Propolis
B2B Marketing needed a membership product that marketers, agencies and vendors would all pay to stay in. We designed it, built it and still run it.
- Sector
- B2B membership community
- Services
- UX · AI Enablement · Development · Managed Service
- Audiences
- Marketers · agencies · vendors
- Status
- Live · ongoing optimisation
What they do
Propolis is the global membership community and intelligence platform run by B2B Marketing, an independent London publisher and events business of more than twenty years. It launched in February 2021 in response to member demand for on-demand expertise and peer connection.
Content sits in themed hives, each led by a named industry expert, across tiered memberships. The Community Index gives members live benchmarking on budgets, ROI, attrition and team structure against their own sector. Members include Sherwin-Williams, Eastman, Pegasystems and Ingredion.
What it was costing them
Three audiences with conflicting interests. Vendors want access to marketers, marketers do not want to be sold to, and agencies sit in between. The community rules ban promotional content.
Get the balance wrong and the community fails either way: too open and marketers leave, too closed and the vendor revenue funding it goes.
A membership product also lives or dies on whether a member can find the one thing relevant to them in a growing archive.
The work
We built the platform so each audience gets something useful of its own rather than competing for the same access.
We designed discovery across the hives around relevance rather than recency, so the archive works as a resource instead of a backlog.
We have supported and optimised it continuously since launch rather than handing it over and leaving.
Giving members a reason to come back
Events have dates in the diary. A platform has to earn the next visit.
The Community Index does that, because it gives members their own numbers in context against peers who will not share them directly.
It changes the commercial logic too: vendors are contributing to the dataset that makes membership worth holding, rather than buying attention.
What changed
- 3
- Membership audiences served
- 2021 →
- Continuous support relationship
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Need 2 Know
Could this work for your business?
Thirty minutes with the people who would do the work. You will leave with a view on whether it is worth building and roughly what it costs.