the bossbabe podcast - 52. Two Pillars for Growing a Thriving Community, The Importance of MSI, and Powerful Ways to Build Long-Lasting Relationships with Kayleigh Watson, Head of Community at BossBabe

Episode Date: November 1, 2019

We’re back with our weekly mini episode, which are shorter episodes that feature Team BossBabe. This week, Kay Snels interviews Kayleigh Watson, the Head of Community of BossBabe. This episode spills powerful ways to grow a thriving and engaged community and build long-lasting community relationships.  Kayleigh shares how to create meaningful social interactions and the importance of having a long-term community retention and engagement strategy for your business. They discuss creative ways as to how best serve your community as well as insights into creating a feedback loop. This mini-episode is an absolute must-listen if you are looking to nurture an audience or community and build long-lasting valuable relationships. Join the Société at: bossbabe.com/connectbuildgrow Sign up to BossBabe's newsletter for ambitious women: bossbabe.com/allthenews

Don't go wide, go deep. Know exactly who you are speaking to, who your ideal client is and how they like to be communicated with. A really important part of understanding how to communicate and cultivate your community is understanding how they like to receive the information. Welcome to the Boss Babe podcast, a place where we share with you the real behind the scenes of building successful businesses, achieving peak performance, and learning how to balance it all. I'm Kaye Snells, head of marketing at Boss Babe and your host for this week's mini episode. These mini episodes are designed with you in mind. Each episode, a member of at Boss Babe and your host for this week's mini episode. These mini episodes are designed with you in mind. Each episode, a member of Team Boss Babe will dive into one topic, whether that's product, sales, marketing, community, leadership, you name it. So consider this your

weekly mini training that's super actionable so you can implement it right away. In today's episode, we interview Kaylee Watson. You might recognize her from the Society or the IGA because she manages those communities like a queen. Kaylee is the head of community at Boss Babe and comes with a wealth of experience in high-end memberships for creatives and entrepreneurs. And prior to joining Boss Babe, she learned so much about community growth in her previous roles as membership manager, events manager, social media manager, and she's been on all the sites. She's been in both corporate and startup environments. So we're so excited to have her on the podcast today and chat about all things,

how to grow a thriving and engaged community and how to really build relationships. So as always, screenshot yourself listening to this podcast. You can tag at bossbabe.inc and hashtag the boss babe podcast and we would love to hear how much you enjoyed this episode. A boss babe is unapologetically ambitious and paves the way for herself and other women to rise, keep going and fighting on. She is on a mission to be her best self in all areas. It's just believing in yourself, confidently stepping outside her comfort zone to create her own vision of success. This episode is brought to you by the Boss Babe newsletter.

Look, we know you're busy and we know you get a lot of emails. But trust me when I say this is one of those newsletters you actually look forward to. We want to make it super easy for you to get all your inspiration, information, and resources in one place. Once a week, we'll share an email with a quick overview of everything you need to know. We share freebies, a recap on our latest podcast episodes, and our favorite blog posts from BossBabe.com. It's the holy grail for ambitious women. If you want to sign up, go to BossBabe.com slash all the news. So, with no further ado, welcome to the Boss Babe podcast, Kaylee. Yay, thank you so much. I am so excited. I'm so excited to have you on because I feel like you bring such a high energy to the team

and you know so much about building communities. So I'm very excited to have you on. Okay, so let's chat a little bit about like where you first got interested in community and making that your career? I feel like you're so good at it. When did that start? It was never planned. It was actually just something that came about. I am super passionate about connecting with people and communication. I noticed that in business, people buy people and developing long lasting valuable relationships and cultivating community is a crucial part of creating a successful business. That's so true. I became so passionate about seeing how people influence the way that products sell, the way that teams develop and the way that businesses work. And I really invested a lot of time in getting

to know what influences people and how people create magic when they come together. I genuinely believe that every single person is so unique in their thought diversities, in their skill sets, and when people come together and combine that, it literally creates magic. I love that. I think that you are the definition of magic because I feel like you're always making magic happen in these communities. Whenever I see your name pop up, you just get so many likes on the comments that you're sharing because people just love to connect with what you're saying and they know that you have good intentions and you're sharing because people just love to connect with what you're saying and they know that you have good intentions and you're there to help them. So I would love to hear a few

examples from you on how you cultivate a community. What are some powerful ways to cultivate community? Absolutely. That's such a good question. So I believe that community comes down to two elements, right? I would say that is content and community. So the content part is actually creating valuable content being a valuable resource to your audience or community and content should be educational, inspiring or entertaining in order to keep your audience engaged. Then the community aspect of it is connecting with people, understanding people, what motivates people and what influences people and how do people communicate, right? So examples of each with the content, you could be creating engaging Facebook posts that ask engaging

questions and entice a response. It could be by a daily or weekly newsletter really creating value and offering a lot of insight, wisdom and trainings to your members. It could also be communicating in your Instagram DMs, in your comments, by creating polls in your stories. It's about creating that meaningful social interaction, really connecting with your members. And the community aspect of it could come down to connecting on live coaching calls or encouraging collaborations between your members in your communities. So for example, I really believe that when people come together, they can thrive, right? I believe that you should be a super connector and tap into what people are being receptive to. Let's say someone in your community is very left-brained and they would love to connect with

someone who could give them insights into something that's right-brained. Then if you know that they're after that, you can connect them. And I do feel like that comes down to intentional relationship building and understanding different people and what different people are looking to achieve. Got it. So, you know, these many episodes are super actionable. Someone could implement it right away. So would you recommend that someone basically writes down content and community as two pillars and then start thinking about what that looks like for their business? Absolutely. At Boss Babe, we really champion collaboration over competition. And again, I think that comes down to those two pillars,

the content and community, providing exceptional value. Another example of your content could be what we have in the society is a membership site, right? And really providing trainings, success kits, the success framework, affirmation bundles. There are so many things within the society that benefit our members, but actually assist in their transformation, right? So I would really recommend having a long-term community retention and engagement strategy. Start with those two pillars, content and community, and dive deep into what that looks like for you and your business. You need to really look at what your goals are and what you're looking to achieve within your community. Again, that could look different to everyone. Don't go wide, go deep. Know exactly

who you are speaking to, who your ideal client is, and how they like to be communicated with. A really important part of understanding how to communicate and cultivate your community is understanding how they like to receive the information. Is that with a weekly email? Is that in the Facebook group? Is that via Instagram? Or is that actually on live calls? It's super important to have a long-term strategy to which you can refer back to, use that as a foundation to then implement things into your business and into your community, really drive and nurture that community. And it's super important to get feedback from your community and from your members to see what you can pivot, what's working, what isn't. And a super powerful way to do this is to

actually get to know each and every one of your members to the best of your ability. Whether you have 1,000 members or 100,000 members, if you could really connect with them and gain insight into what they really enjoy, what they would like to see from you, and where they feel that you should improve, you will be able to really be successful in driving and nurturing your community. Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new favorite all-in-one platform, Kajabi. You know I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity, which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place, so it makes collecting data, creating pages, collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is

simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year. So of course I needed to share it here with you. It's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring cleaning in your business, you know, get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible. I definitely recommend Kajabi to all of my clients and students. So if you're listening and haven't checked out Kajabi yet, now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering Boss Babe listeners a 30-day free trial. Go to kajabi.com slash Boss Babe to claim your 30-day free trial. That's kajabi.com slash Boss Babe. I love that. And can you talk a little bit about if a comment comes in, what's your usual process? So like you have all these

pings in our community, usually it's like positive things, right? It's like, oh, I really want to learn about this or that. But how do you as a community manager really go in and nurture that relationship? I genuinely believe that you need to be a valuable resource to your community, right? So let's say a member expresses interest in learning about a certain topic or they're experiencing a certain challenge or obstacle within their business at that point in time. I would definitely say refer to your own resources, to the content that you have and offer value to them. Let's say you have a resource on your membership site that you feel they will benefit from. Send them the link. Ask them engaging questions that really entice a

response or have a call to action as well. That is how you will have an engaged community by actually getting them to respond to what you are providing to the problems that you are solving. So I would say number one is always try and provide them with value that offers a solution to their problem. And number two, I would say it doesn't just come from that one comment or that one engagement. It actually comes from, like I said before, building that long lasting, valuable relationship and getting to know them. And if you can connect with your members offline as well, that is so powerful. I've actually connected with some of our members for coffee dates, breakfast dates, both in LA and London. And it just provides so much value in getting to connect with them in person, hear their feedback, because you have the opportunity to speak

to them face to face and get their feedback, see what is working and what they absolutely love about your community and where you could improve as well. I think that's so key. And I'm really happy that you shared those tips for how you can really start growing your community. And I love what you said about feedback and actually like feedback loops, right? Like you're listening to the community, you're bringing that back and then improving the product. So how do you think about feedback loops really?

That's a really good question. You really need to be open to getting feedback in order to learn and grow and improve on your products and services because that is being super receptive to what your community is looking for. So I would say number one, implementing surveys into your onboarding sequences, your offboarding sequences, really getting feedback as to what was working and what wasn't. If you have a Facebook group asking engaging questions, that gives you a lot of insight into your members and your ideal client, right? That could be asking what they are currently experiencing in business, what they're currently celebrating,

what they're looking for support on. You can do location posts. So where in the world are they based? What industry are they in? By asking all of these questions, whether it's in the Facebook group, whether it's via email, or whether it's by surveys, you really get so much insight into your community and you learn how to best serve your community and provide value by understanding them. I love that because you are asking these engaging questions and people are sharing their results and their wins with you, which then leads to testimonials. And then you can use those testimonials to grow your community even more. So can you touch on that a little bit? Absolutely. So testimonials are so important because it actually serves as social proof for your business. When you cultivate a community

that really believes in your vision and your mission and your values, they essentially become advocates. And that is so powerful. Just an example of that is we recently had a launch for the society, which was so much fun. And we actually had our own society launch squad. Our society launch squad was made up of founding members of the society who really believe in our brand, who absolutely love the society. They love the membership for various reasons, whether that is the content, whether that's the community, whether that is just connecting with so many like-minded female entrepreneurs and ambitious women. And they really showed up for themselves and for our community during this launch period.

I think that's incredible. And I like that you gave that example because I feel like it illustrates how important that building that community really is and the work that you do every single day, because it makes our audience trust us and want to promote us and want to be those brand ambassadors. So I feel like your role is so, so crucial in that. So I'm really excited. So I wanted to close this with a few more things so right now we have almost 2 million followers on Instagram right and we have thousands of women in the community how do you manage that if someone's listening to this and they're alone and they're running everything how do you prioritize your work because it's so so much. That's a really good question. So I would say be super organized, really prioritize, really manage your time to ensure

that you're able to best serve your community. And a couple of tips for this is number one, have a community content calendar. So I have a content calendar whereby I add in all of our community events, whether that's coaching calls, whether that is the success kit going live in a society, and also plan out all of your content that you're going to be scheduling. Scheduling in advance is also super important. You can use things like Buffer or Hootsuite or Planoly. And you can also schedule directly in Facebook so that you can batch your content ahead of time and then really allocate a lot of time to being within the Facebook group, responding to comments and engaging with your community. Utilizing Asana

is also super impactful because it just keeps you so organized and so focused and having a community content calendar so that you can get a high level overview of your long-term community retention and engagement strategy. That's killer. I think that's such good advice. And I think that anyone listening to this can immediately go implement that for themselves. I really love the pillars that you mentioned of content and community and then what falls under that. And I also really like the last examples you just gave. I think those are very actionable. I think you did such a great job of distilling a really big, overwhelming task into very actionable steps. So I appreciate that. So if you enjoyed listening to this episode, I would love it if

you tag this at KSnells. And can you share your handle with us, Kaylee? Absolutely. So it's at Kaylee Jade Watson. That's K-A-Y-L-E-I-G-H-J-A-D-E-W-A-T-S-O-N. Nice and concise. Okay, amazing. Thank you so much, Kaylee. I'm so excited to have you back on for another one of these. Thank you so much, Kaylee. Okay, bye. Bye.

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