Most companies adopting customer community solutions are aware of the key features needed to get started. Tools like community forums, knowledge base articles, and gamification are all great, but how do you build a community that’s more than the sum of its parts? How do you capture that certain je ne sais quoi that makes your community become a home for everything your users need?
Let’s explore our blueprint for ensuring your community is a vibrant place that brings joy to your users and guides them on their journey to discovering all the value your product or service has to offer.
What Does a Vibrant Customer Community Look Like?
Vibrant online customer communities create a hothouse atmosphere for discussions about your company and your products. Visitors to the community will find:
- Peer-to-peer (P2P) conversations between users where they can get answers, learn best practices, and show off their expertise in your products—and so much more. The power of community goes far beyond these user forums, but they’re a great way to get started.
- Educational programs (including live events) that drive onboarding, adoption, and more.
- An ever-expanding ecosystem of content that keeps people coming back for the latest news and insights.
- A culture of belonging that fosters a sense of ownership among the customer base.
Communities work best when they become specialized settings that are transparent, secure, and productive for customers. The best thing is that these conversations operate both ways, providing opportunities for companies to connect with their customers. Using community, companies can gain the trust of their customers while getting rare insights into customer behavior and mindsets.
Ultimately, communities drive business objectives around engagement, retention, and revenue growth. They’re also scalable, helping you extend the reach of your customer-facing teams, so that a small team can do the work of many, even as your user base climbs into the tens of thousands or more.
Combining a smart foundational strategy with execution via a community platform will help you bring your community vision to life. Let’s dive in.
Drawing the Blueprint
Whether you’re starting your community from scratch or revamping an existing one, you probably need to rethink all the assumptions around what you want the community to accomplish. Let’s break down how to approach that in three steps:
1. Define Your Community’s Purpose
Establish clear objectives that align with your business goals. Customer communities can serve several different use cases, none of which are mutually exclusive. Here are just a few examples of community use cases:
- Reducing support costs
- Increasing engagement
- Driving product innovation
- Identifying expansion opportunities
- Increasing revenue from customer-led growth
Remember: Most companies will use their community to execute multiple use cases simultaneously.
2. Ensure Internal Alignment
Every company’s structure is different, but for most communities, the key stakeholders will be Customer Success (CS), Customer Support, Product, and Marketing. Imagine a hub and spoke model: The community is the hub and each department that supports it is a spoke. Without this interdepartmental alliance, the community-led growth flywheel is much harder to achieve.
That means you’ll want to ensure everyone has a seat at the table and aligns on the following:
- What each team wants to achieve with the community.
- The expectations for how much each team will contribute to the community. For example, who will handle the support questions that are raised in the online forum?
- How will product feedback be managed? (This is key to community-led growth.)
Each department should have a clear purpose and defined goals, and should play a large role in owning that piece of community management.
3. Develop a Sustainable Content Strategy
Keeping the content stream flowing is critical for keeping a community lively. It may seem daunting at first, but you probably already have a solid content library within your company that lives in silos—your blog, support articles, customer stories, ebooks, etc. Your first job is to get all that good stuff in the community in a useful, searchable way. The right community management platform will make that easy.
Then, work on a realistic plan for creating new content, with a clear calendar for creating educational resources, discussions, live events, and gamification to encourage ongoing engagement. Be ambitious, but don’t overdo it. And make sure you have a plan in place to keep your content creators accountable and engaged—and armed with the power of AI.
Community content creators can leverage AI to identify content gaps and write first drafts of the necessary copy. Gainsight Customer Communities has these features built in, including AI Summary, AI Recap, and Write with AI.
Building Your Customer Community
Once the blueprint is complete, it’s time to enter build mode. Start with these four steps to put your plans into action.
1. Activate and Launch With Momentum
Drive early engagement with pre-seeded discussions, welcome campaigns, and exclusive content that encourages participation from Day One. At many companies, this is driven by common support issues that have already been resolved, but it really depends on your organization’s specific goals.
Ideally, get your super users involved pre-launch and ask them to help boost engagement in the community. Recognize and reward these early adopters with perks like:
- Access to the Product team: For example, involve them in betas, provide early access to features when possible, and invite them into the roadmap and discovery process.
- Personal brand-building opportunities. Offer your super users speaking opportunities, badges to share on LinkedIn, etc.
- Exclusive community perks like discount codes to events.
2. Foster Relationships and Peer-to-Peer Engagement
Communities are fertile ground for cultivating even more super users who can act as advocates and champions for your business. You can also create user groups based on industry, geography, role, interests, or other attributes, helping develop a sense of belonging among customers. In-person and virtual events organized within the community are another way to build relationships.
3. Measure and Optimize Your Efforts
Congratulations! Your community program is up and running. After launch, it’s important to evaluate what’s working with your community program and what’s not. Here are just a few KPIs to consider using:
- Support ticket deflection
- P2P response rates
- Monthly active users
- Event attendance
- Group participation
- Article views
4. Drive Business Impact
Community is becoming increasingly important for driving consistent revenue growth from your customer base. But how do you connect the dots from community engagement and activity to real business impact? The answer: Connect your community outcomes back to Customer Success, Marketing, and Product metrics, such as:
- Impact on retention rate
- Expansion pipeline created through community
- Product adoption rates
- Customer Satisfaction, e.g. CSAT scores
Build Your Community With Gainsight
Ready to start drawing the blueprint for your dream customer community? Building an awesome community isn’t just fun; it’s rewarding for both your customers and your business. Learn more about how Gainsight Customer Communities can help you create a scalable, high-value community that delivers measurable impact.
