You're listening to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast brought to you by Affifirst.com. The chapter and verse of everything you need for running successful affiliate programs and partnership management. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers, publishers, networks, agencies, and Martech providers who operate in affiliate marketing. If you want to launch, scale, and grow successful affiliate marketing programs, you're in the right place. In this podcast, you'll learn how affiliate and partner marketing is changing. Gain behind the mic access to affiliate marketing veterans. Listen and learn tried and tested program management tactics. Discover what's new and trending in affiliate and performance marketing. The truth is, you simply won't find this information anywhere else. Want to get your affiliate program noticed? Need new business leads for your agency network or SAS tools, we can help your business get seen and heard. Affiverse offers a variety of advertising and podcast advertising placements, reaching tens of thousands of digital and affiliate marketers around the world. Our content receives over 800,000 impressions a month and is highly targeted. Our podcast regularly charts in the top 100 across Apple and Business News and boasts the most five-star reviews of any affiliate marketing podcast, with more than 2,500 plus downloads per episode, putting us in the top 5% of podcasts worldwide. We help brands and affiliate partners connect and grow. Agencies to share case studies, insights, and help them find new clients too. SaaS companies to find new customers and new leads. Networks, find new advertisers and publishers. Advertise with us and you'll find and connect to all the right people in the affiliate marketing industry. Download our media pack by visiting our site www.affiverse.com and click advertise to find out more. That's www.affire.com. Now, here's your award-winning affiliate and performance marketing host, industry veteran, and your affiliate marketing guide and founder of Affiverse, Leanne Johnston.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to the affiliate marketing podcast with me, Leanne Johnston. And today I'm super excited to have Michelle Goodall from Guild joining us on the podcast to talk about community and why building a community around your affiliate programme is so important. Michelle, it's great to have you here. How are you doing?
SPEAKER_00I'm very well and thank you for asking me to join you today.
SPEAKER_02So let's get started by introducing you to our community. So tell us a little bit about your background, how you landed up at Guild, and you know, just how you got into the industry in general.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, thank you. Okay, so I'm a bit long in the tooth. I've been in marketing and communications and community as a consultant, as a head of a department in an agency, client side, vendor side. So I can see it from many, many different angles. I'm currently chief marketing officer at Guild, and Guild is a mobile-first platform that's purpose-built for groups, networks, and communities. So you can create your own branded communities on the platform. For me personally, 25 years has basically been spent developing marketing, digital marketing, community and comms strategies. I've worked with lots and lots of B2B and B2C brands, large and small, global, UK-based, European, etc., including Unilever brands like Dove, General Mills brands, Direct Line Group, Viacom, the BBC. I worked on London 2012, Multiple Sirrhosis Society, and many, many more. I mean, my history in marketing and digital marketing is really quite accidental. So I came to London in the late 90s and I was working for this very small organization in a tiny, tiny office in Notting Hill, and they had a database publishing product. And at the time, we were also selling software called Hot Metal Pro that would enable people to build uh websites. So I got really hooked in this very early nascent world of the internet and websites and web forums and bulletin boards and usenet boards, those kind of things, actually in the very early 90s. And I kind of found a bit of a niche because I developed as a consultant in this space and worked for the very first online PR agency, uh, working with some fantastic brands, doing some incredible things. I later got poached by a big consumer public relations agency and headed up their digital division and then went to go and work for e-consultancy. And actually, that's where I think really I started to professionalize my understanding of community and help them to create their global digital community of 600,000 digital marketers worldwide as well. So, you know, listen, I've been in pre-social media community platforms, uh pre-metaverse communities, virtual worlds, early social media communities, et cetera, and have worked for some really big brands over those periods of times to help them to kind of navigate through it. And I actually didn't create Guild, I wish I had done, but that was our founder, Auschwitz Friedline, who also created e-consultancy. He intended Guild as a WhatsApp chat alternative for professional purposes. And the reason for that is he just didn't like the world pivoting towards everything being owned by Facebook or now Meta. And also didn't like the idea that platforms were so data hungry and also governance nightmare for brands and organizations and individuals, et cetera. And so we've got product market fit over time. Guild is now four years old, and it's become a space where brands and organizations create branded, private, GDPR compliant communities for thought leadership, lead generation, customer communications, partner management, or many other uses. So that's Guild, my background. Um, and it really has been, you know, affiliate marketing, partner marketing, uh, creator marketing, performance marketing is just a bit of what I do as a CMO. I love it.
SPEAKER_02And that's why I wanted you on this podcast because I'm seeing a big movement to brands, especially in a bigger affiliate programs, building community around their brands. So I want to really dig deep into some of the experiences that you've had working across multiple different industries as well and what community really means. So I guess that's my first question is what is a community and what isn't a community? Let's clarify that first for everybody listening, and then we can go into the kind of how to do it.
SPEAKER_00Okay, well, listen, most people conflate social media with that word community. And I have to admit, you know, I've lectured in um community strategy. And, you know, at that time in the sort of early 2000s, um, we were developing communities on social media platforms because they weren't ad funded. You know, we were able to play and build these wonderful brand communities. But actually, we've you know latterly realized and recognised that you can do this, but they can take away uh the features typically of an online community quite easily and quite happily. So LinkedIn, for example, you know, its engineering team around LinkedIn groups just hasn't existed for a very, very long time. So they don't invest in this element of their platform. But I want to define the word community first, okay, because it's I think bandied around and really misused by people when actually probably they've got a network or maybe they've got an event, but they don't necessarily have a community. So let's start with that definition first. An online community is also known as a virtual community, an internet community, or a digital community. And this is just simply a space or a place where people come together digitally to interact, share knowledge, and build relationships. And, you know, I come at it very much from a marketing perspective and community or marketing as a definition is the management process which is responsible for identifying, anticipating, and satisfying customer requirements properly. So when you sort of smash community and when you smash marketing together, you've got this thing called community-based marketing. And that's something that uh a phrase that myself and Ashley Friedline um coined in 2021. And this is simply bringing people together around a shared practice, purpose, place, product, or set of circumstances to create insights and to create closer, much more valuable relationships with your customers, with your prospects, with your partners and other stakeholders to deliver value for your organization. So that really simply is it. If you start to put everything through the lens of bringing people together, convening people in a virtual private online space to do good things together and to align to your organizational objectives, then you've got a real understanding behind what community can do for you. And, you know, there are lots of different types of community, communities of place, play, purpose, product and practice, and also circumstance. But in the world of affiliate and performance marketing, it probably is going to be aligned around product or practice, people coming together to learn more, to do more, to collaborate, to share. And as a brand or an organization, by convening people in your space, you're getting some fabulous business benefits, which I can go into uh into some detail because I think you wanted to ask the question around that. You know, what benefits do you get?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. And I think for me, the biggest thing that I've seen, and maybe can extrapolate on this, is the benefit of actually retaining your partners and your your affiliates around your brand and what it is that your program stands for. So talk a little bit about the kind of benefits of why should affiliate managers who are already busy in their day jobs actually invest time in terms of building community around their programs and their products and what it is that they're trying to get partners to do for them.
SPEAKER_00You know what I would say they probably have their community already, but what they're doing is they're reaching out to these people through lots of different spaces. Now, there are people who can run communities quite happily with things like, you know, emails and listserves and whatever. You know, that it the the technology, in a sense, doesn't really matter. I'm saying social media because you have no control. You know, that's not an owned platform, you know, that's an earned platform and that's a shared platform in the peso model.
SPEAKER_02But also it impacts your reach.
SPEAKER_00Like you can't actually physically talk to everybody that's in your Facebook group or whatever the case may be, because they don't actually see your messages in their feeds. This you know. I mean, just have a look at your reach. And and you know, the reality is those platforms have ad-funded models, you know, that's how they exist. Um, you have to pay to play and you have to pay for visibility. But but just going back to you know what you were asking about how busy program managers can build community and they've got the community already, they've got the contacts, they've got the stimulus and the content, they've got the events, they've got everything that they need to convene the right people into a space. And what I would say is it's not just the virtual platform, it's also the opportunities to be able to meet people in person, whether that's sort of virtual meetups or whether that's events, et cetera, as well. But I think if you start to look at the benefits of pivoting towards community and not just thinking about this sort of massively atomized approach to your communications with your partners and with your stakeholders, what you get is thought leadership, you get positioning. People respect you as a brand or an organization because you've put that thought and time into actually how can we make this relationship more effective and efficient? Because if you think about, you know, just email or even social media one-to-one or any messaging at all, you're likely to have exactly the same conversation over and over and over again. So efficiency should really drive you towards this. It can extend the value of your content marketing, your reports, your data, um, you know, your help, your FAQs, all of those different things. And I think also this is about uh this sort of creation of a reputational moat and really sort of starting to think about how you can drive ambassadors and advocates for you as well. As I say, we work across so many different industries and sectors. And you know, some things are more important to other people. Customer retention, for example, if you're a membership organization or a subscription business, is really huge, and that's a massive part of community. But also for agencies, for example, community is about uh thought leadership and this you know extension of uh you know reputation, but also um support new revenue streams and and also to kind of identify maybe products or services that they might want to um create, identify customers' um pain points and challenges as well. I mean, there are so many different things that you can do with uh communities and insight generation absolutely is kind of at the front of that as well. But I think it's it's just about I think more intentional relationships with the people that matter to you. And as I say, whether that's your partners, whether that's your prospects, whether that's your existing customers, break it down into the various stakeholders and then consider what sort of community architecture would work for you.
SPEAKER_02The other thing as well is that we need to learn to break through the noise because most affiliate managers use email as the form of relationship building. And actually, a lot of us have gravitated away from just receiving an email or a newsletter about this is what's happening with our product. I mean, I'm thinking affiliate managers could be using communities like this and tools like this to actually, you know, engage with their partners, tell them about early release products. And you touched on ambassadors and influencers that probably have a better propensity to actually communicate with their affiliate manager using a tool like Guild because they're used to being on social platforms, they're used to being in forums, they're used to being engaging with other brands and people and curating content online, and that's what this this channel actually does. Now, if you're listening to this podcast and you haven't checked out guild yet, please go and download the app on your phone because you'll see how easy it is to create a community. Now, I want to get on to some of the kind of like best practices because a lot of affiliate managers are going to listen to this and they're gonna go, oh community. And you know, maybe 60% of them will fail. So let's talk about some of the things that you need to get right before you start your community. Because whilst the tool is very easy to use, it needs to be a strategy, right?
SPEAKER_00Totally. And, you know, so many people, uh it was the same with social media, you know, people would just grab their logo, grab the URL, grab the, you know, the account name, the feed, etc., and then go for it, but actually not put any thought behind it. And, you know, this is route one kind of marketing. You absolutely, if you're gonna put time and effort into building a successful community, then you've got to think about a number of different things that you do before you do this. I mean, notwithstanding how you're going to resource this, you said the word busy, you know, actually, something might have to give if you are going to, you know, put your focus of your efforts behind um building a community. But with any strategy, you always start out with your why, you know, what is this going to do? Why am I aligning, you know, my marketing, my sales, my innovation, my ESG, my CSR kind of strategy to this? And and you know, it's exactly the same if you're approaching it from quite a narrow approach, which is performance marketing, affiliate marketing, etc. But what do I need to do better? Do I need to be much more efficient with my communications? Do I need to retain clients? Do I need to build my brand? You know, basically what you're doing is identifying what will this do that will make uh people in the C-suite and people on the board actually sit up and pay attention? Because whilst investing in a platform like Guild doesn't cost you very much, it's you're gonna have to build this into everything else that you do. So align your uh community to your organizational goals, whether that's sales and lead generation, whether that's marketing uh goals, whether that's improved customer service, customer attention, whether it's you know developing insight for innovation, for competitive advantage, etc. So the simple things that you need to do are to get this thing right on paper. Now, I'm gonna say go and have a look at this resource because Leanne, a couple of years ago, I took sort of 25 years of community strategy and I put it onto a page. And it's something called the periodic table of community strategy, and it breaks everything down into the things that you need to think about on paper before you build a community. So, you know, organizational objectives, aligning it to that is really important. What type of community do you have? You know, is it a community of practice? Is it a community of product, place play, etc.? And then how are you going to resource this internally? What are the roles for different members? What are the things that members have to do in order to be in the community? And what's that value statement for people? So not just your intended purpose, which is to, you know, improve my affiliate programs or to get more insights, but actually the external articulation of what it is for members and the value it brings to them. So they will want to join in the first place. And then you've got more tactical things like how you engage with your different community members over a period of time, the stimulus that you might use, aligning to events, you know, the tactics, the communications tactics and the content formats that you might use, things like quizzes or challenges, for example, or virtual events or leaderboards, all of these different things. And then ultimately different milestones that you might have over a period of time in terms of growth, in terms of engagement, and also in terms of actually how this delivers against the strategy, delivers against what you're setting out to do.
SPEAKER_02A lot of what affiliate managers do with their partners is push communication and they don't actually pull, they don't pull information back and say, how can I help you to earn more? And a lot of the features that I've seen in Guild, and this is why I've got you on the podcast, I've looked at the platform, I've played around with the platform, I've engaged in lots of different communities in the platform, and it's really opened my eyes to see how important community is and how affiliate managers can leverage that to actually improve loyalty because you know, affiliates they have multiple brands to go and promote. They have lots of relationships, key relationships that they need to manage. And, you know, we touched on breaking through the noise of you know dealing with a Facebook Messenger or an email campaign. I think having the platform that's super easy to use and literally every affiliate manager as a member has a mobile. It doesn't cost a lot of money, it doesn't require extra resources, and it's something that you could do even with your own portfolio, never mind for the whole program as a whole. You could build community with the partners that you have to build relationships with and actually keep them informed, drop little bits of information that isn't invasive into their day, but just keep yourself front of mind with your partner so that you're gaining that relationship leverage.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, one thing that I would say the secret of a good community is not I, it's not just another space to push out your messages, but it's we. So how can you do things collaboratively? And, you know, that was a tactical example, something like a quiz, for example. But, you know, we work with a lot of um media owners and publishers, and they talk about this thing which is audience-led publishing. So actually, the publishers who are using Guild have set up communities maybe to support their subscription models, but actually more importantly, to generate insights that allow them to go away and then write articles about things. And I think you're in one of those communities where you can actually actively see the journalists doing that. And, you know, this is a revelation because before, you know, journalists would kind of listen in social media, but there's no competitive advantage there because, you know, it's everybody's got access to the conversation happening. And God, God knows what's happening to Twitter anyhow. So where does this conversation actually take place? Well, you know, you've got to be connected to people on LinkedIn to find, you know, the the more interesting conversations. So, you know, it it it's I think we're seeing a bit of a step change towards uh closed, more uh niche communities whereby a practice or an industry or as you say, a program or something around an organization, it's yours. But what you have to do is to kind of swap over this mentality, which is broadcast, broadcast, broadcast, to put a stimulus in, put a conversation in, listen, and then do something with that intelligence. So whether that is, you know, creating more resources or an event, you know, around the pain points that people have. And you know, as a marketer, a lot of people, you know, kind of slam marketers for being very ad and promotional kind of focused. We're not. The best marketers are the ones who listen, who do their research. And I think what communities allow you to do is to listen and also co-create uh with your audiences. And that's why I think it's perfect, you know, for 2023 and beyond.
SPEAKER_02That's amazing. I really love that analogy. One of the things that I want to touch on for now as well is we've spoken about, you know, what you need to think about before you. Start a community, how to tactically keep your community engaged. But what are some of the mistakes that you see people make that you want this community to avoid?
SPEAKER_00So, number one, with Guild and also many other uh community platforms, you're going to have to have somebody who is the host or the community manager of your community. It's a mistake to put somebody very, very junior on that because actually you need as much as the technology, you need somebody who really understands interpersonal kind of dynamics, group dynamics, and who has the soft skills to be able to get people talking, engaging, and who has the time to be able to message people and get people involved in a conversation as well. So one of the biggest mistakes is actually the resource that people use. And some people are really, they naturally have an affinity to doing this. They're normally the people that you would see at events, networking, feeling confident to talk to people who are much more senior than them, and also, you know, who are able to kind of hold a conversation, but also introduce other people, you know, to somebody who they might want to meet. So I think that's really, really important. Another mistake that people make is what I've touched on before, which is just using it as another channel to broadcast. It's much better if you look at a community as a collaborative effort, you know, it's a collection of people, and you'll get much more um, you know, brilliant results if you approach it in that way. I think the other mistake that people make is that they don't keep the effort going. And also they think that, you know, they'll they'll crack it in six months. Community, uh the way that I can describe it is it's it's much more like brand building than performance marketing. So you are gonna have to be uh in it in the long haul. And you know, at nine months, six months, you should start to see a return on your investment, you know, at that at that point. But so many people give it a few weeks and then they give up because you know, nobody is talking, for example. You've got to approach it in a long-term way and to think of it as a an owned channel, a real asset that you have as well.
SPEAKER_02What's some of the success stories that you've seen with like companies or brands that have used community to build brand affinity to whatever it is that they're getting people to sell?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I can you know talk about clients that I've worked with in the past, but I think it's much more interesting in the present. So, you know, certainly on Guild, we've got a lot of agencies, professional service agencies, digital agencies, we've got uh management consultants, we've even got architects and you know, people who deliver professional services, they're winning big by creating communities because basically what they're doing is that they're getting their existing customers and their prospects in a community and showing evidence that they know their subject. So when their prospects are in market, they've created a much sort of closer relationship with these people. And so they're the big success stories, really, the the agencies. We're also seeing technology companies, um, certainly on Guild, a couple that I would highlight are the Happiness Index. They're an HR piece of technology that gauges how happy uh your your workforce is. Um and they've got a brilliant community, which is about thought leadership, it's about identifying speakers for their events, it's about you know showing that they understand uh inclusivity, uh, what makes people happy at work, hybrid working, all of these different things. So they demonstrate success through their content and their knowledge of the sector. But what they're doing is that they're convening very, very senior people in HR roles globally, who also have the budgets to buy this type of technology as well. Um, and also, you know, in the kind of the influencer space, uh, Analytica are doing really well with their communities. And what they're doing is they're bringing together uh influencers and creators uh and also prospects and and customers in a community that's really focused on sort of, I would say, the nascent area of B2B influencer market as well. So that's just a you know a couple of examples, but you know, professional services and agencies, it it makes sense because you know, if you're going to be creating blog posts and events and webinars and all of these things and podcasts, etc., around the stuff that you know, then where do people go afterward? That's where we're seeing you know a lot of success. And you know, people, I can't say who this is and uh have to get permission, but one of the agencies who who works with, they just want an 80,000 pound mini project off the back of their community. So, you know, we can see this success happening in front of our faces.
SPEAKER_02And I think as well, I mean, this on the flip side again, you know, if if it works for an agency to go get and you Is it not gonna wait for you to go find that partner that actually wants to engage with a brand and a company that is really serious about working with them? And I like the idea of maybe even thinking about getting some of your customers to feed back to your partners in your in your program community because they want to hear from customers too, so they can do better promotions for you. So it might even be, you know, maybe we're starting a trend here. And we see some really cool communities coming out in Guild where publishers are actually speaking to customers and the brand is involved in that conversation as well, because all three of them in the same community is together.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And if you're not involved in that conversation, it's happening anyhow. You know, it will be happening. People would be direct messaging each other through LinkedIn, through guild. Um, they'll be talking to each other anyhow. So it's much better to be part of that conversation and actually convening that conversation. And that shows, I think, authority, thought leadership, and the fact that you're a you know a trusted player within this space. And and I see the conversations around affiliate marketing, and there are conversations around trust and you know, um, the industry as a whole. So I think if you can position yourself in that way, you're in a really good space.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. So there you have it, guys. We've broken down the basics and the fundamentals of community. If you are interested in finding out more, I would suggest that you download the Guild app and actually have a bit of a playbook into some of the communities that are already there, see how other people are using community to build affinity around their programs and their brands and their services, and just have a little bit of fun with it and actually think about it as a long-term player that can make you a differentiator and a partner than you know, affiliates take note of. So, Michelle, it's been an absolute pleasure for having you on this podcast this week. I think you've done an incredible job describing what a community is and what it isn't, and how to really get started. And we'll definitely link to the resource that you mentioned as well in the in the blog transcribe. Um, but all you know, all the best with the growth of guild. I think it's an amazing tool and I absolutely love it.
SPEAKER_00Oh, thank you, Liam. Thanks for having me on, and thanks for being such a wonderful ambassador as well. Thank you.
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