MSP Community Engagement
Category
Community and Events
client or Employer
Moovila
year
2023-2024
Objective
To ensure that Moovila could effectively penetrate and gain recognition in the MSP market. This ranged from basic market acceptance at the beginning to measuring community driven lead generation and targeting earned media opportunities as the community engagement progressed.
Moovila is a South Carolina based early stage startup focused on becoming the leading project management automation platform for MSPs, MSSPs, and other IT service providers.
Process I Followed for Strategic Community Engagement
1. In-Depth Research & Selection
2. Initial Engagement
3. Growth & Expansion
4. Measurement & Improvement
Keep scrolling to learn more about the process and results
Community Selection and Engagement Process
1. Research: I conducted research on the industries common communities, channels, values, and locations of competitor engagement to gain a better understanding of how community plays a role in this industry. From this I drew up an initial list of communities for engagement ranging from MSPGeek, r/MSP, TechTribe, and more.
2. Initial Engagement: Using the insights from my research, I began to join and engage in communities across different media entities such Discord, Slack, and Reddit, looking for our stickiest opportunity. During this phase I would test starting conversations or sharing content or to see what worked by community. A big part of this portion was learning the rules of each community and the general environment.
3. Growth and Expansion: After spending some time in the communities I was able to parlay this into additional invitations to other communities or events - as well as joint content. During this time I also looking for clients or potential referral partners within the community who could be advocates for us. This allowed us to multiply our reach despite me being the only Moovila team member active in these communities.
4. Measurement: As I continued to engage and make our presence known we were eventually able to see an uptick in traffic by community pages and in Demos booked where they specifically mentioned certain communities as where they heard about us. Once this started happening we were able to measure impact and watch for things such as - which posts or types of contents drove more interest and continually adjust based on this measurement.
5. Formalizing Community within the Company: This is an on-going project based on the measured success of early engagement. After seeing this success I was able to have some other team members join in and engage within various communities. I'm also now able to advocate for a Community focused role to be hired to focus on generating demand from communities long term.
Community is an ongoing space for this organization as it is for many others. A large benefit of having a community practice such as this and someone actively checking in these spaces is that they are also able to watch for any negative sentiment in the communities as the company grows and our product gets farther along.
Results
Moovila was able to successfully enter the wider MSP Community and gain consistent recognition over time. Based on the above initial research and my continual focused efforts we were able to:
1. Be recognized from specific communities at events
2. Drive leads from our community engagement - it quickly became a top performing organic channel
3. Drive earned media or partner with others on content based on them finding us or seeing us in communities
