Fiverr CMO Gali Arnon: Turn the Recession into an Opportunity
Gali Arnon shares how to tap into the power of your community. Image: Fiverr.
Fiverr CMO Gali Arnon speaks with someone from the brand’s community just about every week. It’s central to her role leading the company’s marketing efforts, and, with Fiverr’s more than four million global customers, acts as a bellwether to where the creative world is headed.
Despite the rocky economy, Arnon hears positive signals. Companies that lay off workers still have programs in motion they need to complete. This opens up compelling projects that might have been done in-house. And for every business that stalls during this time, another will embrace changing consumer habits and use new tools and technologies to reach their customers and prospects. This means that certain skills, such as video creation and editing, are in high demand, says Arnon, who is uniquely positioned between businesses and freelancers.
Here, she shares how to tap into the power of your community, where to look for promising project openings, and how to build your personal brand along with your skill set.
What are the tentpoles of building and developing an authentic community?
When you want to build a community around your brand, you first need to know who your customers are and the role you serve in their life. For us, it's freelancers on one side and businesses on the other side. We want to know what they both need from us. What type of solutions can we serve to their needs? How can we improve our products or services in order to meet their needs? And how do we engage with them? It’s not only about functional connection, but also about emotional connection. How do you create a feeling of engagement and an emotional role in their lives?
The second thing is to make sure your community members feel included. For Fiverr, our users participate in every campaign, including social, advertising and focus groups. We have an active and vocal forum where they can express their opinions and we can use those platforms to communicate with them.
The last thing is that we have a team that runs our community events. Last year we had nearly 170 events across the globe. When I attend these events, I meet our community members and hear about their lives. There is this feeling of uncertainty in the world with the talk about the recession and people need to feel like they belong to something.
When you speak with your community members, what are the big challenges in the creative community?
A lot of freelancers see the recession as an opportunity. Companies that are doing layoffs are hiring freelancers because they still need to complete their jobs and projects. Freelancers can be a good solution in times when you are limited in your hiring. And freelancers understand this and see an opening even in times of uncertainty and economic slowdown.
What skills are most in demand right now?
The area we’ve seen significant growth has been social media. The world of short-form videos on Tik Tok and Instagram Reels is growing massively. We saw a 74% increase in Tik Tok video editing and 44% growth in Instrams ads campaigns. People need talent to produce those videos. We also see growth in marketing services. E-commerce marketing has grown by 30% and affiliate marketing by 32%.
An area where we’ve also seen a massive increase in interest is AI, where searches for AI-related services have increased over 1,400% in the last six months on the platform. Fiverr is a good test case to see what is happening in the creative world. As soon as new technologies or new trends emerge, both demand and supply of highly skilled freelancers flock to our platform.
If we think of everyone having a personal brand these days, what can individuals do to build and market their own brand?
The first thing is to find your differentiator, whether it’s a skill, expertise, or something else that is unique to you. Then narrow down your story to one that is clear and consistent. This will help you create the right messaging around your expertise and skills to build your follower base and audience.
Second, make sure you know your target audience, the people who will listen to you and buy your services. These are followers and advocates. Once you find them, make sure you communicate with them in the right way. Where are they gathered? And how might you get into that conversation?
How can brands tap into their community members and find people they can work with and commission for their campaigns? And how can community members put themselves on the radar of a marketing executive and leverage their personal brand for new projects?
Everybody is their own brand and the world is moving to personal brands, people like you and me, who need to create their own personality in the digital space. It’s a new era. Brands have moved from celebrities to influencers to micro-influencers that they need to have at scale.
For a micro-influencer trying to get on a marketing executive’s radar, I believe they need to be incredibly proactive and not afraid to reach out to them directly. Think about how you are positioning yourself and your own brand. What’s the value you can bring to them? What are the tools you can offer? How do you want them to perceive your personality and how might that fit into their brand? Think about answering those questions in a brief email or direct message, where you clearly explain how you can be an advocate and brand ambassador for them.
From the perspective of a marketing executive and effectively engaging the community, it’s important to have those one-on-one discussions with community members and learn about their skill set and passions, to see how they might be able to fit into your campaigns. We work with many different freelancers all the time, so it’s useful to understand what their strengths are and how we might be able to work together. Every department at Fiverr has interactions with the community, and our brand team is always on the lookout for great talent that we can work with. We always make sure we include talent across the globe, from graphic designers, illustrators, copy editors. There is always an amazing freelancer ready to work with us.
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