uh, to have it land as well.

What opportunities are you missing out on by being trapped by what your choices were in the past or circumstance or whatever that may be.

Would, is that, does that sound like it's more on track?

Absolutely.

And in that kind of a situation, 'cause we work with a lot of clients who've got tricky issues that people don't wanna talk about in public.

So what you wanna do is go to the end result in that situation that if people are looking for financial freedom, if they're looking for to escape that debt, but what's the end result that they're looking for?

And if you can create an aspirational community, 'cause people are looking for where am I going?

They're not gonna join a group that's about debt because that shows that they're in debt.

So going to that end aspiration and then stepping back from that.

So that group, I'm sure you're in it, that she's on the money Yeah.

Um, group, they do that quite well where there's a community of people who are sharing great ideas, but it's also a safe place where people can be vulnerable about what's going on for them.

And I think for you it's about, but you don't wanna make it too aspirational 'cause people don't wanna hear about seven, eight figure businesses when they're in debt and making a grand a month in their little freelance consulting business.

It's gotta be realistic and they need to be able to see the clear pathway to move forward in that.

So creating a group has been something I've grappled with for a long time.

And we have one about budget angel, but it's not really aligned with where I'd like to go.

I'm more about in inspiration, motivation, accountability, responsibility and forgiveness of what was allowing yourself a new future kind of thing.

So I'm now in, in the conversation of creating something around that, like creating an opportunity for people to come together in a space where they're talking about solutions versus the problem.

I'm just trying to work out how to tie that in together to, without having the objective of we wanna sell, but actually being able to get the message across that people don't need to suffer or go bankrupt.

There's this other option into that space.

Have you come across the single mum Vine group?

Yeah, Lucy's my best friend.

Oh That's right.

Yeah.

I know you and Lucy.

Such a small world.

So in groups like that, if you see the culture that's created there, yeah it's really clear that there's space to talk about what's hard, but it's kept at a level that is aspirational and moves people forward.

So I think, and it's part of that is getting the brand out of the middle of the conversation as well.

So it's not about your brand but you hosting that space gives you the permission to activate that group in whichever way you choose to do that.

But if you can make it about the community and really look at, and sometimes it's about choosing your top 10 clients and say to them, what could we have done differently if we created a community, what could we do?

What support would that give you on this journey?

Yeah.

And really activating those who you've already supported and helped to start growing that community and getting those digital champions and ambassadors early would work well in that situation as well.

Oh, very cool.

Thank you.

Thank you Don.

No Worries.

Kate.

Kate, do you have any, I don't know, examples of where someone's done a group and what they've done and the sort of responses or the feedback from the market?

Oh, I've got hundreds of examples and I'm also really careful not to make it just about Facebook groups 'cause I think community is much broader than that.

But Facebook groups does give you a really good structure and func, there's a lot of functionality that can help you manage a community there.

But there are also other ways that you can build community.

But you look at any of the niche and a lot of them are women led groups, I have to say.

And I think, again, this is something that probably happens quite naturally for women around coming together around common issues or challenges and talking about those more.

But the case study I'm about to give you, it wasn't Facebook groups at all.

It was property development.

So local communities and we didn't use Facebook groups with with that at all.

But I, I can probably give you a better example if you give me a niche to look at because there are so many Example.

I know even even seeing the property development, I think that's great.

Yeah.

Okay.

I'd love to see, I'll go, oh, I did have one more slide, two more slides.

Yep.

The nuance around this one.

So social media conversations are happening on a public stage, we know that.

But what so many businesses do is they use old sales tactics in these new mediums.

So constantly trying to get people off the platforms and into a sales conversation really doesn't work from two perspectives.

One, all of the algorithms we know are based on engagement.

So if you take a conversation offline, you miss all of that opportunity to flesh out a conversation that tells the algorithms that the content is valuable.

But secondly, you miss the opportunity to influence other people that might see that conversation.

And this seems like a little a small thing, but when we're working with big companies and so many of them still send us a private message and we'll deal with it offline or send us your phone number, give us your phone number and we'll ring you and it looks like good customer service, but you miss so much of that organic opportunity on social media if you move them offline too quickly.

And so all of that really encapsulated is truly identifying the avatar, knowing the problem or challenge, addressing their challenges in content.

That's really what helps to build that community surprising, delighting, entertaining, what holds it all together and then that leads people to action.

So that's the model that we work with.

So this is an interesting case study because proving the r o i of what I'm talking about can be quite challenging.

A lot of this is intangible.

And when I talk to boards I say to them, we don't ask for a return on investment on our phone and our email anymore or the internet.

It's just seemed to be part of doing business.

And I see this side of social media as an essential part of just doing business as well.

Not to say that it's not important to track the R o I, but for anyone working in agencies that often they don't have systems processes nor the desire to spend big budgets on tracking some of this stuff.

So it can be quite challenging.

But this was a really interesting situation.

We were engaged by Lendlease, by their communities team to look at their master planned communities.

So these are places where there's a patch of dirt and they are bringing in people.

People are buying from all over the place, buying house and land packages and you're throwing all these people into a melting pot.

There's no predefined community.

And so they brought us in to do a three month coaching program with them to really help them look at how these technologies could be used to, to form community.

So they specialize in bricks and mortar.

They wanted to look at how do we use these technologies to build community.

What came out of that was we ended up running this for them for four years.

They went, okay, yep, you do it for us.

And then last year they brought it all in-house and it was a really interesting case study because we got to prove after we stopped working with them what the difference was.

So it was interesting to see those metrics, but these are their master plan communities.

The kind of content we really looked at, who were the key stakeholders in the community?

So businesses wanted help in better telling their stories.

We did a lot of work around resourcing them to do social media better so that they engaged in the community.

Residents really wanted to know what was happening in the community.

Community groups really wanted to know what the issues were that were were arising in the community so that they could help to address them.

And so a lot of what we were doing was stakeholder management and looking at what were the opportunities to create content that really brought those stakeholders together.

So we created lots of video interviews for the businesses.

We created roving journalist kind of roles.

And for anyone that runs events, it's a great way to activate your, your audience is if you give a couple of free tickets to people who are quite social media savvy and get them to be roving journalists at events.

But we had digital ambassadors who were residents in the community who would attend all of the local events, who were, they used all of the local businesses, they went to the local community groups.

And so they helped to really galvanize and tell the story across the community.

Now the, we don't do your typical ad agency work, so we partner with agencies when we are doing that.

And Lendlease obviously have got a big media buyer that does all of their real estate type ads.

So we were not responsible for that, although interestingly they refused to do any of the response strategy on their ads.

So we were responsible for helping to manage that dynamic.

But we were get we, up until we finished working with them, we're still getting excellent organic reach because we really understood each of the stakeholders in the community and all of them received a lot of value from what was happening on social media.

But you can see in the four years that we worked with them, these were the increases that we had in terms of their community and engagement.

I think each of these communities were at less than a thousand people when we started.

And they were all between the 10 and 15,000 by the time we finished.

But we were often getting reach and engagement way beyond the communities that were there.

Interestingly, Lendlease, the communities team really understood that selling house and land packages on social media is one thing and you've got your cost per click and you all the rest that goes with the ad side of that.

But this community side really showcase what these communities, what it's like to live in these communities.

And they understood that to do that well that went a long way in convincing people.

But tracking, that's really difficult because they're very focused on their ad budgets.

When you look at the competitor analysis, the Lendlease pages were always far exceeding on engagement.

These web pages that had similar, similar audiences, far exceeded on engagement and contact that was coming through their social media platforms.

Um, when we stopped working with them last year, three months afterwards, we, they left us as admins on all their pages, which was interesting.

So I was a bit cheeky, ran a little report for them and gave them some, uh, feedback on what had happened.

When they just started broadcasting their sales messages again, they went right back to what they were doing four years prior.

Just started talking about house and land packages.

And you can see there, I won't read it out to you, but you can see the decline was significant.

So I think this is an interesting case study in that we could show the benefit of what we were doing in the absence of doing it, which anyone in this space knows that it can be quite hard to demonstrate the value of organic social media.

And then I'm sure some of you're going yes, but this wouldn't work with our clients.

This literally we've worked in just about every industry, funerals, weddings, technology, education, healthcare, media, property and have seen success in this community concept and that hyper-personalization of content in pretty much every industry that we've worked in.

Yeah, no, that's, that's awesome Kate.

That's really good.

Did, has anyone got any, any questions about, about that?

Yes I do.

Hi Kate.

Yeah, my question, I've got two groups on Facebook and one is pre-purchase to warm them up and hopefully to get them to purchase and one is post purchase.

Now my post purchase group is fantastic.

It is doing everything it's meant to.

It is awesome.

They are all contributing.

It's very active and fabulous, which I think helps with no refunds, anything like that because they're truly feel like they're in a family.

My problem is the pre-purchase one isn't got, hasn't got that level of engagement.

It tends to be me initiating everything and then I will get a few people answering questions.

Some they just ignore.

But my question, is it a problem to put the same content occasionally on both.

I'm finding myself stuck on the really authentic posts.

Like for example, yesterday I was in a phenomenal high rise building with this amazing glass elevator and the boardroom was just one of the most beautiful rooms I've ever trained in.

And I thought, oh, I'm gonna jump on a live quickly now and say look at this.

This is incredible.

But it's so distracting because you can see everyone in this glass elevator going up and down while you're trying to train.

So I was doing this and I was caught between should I be using that for my post-purchase and give them insider information or should I be using this for my pre and is it a problem if I use it in both?

So some content I think is fine in both that kind of content.

I would keep that for your public group and I would use that to stimulate conversation.

So I'd say ever been in a training environment that's really distracting, this is where I was today.

Tell me your stories about your, what's the biggest distractions you've ever had in your training environment?

I'm just making it up.

Yeah.

But something along those lines.

I think that kind of content is really good for stimulating conversation and building community.

'cause what you're doing is you're finding an issue that happens for all trainers.

They get to talk to each other, they get to commiserate, they get to share funny stories.

That's really good for community building personally.

And there's no right or wrong way to do this for every personal community.

It's about finding the right way for that community.

But I think those closed groups for your paying clients, you want that to be your high value content where they really get something out of it.

And that could also be a really good conversation there, but I would put a different slant on it.

Mm-hmm.

So I would have it be more a solution focused.

Mm-hmm.

And tie it even to your course or your service or what it is that you do.

Mm-hmm.

Whereas the other is around community building engagement.

That make sense?

Thank you.

It does totally.

I'm finding that as much as I've got, the more than a thousand people in the pre one that you're meant to have as a magic number to start making sales to, they all start saying a thousand people.

So you work your butt off to get the thousand plus people and then you work like mad doing these posts and these lives and all sorts of things.

But I'm not finding, I'm getting sales from it.

It might support me out there and it might be a very long sales process that they're checking me out, but I almost feel I'm giving such useful cool stuff that they don't really need to buy.

They're like, yeah, whatever.

She's just gonna dish out.

I'm just sticking around for the useful tips.

I haven't had purchases.

My purchases are from a webinar, which is a very much more direct sales route.

So I'm not seeing rewards Part of that.

And usually what we would do is break that right down and look at who are the people that are coming in.

'cause I'm exactly the same in my business.

We've got the public social media success community.

Most of those people are people who wanna sticky tape their own social media strategy together.

And they're not my ideal clients anyway.

But a lot of them actually become ideal clients down the track when they grow.

But it takes a lot longer for them to get there.

Uh, one of the strategies we're doing this year is joint ventures with other Facebook groups.

So maybe it's about, and so we're running our free five day challenge in other people's Facebook groups.

And then the group, the Facebook host gets a percentage of anyone that converts off the end of that.

So that could be a way.

And then our group is a part of that challenge.

So it helps to build our group.

Mm-hmm.

But it's actually going out and finding our ideal client in other places.

The other distinction there is maybe you haven't quite got the value that you are providing there.

So if you go back to your paid group and really ask them what is the biggest challenge that we're solving here for you?

And then take that back into the group and you may lose some people who find, 'cause I wouldn't be focused on the numbers.

You are far better off in my view, having a, a group of 300 people who are your ideal customer and know exactly who you are, what you do, and love you for that.

I find most of the engagement in my public group is happening from people who are also in the private group, but what they're doing, 'cause then I'm constantly able to say, raise that in our webinar on Tuesday and we'll be able to address that.

And so you're demonstrating the value that you provide by doing that in the public.

That's great.

Thank you.

That's cool.

Yeah, That that, that's great.

Thanks.

Thanks Kate.

And, um, sorry I've gone on a bit.

No, That's good.

I think the, the answer really good.

So what we might do, we'll go into breakout rooms in a second.

Now, Alexi also, just following up on what, on Alexi's session earlier, you've got a bit of a, like a coaching group as well.

Alexi, do you just wanna share which sort of takes people through how you did that in a more extended sort of way?

So I don't know if you wanna share that.

Yeah.

So I often get asked, how the heck did you do it?

So what I mentioned to you guys before in terms of the the ones and the focus and so forth, that's, those are the key one-on-ones.

But whoops, the wind slamming the door.

I've got a whole training program, like a coaching program on the nitty gritty of how we built it from the ground up, from the marketing to the processes to our content machine once we started running it and so forth.

So if you guys are in agency land consulting land or coaching land and what I said before made sense to you and you're wanting more detail, just let me know.

And what I'll do is I'll just drop my email address in here.

Just email me and I'll get over some more information for you.

That's about it, I think.

No, awesome.

That's great.

And Alex's also in the Slack group so you can reach out to him there as well.

Also, if anyone's got, I know you just mentioned Kate, like doing JVs with like people with Facebook groups or stuff like that.

And if anyone wants to do JVs in the Slack group, you'll see there's uh, there's a Slack channel specifically for joint ventures.

So just drop in there, Hey, I've got a whatever you wanna do.

I've got an email list of 10,000 or a Facebook group of what, whatever.

And I'm, yeah, these are the JVs I'm looking for, this is what I can offer.

All of that sort of thing.

So feel free to drop that in there.

And yeah, and, and I think that yeah, how we can help each other is, is great.

So what we might do is we'll break out into, into some breakout rooms.

I'll set up three of them.

And really I think the theme for this breakout room is yeah, how can we use community in our business to, to get it, to get to, to establish trust, establish growth, all of that sort of, all of that sort of thing.

So I will set up these, recreate these breakout rooms.

Now if you're in a break, if you end up in a breakout room with the same people as last time, 'cause these all get assigned automatically, just put your hand up and I can cross things over because yeah, I think it's good for us all to intermingle as much as possible.

We're back.

Hey guys, we're back again.

We've got, Adam is a spokesperson for our group.

Kate's nominated him to Yeah, just the, I guess your number one takeaway from that session.

Yep.

I've, uh, gotta think on my feet here.

Um, look really just using, um, Facebook groups and just being human, like it just reiterates it so many times.

Kate and I have had the same challenges.

We try and take lead the horse to water with our clients, but they've fingers crossed just listen to us and be humans rather than do the sales push.

Um, but no, great session.

Yeah, no.

Awesome.

Awesome.

And Cody, you are, you got the new, you're on brand today.

Is this part of the new branding colors?

No, I've, I've Just found this filter that actually reveals the angelic halo that was always there.

It was always there.

Just people didn't have the visual receptor skills to see it.

So yeah, I've got this filter, but now you can see it.

I truly am angelic and I've got the proof.

What what was your, uh, number one takeaway from the break-out?

So the biggest takeaway today is I've got too big of an ego.

Yeah, Yeah.

Look, we, we struggled to stay on point, to be honest, Scott.

So we, we went all over the place.

We were talking Facebook, Google, uh, or webinars.

Yeah, Preregistration versus paid registrations.

Unfortunately, we, we probably don't have too much to contribute in terms of staying on topic here, Scott.

No, that's all right.

That's alright.

That's, that's, uh, that's what, that's, that's the beauty of being in groups.

It can go anywhere.

Yeah.

And the final group, uh, volunteer or if you wanna volunteer someone else.

I'm volunteering.

Ben, I thought you were gonna speak for me then, Julie.

That would've been amazing.

One of the things that stood out for me that we talked about was that like, we've got so many things that are happening and sometimes, like, there's so many tactics and tips and different ways of doing things that some of the, the basic stuff that we should and could be doing, like trolling groups for language, for resonance and those sorts of things.

They just slide out to the left or to the right and we forget about them.

And, but actually there's a huge value there and it's really important I think, just to go back there and just make sure that what we're doing is on point.

Yeah, yeah.

No, it often is, it's, uh, the fundamentals.

Like Alex's at the beginning, it's like direct mail and get the operations right.

Do you know what I mean?

It's, yeah.

I think that's so critical.

Yeah.

So I think that's, that's a wrap guys.

Thanks for coming today.