5 Signs Community Isn’t Aligned With Marketing—and What to Do About It

Community is versatile. The work you do and the relationships you build with members can boost the outcomes of product, support, and GTM teams. But this flexibility makes it challenging to keep aligned with all the teams you support. Personnel changes, switches in strategy, and ever-altering market conditions all mean you must constantly iterate on how you work with and help these teams.

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In this article, we’re going to focus on the community team’s relationship with marketing. It’s one of the most important. CMX found that 50% of community managers work on marketing as part of their job, and 1 in 3 teams sit within the marketing department. Despite these close links, though, I’ve seen many community teams become misaligned with marketing, sometimes subtly so, making it hard to identify and correct.

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Here are 5 signs to watch out for:

1. Community is not part of launch communication planning

Marketing teams will likely have an established set of assets and channels they utilize for different types of feature and product launches. If you’re not included in that plan, then there’s work to do to get them thinking about how they can make the most of community.

Plus, if you’re only included post-launch, then they’re missing out. After all, community members make a great sounding board for marketing. Instead of springing for costly market research or pushing out untested messaging and campaigns, they could be getting rich feedback from members before any launch.

2. The community team is creating content entirely independent of marketing

Ideally, the content you create or work on with members is an extension of the wider marketing strategy. Except for comms related to the health and running of the community itself, if you’re creating your own content on themes or topics without alignment with marketing, then that’s a flag that you’re out of sync. It’s not just adding to your workload—coming up with a content strategy is a lot of effort—but you also risk confusing customers by talking about different messages or approaching topics in different ways.

3. There’s no connection between community and marketing systems

Here I’m talking about analytics, CRM software, and data warehouses. Whatever marketing considers its source of truth. If you’re not hooked into it, then it should come as no surprise that you’re getting forgotten or that they don’t fully appreciate the outcomes of your efforts. If you’re still working on getting your tools connected, then make sure folks from both community and marketing teams have access and are active in each other’s tracking tools.

4. There are no links to community from the marketing site, or within materials or other properties they own, like onboarding emails, etc.

It’s a two-way street. Yes, community is there to support marketing’s goals, but your community needs to be discoverable to make that happen. Marketing on-ramps to community are some of the best sources for new member acquisition. Peter shares suggestions on where community can be linked. Of course, making that happen isn’t a given. You’ll still need to bring the data, understand their competing priorities, and make your case. But emphasizing the growth loops that come from close integration between marketing and community will help.

 4. GTM teams don’t seek input from community on major decisions

There’s rarely a quick fix for this one. Aside from missing out on your perspectives and experience, few people have the same amount of customer contact as you and your team members. If you’re not being sought out to give the inside scoop on how members might react to new plans, then that’s a sign that your marketing colleagues don’t grasp all the insights you can bring to the table.

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If you’re seeing one (or likely a few) of these signs, what can you do about it?

You can and should address the signs head-on, but it’s rarely a singular problem. More often, it’s an indicator that there’s more work to do in getting other teams to understand how you’re able to help them achieve their goals. 

To do that, you need to fully understand the current priorities of the marketing team - what metrics they are being measured by, their near-term and long-term goals, as well as current pain points.

Start with customer lifecycle mapping

One of the most effective methods I’ve found to gain this understanding is through a customer lifecycle mapping exercise. This enables you to show where and how best community can collaborate. In the case of marketing, you need to work with its leadership to:

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• Map the customer lifecycle stages and who owns what.
• Layer in activities marketing undertakes and the outcomes they’re seeking to drive at each stage.
• With these key elements mapped, you can then identify the biggest opportunities for community to assist.

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This exercise will get you up to speed on their needs right now, but it’s never one-and-done. Their needs are constantly changing, so you want to establish ways to keep on top of them over time. Attending team sync meetings and arranging regular check-ins can help. Getting community in on new marketing team member onboarding is a good way to build a closer connection, too. While committing to a regular community roadshow will also help you maintain a shared understanding over time.

What's next after alingment

All of these things will take a while to come together, though. If you’re keen to get proactive now, you should focus on ensuring you have the results to back up your internal outreach efforts. Whatever you do, you’ll need to be able to show how you’re able to help impact their goals. Thankfully, there are some evergreen needs that marketing always has. If you can help here, that will set you in the right direction. Things like helping with:

• Case study participants
• Speakers for events or guests for webinars
• Testimonials from customers and quotes from early-access participants
• Content. Either input from members like quotes for pieces, or creating subject-area expert content
• Improving customer personas - Connecting the marketing team with members for surveys and interviews to refine personas with real-world data and insights.
• Amplifying marketing efforts on social channels and elsewhere by supporting community members with materials and assets that make it easy to share.

Resolving alignment issues takes time and a concerted effort on both sides. It’s never a solved problem, but something you’ll need to continuously work toward. However, if you can spot the signs of misalignment early and resolve them, you’ll be back on track to work and succeed together.

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