How to use Slack for social media marketing & user acquisition
A lot of people don’t utilize the Slack as the marketing and user acquisition channel - and that can be a huge mistake if your target audience is hanging there.
With more than 2000 different communities, Slack can be a big gold-mine of potential leads and customers - and if you’re not doing marketing there, you can miss a ton of new users.
There are multiple communities with various user personas - so perhaps - for every type of company there can be a piece of cake. You can find developers, customer support representatives, product marketers, founders, investors and a bunch of other user personas.
Also, apart from Slack communities, there are also a couple of workflow automation processes that you can create inside your own workspace to do marketing and acquire users without leaving your Slack channel.
In this article, we’re going to cover both.
So, continue to read if you would like to find out:
- How to do marketing in Slack communities
- What are the best practices to build relationships and acquire users inside Slack communities
- How to automate your lead generation and user acquisition processes inside Slack.
Let’s get started.
How to use Slack communities as the marketing and user acquisition channels.
Here, I’m going to show you something I never talked about before. I’m going to show you my step-by-step process of acquiring new customers and building relationships from Slack communities.
Before we start, please note that you won’t generate 1000s of customers from Slack communities as well as reach the exponential growth.
No, if you want to do this, then Slack communities are not a good channel for you.
But, if you want to increase your brand awareness, be on the top of the mind of your potential customers and target user persona, acquire a couple of new customers occasionally and build strong relationships that will result in content collaborations, word-of-mouth, and potential partners, then this is the guide for you.
I’m the head of growth of Userpilot - a user onboarding software, and my target audience is product marketers and customer success managers.
After some time, I realized that my target audience is gathering on Slack in a massive number.
Literally, there are around 15 different Slack communities with product marketers with at least 1000 - 2000 members each. Some of them even have more than 15.000 members.
That was a huge gold-mine for me (and it can be great for you as well). So, I decided to step-up and build my Slack marketing strategy.
Here’s the step-by-step guide on what I’m doing to acquire customers and build strong partnerships inside Slack.
1. Introduce yourself in a clever way - but don’t be spammy.
The first step upon joining a community is introducing yourself to the other members. This is going to be your first touch with your potential customers through Slack communities - so it’s really important to do this in the right way.
Keep in mind that, at the moment when you join the community, no one cares about your product or how awesome and amazing it is.
So, don’t be spammy and don’t promote your product in your introduction. Instead, just mentioning where you work, what you work on, or even your expertise in managing a dedicated server is great.
Just mentioning where you work and what you work is great. Everything above that will just prompt people to create a negative first opinion about you.
So, instead of saying about your product, its features and benefits, talk about you and the ways you can help other community members.
Here’s a good introduction I saw recently:
As you can see, there’s only one sentence about his product - and it’s just a mention. This introduction is filled with good vibes, positivity, it offers help and support to all other community members.
So, what are the dos and don’ts of introducing yourself in the Slack communities?
- Don’t talk too much about your product. No one cares at the beginning how amazing your product is.
- Share the positive voice and empathy
- Show the other members how can you help them to achieve their goals
2. Build relationships with the community founders
Building relationships with community founders and admins is the second step towards improving your brand awareness among your target audience.
Community admins usually already have a big impact and influence on all community members, so it’s really important for all of us to be close and good with them - their voice can help us a lot.
As you can see, successful relationship with community admins can result in great promotions inside the group:
Or awesome content collaborations with the same guy that’s distributed across multiple channels.
But, the question is, how exactly can you build a good relationship with the community founder?
It’s pretty simple.
Here we can apply the rule that works for almost everything:
Offer value and your help without asking for anything in return.
That’s it.
From the moment when you join the community, feel free to send them a message like this:
Hi [firstName], I recently joined this community and I can say that it’s amazing! I’m able to find a lot of value and useful resources over here. Is there anything I can help with? Perhaps to help you to grow your community or write some piece of content?
Let me know. Would be more than happy to do that!
And that’s it.
Remember, his influence can bring you a lot of benefits and visibility.
3. Personally, welcome everyone new to the community
This is one of the best ways on how can you grow your personal brand and build meaningful relationships with every new group member.
As soon as someone joins the community, make sure to send them a private welcome.
It would be best if you could personalize it as much as possible. For example, if they added their company, you can visit their website and ask them something that’s relevant to their position.
In this way, you’re building a great relationship with them.
Also, don’t hesitate to offer your help whenever they need it. Perhaps your $0.02 can be of precious value to them.
This is a good example of how to welcome new members to the community. As you can see, it’s great for building new relationships:
So, what are the dos and don’ts of welcoming new members?
- Don’t pitch your product at the beginning or during the conversion. Only mention your product if it’s necessary or if the member asks you.
- Don’t spam people. If they don’t respond to you after the first message - then stop.
- Be kind, friendly and positive. Using emojis is a great way to do that.
- If you can, try to research your member's company a little bit and ask relevant questions - it will engage the conversation and give you a little boost upon building your relationship and potentially acquiring him.
4. Offer your help and advice whenever it’s needed
Like in everything else, providing value is the key. It’s the same for doing marketing and user acquisition in Slack communities as well.
In a lot of communities, there are dedicated channels. Some communities even have channels like “help” or something like that.
Those channels are a golden-mine for showing your expertise and providing value.
As you can see, offering your advice and help will grow your popularity, brand and personal awareness.
You can offer your advice in the thread (so everyone can see it), or in the private messages.
But remember, when you want to send a private message, always ask the other member can you send it.
There’s a reason why it’s called a “private” message.
Also, reading all those posts in Slack communities can be very time-consuming - so make sure to set-up different keywords for the topics you’re interested in.
This will help you to save your time and you will be notified only when someone uses your particular keyword.
For me, the keywords are my competitors and general terms around user onboarding and product marketing where I can offer the biggest help.
To do so, go to the preferences and under the “notifications” tab, choose the second option: Direct messages, mentions & keywords.
Here’s how it looks when you add keywords:
5. Use Slack communities to promote your content
This is one of the biggest benefits you can get from Slack communities. But it’s also a double-sided sword.
So there are a couple of rules you should think of before promoting your content in Slack communities.
First of all, don’t promote your entire content. Sending each new blog post or video you create is going to be spammy and the people will start avoiding your links.
So, try to showcase your knowledge only when it’s relevant or on special occasions - like when you’re doing some big launch or when you’re publishing something that’s never seen before.
So, leave your space for only the most important things that can ultimately bring you new customers.
Also, when promoting your content, think about the common problems and benefits your readers can get.
To illustrate this better, here’s a bad example of promoting your content in Slack communities:
As you can see, this isn’t personal - it’s just copy/paste. Even more, this member doesn’t even have his name attached. No one will react to the promotion like this.
Not to mention that the text is too long and boring.
Here’s another example of how Product Marketing Alliance promoted my repurposed article:
On the other hand, here’s a good example of promoting your content in Slack communities:
As you can see, this promotion is filled with positive vibes and benefits. The best way to figure out how to write the copy for promoting some content is to ask yourself:
“Why should someone read/watch this?”
When you have an answer to that question, you will know how to write a killer copy that will make the other members click on it. Will it convert later on mostly depends on your content overall - but that’s another story.
Long story short - how to build relationships and acquire users from Slack communities?
So, here are the best practices on how to build strong relationships, engage meaningful conversations and acquire users from Slack communities:
- Briefly introduce yourself upon joining in the Slack group. Don’t pitch your product - instead, offer your help.
- Build a strong relationship with the community admins. Relationships with community admins can result in great partnerships and cross-promotions.
- Personally, welcome everyone new to the community in order to start engaging with them. Don’t pitch your product if it isn’t necessary.
- Engage in different conversations that can improve your awareness and where you can offer help. You can set-up your notifications so you will be notified only when someone uses one of your keywords - this will save your time and efforts.
How to do marketing, generate leads and acquire new users inside your own Slack workspace?
Slack really has a lot of different use cases that not a lot of us are aware of. Besides using Slack communities for acquiring users and building strong relationships, you can also use your own workspace to automate a bunch of tasks with the help of some of the best Slack apps.
Without going to wide, here are the best Slack apps that will help you to do marketing and acquire new leads from Slack:
Awario - Awario is a great tool for keeping an eye on your competitor’s marketing and social proof. You can receive a lot of interesting ideas just by monitoring what people think about your or your competitor’s product.
Yala - Yala is the bot that allows you to publish your social media posts directly from Slack. Simply upload the image, write the text, and your post will be published on your social media channels.
Arc and Clever Google Ads - Arc and Clever Google Ads are the Slack apps that are sending you reports and statistics from your Google Analytics and Google Adwords accounts. It’s useful to keep them on the top of your hands.
InfluencerBot - with InfluencerBot, you can easily track and find influencers that can boost your sales and traffic directly from Slack.
Lemtalk - Lemtalk is the Slack live chat app that enables you to receive and answer all of your customer support messages (whether they came from email, SMS, Facebook or Live Chat) directly from your Slack channel. It can be extremely useful for real-time lead generation and user acquisition on your website. Since everything is done inside Slack, chatting with your website visitors is easy.
The Bottom Line
As you can see, with more than 10 million daily active users, Slack is the golden-mine for all companies that are looking for some places where they can find their target audience.
There are 100s of different user personas out there waiting for you to find them.
But remember - don’t pitch and don’t sell - instead, build the relationships.
It’s a slow but effective process of building your brand awareness and user acquisition.
So, what are you waiting for?
