Community Marketing: Leveraging Your Brand’s Biggest Fans with Archive’s Cofounder Geoffrey Woo

Disappearing stories. Missed content. Lost posts and tags.

For merchants, there’s inherent value in accumulating and sharing user-generated content (UGC) across branded social media platforms. From increased revenue and conversion rates to social proof, UGC can be a game-changer for today’s DTC brands. 

But, what happens when posts expire or tagged posts go missing in the vast sea of content? How can brands effectively manage, categorize, and share organic social posts? 

That’s where Archive comes in.

Partnering with Four Sigmatic, Olipop, and Jones Road, Archive helps brands collect and leverage UGC to create and launch better ads on Facebook and Instagram.  

The Archive App, featured in the Shopify App Store, automatically saves Instagram Stories and tagged posts and then uploads all content to a central, easy-to-access location within the Archive App. 

To learn more about how Archive is changing the digital marketing game for DTC brands, we sat down with Cofounder Geoffrey Woo to chat about the value in creative content and the future of ecommerce. 

What’s the Most Important Aspect of Marketing? Community

Similar to many in the industry, Geoffrey Woo remembers what ecommerce was like in the early days—especially pre-pandemic. A few years back, Shopify wasn’t the dominant platform that it is today. 

When Woo launched Health Via Modern Nutrition (H.V.M.N) in 2014, he built and optimized in-house platforms. He saw the need for more tools beyond the buying and selling component of the ecommerce experience. 

Fast-forward to 2022, marketing and advertising—especially as it relates to the Facebook pixel—have drastically changed for ecommerce brands. There’s no playbook. 

Due to these ongoing roadblocks and hurdles, most marketers have shifted their focus to community building. Woo says, “We realized the power of unlocking community. Marketing is just a structured way of amplifying goodwill within your user base.”

What’s worked in recent years isn’t going to necessarily work in the future, either.

Woo adds, “We’ve seen so many playbooks and growth hacking techniques. But when we stepped back, we realized some of the most important questions in marketing: How do you build a community? How do you scale a community? How can you amplify the excitement of customers who are already passionate about your product?”

Those questions—and the insights he gained from founding H.V.M.N—led Woo to launch Archive.

“Behind every brand is a powerful community. Brands need to amplify their fans. Empowering their voices and content is more powerful and authentic than buying Google or Facebook ads.” 

Key Marketing & Community Components

Woo has seen firsthand how much the marketing game has changed over the past few years. He admits, “Landing page optimization, targeted ad creative, and smart audience selection worked well for the first generation of DTC ecommerce companies but not so much anymore.” 

So, what does successful community marketing look like today? 

Now, there are complex algorithms. “Meta has shifted Facebook's broad-based algorithms to be more effective and smarter than any marketer manually creating audiences,” says Woo. 

Instead of focusing on finding the right target audience for ads, Woo suggests prioritizing the creative and letting the algorithms do the hard audience work. 

He explains, “With access to UGC, brands can run 3,000 pieces of creative and let the data inform target audiences and paid media spend.”

Audiences are now way savvier as it relates to influencer marketing tactics. What worked early on doesn’t work anymore. So many brands spend massive amounts of money on influencer marketing instead of intentionally partnering with influencers who are totally brand-aligned. 

With Archive, Woo hopes to remove the clunky nature of influencer marketing and automate the process in a way that makes sense for both brands and creators. 

“Take the same marketing budget and spread it across 100 or 1,000 nano-influencers and you’ll get amazing results and a more authentic community.” 

The Ecommerce Ecosystem and Archive’s Place in It 

To learn what resonates with an audience, DTC brands need to dive into the numbers. 

Aside from categorizing attributes from the biggest customers, Woo suggests looking at the following key metrics from influencer marketing campaigns:  

• Engagement ratios
• Comment ratios
• Like ratios
• Community engagement: How does an influencer engage with the community?

Brands need to hone in on the bigger picture and look at the overall ecommerce ecosystem.  Each sector has its own set of enablement tools, and each tool unlocks new opportunities for ecommerce brands to work in conjunction with the big players. 

To run an effective ecommerce brand, Woo says brand builders need to pay attention to retention, loyalty, marketing, and analytics. Additionally, they need to use tools like Archive to build out brand communities and better understand how content attracts an audience.

What does Archive’s future look like, especially as more and more ecommerce brands start thinking about the next generation of the web? 

Woo wants Archive to be at the forefront of ecommerce innovation. While Web3 is relatively new, he anticipates growing Archive as the ecommerce ecosystem evolves. For now, the Archive team is focusing on solving problems for the largest number of users.

He notes, “If we do our job right with the Archive App, we can be the start of every marketer’s workflow. We think the creative asset is the start of any advertising campaign. Knowing what your customers say about your brand impacts all marketing efforts.”  

Archive has ambitious plans to empower and enable the next generation of digital marketers. 

“Our goal is to give superpowers to digital marketers,” says Woo, “There are so many unnecessarily manual parts of a digital marketer’s job. So much of it is moving assets around. If we can be the pipe and tubes connecting all the different touchpoints and channels, we can add a ton of value across the entire digital marketing ecosystem.” 

“We want to unlock interesting, creative ways for communities and brands to popularize themselves versus using the two playbooks that everyone uses: paid search and paid social.”