In your business, you most likely spend a considerable amount of money building out a professional website and running paid ads, while also optimizing your content marketing strategy.
But have you thought about the value that adding a customer community can bring to your business?
According to a recent study by Vanilla Forums, 55% of brands say that a community has had a positive impact on their sales. 66% of companies say that they have been able to improve their customer retention as well.
Branded communities don’t get as much recognition as other forms of revenue-driving activities such as influencer marketing and email marketing, but it can still have a significant impact on your business. If you haven’t decided to build one for your brand, you’re missing out on a potential game changer for your business.
What is a customer community?
A customer community is any place where customers of a specific brand can congregate with each other to talk about their shared experiences with that brand.
Most of the time, these communities are online via Facebook groups, Subreddits, and even Discord chats. On some occasions, they can be fostered by off-line meetups and conferences, but those do require much more effort to maintain.
The hope is that over time, these customer communities take on a life of their own. Conversations, questions, and suggestions should begin to happen organically, with the brand itself doing little more than simply moderating the discussions.
What makes a customer community so powerful? For starters, you don’t need a lot of people to create a strong community. As long as those users are remotely interested in talking to other people about how they use your products or services, a robust community can develop.
If you need help growing your community, you can always reach out to Instagram influencers or other social media stars who are in your niche for help. These people can promote your brand and build a community for you around your chosen topic more effectively than others.
Secondly, they enhance the customer experience beyond the initial product or service. When people buy from your brand, that usually completes the buying cycle until there’s time for you to re-engage with a cross-sell.
Customer community enables the “brand experience” to continue long after you’ve directly engaged with the customer. It enhances the involvement and fosters growth in ways you might not expect.
Four ways a customer community is important for your business
Building a customer community is often overlooked because it doesn’t normally drive sales. Instead, it focuses on the tangential benefits of brand-building, such as authority stacking and customer satisfaction. Over time though, these benefits add up and create an invaluable intangible asset that can separate you from others in your industry.
An often overlooked factor in the value of customer communities is that it increases the value of your company should you decide to sell or go public. Acquiring customers profitably and retaining them for years is a positive indicator for companies’ longer-term profit potential. Therefore, building a community around your business is a valuable strategy to increase the overall value of the business.
That being said, there are other benefits to a customer community.
Additional customer support
No matter how amazing your customer support team is, there are always going to be issues that you can’t solve, or questions that you can answer. This is usually due to time and resources; after all, you have a finite number of staff who have a finite number of hours in the day.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could exponentially increase your customer support team, giving your customers around the clock help using real-world examples?
A customer community can build this for you.
Take Picsart as an example. They are an online image editor — among other things — and they’ve created The Picsart Masters program. Masters are artists or designers who have mastered the tools offered by Picsart and use them to create inspiring pieces of artwork.
Picsart considers these masters to be role models in their community as they not only share edits and designs but also answer questions, share tips and tricks with other users. This is a perfect example of how communities can help other members within the community as the business itself grows.
Truthfully, your customers want to help themselves instead of coming to you for support every time. It’s faster, and it also makes them feel empowered when they handle these issues themselves.
It also saves your brand money by cutting support costs. Not only will your support team members field less support tickets, but it’ll free up time to only handle significant problems that the community can’t solve for them.
Moreover, these answers from the community stay logged so that other people can learn from them later. Most brands struggle to create content to answer every single one of their customers problems, but a customer community that has been around a few years has probably seen it all and answered it all.
Direct market research
The people that are in your customer community make up your target audience. Your ability to anticipate their needs and respond quickly to those needs can make the difference between a good product and a great product.
Understanding your clients, thinking like them, and speaking their language are necessary for building a community. Because they have diverse backgrounds and habits, targeting one industry is not the same as targeting another. For instance, Matchr, which specializes in matching business requirements with the appropriate HRIS software, caters primarily to human resources professionals; as a result, communication through the various channels is directed in that direction. This would not be the case if Matchr catered to engineers.
Conversely, if you are a SaaS company, focusing on building rapport with your customers through interaction is a great idea. Think of creative ways of communicating with your customers, getting feedback from them, and answering questions promptly. Make this a vital part of your SaaS strategy.
Your customer community can also give you direct feedback on a software update or a new product line. Post a question or survey in your group and let the people give you their honest opinion about what you’re planning.
Or, browse through threads and make notes of what they’re already asking for and issues they are having with your current goods and services. You might find a whole list of issues that were never really properly addressed to your customer support team.
Added buying opportunities
Those customers in your community have already expressed interest in your product or service. Why not sell more to them directly?
You don’t need to turn your community into one gigantic promotional group — nothing will turn them off faster — but you can find creative ways to sell additional services directly to them.
One of the ways is by piggybacking your market research posts to provide presale opportunities. Chances are, a certain segment of your group would be thrilled to be early adopters of future goods and services, and will line up with their credit card in hand to buy from you.
Another opportunity is by responding to people’s posts. If somebody asks a question about one of your products, the moderator can jump in and suggest additional products or services that may help them.
The key is to do this in a non-scammy way. You don’t want them to feel like you’re only after their money. It’s ideal when other customers actively sell to each other and recommend products that solve needs, that way it doesn’t look like a conflict of interest on your part.
American Trucks has built an entire community around their auto parts. If somebody is in the market for truck accessories, America’s third-party marketplace has a community of thousands of individuals who are also interested in the industry and build their own vehicles.
In time, these communities became a safe place for customers to interact with each other and even with their favorite brands around these topics. This helps their brand grow as there is a high level of customer engagement that allows the reputation to improve.
At the very least, maintaining active engagement with your community will keep your brand firmly implanted in their mind. When they need to purchase something again, you’ll be the first one they think about.
More brand advocates
These days, people have more loyalty to brands than ever before. Brands both large and small spend a lot of time building a relationship with their consumers; in turn, customers have a vested interest in seeing that brand succeed. They’ll speak about your brand to their friends, and bring even more potential customers into your pipeline.
In the early stages of the sales cycle, people need to find content that is relevant to them. Brand communities do that automatically by introducing them to an entire group of people that share their interests.
And the more they are invested in that community, the more they are invested in you. Customer retention rates go up as a result.
Brand advocates are also important for early social proof. Case studies and testimonials both show new customers that your product or service is worthwhile while watching you engage with your audience reveals your loyalty in return.
Try to foster this type of back and forth by rewarding top community members or those continually start good conversations. “Gamify” this process by creating badges or awards for your most valuable community members.
All of these actions future proof your operations. Technology may move on and other products may eventually eclipse your own, but a strong brand that is built in the back of community involvement should stay intact out of sheer loyalty.
How to create a community for your customers
Despite our wishes, a community won’t magically appear on its own. Unless you’re extremely lucky, your customers won’t create one for you either.
Customer communities have to be intentionally built. To do that, follow a few steps.
Defining the purpose of your community
What is the goal of your community? Will it be a self-help group where everyone talks about best uses for the product, or will it be more of a fan group where people discuss what they want to see moving forward?
Maybe it’ll be an amalgamation of different types of groups, but whatever it is, make sure you state the purpose very clearly at the beginning. For example, Dentfix shares their customers’ experiences with short videos of them to break the “Turkey Teeth” prejudices and giving customers every little detail before dental procedure. The last thing you want is your group morphing into something you don’t want it to be, such as a place for product promotion and discount coupons, rather than an active conversation around shared topics.
Using the right tools
Auto-posting content to your group is a great way to create conversation topics for your people to gather around. Cross-promotion with other brands can help too – especially to build up an audience – but be careful that it doesn’t come across as spammy.
Don’t forget to use all the tools at your disposal though. Live video works great, as does short-form video, surveys, and contests. Flesh out the info on the group to make it visible in search engines, too.
Fostering an environment for customers to interact
Unless you plan on managing the group yourself (which can be impossible once it gets large), you need to have a moderator on staff that can keep the conversations moving. Ask questions and be supportive; delete bad actors immediately before they start contaminating the environment.
You should also strongly consider using signup questions to keep out bots. This will prevent your posts from being bombarded with scams.
At its core, your group should be focused on your brand and generating enthusiasm. If people join your group only to complain, shut down the comments and handle the complaints until you’re confident the crisis is under control.
The beauty of an omnichannel help-desk is that it can funnel all the different tasks that you have as a community organizer into a single dashboard. You can handle requests from members, answer questions that people may have about the product, and take care of all the necessary tasks in an easy-to-read interface.
Moreover, much of this work can be automated, leaving you with more time to create authentic relationships with your community and engaging with them in a meaningful way. Liveagent can handle the routine tasks that don’t require much oversight, which means less money spent on physical support members and quicker service for your customers.
It’s all a part of our omni-channel help-desk. We pride ourselves in helping you build the best customer community possible so that you can focus on growing your brand.
Be a part of the discussion with your customers
Even if you’re in an industry where you don’t think the community could exist, think again. Every niche on the planet, from favorite authors to favorite air compressors, has their own legion of devoted followers. Creating a community simply brings these people together under a single roof to discuss ways to improve their shared interests.
And if you happen to own that roof that they’re all huddled under, that automatically improves your business.
About the author
Shane Barker
Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in influencer marketing, content marketing, and SEO. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Content Solutions, a digital marketing agency. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.
