Christina Garnett on Community Building, Storytelling and Advocacy

Former teacher and marketing director Christina Garnett works with brands to strengthen their digital strategy through community building and audience intelligence.  With a recent move to HubSpot as a Senior Marketing Manager for Offline Community & Advocacy, Christina focuses her efforts to encourage a deep dive to understand personas, competitors, and more.

In this episode, Christina shares with CJ her deep love of audience research and social listening; and how she helps people truly understand their audience, along with her March Madness picks and love of the Marvel Universe.

Christina and CJ Discuss Community Building, Advocacy and the Marvel Universe

Connect with Christina

• Christina on LinkedIn
• Christina on Twitter @ThatChristinaG

Episode Overview

• Christina relates the Marvel Universes' pivot from theatrical releases into television mini series to marketing strategies of storytelling, branding and advertising.  CJ equates it to how brand stories help build interest and brand awareness.
• Rituals and brand awareness cross over into another popular pastime, college and pro sports.  Christina touches on the fact that team colors, fight songs, rituals for good luck, and many more factors create a ‘participation touchpoint’ that fans connect with during each game, and make them feel a part of the community.
• Fostering community in the scope of business is a winning idea for helping businesses grow.  Christina gives the example of isolation of quarantine.  Something we’ve all been dealing with, and people feeling the need to connect with people after being in isolation for so long.  Community needs to be nurtured outside of the Zoom call.
• Starting out in the teaching community, Christine pivoted to marketing early on to focus on her love of learning about the connection between industry and community.  She initially connected with HubSpot via their HubSpot Academy, a free online training for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service professionals.
• Her favorite part of her job is learning from the “fans” of HubSpot.  Hearing what they love, and what they don’t, gathering ideas from them, and fostering the sense of community among the users and leaders of the online groups.
• Both CJ and Christina dive into the benefits and challenges of #marketingtwitter.  Christina credits her 18,000 followers to sharing lots of local tweets and building her community around that.  “Follower account does not dictate value”, but it’s choosing to amplify others' voices, and creating a community that you want to share with your friends.
• CJ and Christina finish up by speaking about their experiences at Inbound, HubSpot's annual conference for industry professionals.