Hiring a community team
The power of a talented and dedicated community marketing team should not be underestimated when it comes to promoting and growing your business.
When you decide to hire a community marketing team you need to make sure that they have a good understanding of the target audience and are well-versed in the best practices for engaging and growing an online community.
A successful community marketing team should also be able to identify industry trends and apply them to your business. This includes understanding which online tools are best-suited for your community members, what type of content resonates with them, and how to use metrics and analytics to measure progress.
When it comes to recruiting members for your team, it’s important to look for people who are genuine, enthusiastic, and eager to help others. These are the individuals who will go the extra mile to ensure that your business is engaging positively and meaningfully with your customers and potential customers. Finally, it’s essential that your community marketing team has the ability to work together as a cohesive unit. With the right combination of people, your business can have a strong, vibrant, and engaged community of customers that will drive sales and boost brand visibility.
Hiring by stage of community maturity
When hiring to execute a community function you need to consider both where you are now and where you want to be in a year.
If you’re starting from zero then the holy grail is a Community Manager who can both create a strategy and execute on it day to day. This person is a bit of a unicorn as more strategic community professionals are less likely to be doing to day execution which is time consuming. What can be easier is to find a more junior community manager who is creative and has good community building skills that can execute on a strategy with some support from a fractional VP Community (I can help with both of these)
Next size up 2-5 people at this point you have your basic strategy and now it’s time to really deliver value to your community. So now you need specialists who can work together to do that for you. This depends on how you’ve designed your community experience (what are the things that happen regularly that define your community experience?). Example specialisms might be event production (online and offline), content production (written, visual, video, podcasts etc), community moderators, programme designers, member acquisitions, partnerships delivery etc.
Once you reach the scale up phase you need to do the same to your team. Obviously you don’t want to build a big team for the sake of it and I recommend creating as many opportunities for the community to create value for itself too but these programmes still need to be managed. Remember every interaction a member has with your team they are building a picture of you as a company so it’s crucial you hire the right people.