Though surprising people with anything new in the social media world seemed impossible, 2020 brought a promising newbie – Clubhouse – to the center stage.
The sweetest about this new online communication space is the revival of a good old chat, without edited photos, well-thought and proofread the text and professionally assembled videos.
Though being a modest startup, Clubhouse app quickly gained traction and exceeded $1 billion in capitalization by the end of 2020.
Many marketing experts used to be skeptical about the B2B and B2C potential of the Clubhouse app for businesses. Y
et, their opinions changed with the app’s quick rise to popularity. Here I discuss the key features enabling Clubhouse to generate leads, which may become a unique competitive advantage for your business.
What Is the Clubhouse App?
Clubhouse emerged as an invite-only, audio-only platform for communication in 2020. With only 1,500 users in May 2020, the medium already hosted rooms where such celebs as Oprah and Drake spoke with their followers.
Users quickly bought into a unique invite-only format and audio-only content sharing, which seems so outdated and, at the same time, so innovative in the 21st century.
In its early days of operation, the Clubhouse app was quite a mess, with users listening to chaotic selections of audios broadcast in numerous chat rooms. Upon receiving an invitation, a user could get into the room. They were invited to listen to the room’s owner’s audio, also acting as its moderator.
Active Clubhouse users can visit numerous available rooms and join the conversations held in real-time; they announce the starting live conversations via the app notifications.
Indeed, the app was initially planned to serve as a certain kind of podcast, though with an innovative twist. While you’re listening to the radio or a podcast, you are a passive consumer of audio information. But in Clubhouse, you can both consume and take the stage in a chat room to speak out.
If you “raise your hand,” the room’s owner can give you a word, welcoming you to join in and contribute to the conversation. This is what made Clubhouse genuinely unique, giving users a whole new experience of listening to conversations of people they’re interested in with an ability to step in.
Who uses Clubhouse App?
Clubhouse is big with celebrities. Float around the app and you might hear folks like Oprah, Kevin Hart, Drake, Chris Rock, or Ashton Kutcher.
They might even host chats. In some ways, that’s part of Clubhouse’s appeal. You get the chance to hear and even participate in, unvarnished conversations with famous and powerful people.
Other than celebrities, the app is seemingly focused on people it considers an elite clientele.
It became a status symbol of sorts for Silicon Valley types after its launch last year. The whole invite-only thing was apparently taken pretty seriously. But it’s now growing.
What Is a Lead?
So, why is the discussion of the Clubhouse app so closely related to the marketing concept of lead generation? The thing is that marketers and businesses have already adjusted all social media platforms in this or that way for reaching their potential customers and transforming those interested in their services and products into active buyers.
Thus, in marketing terms, a ‘lead’ means any sales contact, be it a person or a business entity. Such contacts are carefully planned, with the business looking for leads to present valuable business information and convince the potential buyers that their business offer is the best.
Looking at lead generation from a marketing perspective, one would typically imagine a carefully planned, visually appealing message (photo or video) with key business offer information and a call to action.
The standard model of business slogan delivery is unavailable for Clubhouse marketers as they have no option of sharing videos or photos with their followers.
All they have is voice, and can voice be considered a capable marketing medium? Overall, yes, and recent successes of businesses pioneering on the Clubhouse app have proven that. Let’s sneak a peek at how leads can be generated in this new, unusual social space.
Secrets to Effective Lead Generation on the Clubhouse App
Social media users are tired of aggressive marketing and advertising content with which they’re bombarded every day.
The Clubhouse app is an alternative medium offering intimacy of communication in various chatrooms, so the value of small-group sharing can become the guiding principle of Clubhouse’s rising popularity. How can marketers navigate in this new space to attract leads?
The answer is simple – they need to embrace this platform’s uniqueness and build a fundamentally new marketing approach for this digital space. Here’s how this can work out.
#1 Client Exchange / Mutual Referral
At first glance, Clubhouse chats’ format seems unsuitable for building a sustainable lead generation funnel. There is no common thread that you can attack with repeated commercial baits, attracting target customers to join in and explore your brand.
Yet, there are some other methods for building an audience and getting new clients, even from sources you don’t count on.
A simple yet highly workable system of lead generation on the Clubhouse app involves participation in professional communities and chatrooms. Let’s suppose you are a real estate agent or a fitness coach in Texas.
You can join professional conversations of other real estate agents or fitness coaches in your location to exchange professional experiences and share your insights. You can also participate in U.S.-wide or even global chatrooms in your professional niche and talk to people from other locations.
Besides a super-helpful expertise exchange or discussion of pressing issues within your industry, you can set up a client exchange initiative with colleagues.
For instance, if one of your chatroom colleagues lives in New York but has a client who wants to consider real estate acquisitions in Texas, they can refer that client to you. In return for that favor, you will also refer clients wishing to buy property in other states to colleagues from those locations.
The same principle works well with fitness coaching. Most people want to have a personal trainer offline, so referring each other to client’s inappropriate locations can work very effectively as a client exchange program inside your professional Clubhouse room.
Many users are highly skeptical about such lead generation opportunities, but keep in mind that mutual trust and community building can do magic. You never know where the initiative will go and what scale it will reach. So, trying out some referral system can become an unexpectedly fruitful source of new clients and relevant business contacts.
#2 Partnership for Community Development
Another area for lead generation with high potential is the involvement in community development. This works incredibly well for local chatrooms uniting people from one location – a city, a district, or a state.
It is also a promising option for those united by a single aim, such as planting trees or battling the plastic crisis by introducing eco-friendly, sustainable living initiatives.
In any of these cases, you can build a community of like-minded people from the same or related background as you do, thus developing a network within which your services will be in demand.
A community development initiative is promising in terms of lead generation in some other ways, too. If you create and expand a community-building initiative or organization effectively, it is likely to become famous and widely known across your location.
In this case, the local followers will be more interested in participating in your chatroom’s discussions and planning as they will be personally interested in your undertakings’ positive outcomes. The increasing level of familiarity with your initiative also inevitably leads to your name becoming more widely known and recognized in your location.
Such audacity is sure to have an indirect but positive contribution to your business success, with people knowing you as a community-oriented activist, which instills trust in them. As a result, whatever your primary business specialization is, you’re sure to get more clients among your community fellows because of the positive image and trust you have built.
#3 Offering Your Expertise
Mentorship, coaching, training – these are the buzzwords of the past decade, especially with the boom of online education and the worship of the lifelong learning philosophy today. Another contributor to self-paced homeschooling is COVID-19. This pandemic locked billions of people inside their homes, leaving them with no options other than working and studying from home.
Though the pandemic’s overall situation has been dramatic for many, the Clubhouse app has become a new trusted medium for education and inspiration amid the massive panic and despair.
The core advantage it offered was the ability to tune in to the conversations or lectures of famous professors, learn something new from popular influencers, and join the discussions of pressing current topics and issues.
In this way, Clubhouse has managed to give people intimacy of real-life communication they have started to forget amid the visually rich but distractive content of traditional social media.
Besides the audio-only communication experience, the Clubhouse app has also managed to add a unique educational component. It’s like listening to your favorite writer’s audiobook, but with a unique chance to step in and ask a question to debate some statement.
Just fancy a chance to discuss the actions of Holden with Mr. Salinger! Or debating the ending of Deathly Hallows with Mrs. Rawling! While the former is already impossible, the latter is entirely doable, and that’s what Clubhouse brings to life.
Even if you’re not a celebrity coach or writer, you can build followers’ loyalty by sharing your expertise and engaging in meaningful discussions with your colleagues, students, or simply interested people.
As a business owner or a marketer promoting some business, you need to figure out the unique value your business can offer to people, focusing your audio content on those valuable things.
Once the users see how meaningful and valuable your offer is, they are likely to become loyal customers, attracting new leads to your account by spreading word of mouth about you.
#4 Monetizing the Exclusivity
Despite the seemingly moneyless format of Clubhouse chatting, the app still has much to offer to those seeking monetization of their efforts.
There is no advertising on the Clubhouse app – and people love it. More and more users are coming to join the app every day, relaxing from the aggressive, unavoidable apps at every corner of other social media threads. Thus, a skilled marketer can count on the ever-increasing target audience with low dilution and outstanding outreach characteristics of the app, which is a good start.
The more people join Clubhouse, the greater the scope of marketing activities, with the most experienced and intelligent businesspeople reaping immense benefits of a new and dynamically developing medium.
Another aspect of monetization is the invite-only nature of Clubhouse, which creates a sense of exclusivity, status, and elitism. People love to receive special attention at closed, exclusive events, and Clubhouse enables such experiences on a day-to-day basis.
The feeling of being chosen and invited contributes to much greater loyalty than regular social media use does.
So, marketers establishing some brand’s identity on the Clubhouse app may capitalize on giving people the sense of being selected as a few privileged customers of a closed, private club.
With such a marketing perspective, the users are likelier to get involved with the brand, buy its products, and participate in its events to preserve that selected status.
Experts note that such a focus on exclusivity on the Clubhouse app can be effectively used by luxury brands, the philosophy of which is limited-edition, premium product range.
The elitist nature of Clubhouse communities is entirely consistent with the private-only membership philosophy of numerous prestige brands, which get new relationship management and customer management tool in the form of Clubhouse chatrooms.
Thus, such companies’ marketing efforts can work quite well in the Clubhouse space, aligning with the broader brand identity and customer identification.
Finally, the source of monetization and lead generation on the Clubhouse app is the limitless community it nurtures.
Many celebrities and political figures are there, so the app is exciting as a fundamentally new venue for people’s communication with their idols.
Those coming for meaningful interaction with their favorite singers or writers can still look around and join other chatrooms, mostly the ones related to their interests.
Hence, as soon as intelligent Clubhouse user analytics is available, marketers will gain valuable insights into user preferences, becoming able to offer them related products, relevant services, and interesting information.
#5 Making It Reciprocal
The final point on my list is the ability of the Clubhouse app to generate meaningful, reciprocal communication among celebrity users and their followers.
I intentionally left it for the icing on the cake as I believe it is the most critical competitive advantage of Clubhouse over other social media platforms today.
Businesses, celebrities, politicians, opinion leaders, community leaders, etc. – all these people receive an excellent platform for connecting to their followers at any level, from local to global, to talk and discuss things that matter to all of them.
Unlike the existing social media, where people have thousands (even millions) of followers and never exchange even a couple of words with any of them, Clubhouse is not only about keeping in touch. It is about creating and sustaining meaningful relationships based on common interests and activities.
Clubhouse’s unique format mimicking real-life human interaction is a great starting ground for people from all grounds and locations. They come together, discuss issues of importance, share and compare their perspectives, and arrive at some joint conclusions.
So, Clubhouse has moved the concept of social networking to a whole new level, downplaying the number of likes, follows, or comments for the sake of fueling real-time, real-life human talk.
So, this unique quality of the Clubhouse app gives rise to a conceptually new form of marketing and lead generation, probably possible only on this platform.
It is brand storytelling – a unique genre absent on other platforms, giving the brand representatives a voice (literally) to present the brand, tell stories about its ups and downs, production plans, the pressing production issues, or the philosophy behind a new collection.
Tech companies can present their new technologies to the broader public, giving their followers a voice to vote for a logo design, a game’s name, some new app or program features, etc.
At Clubhouse, everybody can speak out, and this innovative form of voice democracy drives customer loyalty due to being heard and, accordingly, the feeling of being valued.
Such activities are sure to result in higher conversions and more plentiful leads as companies genuinely concerned with their client’s needs and interests are rewarded by loyal, returning fans.
So, Is Clubhouse a Lead Generation Powerhouse?
As you can see, Clubhouse indeed offers immense potential for lead generation, though the principles of marketing work a bit differently here.
To succeed in Clubhouse and get new clients there, you need to be community-oriented, reciprocal in communication and goals, and sincerely directed at partnerships.
Most of the app’s success is attributed to the users’ saturation with the traditional social media, where communication has transformed into keeping in touch.
Annoying marketing slogans crowd most channels of information sharing and delivery.
Thus, Clubhouse can be regarded as a breath of fresh air, a medium with frank person-to-person talks and no commercials. While the Clubhouse app is exciting today, it can become an invaluable source of new contacts and acquaintances; the key to monetizing this advantage is to be responsive, authentic, and client-oriented.
Good luck!
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Jilian Woods is a freelance journalist and a contributing writer with more than four years of writing experience. Being a team member of the essay writer service at Grademiners, she sees her purpose in producing and sharing relevant content with people who are willing to expand their knowledge base and learn something new.
What is the clubhouse app?
Unlike Twitter, Clubhouse is a closed, hierarchical platform: A moderator oversees discussions and can let someone chime in or kick out the unruly. In addition to the “clubs” sorted by topic, two or more users can join together and start their chat room.
Why use the clubhouse app?
The clubhouse app is an audio-based social media app. The company describes itself as a new type of social product based on voice [that] allows people everywhere to talk, tell stories, develop ideas, deepen friendships, and meet interesting new people worldwide.
Can you advertise on the clubhouse app?
The clubhouse does not offer any in-app advertising functionality, as the company doubles down on its platform’s growth and user experience. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t advertise on Clubhouse.
How do you promote on the Clubhouse App?
The easiest way to get an invite is to reach out to your network. Hop onto Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram and let people know you want in. If you’re coming up empty-handed, some users are selling their Clubhouse invites. There are even websites dedicated to selling access to the app.
