Ep. 293- GUEST: #1 Marketing PODCAST U.K.🧐Building Community SECRETS! w/Daniel Rowles CEO TargetInternet.com

Foreign.

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers.

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I'm Jay Schwedelson.

Let's do this not that.

We are back for do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold.

And we're going global today.

We got somebody from the uk.

We got a big guy, a big deal.

Daniel Rolls is here now, you might know Daniel for a few reasons.

Number one, he's the CEO of an awesome company called Targetinternet.com and we're going to get all into.

I mean, the Guy's got like 200 courses that they teach and they provide and they have this amazing community.

But he also has a big deal podcast.

The digital marketing podcast has hit number one in the UK and he's been in the top 10 globally for a really long time.

The guy knows what he's talking about, and we're going to dig into all sorts of community stuff and to see his community real.

Is it garbage?

What's the story?

Daniel, welcome to the show.

It is fantastic to be here.

Thank you for having me.

Amazing.

All right, so listen, before we get into.

Is the word community overplayed?

Is it garbage?

Is it all hype?

What do you actually do for a living?

So Target Internet, the business that I run, is basically a training company.

So we, we work with the leadership team at Google, teams at Apple, loads of other brands you would have heard of upskilling their teams around digital marketing.

And their biggest challenge is just staying up to date.

So we've built this online learning platform.

We go into companies and we kind of train people, basically.

Well, that makes it sound so simple.

How long have you been doing it?

Like, give me some superlatives.

You got a zillion people involved.

What's happening?

Yeah, so we, we started.

Well, I started the business 14 years ago, and it was basically a way for me to get out of the rat race and try and basically run this training business.

And then someone came to us about 13 and a half years ago and said, can you build me an online learning platform?

And we were like, yeah, give us a month, we'll have it done.

And we had this horrible minimal viable product, built the platform, got some people on it, and then we've just been iterating it and building it, and now we have this online platform that benchmarks skills and recommends content and all that kind of fun stuff.

So someone will come to us and say, look, we've got a team.

We need to upskill.

And they can't stay up to date.

There's just too much going on.

And we give them a kind of structured, engaging way of doing that.

I love it.

So for everyone that's listening right now, I specifically wanted Daniel to come on here because I wanted to talk about communities.

And the reason I wanted to talk about it is that that's the buzzword of the day, right?

Oh, I got to build a community.

I have a community.

My community.

I started my community, and it died after 90 days.

It became a ghost town.

And you've done something.

You've built a community that's actually a paid community.

People actually pay to be in your community, and it's working.

And so I want you to share.

What is the secret sauce?

You figured it out.

Everybody else is cl.

Clueless.

Tell me how to run and do a community.

So we've had it before where we've built a community in maybe it was Facebook initially, and we had like, 30,000 people there.

And then we went into LinkedIn, and maybe we had like, 40, 50,000 people there.

And the problem is, you go through these waves, just like you said, that you lose control of it because you don't really own the platform.

The nearest next thing to that for us was our podcast audience.

But, you know, might be 130,000 listeners a month coming into that.

But the friction of getting anybody to do anything afterwards is so great that there was no real community there.

There was only people listening.

There was a handful of people regularly engaging.

So every kind of conference or event you went to, people would talk about.

You need to build a community.

That's where it's at.

It will amplify itself and all this great stuff.

And we tried it and failed.

Tried it and failed.

Tried it and failed.

So we said, we need to take a more structured approach.

So what we've got is we've taken a very quite traditional marketing formula, and then how do you take that and make that into a fairly guaranteed way of creating engagement and a community off the back of it?

So we've taken paz, which if you're a traditional marketer, you know, is problem, agitation, solution.

And we said, okay, what is it that our target audience really care about?

And quite often people talk about creating a community of shared interest.

But shared interest, like, you know, you're interested in marketing, is probably not enough to get you to take action.

It's enough to make you listen to a podcast, but not enough to actually bother doing anything.

So he said a community of a shared problem is actually a better solution because if you've got a problem, you want to kind of solve it and it's a pain point for you.

So we try to take a very data driven approach to it.

So if I walk you through the kind of three steps of doing this, the problem is that our target audience, we look at our target Persona marketers, they can't stay up to date.

That's why they listen to your podcast, that's why I listen to ours.

So we say, okay, how do we agitate that problem?

How do we really prove to them how serious this is?

And they need to be taking it more seriously.

So what we did big piece of research.

We chopped up 80,000 jobs into tasks.

Okay, so writing emails, writing reports, attending meetings, all the stuff that we do every day.

And then said, okay, what's the likelihood of those tasks changing in the next three years, I.

E.

Being automated by AI or being replaced?

So how much of our jobs not going to be replaced, but are going to be changed?

And the big piece of research comes out and said, on average 42% of every information worker's job is going to change.

So anyone that works in office does all that kind of stuff is very likely to change in next three years.

The top career that came out, number one, marketing.

57% of what we're doing is going to change or disappear.

We're screwed.

In all my students, so I'm also senior lecturer at Imperial College in London and all my marketing master students are coming to me and saying, have I picked the wrong career?

Like really worried about it?

And I'm no, no, no.

What it means is that we're getting this stuff first.

We get all the exciting stuff.

So it's good, right?

There's evidence here.

This is agitated.

You've said, this is your problem.

Everyone's agreed, you've got a bit of trust with them via the podcast.

You then agitated this and said, oh boy, are we in trouble.

Yeah, we've, we've got to really do something about this as well.

And then the solution piece, we need to give them something that is so data driven you can't argue with it and also fits into what they want to make them take an action.

So, okay, we've agitated the problem.

We've done this piece of research, the next piece of research, just to say, well, are you alone in this?

Like, is it Everyone, or is it you?

Or is it, you know, everyone's smarter than you?

If it's everyone dumber than you, what is it?

And actually we do this digital marketing skills benchmark.

So we give this away for free.

People can come in, benchmark themselves or their teams.

And we've benchmarked 30,000 people in this test.

That takes like about 40 minutes to do it.

And it works out.

How good are your analytics, how good are your SEO, how good are you at content?

All those sorts of things.

And what we can then demonstrate is that the pace of change is ridiculous.

You have agreed with that.

You can see it's a problem.

You've come in, you've potentially benchmarked your skills.

Or you might just look at the data and you look at it and go, well, actually, everyone's terrible.

Like, if this is 100% at the outer edges, then actually the kind of blob that sits in the middle on a spider diagram that shows where people's skills are is actually really small.

So as an industry, we've got a huge problem, there's a huge skills gap.

But what it actually means is that you don't need to be a hundred percent, you don't need to know everything.

Because the problem with this agitation piece is that you overwhelm people.

You kind of say, look at this fast paced, changing environment.

You really need to do this stuff.

It's really.

And people just get, oh, I can't be bothered.

It's like trying to get someone to go to the gym when they haven't been going for 10 years.

Yeah, it's just, yeah.

And you can get them to sign up to the gym, but they're probably not even going to go because it's just too much friction.

So we then say, look, everyone's kind of here at the center.

All you've got to do is you've just got to make your little kind of shape at the center that shows your skills ever so slightly bigger than your competitors or slightly bigger than competing individuals that want that career break that you want.

Okay, so actually we will give you the solution to do that.

Okay.

And, but we'll do it together.

And it's not necessarily about the fact that saying we have greater expertise than you, but it's really about saying, we've tried it, we've tested it.

Here's the data to back up.

Here's stuff that's actually worked.

So let me ask you a question.

So this is really interesting to me.

So you're saying, and this makes sense, that the overwhelming majority of communities that are out there, whatever version, free, paid, whatever the topic is, what normally the people who are organizing the communities are bringing together people that do a similar thing or like minded people or have an interest in a certain thing.

But what you're really saying is if you, you're better off focusing on the pain point.

Yeah, right.

What is the problem that they have?

Not necessarily just who they are.

And you find people facing a common problem and you build a community around that instead.

Is that what we're saying?

Exactly.

And what that does is build honesty.

I mean, it's why our podcast worked.

Because there are quite a few other digital marketing podcasts at the time and a lot of them are like, how to make your, you know, your first 10 million and how are you going to do this?

And how are you going to do that?

And actually came in and went, oh no, this is horrible.

We did this.

It didn't work.

That didn't work.

I mean, and we keep making the point, if there was a formula for this then everyone would be doing it, it wouldn't work anymore anyway.

So it's like, let's just be honest, let's, let's be pretty transparent about that.

And the community allows people to have that vulnerability to say, yeah, I'm not finding this easy.

Now this is a lot of the world's leading global brands that are members of this, so you're doing it in a safe environment for them that they don't have to share it to their competitors and things like that.

But it's really saying learn from experience, not just this is the best practice idea to doing it.

And addressing that common problem is what's going to, is going to get them to engage and actually build that community.

So if I'm listening, okay, and I'm a small business owner, okay.

And my problem right now is I really have a hard time with my invoicing and my billing and the accounting side of my business as a pain point.

I'm not really going to join a community though, about a small business owner with accounting issues.

I would do because that, that's a community that would last five minutes.

Is it more like I would join a community about, you know, small business owners with, with trying to grow their business and struggling with, you know, a variety of things like how narrow, how broad does it have to be to make sure a community is not just they're there for five minutes and they bail.

You can't build a community on a, a single issue.

So it's got to be Broad enough that this is existential to what they represent, I.

E.

If I'm a small business owner, it's about growing that business and making that business alive.

If I'm a marketer, it's about me making a success of my career.

So you've got to make that emotional connection to what's important to them.

So by being broad enough, we'll basically say, look, we are the place that if you want to make your marketing succeed, you come on our platform and you learn from our platform and from our team.

Now the other thing, you also realize you've got to differentiate that community a bit as well.

Like where does the community actually live?

This has always been a bit of a challenge, right?

Is it, is it an email list?

Is it a LinkedIn group?

And actually, for us, what's probably a little bit surprising is that what's made the community come to life is webinars.

So because, you know, everyone thinks webinars are a horrible idea, right?

But the, the real, and you've said this to me before as well, I'm going to do a conference.

It's going to be an online one.

It's like, that's a terrible idea, Jay, but you know, you made it succeed.

So, so the reality was, okay, got the online learning platform, that's great.

You can dip in and out of it, but actually face to face, real time, even if it's online learning, where people can speak and interact with each other is great.

So we just don't, we don't call them webinars.

We have, every month we have a masterclass, which is a half day intensive online thing.

And then we do update sessions like get social algorithm update and we put a load of these in and then people can just grab the ones, but they go into their diaries and it's penciled into their diary and therefore they attend because it's scheduled.

So there's all the benefits of all this online learning where people go, oh, that sounds great.

And everyone says it sounds great.

And then they never use it.

You know, it's going to be a small percentage, but because you do the live, real time stuff as well, you get to do stuff like this, you get to speak to people one to one, and they ask questions and they speak to each other.

Okay, now I need you to consult me here for a second because I kind of understand why your model works because you're getting people to pay, and when they pay, they're like, well, I'm paying for this thing, I better participate.

I mean, that's Kind of how I feel.

The, I would say the majority of people out there that either have a community or want to have a community, they're thinking about doing a non paid version so they can have an audience.

And for my business, Right.

So we put on these large events.

Yep.

And after these large, like, you know, 20,000 people events, whatever, these virtual events, everyone's like, oh, we want to, we need a community.

We need to hang out somewhere, you know, let's all get together, you know, start a slack channel and we're going to talk and whatever.

And so I said, fine.

I gave in this past cycle and I said, we're going to test a WhatsApp community.

We put a WhatsApp thing community and we called it a pop up.

Because the reason I called it a pop up was that I was like, if this thing stinks and people start not participating, I'm shutting it down because I can't handle, I can't handle a ghost town.

So we started it and after about 30 days, you could see it just started dying, no matter how much we were in there trying to juice it.

So my question to you is, A, are free communities fake?

Are they garbage?

And B, did I just do it wrong?

Is there a way to make a free community really crush it?

I think with the, the free community piece, the only way of, of really making it work is that it can't be a place where people just come out and, and hang out.

Right.

It's got to be curated.

So if you did a pop up and you went online, you know, live for now, and you did a live podcast episode on the WhatsApp group once a month, whatever it was, I can see that working because you've already got enough traction.

You got to trust people like you enough that they want to, they want to spend some time with you.

So if you curate it, I think it can work, but there has to be an incentive to come back to it every time.

Whereas this idea that a community will run itself, I think is an incredibly difficult thing to do.

And all of Those communities like HubSpot, this community of developers and community of partners, the partners want to make more money, the developers want to make more money.

There's something in it for them from a business development point of view.

And you can sometimes get some individuals that then start to curate it for you.

So it might start off with you or I doing these live sessions and then we might spin off and have a couple, they're really active, they could run some part of this as well.

And then you can kind of amplify it that way, but I think otherwise it's really hard to keep momentum.

Yeah, I agree with you.

And I think the word community has just been, it's overused.

It just, I don't know, it's like this catch all for people that are like in the same category or something.

It's actually driving me nuts.

But all right, before we, before we run out of time here, is there any tips, tricks, thoughts, whatever about community that we didn't get to, that you want to kind of download on everybody before we run out of time here?

Yeah.

So real quick, I said it was webinars, but it's webinars and email in combination.

So the email promise, there was kind of three steps.

Get them on the podcast, build some trust, get them to take an action so you know who they are.

You get them sign up to the email.

But the promise of the email was three tips, tools, techniques, no sales, no ads ever.

So we would never use that as a kind of sales channel.

And then from there you're engaging people and saying, why don't you come along to one for free, come and join one of our sessions and then you speak to them often, say, did you find it valuable?

If you are, would you like it for your team?

So there, there's a, there is a clear path through these kind of different content channels.

And I, I social is in there, but it's a tiny, tiny piece of the pie.

And if I had one tip is don't spend so much time on social media.

And that sounds kind of crazy, but I think that actually there's so much more you can get done with email.

I mean, I'm not counting podcast as social to some extent because I think it's quite broadcast.

But I think, you know, the reality is that that email webinar kind of piece is such a powerful combination if you get it right and you can really engage people.

I love it.

I love all of it.

All right, how does everybody follow you, connect with you, your podcast, lay it all out there.

We're going to put in the show notes, but tell everybody what they got to do.

So if you want to benchmark your skills or your teams for free, targetinternet.com skills you can come in and you can then see yourself against the, the kind of industry average to see where you sit.

Podcast is the digital marketing podcast.

You'll find us everywhere.

You find good podcasts and then probably the best place Daniel rolls R O W L e s on LinkedIn.

And that's where I post all my.

Latest stuff and listen everybody.

I'm not just saying this because he's here.

His podcast, the digital marketing podcast is awesome.

I don't care where you live in the world, it is fantastic.

It's actionable.

You got to check it out.

We're going to put in the show notes.

Daniel, thank you for being here man.

Appreciate you.

It's been a real pleasure.

Thank you so much.

You did it.

You made it to the end.

Nice.

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