The New Power of Professional Marketing Communities

Happy Friday, and welcome back to your second installment of MarketingUnfiltered for the week.

Thanks for the kind DM’s & WhatsApp messages on LinkedIn about Sunday’s Marketing Leadership Reminders. Below’s a quick summary if you missed it.

Onto This Week — Community

…Is our first video from Marketing Unfiltered. We have 20 newsletters in, and we are practising what we preach with clients. We have embraced video, and we invited friends of MU Nicola and James who run the popular community CMO Circle.

Learn Why

• Marketing leaders don't need to be lonely in leadership positions anymore

• Non-members are known to struggle in silence, while leadership community members can connect and gain support

• Communities (not just another group) are becoming key to Marketing's connecting and often lead to hiring from within the group for consultants, fractionals and FTEs

• The secret sauce isn’t just hosting a WhatsApp community, it’s also sending out a newsletter and hosting events (importantly IRL and online webinars) - events are a cornerstone to The CMO Circle's success and their key to building community

• Learning from our community peers might be the way we choose to learn in the near future

• & why merch especially hoodies with zips is such a hot topic of debate

The Interview 💬

The Key Takeaways To Apply At Work

• Being deliberate helps to focus on the right community and the right connective goals

• James and Nicola have both learnt from the community to improve their own Marketing skills and helped to apply within their community - learning from communities is critical in 2025 and often the difference between invest of time in a community vs being in a group

• Feedback is a great tool, being a community leader, you will receive it. But importantly, community members’ messages can bring you to tears (joyful)

• Connecting community members is breeding a new ecosystem of word of mouth recommendations and referring work member to member

• The high concentration level on work helps foster great community conversation

• Stepping in is important but letting a conversation breathe is critical for community health

• Understanding that quality over quantity is always essential

• Community leadership is

  • Speaking to quiet members and checking in is vitally important 

  • Allowing conversations to flow and self police 

• Seeing community members hiring other members is a sign of a very healthy community (and should give hope to Marketing leads who might be struggling in this market)

• Monetisation and sponsorship are important - still knowing sponsors are looking for quantity not quality is always a double-edged sword

• If you want the most out of community, Nicola’s quote is a powerful one “What I would say is if you're going to join a community, it's about give to get.” - we can remember this as Marketing leaders with internal and external customers

• High quality content will always travel, and having experts in the field to share their expertise is critical - the example is the AI webinar, please click below to watch

A big thanks to Nicola and James, please connect with them on LinkedIn and if you’d like to join, below are the details

• The CMO Circle Website - https://www.thecmocircle.com/

• Request to join - https://www.thecmocircle.com/#contactus 

Coming Soon On Marketing Unfiltered:

• Next week we have a post by Fasial Laljee questioning “Is SEO really dead?” 😱

• We have two other great community leaders interviews 👏

• Harry takes on job seeking (in this market) 👀

We will land in your inbox next Friday!

Thanks and have a great weekend,

Danny, Harry and the Marketing Unfiltered Writers