Use integrated marketing to convert followers into a fanbase

It’s not always enough to sell a product. For one product marketing team, they wanted to turn casual social media followers into a vibrant and engaged community.

The challenge

The question became: how do we build a trusted, engaging community for product enthusiasts where we can encourage their advocacy while also gathering feedback to help accelerate product innovation?

This team had an existing blog channel for product content, but it didn’t foster the two-way conversations needed to create a community. However, their existing social media channels had to be part of any solution.

The plan

To foster this level of community engagement—or fandom—across social, we needed to make sure we were reaching the right people, on the right platforms, with the right content, at the right times. Our initial research explored what other communities existed and what they were doing right (or not so right). We analyzed the team’s current social channels and their current audience engagement.

We landed on an end-to-end social media and community strategy with four key priorities:

• Promote and drive views to new blog content to boost interest in product previews and understanding of early-release features
• Build an active community on social by personalizing engagement approaches, showcasing individuals and their stories, and sharing conversation starters
• Gather regular community feedback via surveys and other feedback requests
• Engage with the community on their terms by showing up across multiple channels and forums with timely responses to questions and insights

To get people interested and connected to the community, we invested in supporting the product teams with blog content focused on telling people stories about product updates. We also developed a mix of social content that stopped the scroll and got people engaging.

The importance of leaning into change

No day is the same when managing social and a broader community. There is always a pervasive need for agility and flexibility, especially as new platforms emerge, larger events shape conversations, and community members expect immediate responses to their needs.

Two years into building and establishing a social community focused on product evangelism and storytelling, one more change came our way. The product was being rebranded.

Instead of seeing this as a challenge, it was an opportunity to get the existing community excited about what was to come, while also seizing the opportunity to leverage this moment to bring a net new audience into our community.

Leading up to the official brand unveil, we shared the new product name and look with playful visuals that encouraged reactions and sharing. We also amplified our posts across other brand handles as an update for their audiences with call-to-actions to sign up for our community program. This effort drove more than 2,500 new followers in less than a month.

Understand user behaviors—and mirror them

Trying new things and then quickly pivoting or fine-tuning based on data is one of the best ways to see what works (or doesn’t) for your audience. When the program first started, we repurposed the product marketing team’s existing forums and X handle (formerly known as Twitter) to build the initial community.

But followers don’t always stay in one place. Our followers were migrating to LinkedIn and YouTube, so we moved with them. We launched a new LinkedIn showcase page for the community, as well as expanded into creating YouTube shorts featuring helpful product tips. The additional channels let us diversify our channel tactics, and data helped us reassess how and where we were driving out targeted messages.

The outcome

A true testament to the impact of building a product-focused social community is the number of voices that joined the community. In the most recent year of the program, we saw more than 10K organic program mentions and 100 individual community questions and support needs triaged.

Followers grew to more than 11K new people in under a year. They showed their brand love with a 78% positive brand sentiment supported by more than 40K video views and 23K clicks to view more in-depth product content.

Powering integrated marketing strategies with social + community

They say social is all fun and games. Yet many find it’s a space of constant change and evolution—algorithms change, and new platforms emerge.

The good news is our team at Delightful is passionate about staying on top of the latest updates, testing new platforms and posting strategies, and integrating these insights into larger integrated marketing strategies—all so you can focus on your business priorities instead.