Community Building & Partnerships in Marketing 🔗

I don’t know how the grifters do it. How does a Snake Oil Salesman even sleep at night? No seriously, I don’t understand how someone could even attempt to sell something they know doesn’t work. 🤷‍♀️

If I don’t believe in something, how am I going to convince someone else to? To me, being a marketer requires being human and authentic. I can only sell things that I know and believe in. Maybe that limits me, but it helps me do my best work and truly connect with audiences. I have to understand something to communicate about it, and I have to get inside the minds of the audience and flex that empathy super power.

Marketing at its core is communication. It starts with awareness and builds a connection, and doing it well can help build a brand, enable sales, or spark something that can grow into a true relationship.

So if you’re building a Marketing Plan for a new venture or trying to figure out ways to grow your small business, don’t neglect the power of community bridge building and just showing up locally. It’s of course easier to show up if you know your why or your purpose - and that purpose aligns with that of your partners and collaborators.

Community building and growing sustainable partnerships is foundational to marketing, but it’s often overlooked because it’s a long game, and capitalism demands quick results and ROI. For small businesses who are integrated with their local communities, it can be a serious differentiator and a way to stay resilient in challenging times. “If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.”

Of course, this goes far beyond marketing. We need strong communities now more than ever. Creating an atmosphere that is conducive to collaboration and that encourages everyone to show up and contribute applies to healthy homes and neighborhoods, companies and countries too.

💓 Know Why: If your only reason for existing is making money, then it’s gonna be pretty hard to convince anyone to give you theirs. I know it’s expensive and time consuming but biiiiiiiitch, you need ✨BRAND STRATEGY✨ so you’ll know why you’re doing any of it, who you’re talking to and how to reach them. Having a strong purpose, and articulating it in a way that makes it easy for others to get on board is key. Thank you Zack Darling and the team at The Hybrid Creative for drilling the importance of Brand Strategy into my head (and Simon Sinek, the OG of WHY).

🤝 Join Up: If you’re a small business owner, join your local Chamber of Commerce and any associations or networking groups relevant to your industry. Attend City Council or County Assembly meetings when you see something relevant on the agenda. See how you can work with your local tourism board or destination marketing organization. Get out there and mingle like you’re single! I’m very proud of my clients at Doobie Nights for joining local Chambers, hosting mixers, and participating in Visit Santa Rosa initiatives (like the Santa Rosa Cannapass app that I helped create).

🎉 Get Together: There’s no better way to connect and inspire people than getting them together in real life. Events (even virtual ones) and immersive experiences are far more memorable than any ad or blog post ever will be. Making people feel something is the best way to live rent free in their heads. So if you have space to host events, get your vendors and friends together often. Or pull your community together to pool resources and rent a venue for an annual fundraiser. Supporting a cause or fundraising for a local charity or community member in need gives any event a heartfelt purpose that can draw a crowd.

👂 Listen & Stay Relevant: Knowing which partnerships and collaborative campaigns to pursue starts with knowing your audience, your purpose, and meeting your people where they are. The first step is listening. What are your teammates into? What causes are near and dear to them? Who is your audience and what pain points is your company or product solving for? Your collaborations should be a natural reflection of your brand and your team’s purpose.

📲 Small Acts of Support: When you meet a new work contact or potential client, someone who shares a hobby or anyone you’d like to collaborate with, follow them on your preferred social media apps and save their contact info. Building bridges often begins with small acts of support that helps people feel seen (and helps you remember new people’s names, if you’re terrible at that like me). Like and comment on their posts, start inviting them to events, send them a funny meme, collaborate on posts, find those common threads and see where they lead.

📧 Keep in Touch: I need to use my own advice on this one – try to communicate with people in their preferred method. And keep a regular but comfortable cadence with your communications. This goes for personal calls and for things like your company’s email list. Don’t spam people! Nobody wants a marketing email daily unless maybe they’re tracking a package. Some people hate phone calls or texting. At some point your network gets too big and you need a CRM to help you organize it all and automate things (and keep track of who hates phone calls). Then you can build group texts and email segments for certain projects, types of partners, and internal teams.

🥰 Actually Care: I wish I didn’t need to say this, but don’t just do something because it’s good PR. Collaborations and partnerships require actually giving a f*ck. Authenticity matters and if people can’t feel it or it feels fake, they won’t buy in. Choose partnerships and projects based on what you and your team actually care about. And do what you say you will when you make a commitment. When you care about your community and get involved in it, people will trust you and your brand, and actually want to hear you and support you.

💪 Put in Work: Volunteering in your local community and encouraging employees and partners to participate together is one of the best ways to build community. Showing up in person as a team is the ultimate team building exercise. But make sure you compensate your team for doing it, not require them to come in on their off time. Don’t just do it for the photo op, but find a way to align your community initiatives with your marketing, like highlighting a local non-profit each season and giving your community a chance to be involved or donate to a cause.

🫶 Be Inclusive, but Selective: You’ll want to make sure you are keeping yourself and your company safe whenever you partner with others on a campaign, fundraiser or brand promotion. Do your research and make sure your values align and there are no red flags before choosing to partner with people. People who are transparent, good at creating win-wins, reciprocate and set you up for success make great partners. When you think of who you’d hang out with outside of work and actually like as a person, those are the ones to start pestering about a collaboration for work. Good partners become ambassadors for you and your brand and tend to refer you to other good people as well.

📊 Measure your Impact: When it’s time to pull together an annual report, don’t forget to include the community building activities, events you sponsored, and causes you supported in an impact summary. Creating trackable QR codes that you can have on buttons or signage at events, capture notes about leads or impressions generated, donations and other outcomes, and any key relationships made or strengthened from each of your collaborative campaigns or partnerships. If you can justify to your company that investing in community has a good ROI, you can put more of your marketing strategy and budget towards purpose driven endeavors.

Ok you get the idea. All of these communications strategies can be applied to community organizing, choosing causes or organizations to support or give your limited time to, connecting with others and holding on to hope as you quietly build your apocalypse team… How are you choosing partners and planning collaborations? In such divisive and scary times, we could use all the bridge building that we can get.

As with any digital ad campaign, the important thing is to reach streaming audiences who will convert. Roku’s self-service Ads Manager stands ready with powerful segmentation and targeting — plus creative upscaling tools that transform existing assets into CTV-ready video ads. Bonus: we’re gifting you $5K in ad credits when you spend your first $5K on Roku Ads Manager. Just sign up and use code GET5K. Terms apply.

Use code GET5K now