đź“ť Episode Summary
Did you know that the first community Justin Levy created was a foodie community? In this week’s episode of The Antidote, Justin Levy, ZoomInfo’s Head of Social Media, Influencer Marketing & Community, shares the key learnings from his 18 years spent building and maintaining engaged and authentic communities. From creating great content to establishing long-term relationships with influencers, and constantly analyzing community members’ sentiment, Justin shares the do’s and don’ts of community marketing, highlighting how community engagement directly correlates to business success.
🤓 What will I learn
âś… Why building a community based on authenticity is so important
âś… What is the role of content in community engagement
âś… The impact of building long-term over short-term partnerships with influencers
âś… How social sentiment analysis can shape a content and community strategy
đź‘€ Key Insights
1. Personalized quality over spammy quantity, please!
“Authenticity is everything. People can spot insincerity from a mile away. If you’re not genuine, you love the trust of your community, and without trust, you have nothing.”
Authenticity should be the basis of all communities. People buy from people, relate to people, and have conversations with people - not with brands. If people behind brands are not genuine and transparent, creating authentic relationships and gaining trust will be challenging.
To truly foster authenticity and build a strong and trustworthy community, Justin suggests community leaders:
- Be genuine and transparent, and showcase not only their successes but their failures and learnings as well
- Actively listen and guarantee their community members feel heard and seen
- Engage consistently with community members, fostering a sense of belonging
- Celebrate diversity and promote open dialogue, encouraging members to safely share their perspectives
2. The role of content in community engagement
Quality content is the backbone of any thriving community. If community members feel there is no value for them in being a part of the community, they’ll quickly become disengaged and silent. Great content can educate and entertain, while also inspire community members to interact, generating positive and rich discussions.
How can community leaders create good content?
"Great content starts with listening. Understand what your community cares about and tailor your content to meet those interests. It's a continuous cycle of feedback and improvement. (...) Always aim to provide value. When your community sees that you’re invested in their success, they’ll invest in you."
Don’t forget, high-quality, helpful, and valuable content, that addresses your members’ needs, keeps them engaged and coming back for more.
3. "But how do you measure community marketing?"
All community leaders have had this conversation at least once in their career: what is the impact and importance of community? And how can you measure it?
On the surface it might seem that community marketing is an initiative that only serves customers. However, by building a community based on authenticity and knowledge sharing, brands can connect with a different range of consumers, from prospective buyers in sales processes to potential employees, and target prospects who might not even know they need such a brand’s product yet.
So what is the real impact of community marketing? And why should one care to focus on building communities? The answer is: building trust.
"An engaged community doesn't just create buzz; it creates trust and authority. This trust can lead to quicker deal cycles because your community members already believe in your value proposition. They're your advocates.”
▶️ Watch the full episode on Youtube:
đź“– Transcript
Alex Olley (00:01.54)
Justin, welcome to The Antidote. What's been keeping you busy?
Justin Levy (00:05.014)
Well, I'm in the start of my ninth week here at ZoomInfo. So part of it has just been going around the business and meeting with as many people as possible. I am probably in the hundreds of meetings right now, but I think when we look at three of the main areas or so that have really been keeping me busy lately, one was around our social sentiment and our social support. So we have monitoring set up for 12 hours a day, across three shifts, five days a week. We're bringing on contractors to kind of fill that gap on the weekend. So a total of 16 hours over the weekends. And then my third week here, we launched a social swap team. So that comprises of directors and above across eight areas of the business. So like, privacy and legal and sales and product and what have you, and 13 total teams, including a team in the UK that we're standing up. So that has been a massive undertaking, obviously to get all of that in place or to continue what was already there when I got here.
We are getting ready to launch our private Slack community called Modern GTM. So that actually launches over the next few weeks from a beta launch to the public launch. And then, you know, we've been really working on building content, especially video content, whether it be for TikTok or LinkedIn, YouTube shorts, whatever, as well as text-based content that aims to provide tips, tricks, hacks in just overall value for ICs and frontline managers really focused in sales and rev ops roles.
Alex Olley (02:06.874)
Wow, so you're nine weeks in and you've already got all of that to have to tackle.
Justin Levy (02:11.088)
That's just a few. There's been a whole bunch more. But yes, that's been a little.
Alex Olley (02:13.968)
Wow, so you're learning, you're trying to get all this done at the same time. That sounds mad. So I appreciate you giving up your very valuable time for us today. All right, well let's go straight into it. For those listening that have listened to The Antidote before, we like to start off with the big challenge that people are trying to solve. So we call this the poison. What we wanna do is give listeners an antidote. What's the big challenge you're on a mission to solve?
Justin Levy (02:39.978)
I think right now, you know, with the focus of our content, it's to create helpful content, like I just mentioned, for ICs and frontline managers in sales and rev ops roles. It's to be more resourceful to them, right? So that when they engage with our content, whether it's through LinkedIn, or they're scrolling their feed on TikTok or they're considering a new private community to join, and they decide to join ours, that they know that their engagement with Zoom Info, broadly speaking, when it comes to content, will be something that, in their moment of time, will help them be better at what they do.
Alex Olley (03:27.961)
Okay, so where did this initiative start? How did this come about for you guys?
Justin Levy (03:32.414)
A lot of it started, I think that there were conversations obviously that were happening before I got here and there were initiatives that were already underway. But certainly since I've gotten here, we've been able to ramp it up a bit more and prioritize it just by the nature of having someone in this role now. And as we build out what my entire team looks like now there's just more naturally more resources dedicated to the effort across whether it's our employee advocacy program, its social, its influencer, or its community, we're now able to broadly take on the initiative.
Alex Olley (04:19.868)
Okay, so I speak to a lot of people at the moment about those three things, influencer, social, and community. They're kind of all tied together nicely, right? And obviously you are the pro here. Where do you think people go wrong when they're trying to build out a program similar to what you're building?
Justin Levy (04:36.214)
I think a couple of different areas. When it's with Influencers, companies focus on the short-term transactional play. So I reach out to you and it's, Alex, you have a lot of followers and I wanna pay you to post three times about this. Fill in the blank, product launch, or whatever.
Besides you making a few quick dollars off of it, it doesn't help you, it doesn't help your community, it doesn't help the brand, and there's no future relationship there, right? So really focusing on developing a long-term relationship that's beneficial to all parties involved, right? It's something that you actually get to know that person and know how you can be helpful as a brand to them. It provides opportunities for that influencer or that thought leader to engage with the brand, whether it's co-created content, it might be an ebook or podcast or what have you, just it's a tighter relationship developed there. So I think that that's probably the primary place where brands are going wrong with influencers right now. With community, I think that brands build and launch communities and abandon them too quickly. So when you launch a community and at the initial launch, it might not be as much work, right? You get an idea, you create the logo, it takes 10 seconds to save a Slack name, right? And create the Slack. You might have a couple of quick ideas for two to four weeks worth of programming. But as the community grows and you continue to consider additional programming and you need to spend more time, you need more effort and more dedicated time there, right?
So as I built communities in the past, maybe it was five or ten percent of my time initially because you had a small community engaged with ten, twenty, thirty people, but as that community grew to be a thousand people or a thousand plus, now my time shifted to be 40 to 50% of the time in the community because there's more members to manage and to connect and to build programming for and things like that. So that's where I think brands don't understand how much effort the community really takes to get it right. So you think it's this new dangle thing that they'll launch because everyone else is doing it? And it'll look good for the brand, and then they quickly abandon it. The problem there is you built up a community that's now reliant on that. So you have to show up every day for your community to keep them engaged.
And then social, I think the biggest issue right now is that brands aren't creating content in the formats that we know that people responding to. So we continue as brands to create very formal content. It might not take advantage of things that we know that the algorithm favors right now, such as on LinkedIn. We know that having to click the "... see more" keeps people engaged. It's favorable to the algorithm.
A lot of brands won't create content, especially B2B, I should say, won't create content for TikTok because there's an aversion to it for some reason. But the reality is when you look at all the stats that are coming out, when you look at engagement with vertical video, whether it's on TikTok or off that platform, that is where the demographic is these days, you know, I know that when I looked up the demographic of those that are engaged with the ZoomInfo TikTok account, there is a large percentage that is saying that 35 to 54 range. So a good portion, if you make an assumption of your buying group at some level is on that platform. So there is a huge mistake of not taking advantage of that platform or remembering that YouTube is still the second, you know, most important search engine. So there's kind of misalignment, I think, sometimes on like the content strategy, both within the business and then within the platforms that they choose to use.
Alex Olley (09:48.1)
Wow, I'm literally, I'm trying to digest all this. Luckily I can listen back to it, but there are a lot of lessons in there. I'd like to get back to the community thing, because this seems to be, I think socials, it's growing and it's growing, and it has been for a long time. In the past 12 months, what I see, and I might be wrong, community is really having a bit of a boom, but as you say, I see a lot of companies abandoning it. Why is community becoming more and more important now?
Justin Levy (10:13.418)
I think that it really, if you go back and you look at the stacks around it, it really went up into the right during the pandemic. Reddit and the Global Web Index partnered on a joint report and nearly every stat across the board showed that it was growing at a pace that was faster than before, right? A lot of these communities aren't new. Some of the bigger ones, they've been around for a while.
But during the pandemic, a lot of people in now post-pandemic want to engage with people that look like them, right? So co-founders wanna talk to other co-founders, folks in marketing operations or rev ops want to talk to other people that look like them, that are in the same roles, that are experiencing the same issues in marketing ops, for example, folks that are considering changes in their tech stack or issues with integrations. How does this tool integrate with Salesforce? So I think that's what really started to cement it as being a focus area.
Now you have different community types, I think if you start to look at it, right? You have communities that are businesses themselves, right? You have like the pavilions and the rev geniuses of the world, that is the business. Rev Genius is a business with 40,000 plus community members. Pavillion is a business. You pay Pavillion to be a member of it. Rev Genius is free. They rely on kind of sponsor dollars and whatnot. But then you have communities that are built as being, I always think of it kind of powered by brands, right? So the brands essentially pick up the dollars on it. The community that we're launching, Modern GTM, same, that's how it is, right? We're not taking on sponsors or anything. The brand is the one that's providing the resources for it. You also have the Demand Community from Metadata. That same thing, it's kind of a powered by community. I know that they do some work with brands around some of their larger engagements and larger activations.
And then you have some hybrid ones, right? So you have this span across, but the thing that all of them have is that they're going after a certain ICP, trying to engage with and attract a certain group of people to interact with one another. Could be brand, it could be actual role-based, you know, company size, so all of them are slightly different, but there is continued room for these communities. It's just the main issue, like I said, of not abandoning your community. And I think that that's where you're seeing the highest rate of failure, right? The people who show up every day and manage and nurture the community. The community might only be 500 people large. It's not the number, it's the engagement and the value that your community gets out of it. Not what the brand takes or what the company makes as money. So I think most folks get involved in community thinking that they're gonna have 50,000 community members and that's the definition of success. It's not, it's engagement with the right people.
Alex Olley (14:04.868)
And surely, I mean, for us as a business, we're thinking about it, we're thinking about how do you tie that engagement to revenue. Is that the ultimate goal? And if so, what do you think?
Justin Levy (14:16.002)
So I think more about it in terms of deal velocity, right? Like how can you tie the work that's being done in the community back to kind of helping to accelerate deals? Because the way that I think about it and others think about it in other ways and that's perfectly okay, is that there should always be a hard line in the sand between almost the brand and the community, if it's a brand run, kind of powered by, because you shouldn't be as a brand kind of hawking your wares in the community. That would violate the community's trust. You've worked hard to say, listen, we want you to come and engage, and we built this for you, and we want it to be valuable to you and you build that trust and then the next week you go, hey, we have a deal or we want you to fill out a form and we're gonna continue to spam you after the fact, right? Like we're all game to that as a business professional, so you don't wanna violate that trust. However, you can accelerate the deal velocity or put yourself on people's radars.
So in previous communities, I've run I've had people come out publicly say, I never, I'm not a customer, I'm not even a prospect of this company, but they provide value to me with this community. Now, in that one example, that person was a VP of marketing. So no matter what happened at that time, they found value from the community and they knew we weren't pitching them our product, but we had that resonation like we are we resonated with them so maybe in the future they do uh they are looking for the solution or someone asks them for a reference on that you know someone a company with those solutions we are probably top of mind because of that.
Alex Olley (16:30.364)
Such good advice Justin. I can talk to you about community all day, which sadly don't have all day. You've already told me how busy you are, so let's move on a little bit. You're known throughout the B2B, particularly go to market industry as a key player in building social community. Many things you've done, particularly like your current company and previous companies. What did you have to do to get to where you are today?
Justin Levy (16:59.85)
So it's been an interesting journey, that's for sure. I've been doing this now for 18 or 19 years, which is crazy to think about because that was before it was an industry. So there was a group of us, and I'm not saying that this was exclusive to this area, it was happening around the kind of country, and I'm sure around the world, but there's a group of us that really started to try to figure this stuff out around 2006, 2007 or so. Some people had podcasts then. You had folks like Gary Vandertrauk, who was already deep into having Wine Library TV. It was already a very popular kind of web show, one of the first, if not the first of its kind. And at that point the best man at my wedding had a steakhouse in a small town, a kind of small 20 or 30 table steakhouse. And it was failing month over month as far as revenue and being able to pay bills and pay himself and all that good stuff that's hard on a business and hard on a business owner.
So we were talking about it one night and just kind of as friends and I said, listen, you know, I do marketing kind of by day, you know, I was in a kind of out of college job at that time. I'll come up to the restaurant on Sundays and like, I won't take any money or anything, just give me a free dinner and, and buy me lunch. And you know, like, let's try to figure this out. And
As we started to dig into it, the previous owner, because he was the executive chef, had an opportunity to buy the business, chose to market in kind of all the local things, right? Like the local Pee-wee football and the local town magazine thing. But it was just always renewed, right? So every year or every six months, whatever, yup, do you still want that bottom left spot? Okay, that's $300 or after a while, you don't see that anymore, right? If you see that same billboard every day driving in to work, eventually you don't see that billboard because you know it's going to be for this brand and they don't swap it out for anything. So there were these new things that would eventually become social networks, right? Twitter and YouTube and Facebook. Back then we also had Friendster and MySpace and Plurk and all sorts of ones, probably 15, 20 different ones at that time. And why don't we start to try out some of this stuff? I see what friends are doing, people that I'm now becoming friends with and I've kicked this around at night.
So we did a couple main things. One, we had launched a third party or off-domain blog and the mentality behind there was I didn't think anyone would want a blog that was on the restaurant domain because what would your assumption be? Just it's going to have the specials or it's going to have some employee spotlight. So what we did was bring together foodies to write about food and write about their passion for food and things of that nature.
We dabbled in some other stuff, but then what really also took off was we created a YouTube show, weekly YouTube show. And this was shot with janky point-and-shoot cameras edited in Windows Movie Maker. I mean, it was horrible. But we posted it week after week and, well, it never went viral or anything like that. It, uh, we started to have comments from people that work or were in school at like the Culinary Institute of America, right? They would comment like, oh I missed my class, but I was able to see it in this video because my best friend would teach people how to cut down a side of beef or unzip a tomato or fire roast beets or all sorts of craziness. Immediately following that, the restaurant grew back from losing about 20% month over month to being in the black, and then eventually growing to be 20 to 30% in the green, and it maintained that for 20 months straight.
And that started to just naturally get on a bunch of radars with local news channels and, you know, so places like the Boston Globe and Associated Press and some kind of major news networks and then it started to become included in a lot of case studies, like industry case studies. So from there, I ended up going to an agency and working with huge Fortune 500 brands and you know, eventually then got involved in tech and so first company was Citrix and moved through that kind of realm of leading social media globally for big brands.
And then that evolved as Influencer took hold as a name thing. I did Influencer stuff back in the day, but that was before it was kind of called an Influencer program. And 18, 19 years later here, I find myself still doing this.
Alex Olley (22:59.497)
I mean it's a pretty incredible story. I actually had no idea about that in terms of like the restaurant where your roots started. But I can't imagine it was all plain sailing along the way. I'm sure you've learned a few things, maybe you would have changed a few things but you've essentially got on board with something that is now pretty like essential for most businesses. Did it go wrong at any point?
Justin Levy (23:27.002)
I think besides natural waves and tech, you know, when you're part of tech for long enough, you start to understand the impact that layoffs and reorgs and leadership changes and things can have. And being young initially and being at my first company for seven years, I didn't realize that was like retirement age in B2B tech. So I've gone through those, you know, been affected through those natural changes that unfortunately even today as we record this, a lot of people are still going through. But some of the things I had to learn the hard way and it affected how I view this world is a couple major crises, for example, that really through the company deep into a crisis that had the potential to impact sales and customer service and lead generation. We're talking all aspects of a company. That was something before it happened that I never truly understood the impact. I don't think the businesses understood the impact at that point because it was so early on.
Um, so that, in that crisis, it's a very long story for another day, but ended up being something that even the White House commented on. So I mean, it was a national crisis. It wasn't just involved in us. It was a public personality and some other things. But, um, so that, that made me more mature in the way that I think about the protection of businesses, right? And the reason why one of the first things I do when I come to a new company is align myself with legal and understand what policies are already in place and that we may need to create or modify. So that was something that was forced to mature about very quickly and figure out at an early age, both physical early age and early kind of age in my career.
Alex Olley (25:54.78)
Very interesting, fascinating. All right, well, we're going to go into the final bit then, Justin, the quick fire round. So I'm just going to literally go through these quickly. If you could have a drink with anyone in the world, who would it be?
Justin Levy (26:08.91)
So I think if I had the opportunity, it would be Jay-Z. So I've followed his work, followed his music since 1995, 1996 when his first album ever came out. And through to today, you know, he's a self-made billionaire and he is arguably one of the greatest to ever live uh, in music and then, uh, certainly, uh, rap and hip hop music. And I think that his approach to how he's gone about, uh, his transition into being a businessman has been, uh, just very well regarded. And he kind of set the stage that a lot of people have kind of followed that blueprint, uh, a bit. So I think that, uh, both him and Taylor Swift would probably be two people that'd be really interested in to have that conversation for essentially the same reasons, right? They're both in music and have, Taylor Swift obviously still is in music, but have had an impact outside of it. And so how could that tie from what I do by day to maybe different aspirations later in my career?
Alex Olley (27:38.04)
Okay, well if Taylor's worth some JZL listening, please take just that for a drink. Ha ha ha. Alrighty, what do you think the dumbest thing that let's say marketing people are doing right now, what should they be doing differently?
Justin Levy (27:53.326)
I think when, especially in B2B, the thing that brands are doing wrong is that they forget that there's a human on the other side. So much content for B2B brands is born. I mean, just call it what it is. It is born. And so we look at B2C brands and we laugh and we point at the content and we think it's funny and it's engaging and we learn nothing from that because we're B2B and we think that means that we have to create very dry content and it doesn't have to be that way.
Alex Olley (28:40.536)
I can't believe you said that and we did not talk about this before but I love that you said that because the human element of what we're trying to do is so critical. And then final one for me, is there a company you're watching right now that you think could be a future game changer?
Justin Levy (28:55.274)
I think it's a company that's already a game changer. And we've talked about TikTok and vertical video and things like that. And one of the companies that has always impressed me with what they do is the Washington Post of all organizations you could ever think of, right? We're talking about creating boring content. And I think that's what we default to. If there's any brand that would create boring content, it would probably be a newspaper, right? Especially one that's so focused on creating news of the day. But if you go look at their TikTok, it is by far one of the most hilarious TikTok accounts you'll find. It's who TikTok holds up, like when I'm in brand meetings with them, as one of their favorite accounts.
It's an account I've known of for several years now. And what they do is they create funny, engaged content around the news stories that they're publishing. And so the speed at which their team is able to draw up and execute on these skits and take it and make it funny. Is something I think a lot of brands can learn from because it is easier to be funny if you are a fast food brand, right? And I think a lot of companies would point to the work that McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, what have you have done, Steak Homes, like any of those accounts, they're hilarious. But I think it's easier to figure, to find those angles. I don't know that many people would think that a newspaper brand could be as funny as they are through their tech.
Alex Olley (30:54.02)
I had no idea you were going to say that. I'm going to go and check that TikTok out because I did not expect that at all. But that's so refreshing to hear. Love it. Justin, we're coming to the end. I always ask one final question. If there were to be any advice you could give to, let's focus on marketers or go-to-market professionals right now who are trying to break through the noise, what would you tell them to be doing?
Justin Levy (31:18.226)
I would recommend that they, you know, do things such as listen to podcasts like this or other podcasts that exist that are reputable and read content from reputable sources or attend conferences, things like that. There's so much, there are so many fake experts out there right now, right? Like you take a topic for example like generative AI. And I mean, it was like a week after chat GPT became popular that there was like books already on how to like prompt engineer. You can't tell me that anyone was an expert that fast unless you had kind of seen this come in several years before which there were, I have friends that have been doing that but they didn't write a book because instantly it was kind of out of date, right?
Um, so I think look toward to those sources that have been doing this for a while for the areas that you care about, join the communities that are relevant and, uh, follow the brands or the thought leaders. Um, but be careful of the kind of fake news, the fake experts, the, uh, to a certain extent, the deep fakes and stuff that, that are out there right now, because those are going to continue. And can continue to sway opinion. And we've seen it in politics and with celebrities and things of that nature. I wouldn't be surprised if we're not that far away from it happening to brands, to the big brands. I can easily see deep fakes happening that could affect larger brands.
Alex Olley (33:10.156)
That's such good advice. Well, thank you for that. Final question, if people want to follow you or anything, you put out a lot of amazing content. I've been a follower of yours for a while and I've really appreciated everything you've done. Where can people follow you?
Justin Levy (33:23.81)
The easiest place is, well, everything is Justin Levy. So J-U-S-T-I-N-L-E-V as in Victor Y, but LinkedIn is the easiest place that I publish most. Instagram tends to be more personal content. So if you wanna see pictures of my cat or me on vacation or whatever, venting about random things in my travels, you can find me over there, but typically it's LinkedIn is where the majority of my work is.
Alex Olley (33:54.188)
Awesome. For everyone listening and watching, follow Justin. I've been a follower of yours. I've learned so much from you over the years. So thank you for the content you put out. And look, thank you for joining us today, man. It's been a real pleasure.
Justin Levy (34:04.034)
Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Alex Olley (34:08.624)
Cool. All right, well look, guys, this has been another episode of The Antidote. We'll catch you all soon.