Building a healthy community can put you and your business at the very heart of a vibrant and potentially profitable inbound lead channel. But what does it take to build a healthy community and how have the leading companies managed to do it?

Questions that many agency partners may ask are can a service business build out a community successfully or would the investment in community building prove fruitful for a service business?

Whilst our SaaS followers would like to know how to successfully build a community, what platforms are the best for managing them and strategically what does it take to implement a community strategy beyond hiring a community manager?

*Late update - DigiKat's founder Mick Goman has stepped in last minute to add a demo of his dedicated community theme for your HubSpot portal so that you can maximise the power of HubSpot whilst building community.

We have a great lineup to speak to you on the subject that includes HubSpot's own Christina Garnett and Mary Green formerly of Forbes and Demandbase as well as Mick Goman from DigiKat Australia. Check out their respective bio's below and get ready to fire in the key questions that will help make your decision easier.

Christina Garnett - MBA | Community Builder | Advocacy Strategist | Audience Intelligence | Top 100 CMA Strategist |

Community builder and advocacy strategist Christina Garnett uses audience intelligence and social listening to learn more about audiences and determine needs and behaviors. Her work serves to help brands better connect with their current customers, potential customers, and fans.

Christina is featured in HubSpot Academy's Social Media Certification course and social listening courses, Semrush Academy's social listening course, and is a partner for On Deck's Community Builder Program, teaching a module on advocacy as a community growth lever. She has been a speaker for national events like INBOUND19, Social Fresh 2021, Adapted Digital Media Summit, and local events for the Virginia SBDC. You can also find her featured in HubSpot, Social Insider, and Talkwalker ebooks and articles in Adweek, The Next Web, and Meltwater.

Mary Greene - Community Manager and Community Building Consultant

I help B2B brands build communities that bring their customers, industry, partners, and teams together.

By aligning their business goals with users' needs and community efforts, these brands become active homes for networking, learning, and career success.

I’ve grown communities at HubSpot, Forbes, and Outreach (Sales Hacker) and other startups through content and event programming, evangelism, partnerships, internal relationships, overall strategy, training and execution.

Accomplishments:

* Launching Sales Hacker’s discussion community in May 2020 and growing it to almost 15,000 members in less than a year.

* New strategy for Outreach communities including Sales Hacker & the customer community.

* Grew HubSpot's Inbound.org 40k to 154k members

* Increased retention and revenue in Forbes premium communities

* Worked with dozens of partners and experts on events, sponsorships, and other collaborations.

Mick Goman - Founder Digikat Australia

Michael (Mick) Goman is a dedicated, business solutions professional. He has a passion for business growth and a staunch focus on lead generation and digital marketing.

Mick has a background in ICT, video production and digital everything - a powerful combination to advise and deliver to organisations at every level. He has gained outstanding results in lead generation and business process improvement across varied industries like rural agencies, Government and the financial sector.

As an entrepreneur on the move, Mick currently owns a burgeoning business growth agency, DigiKat Marketing with offices in Newcastle, Tamworth and on the Gold Coast 🚀