Online Community Blog

5 Essential Online Community Management Tasks to Kick Off the Year

Joshua Paul — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 14:40:00 GMT

With the start of a new year, you probably have an extensive list of goals and to-dos to improve the health and functionality of your private online community. However, before you get too caught up in some of your loftier ambitions, there are a few online community management tasks you can tackle to get the year started off on the right foot.

It’s all too easy to let important community management activity fall by the wayside in favor of more strategic tasks, but taking the time to refresh some of the basic everyday functions of your customer, partner, or member community can get everything working more smoothly behind the scenes.

While these community management tasks can be initiated at any point throughout the year, the start of a new year is a great time to bring them into focus. Make it a goal to tackle one of these tasks a week and, before you know it, your online community will be ready to perform optimally for the next 12 months.

Five Tasks That Will Tune-Up Your Online Community

Task #1) Survey Your Members

In order to know what your community members truly want, you need to ask them. Conduct a survey to discover their interests and engagement preferences. Ask your members what they want to see the community do this year, how they prefer to be engaged, and what types of content and tools would be most useful.

Figure out your target community members’ communication preferences so you can determine whether you need to contact them less or more with news and calls-to-action from the community. Use their responses to gain an increased understanding about what topics interest them and what you need to do differently to keep them engaged.

Your online community needs to consistently engage your members to thrive. Before you decide what needs to be improved, changed, or added in 2015, go to the source. Asking for their feedback every 9-12 months will also make your members feel valued and more invested in your community – everybody wins.

Task #2) Refresh Your Advisory Groups, Committees, and Leadership

If it’s been awhile since you switched up the leadership in your community, a fresh new year is a great time to reevaluate. Encouraging new perspectives to step up and take on a leadership role in your online community could be just the refresh your community’s small groups need to be reinvigorated. Systematically cycling new people into your committees and other groups keeps ideas from going stale and encourages further engagement from members who may have been trying to decide how to get more involved.

Look at the various small groups in your community – general membership, chapters and segment groups, product advisory groups, or committees – and consider how long the group membership has been in place. Sometimes a change can be exactly what your small groups need to tackle the goals of the new year with fresh energy.

Task #3) Evaluate Your Content Calendar

Relevant and helpful content is a big motivator for bringing members back to the community and reminding them what the community has to offer. The new year is a great time to take a hard look at your online community's content calendar and evaluate what works and what doesn’t.

For instance, what types of formats are more likely to be read, shared, or discussed? Do certain lengths resonate more with your readers? Is there specific keywords or language that performs better than others with your audiences?

Dig into your data to gain a clear understanding of the type of content your members prefer. Don’t be afraid to get as specific as possible and consider breaking down your analysis by certain segments of your audience. Taking on this community management task early on in the year can help set your community up with a stronger value proposition for months to come.

Task #4) Take Advantage of New Features

Your online community software platform provider probably added a lot of new features over the last year but, if you’re anything like the rest of us, you were too busy running your community to take advantage of them.

Take the time now to go back and make sure you understand everything that’s been updated added. Use the downtime of January to try out something new. Understanding what’s available can, at the very least, make sure you aren’t missing out on a feature you’ve been wishing you had – when you could have had it all along!

In many cases, the new online community software tools you’re interested in might not even be member-facing features. Perhaps you’ll stumble across an internal community management feature that saves your team 10 hours of work time per week. You won’t know what’s out there unless you take the time to look.

Task #5) Enlist Others in Your Organization

In many organizations, community managers are hesitant to ask for the help or support of others in your organization when the community is first getting off the ground. Though not ideal, that is understandable. Online community strategies and their business benefits are still very new to many executives.

However, now that people throughout your company have seen the results and you’ve proven the importance of an online community, they might be more willing to get involved. Use the start of a fresh year as an opportunity to report on the success of your community. Once they have a better understanding of how the online community impacts your company and customers, they’ll be more willing to participate in some way.

Since this is a great time to expand the number of people who are participating, pose various options for involvement. Seek out the people you want to see involved and explain to them how they can help out – whether it’s contributing content, running a part of the community, contributing an ongoing video series, or determining ways to integrate the community and the engagement it delivers further into your business practices and customer management. Set goals that involve more people in your organization to make running your online community a company-wide affair.

Online Community Management Takeaway

Online community managers have a lot on their plate. Before the year gets too hectic and all of your time is taken up with the complicated process of simply running your online community, take care of these five housekeeping tasks. When you see the positive effect they can have on your community as a whole, you’ll be glad you did.

Why Creating an Active Online Community Starts With Choosing the Right Topic

Katie Bapple — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 15:07:00 GMT

So, you want to create an online community.

That’s great! Whether you’re a company interested in providing a space for your customers to collaborate, an organization interested in uniting your members, or a niche interest group simply aiming to connect people with other likeminded individuals, your online community strategy can be a valuable part of achieving your goals.

However, planning, launching, and managing an online community can also be a lot of work and a substantial investment. That’s why it’s important to figure out exactly what type of online community you’re creating from the very beginning of the planning process. When you take the time to determine the right topic and target audience, you can avoid a common pitfall — creating a community with no purpose or audience.

Choosing the right topic might seem like an obvious step, but more goes into the decision making process than meets the eye. What does choosing the right topic really mean? Why is it so important? And how can you make sure you do it well?

What Does It Mean to Choose the Right Topic for Your Online Community?

Though every online customer or member community follows its own unique path, they all start from a place of common interest. The formation of online communities happens when people join together around a common identifier. This can be anything such as a profession, hobby, activity, product use, or social factor.

You have a lot of leeway in determining this one specific item that unites all the members of your online community (or sub-community within the broader online community). If you are trying to position your organization at the center of your market, you might create a community based around a specific industry, like HR, IT, or health care professionals (many associations take this route). Or, you could start a community geared toward a certain hobby or interest, such as jazz musicians or mountain bikers. The possibilities are really and truly endless.

Then, of course, there are the online customer communities that center around a specific brand or product. Big companies with devoted consumers like Starbucks, VMware, and Apple are well known for their big online communities where people go and talk about the products because they feel so connected to the brand.

Regardless of the common identifier you choose to be the topic of your community, it helps if it is something that people feel passionate about. However, this interest doesn’t have to be their life’s work. Your online community could focus around helping community members them perform better in their jobs or advance in their industry. These are often not a labor of love, but still something that people care about deeply.

Once you zero in on your topic, you may also want to combine it with a certain geographic area to increase the niche appeal. From there, your community might grow to have different layers of sub-communities for other interests or products that fit under your main umbrella topic.

Why is Choosing the Right Topic for Your Online Community So Important?

Again, choosing the right topic might seem like a no brainer, but getting this step wrong can have disastrous consequences for your community down the line. The right topic can make the difference between launching a successful, thriving online community and finally throwing in the towel on a community that just doesn’t work.

Are There Enough People to Support Your Community?

The wrong topic might mean there isn’t a wide enough audience to support the level of engagement your online community requires. While you want a community to speaks to a specific interest and area, you also want to make sure that the audience you’re targeting is large enough to warrant the creation of this type of online social space.

Beware of Competition for Your Target Audience

Choosing the wrong topic could also mean you end up in competition with several other similar online communities and you aren’t prepared to battle for your share of the audience.

If there are already several communities for your audience out there and they’re doing well, it will be even more difficult to carve out your place in the market. Competing with pre-established online communities means you aren’t just asking people to engage in your social network, you’re asking them to choose to spend their valuable time in your community over another community where they are already comfortable.

Doing a little research in advance can help you avoid choosing a topic for your online community that sets you up for long term success. Acknowledging the engagement potential of your prospective audience is the first step in ensuring you’re creating a community that will be worth your time and investment.

How to Choose the Right Topic for Your Online Community

So, how do you know if you’re choosing the right topic? While you’ll have to rely on some degree of instinct and industry knowledge, there are a few questions you can ask yourself to help determine the strength of your topic.

Is there already a community for this topic online?

The answer to this question can help you assess your competition and determine if your community will be filing a void. However, even if the answer is yes, that doesn’t necessarily mean your online community strategy is a no-go.

If there’s not already a community for this topic...why not?

If your answer to the first question is no, take a minute to wonder why. Is it simply because no one has taken the time to create and manage a community? Is it because your online community topic is either too specific or too broad?

What is unique about my topic?

This question is especially useful if your answer to the first question was “yes.” For instance, there might already be an online community for avid knitters, but there might not be a community unique to people who knit and live in New York City.

What makes my topic a community?

Once you pass all the other questions, it’s time to think logically about how the members of your online community will actually function as a community. What bonds them together? Why does that bond benefit from having an online community?

A good rule of thumb is to make sure your topic follows this simple and flexible formula:

Topic = Person who does X in Y

With this formula, X represents the common interest (whether it’s an activity, hobby, profession, subculture, or product), and Y represents a geographical location, company, industry or cultural affiliation. Once you fill in the formula, you should be able to clearly define what your topic is, what makes it unique, and what makes it a community.

Online Community Strategy Takeaway

More often than not, a topic idea is the driving force behind the decision to launch an online customer or member community. While this is an incredibly logical place to start, don’t move on from this step until you can confirm you’ve chosen the right topic. Take the time to consider other communities already in existence and how your new community will offer something unique to your target audience.

The Most Popular Advice of 2014 from Socious’s Online Community Blog

Joshua Paul — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 21:00:00 GMT

Despite differences across roles, industries, and organizations, we all shared some common experienced online in 2014...

We are busier than ever.
We’ll never get to all of the relevant and useful content that we would like to.

Last year, Socious produced over one hundred educational articles, videos, and guides on topics ranging from the value of strong customer relationships to online community management.

Given these two realities of life in 2014, I’ve highlighted some of the most popular advice from the past year to help you get a leg up on 2015.

Online Community Management

10 Non-Social Media Skills of Great Online Community Managers

Public vs. Private Social Networks

The Ultimate Guide to Public Social Networks vs. Private Online Communities

Customer Support

Forum Software vs. Online Community Platforms: Which is the Best Support Option for Your Company?

Customer Relationship Management Technology

How to Create a Great Online Customer Portal

Customer Experience

What Do the Companies With the Best Customer Experience Have in Common? (And How Can You Have It Too?)

Customer Retention

How to Accurately Calculate Your Customer or Member Retention Rate

User Group Management

How to Create an Engaging User Group Community Website

Member Engagement

10 Elements of a Winning Member Engagement Strategy

Your Turn…

Which blog posts did you find most useful last year? We’d love your feedback.

If you found this information useful, you can see all of Socious’s free online community resources below:

Over the next couple of weeks, Socious will be conducting our annual reader survey to uncover the topics and advice that you would like us to cover over the next year. Thanks for reading and stay tuned!

Come Back! How to Develop the Right Re-engagement Strategies for Your Online Community

Katie Bapple — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 14:59:00 GMT

Inactive community members will inevitably make up a large percentage of your total audience size. Don’t worry, this is perfectly normal in most online communities, especially as your community ages.

Your efforts to engage your audience and grow your online community are best spent focused on the members who are actively present or just walking through the door – not walking out of it. However, if you start to notice unprecedented rates of decline, it could be time to take action.

When Should You Focus on Re-Engaging Inactive Online Community Members?

There are a few metrics that will tell you whether you need to set aside the time for re-engagement efforts.

Deleted Accounts. If you track deleted accounts, you should have some idea of what (monthly or annually) the average turnover rate is amongst your audience. If this number starts to increase, start taking action.
Membership & Logins. If you track membership growth rates or login rates on a monthly basis (which you should be), a decline in the average percent of change each month is a good warning sign to make a change.
Active Members. Most importantly, if you notice the total number of active members on a monthly basis has started a downward spiral, this is a problem you need to solve – now.

How to Re-engage Inactive Community Members

Here are a three key strategies to re-engage online community members walking towards the door.

Strategy #1) Collect Feedback Via Direct Outreach

The best thing you can do to reconnect a member with the community is to make them feel like they matter. You can’t do this via email blast. It’s time to roll up your sleeves, set some time aside and get personal. This means scheduling a time to pick up the phone and having an honest heart-to-heart.

Your main goal here is to make your community member feel comfortable sharing their opinions as to why it didn’t work out and what could change about the online community to make their experience more fulfilling.

Be realistic about what is doable and what isn’t. Even if you can’t resolve everyone’s turn-offs, being transparent, honest and open will leave a positive last impression.

Strategy #2) Contact Targeted Member Segments Based On an Expressed Interest

If your online community platform has good reporting functionality, you should be able to drill down into specific information on inactive members, then use that information to provide highly targeted re-engagement messaging.

For example, if you can query for the last post date of all subscribers of a topically-specific discussion forum, you can create a personal email to contact those who have not been active in the last X number of days. (Don’t worry too much about scaling this effort, a mail merge will do just fine.)

Messaging should be specific to the circumstances that compelled you to reach out. Here is an example:

“Hi Nancy,

I wanted to reach out personally to ask about your experience in the XYZ online community. I noticed that you were interested in the _______ forum, but haven’t had a chance to jump into a conversation since XX/XX. Is there anything I can do to help out? Don’t hesitate to let me know if you are looking for a specific topic or opportunity to engage around!

All the best,

Katie”

When and if you receive a response, be prompt to address their feedback and/or challenges. This could be the last time you have their attention.

Strategy #3) Create a New Value Proposition

Giving community members a brand new reason to re-engage is much easier said than done.

Realistically, if your organization is invested in the success of the online customer or member community, a roadmap of user experience enhancements or experimental engagement strategies should already be something that is being actively pursued on an ongoing basis.

By giving members something new in the community that has been a top request, your organization is showing strong intent to make the community a solution to its target audience’s problems.

Communicating exciting new content offerings or ways to participate in the community – ways they requested - might just bring a few curious lost members back to visit. Where member-supported updates really help though, is by preventing those who are still around from also heading towards the exit.

Re-engaging online community members isn’t always going to be worth your time or effort. If you are spending a large amount of time chasing after community members that have already made their final sign off, perhaps that’s your problem.

Prioritize engaging the people who are active and present first; if the numbers start to point to an increase in turnover and inactivity, be smart, efficient and effective in your outreach. Use the time you have invested talking to lost community member to learn from past mistakes and prevent the cycle.

Happy community building!

Why Marketing Your Online Community is Critical to Its Success

Katie Bapple — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 13:56:00 GMT

When it comes down to it, a private online community is a service offering. As such, you need to get people to drink the proverbial Kool-Aid. Your target audience is just as busy as you are. Your community members are constantly being bombarded with demands on their time and attention.

How will you get them to take time to visit and participate in your online customer or member community?

This is where your online community’s marketing plan comes into play. Many organizations put this part of community management on the back burner to focus on building out the value and processes inside the community.

However, a comprehensive, well-planned marketing strategy is key to driving people to your online community on an ongoing basis. Your marketing plan should be developed around your community’s relevancy, value, and purpose. It should also highlight the ways that your community members can engage and how easy it is.

Before getting started, however, it’s important to know that effective online community marketing tactics are not reflective of traditional marketing practices. If this is your bread and butter, come open-minded and prepare yourself for a paradigm shift.

Here are the (potentially unexpected) reasons why your marketing approach is critical to the survival, and ultimate success, of your private online community.

Reason #1) Marketing Is the Only Way People Will Know What’s Going On

In offline communities, people know what is happening to those around them via the newspaper, word of mouth, phone calls or group gatherings. In online communities, these communications don’t happen in quite the same way, but the basis is the same – people want to be “in the know” and they want to hear it straight from the source.

Marketing that supports the dissemination of community conversation and other activity is necessary to let people know what’s going on and drive them back to the community to check it out.

What are some effective ways to do this?

A digital newsletter of user-generated content
Forum email listservs
On-page calls to action
Special interest bulletins, such as community news or topically targeted collections of popular user-generated content
Direct outreach to topical experts
Promotion of offline events

Once community members are brought into the conversation, they will be more likely to develop an interest in the community and, ultimately, engage.

One important note to keep in mind here; while a person might have opted to be part of your community, you will still want to be careful not to overwhelm them with marketing messages and content. No one likes to feel spammed. This is especially true if your community has more than one primary interest.

Over time, learn about your individual users and make sure to send them information that's relevant to those interests.

The same goes for calls to action and special interest bulletins. The items you choose to promote should always help your users find the information they want, not be in the way of it.

Reason #2) Marketing Illustrates Community Value and Makes Participation Easy

Community members don’t have time to figure out new processes or dig through content. Additionally, online communities can be confusing to some members, especially if they aren’t the most technologically savvy, or accustomed to the concept. In order for members to discover engagement opportunities deemed personally beneficial, they need to be shown.

Direct, one-to-one engagement that suggests a single and easy action the member can take generally works best. I've found that positioning the activity as an opportunity to showcase their expertise or collaborate and connect with like-minded peers is also very effective.

To scale efforts across a larger audience, topically targeted promotions aligned with relevant audience segments works well.

These types of marketing activities don’t necessarily have to showcase content, either. Highlighting the value propositions of joining a specific forum is also a popular option.

Include a one-click subscribe link as the main call to action; a discussion forum or listserv subscription makes participation easy and established a new, hands-off marketing channel for your community’s content.

Reason #3) Marketing Provides Community Recognition and Illustrates Vibrancy

When done right, online community marketing illustrates a continuous pattern of members engaging with one another, sharing knowledge and collaborating around common interests. The use of member names and images showcases those who are continuously adding value to the community via content creation, and can provide recognition to those who have made notable achievements.

Why is this an important part of a community marketing strategy? Creating and strengthening an ongoing sense of community will keep members invested and increase retention rates over time. The formation of human bonds, a sense of inclusion, and a path to recognition are powerful drivers of community loyalty.

How Marketing Your Online Community the Right Way Impacts Success

Once you have a strategic marketing plan in place that is built around your members, online community marketing can drive visits, create a stronger sense of community, increase member retention and grow engagement.

Start by finding a voice, creating a pattern of consistency and measuring results to refine tactics along the way. Over time, you’ll see a direct correlation between the effort you put in and results you get out.

Happy community building!

How to Improve Customer Lifetime Value Using Your Online Customer Community Platform

Joshua Paul — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 19:27:00 GMT

Most companies invest big bucks to build their customer base. Unfortunately, while spending large amounts to acquire new customers, many organizations often make the mistake of paying less attention to the customers they already have.

Despite customers costing significantly more to acquire than retain—five to ten times as much, according to Bain and Co.—marketing strategies still tend to focus predominantly on new customer growth.

Many businesses are creating private online customer communities to improve their customer lifetime value due to scalable ongoing engagement capabilities of these platforms. This allows businesses to focus on closing new customers while maintaining a strong relationship with the ones they already have.

Before we get into how to leverage your online customer community to improve customer lifetime value, let’s start with the basics.

What is Customer Lifetime Value?

Customer lifetime value (otherwise known as CLV, CLTV, LTV, or LCV…but for our purposes, we’ll stick with CLV) refers to the amount of profit your company can stand to gain throughout the entire duration of your relationship with a single customer.

Essentially, CLV attempts to predict how much revenue you can expect from a customer for as long as they stay a customer when you subtract out the cost of acquiring the customer, serving that customer, and delivering your product or service.

Companies often view the average CLV as a key performance metric that they target and track monthly or quarterly.

The challenge with discussing how to improve your CLV is that most strategies don’t start with the tangible levers. Instead, they focus on pie-in-the-sky ideas and vague tactics that don’t address the specific metrics at hand, such as connect with your customers on Twitter or raffle off an iPad each quarter to customers who attend training.

Sure, running crazy giveaways or campaigns will probably get your customers’ attention. But will it really do any good to build stronger relationships in the long run?

What Impacts Customer Lifetime Value?

If we’re going to discuss CLV, we’re going to do it the right way. When it really comes down to it, there are three primary levers that you can pull to drive lifetime value within your existing customer base:

Lever #1) Keeping Customers Longer

This comes down to simple customer retention. The longer that your customers do business with your company, the more revenue they will spend as they renew contracts and extend license agreements.

However, improving customer retention is anything but simple in most cases. Along with ensuring that your product or service generates the expected results for your customers, there are a variety of other factors that lead to customers remaining customers.

Lever #2) Increasing Average Selling Price (ASP) Per Customer

Ideally, you aren’t just keeping the customers you already have, you’re trying to sell them even more products and services. Most companies take an up-sell or cross-sell approach to get customers interested in the next best product or compatible products to what they already purchased.

Common examples of increasing revenue opportunities including coupling professional services with your product, selling add-on products to your existing customer base, and providing an upgrade path to more lucrative solutions.

Lever #3) Lowering the Cost to Serve

By reducing the amount it costs to serve and support customers, you can increase your net profit per customer. However, keep in mind that it’s important to not lower costs at the expense of good customer service and your customers’ ability to generate expected business outcomes from your solution.

You can learn more about how to calculate customer lifetime value here.

Now, you might be wondering how your online customer community platform comes into play with these three levers. Let’s dig in.

How to Leverage Your Online Community to Increase Customer Lifetime Value

The structure and various features of your online customer community can actually address all three CLV levers, creating higher customer satisfaction and bringing more value to your business.

Here’s how we see it done most often:

Keeping Customers Longer

Offer Better Contextual Customer Support

Customers will have more access to tips, tricks, and experts within your online community than they would with traditional customer management approaches. With better support and product training, you’ll reduce their learning curves or potential frustrations during the onboarding process.

Your customers will also get the unique opportunity to connect with other customers and experts to get questions answers and learn how they’re using their product.

In Socious’s experience, customers get more in-depth answers to questions in online customer communities than they do with traditional “you ask, the company answers” support channels. Since the customers and partners that are answering the questions in your customer community have been in the shoes of the person asking the question, they are able to read into their challenges and incorporate that context into their response.

In addition to learning from their peers, customers might even get the chance to help other community members. This peer-to-peer sharing and consistent support network fulfills many of the elements that drive customer retention.

Create Loyalty Through Value and Differentiation

An active customer community is a strong differentiator in most markets. The exclusive content, discussions, and access to experts are things that your competitors will have a hard time replicating, even if your products are similar.

Your customers might also find themselves growing attached to the social bonds and connections they’re forging. Often, even if customers are discontent with a decision that your company has made or struggling with your product, they won’t want to give up their access to valuable content and interactions with other customers, partners, or people inside the company.

Help Customers Generates Better Business Outcomes

The ongoing support, personalized resources, and proactive outreach that your online customer community provides help your customers navigate every phase of their relationship with your company and your products—from getting started to overcoming roadblocks.

Most importantly, customer communities play a central role in advising customers on how best to use their investment to get the business outcomes that they want. Your customers purchase your products or services for a reason. Help customers take advantage of the content, discussions, and advice from peers in your community to make sure that they get those results.

Shape Customer Perception

When your company provides an online community to your customers, you own the airwaves. The platform provides your business an opportunity to shape customers’ perceptions on a variety of matters—from how they view your products and organization to how they see your industry and the value that your company brings to it.

In addition to shaping the conversation through content and conversations, your online community allows you to monitor customer perceptions so you can be proactive about any issues that arise. You can identify particular customers who might be considering a change and reach out to them personally.

Let Customers Know Their Voice Is Heard

Creating a platform where there is the opportunity to discuss concerns and provide feedback helps customers feel like they have a voice and that you are listening. Through your online community software’s discussion, survey, and product enhancement tools, you will be able to provide plenty of opportunities to capture customer feedback.

Then, you can leverage personal outreach, as well as built-in email, blog, and other communication features to assure customers that you hear their requests.

Keep Customers Engaged

Highly engaged customers are critical for customer retention. Set up your online community to provide a host of engagement opportunities for your customers. You can go about it in three ways:

Content – Exclusive guidance and info about your products/company
Conversations – Discussions with other customers and partners
Connections – Access to experts or key company personnel

By getting customers to consistently convert on relevant engagement opportunities they will be more informed and responsive to your messages and calls-to-action.

For more on how to reduce customer churn, check out the slides from Socious’s on-demand webinar on how to increase customer retention.

You can also watch the full video.

Increasing Revenue or ASP Per Customer

Increase Conversions on Offers

As customers learn about new products, add-ons, training, or professional services through their participation in your online community, they are more likely to open your emails, return your calls, and read your announcements.

There is a direct connection between customers being more engaged and informed and customers’ willingness to convert on offers to learn about a new product, consider an upgrade, or find out how new services can benefit them.

Combine Social Community Data with Traditional CRM Data

The way that your customers behave within your customer community allows you to learn more about them. For instance, which videos they watch and the discussion that they participate in provide valuable information to your company that helps you to identify your target audience for upselling, upgrading, or add-on offers.

When you know more about your customers, you can provide content and communication directly to their interests. You can even use the social data in your customer community to help account managers determine who to contact directly and which new products or services to talk to customers about.

Lowering the Cost to Serve Customer

Create a Centralized Experience

Your customers don’t want to navigate to multiple places and remember an array of passwords to access the resources they need to be successful with your solution.

Often companies will have support forums in one place, tips in another, and updates from the company in yet another. Aside from a choppy customer experience, this common scenario does not help make customers aware of all of the resources available to them, rending major parts of your customer service strategy less effective.

By bringing together support documentation, access to other customers, customer account information, and training events in your online customer community, you can creating habits among your customers to take advantage of specific support options. The example we see often is one where companies want customers to use self-service support options before contacting the company because it is less expensive.

Providing a one-stop-shop for customers to get answers to their questions and learn more about how to get results with your products or services increases the effectives of the support infrastructure that you have worked so hard to put in place.

Decentralize Support Operation Costs

Leverage the peer-to-peer support and the user-generated knowledge base that your community’s discussion forums create to reduce your reliance on only using call centers and paid employee support. What would it mean for your company if 15% of your customer support questions were answered before they reached the phone-based customer service representative?

Additionally, in online customer communities, customers answer others customers’ questions and share ideas in blog posts, documents, and videos. This decentralization of production from your support staff to your customers and partners lowers the cost of creating support documentation.

Customer Lifetime Value Takeaway

While acquiring new customers is important, improving your CLV can cost your company less and increase your profits significantly in the long run. According to Bain and Co., boosting retention rates by just 5 percent can actually raise profits by 25 percent to 95 percent.

It is important to understand the three main levers for improving CLV—retaining customers, lowering costs, and increasing ASP per customer— and how they can all be addressed by a highly engaged online community of customers, partners, and employees.

Why Online Customer Communities Need a Purpose Bigger Than Building Community

Joshua Paul — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 15:47:00 GMT

A few years ago, I penned what I believe is still one of the most concise and clear definitions of social business:

While the original publication of the definition received a lot of positive feedback, a few readers of the Socious online community blog took issue with the use of the phrase, “use its communities” in the definition.

I respect those purists who hold the act of building and maintaining a community above all else. After all, an organization cannot derive any business benefits if nobody uses their community. These are the people who grow and manage online communities. And every community needs these advocates.

I also want to point that online communities don’t work if community members feel that they are there to serve the sponsoring company’s purposes. Your online community’s value proposition must clearly solve your target audience’s problems without a hint of self-interest.

Having made that clear, even after a few years have passed, I still stand by my original definition. Discussing how online communities are “used” or leveraged by companies certainly isn’t an idealized view of them. It is a practical one.

Simply, building an online community is not the same as growing a business. Online customer, developer, and partner communities aren’t built just for the fun of it, to promote the idea of community in a specific market, or to solely provide support and resources to your target audience. They’re created to serve a business purpose.

Creating Active Online Communities vs. Planning for a ROI

Unfortunately, many organizations start their thinking too late in the process and end their planning too soon.

The true business goals of online customer communities can get lost in the planning process. All too often, companies focus more on creating an active, thriving community at the expense of first developing a well-thought-out plan for integrating the online community into their business.

Considering most companies are launching an online community for the first time, this is an understandable problem. It’s perfectly natural that the focus is on creating a functioning and healthy community, because this is a very involved process and that goal is often easier to define and measure.

Here’s the problem, though: simply developing a thriving community isn’t going to lead to improved business performance.

Focusing on community management personal and processes before settling on an online community strategy causes many companies to throw their hands up and declare that their private online customer community isn’t “working.” Often, projects stall before they get off the ground because the business outcomes and how they will come to fruition are not clear to executive stakeholders. Their goals aren’t achieved because they weren’t well-outlined in the first place.

So, how can you make sure your customer community will be sustainable, as well as serve a bigger purpose for your organization? The solution requires changing your approach to building an online community. Rather than starting with plans for how to create an active community, design your online community with a greater business-level end game in mind.

5 Steps for Creating an Online Customer Community That Drive Business Outcomes

Step #1) Start With Business Goals

There is a difference between creating an online community and creating an online community that leads to business success. Planning to build a community is great, but if you want to plan for a community that impacts traditional KPIs, your reason for building community cannot end at creating an active social space online where your customers and partners want to spent time.

When your plan starts with business goals at their core and grows from there, you can create a community that is designed to solve a problem for both your target audience and your company. Begin by identifying the business goals you’d like your community to achieve and plan everything else with those goals in mind.

For instance…

Do you want to reduce your support costs?
Do you want to increase opportunities for upselling and add-on revenue?
Do you want to create more sellable products by bringing customers into the product development process?

Having these goals at the forefront of your planning process will allow you to make better choices as you implement your community.

Step #2) Make a Plan to Address Those Goals

Once you have your business objectives in mind, you can begin to plan how you can leverage increased customer engagement within your community to address these goals.

This stage is important for two reasons:

To create concrete processes that address your objectives
To ensure that creating a community is the right course of action to achieve your goals

Here’s a tip: You might discover that this is not the right solution for your business problem. Online customer communities aren’t for everyone. If you can’t map out how online community engagement and the tools in your online community software will address your business goals, it may be time to explore a different approach or get a second opinion during the online community planning process.

Step #3) Design Processes for Leveraging Social Community Data

Once your community is active, you’ll have access to a wealth of social and behavioral data. This includes a ton of information about your customers' challenges, motivations, and dispositions toward your company. Don’t let this data go unnoticed. It is the real gold behind your online customer community strategy. Put processes in place that allow you to leverage it to achieve your business goals.

For instance, how will what you learn about your customers within your community impact your product roadmap? How can you leverage data to create better customer relationships with customer advocates or proactively reach out struggling customer?

In the hustle and bustle of managing an online community, analyzing data and integrating your conclusions into your business processes often slips to the bottom of the to-do list. Making it a priority will help you align your online community with the things that you senior management cares about.

Step #4) Create a Community Your Customers Will Value and Want to Use

Yes, even though your business needs to “use” your community to its advantage, your target audience (usually customers or members) also need to see the value in order for your community to be successful.

This is where people who take issue with my definition of social business want the community building process to start. This step is highly important since your business won’t see any of the business benefits mapped out above if your community is a ghost town. However, it is important that this step comes after the internal planning outlined in steps 1-3.

With your knowledge of your customer base, you can create an active and sustainable community that your customers will want to return to often. Keeping your target audience engaged is what will make achieving your business goals possible.

Step #5) Put Processes in Place to Keep the Community Healthy and Growing

The community management processes that you establish are what will allow your community to continue to grow and thrive long after the initial excitement of the launch. Develop detailed onboarding and nurturing processes that create active and engaged members.

Consider how you will move your community members through the engagement cycle. What processes will you have in place to turn first time visitors into active participants?

Online Customer Communities Takeaway

While you want your customers to receive value and enjoyment from participating in your community, it’s important to remember that your online community doesn’t exist solely for their needs. When your customer community platform is designed with business outcomes in mind, you can more easily leverage the engagement in your community to achieve those goals.

The First Five Places to Look to Increase Online Community Engagement

Joshua Paul — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 14:58:00 GMT

By now, you’re well aware how important ongoing engagement is to the success of your online customer or member community. Without active conversations in your discussion forums or dedicated readers for your content, your entire online community management strategy falls flat.

An active and engaged community can play a big role in your customer experience. Imagine this scenario:

You offer a fairly complex solution to a business-to-business market.
A new customer is thrilled to learn your business offers an online community. She immediately pulls up a web browser to check it out with the intention of creating a log-in and bringing some questions to a specific product’s customer discussion board.
However, she quickly notices that the groups in your community often go weeks without discussion replies and your latest blog post isn’t worth her time.
Before even getting a chance to click over to your product resource library to check out the guides and videos, she remembers a Facebook message she forgot to reply to and clicks away.

In this case, your online customer community wasn’t even strong enough to hold the attention of a potential new member who initially had the intent to join. The early promise this new customer felt when she noticed your company had an private online community quickly fades.

While only time will tell how that affects her future as a customer of your products, you do know that this particular customer will get fewer of your messages, have little opportunity to learn from her peers, and feel less connected to your organization and its ecosystem.

The Opportunity and Challenge of Increasing Engagement

Increasing online community engagement isn’t only significant for the overall health and sustainability of your community—its impact extends to customer satisfaction and retention as well.

While increasing online community engagement to improve the customer experience might sound easy at first, generating participation isn’t as simple as your typical run-of-the-mill customer communication strategies. With all that goes into running a successful peer-to-peer community, often distractions get in the way of nailing down an effective plan for building engagement.

Regardless, your members aren’t going to magically become more active participants all on their own. You need to take intentional steps to zero in on your engagement problems and focus on finding solutions. And as with any complicated task, the trouble comes in knowing where to start.

Luckily, we’ve got you covered. Here are the first five places you should look when trying to increase engagement in your online community.

Area #1) The Social Density of Your Groups

The structure of your community and the number of groups you have dictates your social density. It comes down to how you segment information, community members, and engagement opportunities. Even though it might seem like more groups equals more participation, giving your members too many options can actually reduce engagement in your community.

So, how do you know if you have too many groups? First, look at the total number of people in your community in comparison to the activity across groups. If you have a group where the last question was posed two months ago and received zero replies, then that’s a strong indication your members have too many participation options and your social density is diluted. You’re more likely to see an increase in community engagement with fewer groups that have more members and a steadier flow of traffic.

Area #2) The Value of Your Content

It might feel like you’re producing a lot of content—and you might actually be producing a lot of content—but that won’t matter if the value isn’t there for your target community members. Think of this as a quality over quantity scenario. Producing enough content is one thing, but producing enough content that addressees your target audience’s biggest challenges is another thing entirely.

The content you produce helps give your target audience a reason to first visit your community, but it’s the value of the content which you're continuously adding that gives them a reason to return for a second, third, or fourth visit.

Since your content is already competing with all the other content on the Internet for your customer’s attention, you need to make sure it has enough value to catch and keep their attention. Make sure you’re hitting topics that matter to your target online community members by developing your content plan around their various personas and pain points.

Area #3) The Success of Your Outreach and Re-engagement Efforts

Your members are busy and your online community is not going to be top of mind. It is your outreach or re-engagement plan that is going to bring members back to your community. Your online community software's email system is the most common tool for this important part of your online community management strategy.

Once new members come to the community, what are you doing to keep them interested and motivate them to come back? A large part of turning new members into regular members is making your members—both new and old—aware of the engagement opportunities available to them.

Your initial outreach and onboarding is important for getting members in the community, but it takes an ongoing marketing effort to make them stay. Consider what opportunities for engagement you’re offering and analyze how you can make them more relevant and valuable to your target audience.

Area #4) Your Basic Engagement Ratios

There are several questions you’ll need to answer in order to find and focus on the right weaknesses in your online community’s engagement funnel. For instance: are new members finding the community? Are they registering? Are they logging in? Are they viewing the discussions and content? Are they contributing?

These questions are best answered by examining your online community’s basic ratios. This data helps paint a complete picture of member behavior and also helps you to avoid going down a path toward fixing the wrong problem.

Rather than just consulting your log-in numbers, check your log-in to action ratio. This will tell you if the problem is that your members aren’t signing into your community? Or, that they’re signing in, but not doing anything once they’re there? Learn from the behavioral clues your ratios provide so you can address the right part of your engagement problem.

Area #5) The Engagement Level of Each Persona

Your target audience is made up of different personas. You can track where a bulk of the members that fit a specific persona are in the engagement funnel. The same messaging that might click with a user of a specific product who is new to the community won’t resonate with an executive that has been engaged in the community for several years. You need to focus on handling each persona differently.

Successful messaging takes both what you want your members to do and their current engagement level into consideration. This allows you to motivate members to engage in the community by promoting the right activities for the right people at the right time.

Online Community Engagement Takeaway

Increasing engagement isn’t easy, but it is a lot simpler when you start in the right place. By examining your groups, content, outreach, ratios, and personas, you can get a clear picture of what’s not working. From there, you can build a strategy to increase participation and improve your customers’ experience.

Steal This Simple Way to Cement Your Online Community’s Success Before You Launch It

Joshua Paul — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 15:18:00 GMT

Launching a private online community for customers, members, employees, or partners is a big undertaking and you want to make sure all your hard work pays off. However, in the excitement of the planning and launch process, it’s not uncommon for companies to get ahead of themselves and neglect crucial details. When you’re just starting out and everything is new, it’s easy to laugh off the question of, “What could possibly go wrong?”

Unfortunately, it does take hard work and careful planning to make sure your online community is successful. There are several areas of research, strategic elements, and community management processes that, if not addressed during the planning phase, can lead to the derailing of your community down the line. With all that needs to go right, planning for the best and the worst at the same time can get a little overwhelming.

That’s why we’ve decided to borrow the simple tactic of conducting a premortem. As a common practice in business projects and product management, it only seemed sensible to apply the same strategy to building a successful online customer or member community.

What is a Premortem?

You’re probably familiar with a postmortem, which is most often used in medical settings to refer to the process of investigating a patient’s death. The term has been borrowed by the business world to conduct a focused look-back at a product, project, or campaign. Essentially, a postmortem asks, “What went wrong?”

While this might make sense for business or medical purposes where some level of ending is inevitable and there I nothing you can do to change the outcome, you don’t want to wait until your online community fails to find out what caused the death.

Enter: the premortem.

The Harvard Business Review defines a premortem as, “the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem.” However, premortems are not to be confused with a discussion centered on the question of, “What might go wrong?” Instead, premortems are conducted under the assumption that the community already has failed, and participants present realistic possibilities for an answer to the question of, “What did go wrong?”

By identifying the potential pitfalls of your community ahead of time, you can safeguard your launch and better ensure your success. You won’t only have an answer to “What could possibly go wrong?”—you’ll have a plan to prevent it.

Why Premortems Make Sense for Online Communities

While it’s impossible to predict each and every potential problem your private online community strategy might face, many community managers find themselves with a struggling community at various stages of the community’s lifecycle due to things that could have been addressed much earlier in the planning process.

Unfortunately, by the time you convince all the involved parties and stakeholders that launching an online community is a good idea, the last thing you want to do is present a list of problems that might talk them out of it. That’s where a premortem comes in handy.

Rather than reading like an unprepared list of issues you won’t know how to handle, a premortem identifies scenarios as if they already happened, allowing you to seemingly have a crystal ball. Instead of weakening your launch with potential problems, you can fortify it with plans to avoid failure. Premortems allow you and your community team members to voice your concerns without fear of undermining the goals and intent of your online community strategy.

In order to ensure your premortem is a productive part of your planning process, we’ve outlined five necessary steps below.

How to Conduct a Premortem for Your Online Community

Step #1) Gather Your Team Members

Bring together everyone who has had a hand in building your online community and everyone who will interact with it during and after the launch. Try to gather a diverse group of stakeholders that can bring a wide range of ideas to the table. However, bear in mind that it might be best to keep your group relatively small to avoid unnecessary repetitions.

Step #2) Tell Them the Community has Failed

Make the announcement that, despite their best efforts, your private online community has failed. Next, ask them to write down a list of what happened to lead to the community’s failure. Stress that the reasons why the online community failed need to be plausible.

Step #3) Present the Possibilities

One by one, ask your team members to present their findings on why the community failed. Collect the reasons in one list and make a note when more than one team member identifies a reason. This could indicate that a particular situation is more probable.

Step #4) Review the List and Look for Trends

Once all of the reasons are collected, look over your list to see if any patterns or trends emerge. For instance, if several of your team members identified low engagement from longtime customers as a reason for why your community failed, that might point to a weakness in your outreach plan or value propisition for that audience.

Step #5) Make a Plan to Strengthen Your Community

Use the list of premortem downfalls as an opportunity to revisit your community strategy and launch plans and make them stronger.

Ask yourself: what can we do to make sure that doesn’t happen? If there is a reasonable answer to that question, don’t wait for a potential problem to occur before taking action. Find as many ways as possible to safeguard your launch and secure your community against the possibility of failure.

Online Community Success Takeaway

It can often seem counterintuitive to think of all the ways your plans for an online community can go wrong. However, identifying pitfalls and problems ahead of time doesn’t have to be viewed as negativity.

Instead, take the time to hold a premortem with your team members and put your heads together to identify the holes in your plan. By planning for the worst, you’ll be able to strengthen your plan and give your online community a much better chance at thriving.

Online Community Management: How to Get People to Participate [Quick Tip]

Katie Bapple — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 13:05:00 GMT

During my first year in online community management, I created a survey for a council of more than 1,000 members. The questions aimed to create an in-depth understanding of activity-related behavior patterns and general community utilization habits. I spent weeks on this survey, ensuring I had the perfect questions that would enable me to analyze every deterrent, motivation and decision-making factor of their interactions in the online community.

After the survey had been polished off and shipped out, I started analyzing the responses of more than 430 participants. The results to one particular question caught me off guard:

“For what reasons have you chosen not to participate in a discussion forum conversation?”

The most popular response wasn’t one I offered in the list of multiple choice answers. Instead, 48% of respondents chose an “other” option and entered their own answer – “lack of time”. (FYI – As you might expect, a close second was a preference to lurk by quietly absorbing content posted by others).

How Do You Get Online Community Members to Participate? Make it Easy

If you don’t make participation easy, members won’t participate in your online community.

Any barrier, including a long registration process, difficult navigation, and poor search functionality, will cause potential participants to lose patience before they find what they are ultimately hoping to gain.

There are several steps you can take to cut down the time it takes for members to get direct value from your online community.

Work with your online community platform provider or product manager to reevaluate your community’s ease of use; get feedback from community members before making any major changes.
Reach out to specific member segments to inform them of discussion forums, blogs or other community resources that align directly with their interests; when viable, include a one-click subscribe URL.
Educate members on your online community platform’s listserv features so they can start participating via email, rather than having to login to the community. At Socious, we’ve found that enabling online community members to participate in discussions via both the email listserv and browser-based forums increases participation by 10%.
Test out new marketing tactics that highlight popular content types, as indicated by community feedback and data, so community members won’t feel like they have to dig.
Introduce a larger volume of broad and low barrier-to-entry content that will apply to all member interests.

If you’re having a difficult time getting your online community members to participate, talk to them directly, assess your community’s usability, remove roadblocks and implement strategies that will make participation as easy as possible.

What have you tried in your online community to make participation easy?

Katie Bapple is a senior online community strategist at Socious. She works with businesses and nonprofit membership organizations to develop effective customer community strategies and implement online community management and growth plans.

7 Reasons That an Online Community Site is the Ultimate SEO Hack

Joshua Paul — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 14:15:00 GMT

This post was contributed by Tom Schwab of Inbound for eCommerce.

Too often it seems like every new SEO trick becomes the thing that Google punishes on the next algorithm update. While you can argue on the existence of negative SEO, there is no debate that having more user generated content on your site is good for SEO.

After talking with the community managers at companies like King Arthur Flour and Sephora at the IRCE conference earlier this year, we beta tested our own online community site for our direct-to-patient, B2C ecommerce site. The engagement results were promising, but what really spurred us on was the analytics we saw. We knew the search engines saw them too and would reward us.

Here are seven reasons we found that adding an online community to our website is one of the best things you can do from an SEO perspective:

Reason #1) More Content

Google loves content. An online community continually adds new unique pages signals that the site is alive and increasing in value every day. We built 12 pages on our community site. Over the next six months, the users added over 643 more pages!

Reason #2) Increased Traffic

Traffic to our online community site now accounts for just over 5% of total traffic. While this is still a low number, our beta test proved that we can grow traffic with an online community. While we expected most of the traffic to be returning visitors from our ecommerce site, we actually found more than half found our ecommerce site via the Community Site.

Reason #3) Lower Bounce Rate

Visitors on the online community site interacted to a much greater level than our standard product detail pages or even our blogs. The community site saw a 25% lower bounce rate compared to our overall site. This helped the SEO of the entire domain.

Reason #4) Lower Exit Rate

The community site had 50% lower exit rate. Visitors were staying longer, seeing more pages and clicking through to other portions of the site. A study by the University of Michigan even reported a 19% increase in revenue with sites that used a community site.

Reason #5) Natural Links

We’ve found an abundance of natural links from sites we would have never approached or considered. As people share what they have learned and promote what they have written, we’ve seen an increase in links back to both the online community site and the main website.

Reason #6) Natural Long Tail Keywords

As marketers, we are often accused of overstuffing keywords or using them in a less than natural fashion. When the visitors create the content, they can be nothing less than natural. We find users using different words, which we incorporate into our campaigns. Even the misspellings they use are forgiven by the reader while being indexed by the search engines. If one person spelled it that way, you can be certain someone else will search for the same spelling.

Reason #7) Efficient Ongoing Content Production

One of the most challenging parts of content or inbound marketing is the significant time and cost to create quality content with context. Most who abandon an inbound strategy report doing so because it was too hard or they didn’t have the time. That is why User Generated Content is the Holy Grail of Inbound Marketing. Many of the post are over 600 words, making them like a blog post that would take us hours. Instead of curating content, we let the experts (the customers) find, post and promote what they feel brings value.

An online community site is a long term investment in your customers and your brands. We found it takes the most effort to start the conversations. Once members are active and engaged, it’s still important to be an active participant although the community can handle most of the day to day activities.

If you are looking for a quick traffic surge just through some more money at Pay Per Click. If you are looking to build a business, a brand, and a tribe, we have found no better way than using an online community site as part of your strategy.

Tom Schwab is an entrepreneur who has grown Goodbye Crutches from a regional player to a national leader using an Inbound Strategy. He helps other high potential businesses achieve similar results with coaching, consulting and mastermind groups at Inbound for eCommerce. Tom is also the host of Inbound Movement, a daily video series where real business owners get their questions asked from an inbound perspective. Connect with Tom on LinkedIn.

It's Not All About You: Is Company-Centric Communication Hurting Your Online Community Engagement?

Katie Bapple — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 19:55:00 GMT

There is a way to communicate smarter and it’s quite simple - take your company out of the conversation.

It remains a common practice for companies to use traditional marketing tactics that inundate people with messages of product superiority and boastful “us v. them” claims. But customers generally don’t care about what they can do for an organization, they care about what an organization can do for them.

According to a Nielsen Global Survey, up to 77% of people are influenced by word of mouth from close personal connections when making a purchasing decision, compared to 34% who are influenced by the ever-present promotional email.

In fact, word of mouth was more powerful than any form of traditional advertising, including TV, internet and radio ad spots. The buying conversation has become more personal than ever. Consequently, the main way organizations typically communicate with their audiences is becoming less effective.

Problem: Company-Centric Messages Are Less Effective in Keeping Members Engaged

When it comes to online communities specifically, there are a few problems with this:

Problem #1

Traditional marketing tactics do not foster a sense of community. In online communities, members want to be enabled to hear from like-minded peers with whom they can personally identify (branded communities included), not corporations.

Problem #2

Promotional messaging does not offer a strong value proposition for why the audience should be engaged in an online community. Organizations need to address “what’s in it for them?” if they hope to get community buy-in.

Problem #3

Marketing oriented around products and services takes away the focus from makes the online community a community – a shared sense of inclusion supported by audience interactions – negating internal goals for higher engagement and retention rates.

Soution: Make Your Communication About Your Community

When communicating with your online community, make the content entirely about the online community. For example, instead of promoting a product or a service:

Highlight recent conversations started by members of the community
Share blog posts that provide a learning opportunity, address a relevant current event or announce community news
Promote “how-to” events hosted exclusively for community members
Send a regular newsletter that shares a variety of popular user-generated content

A shift in communication doesn’t mean you stop building brand awareness amongst your audience. In online customer communities particularly, community members are brand advocates and they have a greater reach and impact than internal staff could possibly ever scale or achieve. The end result will be a much higher level of audience retention, engagement, product awareness, and trust.

How to Improve Customer Satisfaction By Getting More Customers to Trust You

Joshua Paul — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 16:20:00 GMT

It’s no secret that Socious runs many of its marketing programs and blog on the HubSpot platform. We use their marketing and sales tools extensively and I’ve personally been using their platform for over four years. That’s why I was especially excited about some of the new features announced at HubSpot’s Inbound conference in September.

One feature in particular that caught my eye was the calendar function. It allows you to manage all of your blog posts, email campaigns, and social media postings in one place. This makes scheduling easier so you can make sure all of your messages and content are spaced appropriately and nothing falls through the cracks. In theory, it all sounded great.

Sure enough, I went to use the new calendar function and it did everything it promised to do. Then, I realized I needed to change the date on an item I’d already added to my calendar... and realized I couldn’t. As great as the new feature was for scheduling marketing tasks, there was no way to change a date.

This seemed like a pretty significant oversight, so I contacted HubSpot and gave them my feedback. They asked follow-up questions about how I would like the feature to work and promised me they’d work on it.

Now, for many companies, that experience would have caused enough frustration to make me lose interest in their product and possibly go public with my discontent. However, that wasn’t the case with my marketing platform. They told me they would work to fix it and I believed them. I can think of a handful of products that I have worked with over the past few years where this would not have been case.

The entire experience made me wonder:

Why do customers trust some companies and not others?

Why did I trust HubSpot to follow through on their promises, but don’t give other companies the same leeway? It was trust that made the difference: I trusted them to get it right and am willing to wait until they do.

My example is living proof: when customers trust a company, they’re willing to give them grace even when a product performs unsatisfactorily. So, how can other companies cultivate trust with their customers?

The answer? Establish a deliberate customer culture.

How to Build Trust By Establishing a Customer Culture

What is a customer culture? Just as your company’s culture (also known as corporate culture or organizational culture) is a social contract around common values for how a business operates (see Socious’s culture code for an example), your organization’s customer culture is the set of behavioral patterns and values that guide goals, strategies, and members of your company in how they will treat your customers.

Building trust between your customers and your company starts with the customer culture your company establishes — whether is is purposefully designed or grows organically. This isn’t done by just one action, but is actually made up of dozens of different elements. Here are seven that contribute most highly to customer trust:

Tip #1) Put Customers First

Every business is ultimately in it for itself, but your customers still need to feel valued. When problems arise, make it very clear that you’re doing everything you can to help them figure out a solution. By being as helpful as possible and clearly communicating that you understand their needs, your customers will have faith in your continued commitment to their interests, as well as your ability to fix their problems.

Tip #2) Follow Through

If you say you’re going to do something, make sure you eventually do it. Following through on promises is the number one action that builds trust. When your customers have past interactions with positive outcomes to refer back to, they’ll be more patient when future issues occur.

Tip #3) Be Consistent

Your customers will be more likely to stick with you when they feel like they know who you are. Being consistent in your actions and messages helps customers feel more comfortable when changes arise because they know what to expect from your organization.

Consistency helps to establish your overall customer culture. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind and make different decisions — it’s consistent communication and purpose that makes change easier on your customers.

Tip #4) Give Updates and Communicate Often

You never want to leave your customers in the dark about what’s going on, especially if change is on the horizon. Get in front of any unintentional rumors, so your customers aren’t left wondering if your company forgot about them.

Many of Socious’s customers leverage their online customer community to provide easy updates and ongoing customer communication. Your customers can log in and see messages from the executives, ask questions, and learn about important product and service updates in one secure place.

Tip #5) Be Transparent and Don’t Get Caught Hiding

You can’t tell your customers everything, but you also don’t want them to wonder if you’re hiding something from them. Be as transparent as you can and avoid alluding to things that your customers don’t know and that you can’t tell them. The customer culture you create needs to value transparency if it is going to build trust.

Tip #6) Provide Social Proof

By providing a space where customers can gather and share experiences and reactions, you give them social proof of other happy customers. Branded, private online communities allow customers to connect and see that others might be in the same boat.

When a disgruntled customer sees an example of a fellow customer exercising trust in the company, they are usually more likely to do the same to stay within the social norms implied in the customer community.

Tip #7) Produce Awesome Stuff

Whether it’s your content, your product, or your services, it needs to be high quality and awesome. Having satisfied customers is a big factor in building trust. If a customer doesn’t like what you’re doing, they won’t be willing to stick around when times are tough.

Think back to my example: I think Hubspot’s platform is a great product that’s awesome for growing our business. Because they have a good track record and follow many of the guidelines above, I’m more willing to trust that they will eventually get my issue right.

Improving Customer Satisfaction Takeaway

Unfortunately, trust is typically something you need to have already built by the time you need it. Don’t wait until a problem comes up to figure out if your customers trust you. Instead, put in the time to build trust by establishing a customer culture that encourages it.

With the right platforms and processes in place—and the consistency to maintain them—your customers will have faith that your company can meet their needs.

The 7 Ways to Source Members for Your Organization’s Online Community

Katie Bapple — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 14:27:00 GMT

Over time, members will leave your online community. Though you might be a throwing down some serious online community strategy, abandonment is simply unavoidable. People simply lose the need that your community fulfilled by changing jobs, losing interests, retiring or other inevitable life events.

Chasing after abandoned members isn’t a solution, nor a productive and scalable use of time. Instead, proactively counteract the decline of old members by focusing on new members.

New member acquisition is an important element for sustaining online customer or member communities. A rate of decline in active members due to abandonment will create a noticeable void in community participation and engagement over time. In order to avoid this scenario, new, active members must be acquired at a rate equal to or greater than that of member abandonment.

This is one of the common online community management challenges laid out by attendees of Socious’s recent webinar, The 11 Most Asked Online Community Planning Question (and Their Answers).

Let’s dig into this specific question.

How to Recruit New Members for Your Online Community

There are seven primary ways to source members for an online community, though not all may apply to your specific target audience or online community lifecycle stage. Here are definitions explaining each of the seven sources to help you identify which options fit your organization and how you can start implementing plans to increase member acquisition right away.

Method #1) Direct

Direct member acquisition is great for new communities, when micro-level tasks are a regular part of day-to-day community management activities. In this option, community managers use 1:1 outreach to invite members, customers, or potential audience members to join the online community.

When you are creating an online customer community or private member community (i.e. associations), you’ll find people to target in your crm system or member database. Segment your records to identify the members that are most likely to convert on your offer to join in the community. When you are starting an awareness or industry online community, members are usually found via public social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or via relevant conferences and events.

Method #2) Organic

Organic member acquisition tends to drive a majority of community member conversions in public or semi-private online communities. Potential members are referred to the community via search engine-indexed content and usually convert via on-site calls-to-action (CTAs).

Organic member acquisition is usually the number one source for new members in fully indexed public online communities.

Method #3) Paid

Paid member sourcing can refer to a few different avenues. The most common paid method for sourcing members is search engine marketing. Organizations set up Google Adwords or Bings Ads campaigns by providing a monthly budget, targeted keywords potential members would be likely to search for, and a relevant URL that will take the individual at the end of the keyboard to a page within the community, where they will hopefully find value and convert into members.

The second most common method is third party advertising. This usually appears via box and banner ads on websites that work with ad partners, such as Google, to sell ad inventory to place ads. The paying organization’s ad spot then appears on relevant sites. Using retargeting (also known as remarketing) campaigns, community managers can also have their online community’s ads shows up on various web pages if the end user has a cookie in their web browser that tracks a previous visit to your community’s web domain.

Paid options are generally used by both open and private online communities that are at a mature stage of the community lifecycle, as scaling micro-level member acquisitions become less practical.

Method #4) Viral

Viral member acquisition occurs when current community members directly invite friends, family or colleagues to join the online community. In some instances, your online community software provider may provide options for members to execute this action directly from their account, which helps to encourage viral member acquisitions over time.

Method #5) Social

Acquiring online community members via public social networks is relatively common and straightforward. Count the individuals who were referred to the community via social media channels and converted into a registered member as a result of their visit. This is a great word-of-mouth channel for communities at all stages in their lifecycle.

Method #6) Partnerships

Partnerships create brand awareness to drive referral travel and consequential member conversions. Partnerships describe a mutually beneficial deal between similar organizations, such as agreeing to post logos on one another’s websites, or trading media sponsorships at upcoming events.

Method #7) Special Campaigns

Member acquisitions via special campaigns account for any strategy that does not fit within the 6 other tactics outlined above. This could include list rentals, special events, or members directly ported into the community from another database.

Online communities should always have more than one source for new member acquisition. In the beginning, refining tactics to grow new member volume will require patience, trial and error. Be sure to test various forms of communication and record results to optimize your process over time.

Happy community building!

Everything You Need to Know About Careers in Community Management [Infographic]

Joshua Paul — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 13:59:00 GMT

If you’ve recently started to consider a career change to community management, chances are you’ve come up with more questions than answers.

Due to the relatively new need for community management positions, the various roles and responsibilities have gone largely undefined. However, if you have plans to embark on a career in this rapidly growing field, there are certain factors and details you’ll need to know to make your plans.

Luckily, our friends at The Community Roundtable conducted an in-depth survey on the “role, compensation and career path of the community professional” to help answer some of the biggest questions surrounding community management careers. Some of their preliminary results have been released in an infographic you can download here.

Today, we’re interpreting some of their findings alongside those unanswered questions to help you better prepare for a career in community management.

7 FAQs About Starting a Career in Community Management

What are the different types of online community management roles?

Though “community manager” is often used as a catchall term for jobs in community management, there are actually three key roles:

Community manager
Community strategist
Director of community

These three positions have different priorities, make different salaries, and require different levels of experience.

What is a typical salary for online community management careers?

The survey found that community professionals who work with internal, employee-facing communities tend to earn more than those who work with externally-facing customer communities. Here’s the average yearly salary breakdown by role:

Managers: $69,887 external, $74,939 internal
Strategists: $85,075 external, $90,400 internal
Directors: $106,356 external, $113, 263 internal

As you can see, there’s also a substantial increase between the three common roles, which likely takes experience and priorities into consideration.

How many years of experience do online community professionals usually have?

While the average years of total work experience for all three community management roles were comparable (a minimum of just over 10 for managers and a maximum of nearly 16.5 for directors), the most significant experience difference was found in the years specific to working in community management.

Community managers averaged just four years in both external and internal community management, while directors boasted over seven in each. Strategists fell in between, with just under seven years devoted to external community management work and an average of just four and a half for internal.

Another telling statistic: directors and strategists reported devoting a larger percentage of their total work experience to the community management field. Both roles averaged nearly 50 percent for external community management, while managers were only 30 percent for both external and internal.

What are the top priorities for the different online community management roles?

All three roles showed some crossover between the different positions, but the survey showed a noticeable increase in business and strategic skills as seniority increases. Here are the top three priorities reported by each role:

Managers: monitoring activity and listening, communication and editorial, curating and sharing content
Strategists: monitoring activity and listening, developing the community strategy, measuring and reporting community performance
Directors: developing the community strategy, advocating for the community, developing community policies and guidelines

As you can see, the roles vary significantly, which further highlights the need for differentiating between titles.

Do community professionals work in the office or remotely?

Many remote workers will be pleased to know that the survey did not show working remotely in any of the three roles hindered career progression.

However, working remotely isn’t very common for managers and strategists, as only 24 percent of the professionals surveyed reported working remotely. Directors of community, on the other hand, were 71 percent more likely to work remotely, suggesting their advanced skills allows for more flexibility.

What types of organizations hire community professionals?

By and large, the most common type of work environment for a job in community management is corporate. While some survey respondents reported working for agencies or on a freelance basis, the large majority work in corporations. Strategists appear to have the most variety, with only 62 percent working in a corporate environment and nearly 25 percent working for an agency.

Where do community management professionals find jobs?

So, just how are these professionals finding their positions? Unfortunately, most community management roles don’t follow the traditional hiring process. Only 27 percent of community professionals reported finding their position through your standard job posting.

The most common response from those surveyed when asked how they found their current job (at 39 percent) was being approached by or introduced to a hiring manager or team, suggesting that networking is a crucial skill for those looking to break into community management.

However, it would appear that taking initiative could pay off: 20 percent of community professionals achieved their current position by taking it upon themselves to define their new role.

Careers in Community Management Takeaway

Thanks to The Community Roundtable, we now have a much clearer picture of how community management careers function in the real world. By breaking down community professionals into three main roles, we get a better understanding of how experience and priorities affect salary and career trajectory.

One thing’s for sure: we imagine we’ll be hearing a lot more about online community professionals in the coming years as more organizations embrace the growing need to connect with their customers and members online.

How to Handle Conflict and Controversy in Online Communities

Katie Bapple — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 12:45:00 GMT

In offline communities, conflict and controversy create socially polarized environments. Negativity monopolizes these interactions because in our own personal lives, they are the very interactions in which we aim to absolve ourselves.

However, avoiding conflict is also isolating. Dancing around issues of contention without actively building towards resolution fractures relationships; it fractures communities.

The alternate solution is to handle the matter head-on by building an understanding of each conflicting viewpoint at a deeper level. This is what creates human bonds. This is the kind of interaction we need to enable in online communities.

The Problem with Banning Conflict in Online Communities

The most common response to conflict in online communities is to “put the fire out” as quickly as possible. Yet most of the time, this reaction is acted on before the situation has been fully assessed.

Too often it’s assume that the presence of challenging content will disenchant community members and unfavorably impact the perception of the organization. But in the haste to silence topics of discomfort, organizations often overlook the fact that this action can marginalize passionate and active community members.

Consequently, these brand advocates are taking their loyalty and contributions elsewhere, to a place where they feel a greater sense of value and support.

How to Manage Controversial Content & Discussions in Your Online Community

As an online community manager, you have three basic options for how to react to conflict:

Ignore the situation
End the situation immediately by removing it from the community and/or removing the instigators
Keep an eye on the situation and facilitate when needed

Before deciding how and when to step in, take time to answer the following questions:

Who is the Source?

Are the participants who are engaging in the situation regular contributors, new community members, or resemble something closer to trolls? The source of the conversation can be a big indicator for the how topic will progress, just don’t judge newcomers prematurely.

Is the Topic Controversial or Contentious?

Allowing people to debate over controversial topics is good for online communities. Controversy brings members of similar interests together – on each side of the table – and, when facilitated and handled professionally, can build bridges of understanding and respect between conflicting parties.

However, if conversations get overly combative to the point of being offensive and inappropriate, single out the source of contention by contacting the individual directly.

Is the Topic Related to Your Audience’s General Interests?

If the topic of conversation fits within the scope of the community, the motivation behind the contribution is rarely malicious. Sure, sometimes conversations are started to stir the pot, but they can also draw attention and drive interaction in your community in a way that fosters greater sense of community, member-to-member stickiness and collaboration. Peers with common ideologies often band together organically.

Of course, there is a second situation to take into account here – negative conversations about your brand, product or the online community itself. Ignoring or hiding the problem will not provide an ideal resolution.

Conversely, a negative comment in your online community is your best opportunity to create a positive experience. Consider negative critiques as an opportunity to hear out your members and get actionable feedback. Even if you can’t provide an ideal resolution, the action will show members that your organization cares about the experiences of the people who support them.

Online Community Management Takeaway

Relenting complete control over the conversations that take place in your online community can come with a great deal of risk and anxiety. However, the most positive and impactful community experiences can stem from the very freedom you allow your audience to create their own experience.

Listen, take note and let content practices evolve based on where the audience drives it. If that includes conflict, take a step back, maintain a watchful eye and give social ties the opportunity to form.

5 Proven Private Online Community Strategies for Associations

Joshua Paul — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 15:03:00 GMT

Associations and other nonprofit membership organizations are already natural communities. This makes building a community online a common sense decision for most association executives.

However, there is more than one way to leverage a private online community. Since every association’s mission, priorities, and capacity are different, their abilities to capture the opportunities that building communities presents are also unique.

How associations leverage their online communities depend on the overall purpose of their community, which are based on the organization’s overall goals. This may include:

improving retention
increasing the value of member benefits
keeping member engaged
educating the public
boosting advocacy toward a legislative initiative

While there are certainly more than five types of private online community strategies for associations, here are five proven successes.

What Types of Private Online Communities Do Associations Create?

Type #1) Member Communities

WHO: Designed solely for members of the association to connect with one another in a secure, private, and collaborative environment.

WHAT: Online member communities are the most traditional and straightforward online communities. Members get access to discussions, content, and other online collaboration tools depending on their member level, volunteer involvement (e.g. committees), chapter affiliation, and general interests.

WHY: Member communities are a valuable member benefit for many associations and their members. By having a space to connect with other members and share ideas, membership in an association becomes more important to members. When people value their membership, they’re more likely to renew and remain invested in the association. The member community also helps keep people engaged in the organization. This engagement can then be leveraged for a variety of other asks down the line, such as conversion of product, education, or event registration offers, mentorship, volunteer opportunities, and legislative advocacy.

Type #2) Industry Communities

WHO: Open to both members and non-members. Non-members often include media personnel, regulators, and legislatures who have an interest in the industry.

WHAT: These communities are meant to position the association at the center of their industry. By creating an online community for a specific industry, the association is effectively saying, "I want to host the discussion." While the association can’t entirely control the conversation and content being put into the community, they can have a big influence over the audience, simply by hosting the platform, providing educational content to members, and exhibiting leadership in the community

WHY: Creating an industry community is a position play. It places the association at the center of what’s going on in the industry and gives them some ability to shape the conversation.

Type #3) Awareness and Advocacy Communities

WHO: Members and non-members; anyone interested in the issue your association is advocating.

WHAT: These communities exist to raise awareness around a particular issue. By positioning themselves at the center of an issue, associations can use the community as an open forum to educate people and field questions about their specific issue. The community can serve as a platform that gives your organization the opportunity to participate directly in the discussion, as well as produce content around your position.

WHY: Awareness and advocacy online community strategies are also a position play. However, it positions your organization at the center of a specific issue or set of issues, rather than an entire industry. By creating an active awareness and advocacy community, your associations will be seen as the place to discuss the issue, get questions answered, and get educated on the topic. Though vibrant discussion and strategic use of helpful content, your organization can more easily promote your specific position.

Type #4) Event Communities

WHO: Registrants, attendees, speakers, and organizers of an event. This sometimes includes previous and past attendees.

WHAT: Event communities are created to act as a “home base” for an event or conference. Attendees are able to connect with other registrants, ask questions, and access content from presenters leading up to, during, and after the event.

WHY: Though these communities are often created only for the brief period of time during which the event takes place, we don’t advocate this model. Communities take time to build and even more time to leverage—working within the small frame of time that an event takes place won’t allow you to get the most out of your community. Instead, it’s best to create a segmented event group in your year round association online community for better efficiency in community management, member experience, and cross marketing. That way, attendees of your event can enjoy the camaraderie of an event community, but also belong to an active year round online member community.

Type #5) Education Communities

WHO: Members who are currently enrolled in an educational program or course.

WHAT: Education communities exist as a place of support and collaboration for people currently going through an educational program. These communities can act as virtual study groups for short courses and certification programs. While membership in these communities is typically short-term (less than one year), organization will often move people into an online alumni community once the program has finished to maintain engagement.

WHY: Education program-based online communities enable participants to go beyond traditional engagement with instructor and content and engage each other. Just like event communities, education communities have the potential to thrive beyond just the calendar period of the course if people stick around after their course is finished. This would likely work best if the community is part of a larger year-round member community, but could have benefits for the association hosting the program past the duration of the course.

Combining Private Online Community Strategies for Associations

Associations don’t have to select only one of these private online community strategies. Many organizations start with one audience or approach and then expand their community to include other strategies.

For instance, associations can create a hybrid member community and industry community simply by leveraging the settings in their professional social networking platform. Everyone can have access to general industry content and discussions. However, when members log into the community, the software knows that they are members and also gives them access to members-only resources for private discussions, exclusive content, and other private collaboration features.

Private Online Communities for Associations Takeaway

With their natural propensity for community, associations are almost hard-wired for the inclusion of a private online community in their member benefits and member engagement strategy.

The different types of communities that associations can create depend on the needs of the members and the goals of the membership. However, private online communities function best when they aren’t limited to a certain period of time, instead spanning year-round with time to grow, develop, and be optimized.

3 Easy Ways to Create Content for Your Online Community

Katie Bapple — Thu, 16 Oct 2014 13:26:00 GMT

Let’s face it, sometimes brainstorming new content for your online community can feel like an absolute chore. Over time, not only is it easy to run dry on new, genius-invoking ideas, but finding the required time each day to produce both thoughtful and thought-provoking material – in mass – can start to feel like your boss handed you a Sharpie and asked you to recreate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in their office. Impossible.

Content creation doesn’t have to weigh down your day. In fact, once you measure the results of your efforts, it can’t be quite rewarding. The solution is never to cut down on the volume of content you create to offset the agony, but rather to simplify the process. Yes, creating content can be simple!

Here are three easy ways to revive your content plan:

#1) Join Related Communities

Topically-related forums in other online communities provide a great option for scouting out new content.

Most online forums readily display total views and replies for each thread, making it extremely simple to target popular content. Just be sure to scan through responses to the original post before borrowing the idea, in order to validate that the content encourages both the quality and value you are aiming to provide.

Finally, always be sure to rewrite borrowed content in your own words – plagiarism won’t reflect well on you or the community!

#2) Browse Editorial Sites

Relevant news and editorial sites are great for finding ideas for new content. While this content won’t usually have the longevity or long-term value as more technical content, timely and controversial topics drive a great deal of conversation in online communities.

This type of content also provides an opportunity for community members to share opinions, not facts, making the barrier to participate low and the number of possible answers infinite.

A good example of how to position news or commentary-related content is, “I read an article on XYZ about ________. How do you feel about _________?” Easy, right? (You can also find another approach in this example I posted in June 2014 that received over 70 replies.)

#3) Leverage Events

Events are an amazingly easy way to generate a variety of content for your online community. Here are several ideas that should suit most communities:

Use questions asked in the Q&A potion of web events to post in the community’s discussion forum(s)
Add the event transcript or recording to a resource library or blog
At the end of the event, automatically redirect members to a discussion forum where they can continue topically related Q&A with the presenter(s) (check to see if this is part of your vendor’s functionality)
Write a blog post before the event with a description and link to where members can register
Write a blog post after the event to announce when the recording is available and where it can be found

To further simplify how you source content, make it come to you! Almost every content source has its own RSS feed or self-subscribe option these days, so sign up with your email address to get content inspiration delivered right to your inbox.

Content is the number one way to build value in your online community. If you’re having a difficult time dedicating yourself to the content creation process due to writer’s block or fatigue, don’t give up.

Simply rethink the way you generate content, stay ahead of your content plan and track what type of topics and content drives the highest number of interactions. You’ll feel like the Michelangelo of content in no time!

What are some easy ways you create content for your online community?

Why Creating an Online Customer Community is the Ultimate Post-Sale Inbound Strategy

Joshua Paul — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 14:53:00 GMT

At this point, you’re probably tired of hearing about inbound strategies. However, there’s a reason inbound marketing, sales, and customer communication has changed the way people do business. There’s a reason they’re so popular.

Quite simply, they work.

We’re guessing the majority of information you hear about inbound strategies has to do with attracting customers and making the sale. Today, we’re taking a bit of a different spin on things and discussing an inbound strategy for after the sale.

Before we get too far into it, let’s back up for a minute.

What Exactly is an Inbound Strategy and Why is it so Popular?

Rather than disrupting prospective customers with advertisements and cold calls, inbound operates on the principle of helping, not selling. You attract customers with information and useful content that builds trust and promotes competency.

With an inbound strategy, you’re able to build lasting relationships with your people in your market and then lead them to become customers when they are looking for solutions to the problems that your products or services solve.

Content creation like blog posts, ebooks, videos, infographics, and slideshares gives you a platform on which you can be remarkable, get found by prospective customers, and spread your ideas. An inbound strategy is one of the most efficient ways your company can stand out from the competition and convert people into qualified opportunities by being uniquely human and helpful to your target audience.

Beyond how well it works, there’s another reason inbound strategies are so well liked by both executives and people in the tranches: they’re data driven. Take inbound marketing and sales, for instance. Data plays a significant role from the beginning to the end.

Marketers collect data about their target audiences’ behavior to determine what the right messages are for the right people at the right time. Throughout the process of generating leads and nurturing those leads toward a sale, data tells marketers and salespeople what’s working and what’s not, allowing them to adjust and optimize.

But what about what comes after the sale?

What Are Your Options for Post-sale Customer Management?

There are a few common choices companies usually choose for post-sale customer management. Typically, there is an account management team that reaches out to existing customers to promote new products, services, and training offers, with a goal of increasing customer satisfaction and encouraging a future sale.

This is usually done through emails and phone calls. Outreach by account managers is usually somewhat targeted based on known customer information housed in CRM systems.

In addition to account management, after the sale, product issues that customer are experiencing are usually handled through customer support tickets and call centers.

Lastly, when it comes to collecting product feedback and gathering data from your market, product managers often have to recreate the wheel to select the customers to survey and interview and then contact them to get them participate.

While all of these options, when used together or separately, can lead to effective post-sale customer management, none of them delight customers and deliver efficiency of “inbound.”

However, there’s one tactic we left off the list: online customer communities.

How Online Customer Communities Embody an Inbound Approach

Going back to our original assessment of inbound strategies, let’s see how online customer communities match up.

Online Customer Communities Work to Attract Customers

After the sale, there are certain things you’re going to want your customers to do. Common examples include:

Simply learning and using your product
Purchasing again or upgrading
Helping other customers
Provide product feedback
Becoming an advocate for your company in the market

Regardless of your business’s priorities, products, and customer base, you’re going to want to find a way to keep them informed and engaged so that you have an easier time converting customers to take the actions that you want them to take.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to get customers’ attention after the initial purchase. Creating an online community stocked with original, insightful, and helpful content gives your customers access to an ongoing support system. They can connect with industry experts, find partners to help them solve their problems faster, share ideas and suggestions, and help other customers with the issues with which they are wrestling.

You can’t force customers to consume and respond to your messages. By providing a platform where customers can access content, have conversations with other customers, and get advice from to experts, your online customer community acts as a magnet for customers looking for get more out of your products and services. When customers are engaged, your company has fewer barriers to getting customers to respond to your calls-to-action.

Online Customer Communities Are About Helping, Not Selling

Just as “ABH - Always Be Helping,” is a core value of inbound marketing and selling, this is a pillar of creating a successful online community. If customers think they’re being sold to through your community, they won’t bother to stick around or invest in the process.

From the start, you want your online customer community to become a central online destination where customers, partners, and employees help your customers, share their ideas, and answer each other’s questions.

In order to make your community worth your customers’ time, helping your customers find more success with your products and services needs to be at the very heart of everything you do.

Online Customer Communities Create Advocates

There will be different engagement levels throughout your community but, ultimately, you want to transition customers from new community members, to regular members, to contributing members, and then to senior members.

Eventually, the goal is to build advocates within your community and beyond. Customer advocates are more willing to spread your company’s vision and educate people on your solutions in the general market. Online communities help build customer advocacy and reference programs by maintaining relationship with your biggest fans, supports, and power users through the various engagement opportunities in your online community.

Smart businesses leverage their online customer community to make their customer advocates feel special, like they’re more of a partner than a customer, as well as keep them up-to-date on company news and product direction.

Active Online Customer Communities Are Inherently Remarkable

No two customer communities are the same, even within the same market or for companies with similar products. While a portion of this uniqueness is due to the many different combinations of features available in your customer community software, the real remarkability comes from the people involved.

Active participants in your online customer community can change the way you do business. Their unique insight and experiences can change the way other customers view your company. Their discussions and the content that they produce for the community helps position your online customer community as a differentiator in your market that other organizations cannot emulate. How the people in your community engage with each other and with your content helps to set your community apart.

Online Customer Communities Are Data-Driven

The key to a successful, thriving online community is how online community managers leverage the social activity data to steer the community.

Your company has access to everything that goes on in your online customer community. This allows you to identify and track common questions from your customers and analyze data from specific customer groups to make better business decisions.

Just like inbound marketing strategies leverage data about which resources prospective customers viewed on your website to get people to convert on marketing offers, when you know more about your customers, you can get them to do what you want them to do.

Whether it’s registering for a conference, attending a training session, renewing a subscription, upselling or upgrading, the social behavior data of your online community can help you provide the right message, to the right people, at the right time.

Post-Sale Inbound Customer Management Takeaway

Inbound strategies are popular because, quite simply, they work.

Just as marketers apply inbound principles to how they attract customers and convert leads to sales, your company can handle their post-sale customer communication with an inbound approach.

Among all the other post-sale customer management strategies, creating an online customer community is the only option that fully embraces inbound principles. They attract and help customers, create advocates, allow your company to be remarkable, and rely on data for optimized processes and post-sales conversion rates.

Four Essentials for Creating a Successful Online Community

Katie Bapple — Thu, 09 Oct 2014 13:30:00 GMT

Private online communities are not a universal business solution. According to Gartner, at least 70% of all online communities fail.

Lack of planning, poor business integration, unattainable market share, unaligned organizational motives and unrealistic expectations are all factors that impact community viability. However, you can avoid being a statistic by ensuring your online community has a foundation for success before making a costly investment.

Here are four prerequisites every organization should consider first:

Essential #1) Proof of Concept

Obtaining an online community proof of concept requires two qualifiers:

An isolated, niche common identifier
Audience inclination

The common identifier for your target audience should be specific enough that potential members will easily grasp a sense of inclusion, but not so specific that the total feasible audience size would be too narrow to reap a return on investment. Hobbies, industries, professional associations and other general interests, in combination with a geographic location or a niche specialty, is a good way to define an audience.

In other words, a format of ‘people who do X in Y’, such as people who do mountain biking in North America, or people who do computer programming in Ruby. This common identifier will be the basis for your online community.

Once you know the common identifier that will define your online community, understanding how and if that specific audience will gravitate to an online community concept is critical.

Look for proof of social spaces on the web where people who fit your target audience are already interacting. Is there evidence of ongoing participation? If you can’t find or access an example of a similar social concept, (or even if you can) reach out to individuals who meet the profile in offline groups or via LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Collect feedback from enough people to ensure you have a reliable sample size to decide whether or not audience inclination exists.

Essential #2) Market Share

When you researched social spaces that aligned with your target audience, did you see other pre-existing, well-rooted online communities?

Be wary of being just another fish in the sea. Even if you pick a platform that has all the newest bells and whistles, well established online communities have one big benefit you don’t – an ingrained sense of community. The loyalty and attachment between members of your target audience elsewhere will make it difficult to convince them to spend their limited time somewhere new.

Every type of audience has a total feasible market size, so if the market is already saturated with other online community options, you might not be able to get the share in which you were originally hoping.

(Note that one exception is brand-owned online customer communities. Big brands can typically beat out independent brand-oriented user groups over time.)

Essential #3) Bandwidth

If you hope to succeed, online community management is not an option, it’s a requirement.

No online community grows 100% organically. In order to obtain audience buy-in, the online community needs to illustrate value via content, audience engagement and strategically communicated value propositions.

Establishing, implementing and executing processes for each is a full time job. Budgeting for this type of role might seem hard to justify at first, but betting on a platform without a process is like betting on half a horse.

Having someone in place who can constantly focus on driving growth will not only make revenue generation a possibility, it will lead to a positive return on investment much quicker. If your organization wants to commit to a private online community, commit to staffing it as well.

Essential #4) Executive Buy-In

Successful online communities happen when they are part of a fully integrated and widely supported business plan.

If future community members sense that the online community isn’t a priority for the organization, they won’t feel like their participation, insight and feedback are valued. Without executive buy-in, online communities lose audience buy-in. This makes championing the community concept a key role for your organization’s decision makers.

According to the Community Roundtable’s 2014 State of the Community Management report, “data suggests the critical role executives play in both supporting the community and in modeling behavior.” Comprehensive survey results showed that executive participation does not only significantly impact online community engagement rates, but also factor in to whether or not the community has a fully funded roadmap.

Abandoning ship too early by dropping staff overhead or platform support kills far too many online communities before they are ever given a chance. If your organization’s perception of an online community doesn’t have total buy-in, proceed with caution.

Private online communities are a fantastic solution for an organization’s long term customer retention, acquisition, and brand awareness objectives. Companies and membership organizations who properly plan and align the right support system have seen remarkable results. You can find success too.

Before launching your very own private online community, vet your audience, market space and key decision makers to ensure a secure foundation to build a thriving online community. (And if you need help, we’d love to lend a hand!)

Creating a Customer Community: 5 Questions That Scare the Heck Out of People

Joshua Paul — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 13:29:00 GMT

In most cases, when businesses start down the path toward creating an online customer community, they’re doing it for the first time. Compared to other business strategies, relatively few people have developed online community strategies, managed a community, or actively tried to increase engagement in a community.

There’s nothing wrong with this.

Building and leveraging communities of customers, partners, and employees is still an emerging strategy, so it’s not surprising that most people have never planned or managed a customer community before.

Why Should You Think About the Tough Questions?

When you first start the process, there are a lot of unknowns. The difference between thinking you should have an online customer community and actually having one can be intimidating enough to scare even the most ambitious companies.

However, as with any new project, being aware of the unknowns and developing a plan to address them can help you avoid those scary high-pressure scenarios when you need answers from your team or have to provide them yourself. Rather than getting taken by surprise and potentially derailed by one of these questions, you can be ready and prepared to handle them.

Keep in mind that these are likely the same unknown questions that the higher-ups in your company will be asking when you pitch the idea of a customer community. Taking the time to develop answers and a strategy that addresses these important questions makes your community more likely to produce the business outcomes that you want to see.

5 Must-Answer Questions That Come Up When Creating an Online Customer Community

Question #1) Why Will People (Specifically, My Target Audience) Use The Community?

The answer to this question makes up a large part of the equation behind launching a successful online customer community. It is often referred to as your community’s value proposition or “the reason why.”

Understanding the answer to this question will help you understand what your customers want from your community, so you can then give it to them. Examples include:

Faster support
Networking and ideas from other customers
Insight into your company and its future plans

The broad range of ways that your community can provide value to specific personas enables you to develop a strategy that is unique to each of your target audiences.

Getting this aspect of community creation right is how you’ll convince your customers to come to your community, have an experience that is worth their time, and return to the community frequently.

Question #2) How Will The Community Provide Measurable Benefits To My Company?

If giving your target community members a reasons to visit and participate in your online community is half of the equation, proving business value to your company is the other half. This can be an especially scary question to answer, but it’s also one that cannot be overlooked.

Throwing up a Facebook page for your business is expected these days. However, that page is not expected to have a direct business impact at most companies. The same is not true for your private online customer community. The benefits to your company must be clear.

Online communities act as the cross section between creating value for your customers and creating value for your company. The intersection of these two priorities is where the most successful online communities fit.

Successful online customer community strategies provide valuable content and interactions to your customer and, at the same time, provide important information about your customers back to you company.

While it takes a lot of effort to create an active online customer community, never lose sight of the value that the community needs to bring back to the sales, support, and product management teams at your company.

Question #3) How Do I Keep My Colleagues, Management, And Most Vocal Customers On Board With Our Online Community Strategy?

This is a common concern, not just in the early stages of community creation, but throughout the planning, launching, and growing phases. Communities grow slowly and it often takes time to see the results your management might want to see.

Prepare key stakeholders for this at the start to buy yourself some time to make your case and lay out a more convincing roadmap to results. It takes a village to build a customer community and you want all the important members on board with your community's vision and strategy.

Question #4) How Do I Get People To Visit The Community Regularly And Contribute?

This common concern is different from why your customers would use the community in the first place. This question involves how to increase engagement—the most common concern when creating an online community.

More than just getting your customers to visit your community, you want to turn those regular visitors into contributing members. Your community is only as strong as your level of member participation, so having a plan for encouraging ongoing engagement is critical.

Question #5) What Kind Of Time, Money, And People Do I Need To Launch And Grow An Online Community?

Even if the idea of having an online community sounds great, you still need to have a clear idea of the logistics behind your strategy.

Beyond just creating and launching an online customer community, you need to make sure you have the manpower and funds to invest in monitoring key online community growth metrics, managing your community, and integrating the social data that comes out of your customer community into other areas of your business. Think about:

Will your team need training to develop any particular expertise in order to properly run your community?
Will you need to hire someone new or outsource any of your community management operations?

Preparing yourself to answer these important logistical questions from the very start will avoid any unpleasant surprises from a resource starved customer community.

Creating a Customer Community Takeaway

When you’re ready and prepared to answer the scary questions, they don’t have to be so intimidating. Even though these common concerns might seem daunting now, rest assured that they all do have answers and the benefits that your organization will see from providing your customers with an online community will be well worth the effort.

When in doubt, don’t hesitate to seek out resources or advice from professionals who know all-too-well how scary these questions can be. Creating an online community isn’t something you should have to do by yourself, and answering the tough questions shouldn’t be either.

How to Improve Customer Retention By Increasing the Value Customers Get From Your Products

Joshua Paul — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 13:25:00 GMT

A lot of factors go into keeping your customers. Especially in the case of B2B companies, customer retention can be a complex challenge. However, despite its intricacies, reducing your retention rates can have a significant effect on your profits.

Research has shown that reducing customer churn by a mere 5% can increase your profits by 25-125%. With those kinds of numbers, your current customers suddenly seem a lot more valuable.

How to Use Your Online Customer Community to Improve Customer Retention By Increasing the Value Customers Get From Your Products

While there is a lot that goes into keeping customers over the course of their lifecycle, it starts with a strong foundation. One of the cornerstones an effective customer retention strategy is ensuring your customers get value from the relationship, specifically get results your products of services.

When they’re achieving real business-level outcomes, they’re more likely to remain customers. This helps minimize intangibles, like how a customer feels about your company or a specific frustrating customer service interaction. In many cases, as long as your product is working for them and continuing to produce results, your customers will generally be happy.

The tricky part is making sure your customers are making the most of your product of service to really receive that level of results.

Quick Customer Retention Example

For example, consider a marketing software company. In that case, your business is providing the base platform and then it’s up to your customers to leverage the tools in different ways depending on their specific objectives, markets, and capacity. This can create a disconnect when companies sell a product, but don’t create a clear path for how to get the results their customers need.

Luckily, your online customer community can help bridge this gap by providing customers with the guidance and support network they need to get better results from your products or services.

5 Ways to Leverage Your Online Customer Community for Better Retention By Helping Customers Get Results

Tip #1) Provide Quicker Access To Answers

Often your customers will get a faster response from other customers and partners within the community than they would from a traditional “submit a ticket” system.

The ability to connect with other product users leads to a support network that can readily dispense quality advice. This helps to avoid potential frustration customers might experience when they’re questions aren’t quickly answered, as well as strengthens the value of your community.

Putting It In Practice: Direct customers to forums and listservs as go-to places for getting advice. Put processes in place to help customer create a habit of asking and answering questions in your customer community discussion forums.

Tip #2) Increase Access To Helpful Tips And Experts

Since the information and groups in online communities are segmented, customers won’t have to dig through the irrelevant content to find helpful tips and tricks for making the most of a product.

Customers can even search for help by using profile searches to find experts willing to connect. While having experts in your community adds to your company’s credibility, their advice can also unlock hidden potential for your customers to get value from your solutions.

Putting It In Practice: Content delivery platforms built into online customer community software, like blogs, videos, and file libraries, are often used to house helpful tips, tricks, and how-tos. You can even host events and webinar series to demonstrate how customers can get more out of your products and services.

Tip #3) Expose Customers To What Other Customers Have Done

Being able to read through posts from other customers who have had similar struggles or experiences can be extremely eye-opening and helpful for new customers.

Viewing examples and learning from descriptions of how other customers have achieved success can help more complicated processes click for customers who otherwise might not have figured it out on their own.

Putting It In Practice: Learning from other community members can happen just about anywhere in your community, but publishing educational case studies is an especially effective way to draw attention to product successes.

You might even consider featuring certain community members in an ongoing “featured customer” blog who have found ways to get tangible results from your solution as examples of how it can be done.

Tip #4) Highlight Specific Uses

Learning a new product can be overwhelming for people. Most of your customers focus on a specific feature set to solve an acute short-term problem when the relationship begins. Unfortunately, many don’t expand their understand of your products and services over time.

Don’t be afraid to simply tell members about how to get the most value out of your products or services. They most likely want to know and no one knows your products better than you do.

Your community can be an ideal place to centralize and share this information with a large population of your audience. By systematically zeroing in on one specific feature or strategy, you can help customers who might be overwhelmed by too many choices.

Putting It In Practice: Create a special column in your customer community’s email newsletter that highlights a new feature each issue or create a video that walks viewers through a tutorial on what they can do with your solution.

Publicize the additional uses for your product through various types of community content so customer community members will have several opportunities to notice.

Tip #5) Provide Better Product Training

Though products are getting easier to use, product training is still an important part of helping your customer base fully take advantage of your products and services to get results. More importantly, customers expect it.

This training might come in the form of self-serve training from videos and documentation in your customer community’s resource libraries or live event training that you can manage through your customer community software.

Taking the time to creating train programs customers might seem like a big undertaking at first, but the potential benefits to your company’s profits make this process well worth the effort.

Putting It In Practice: Online webinars, videos, or documents in your file library can all provide quality self-serve training. However, make sure you promote these materials and direct your community members to training resources. Live training makes participation a bit easier since customers are physically present to learn about obtaining real business outcomes and network with other customers.

Improving Customer Retention Takeaway

Customer retention plays a large role in your company’s financial stability and growth. Customer retention starts with delivering the expected results for customers when they purchase your product or service.

If your customers continue to derive measurable value from the products they’ve purchased, they’ll have little reason to stop patronizing your company. However, these results are not instant, especially with more complex products.

Leverage your online customer community to teach customers how to produce results. Consistently highlighting the value of your product beyond its basic uses shows that your company is focused on helping customers succeed and gives your customers a reason to stay in the relationship.

Growing an Online Community: A Case Study on Social Density and Ongoing Analysis

Katie Bapple — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 18:03:00 GMT

A bulk of my personal experience as a full-time online community manager was spent developing sizable communities of practice. It offered a great vantage point, because the years of quantitative and qualitative data available allowed me to uncover patterns of audience behaviors and interests, as well as corresponding community development processes, over time.

What did I learn? The most notable lesson was that somewhere in the success of the online communities we had grown, we got carried away - we physically grew the communities too much.

How Taking a Step Back Can Be the Best Way to Move Forward

The largest online community had over 600 discussion forums. Not only was this number just plain daunting for the end user, it wasn’t scalable. In order to get a handle on the situation, my team and I did a data analysis of each forum. We compared age, activity and engagement metrics and, in the end, discovered that over 75% of the forums had passed their heyday – the audience was no longer interested in their topics.

This was an example of poor social density. In online communities, social density is defined as the mass of total active members in a defined social space.

Ideal social density occurs when a critical mass has been reached – the number of active participants concentrated in one defined social space is high enough to provide a constant flow of activity, but low enough that the level of activity doesn’t feel inundating. Or, for an offline perspective, it’s the balance between standing in an empty room and getting caught in a mosh pit – just the right amount of human interaction. At that time, the community had too many “empty rooms”.

The key takeaways of our analysis were to:

Constantly evolve the community to meet member interests – this meant adding and subtracting community components as needed
Not even think about launching a new site section, sub-community or discussion group until we could gauge a visible demand from the audience
Take advantage of opportunities to concentrate larger numbers of topically-aligned forum subscribers into active discussion forums

How did we solve this issue? Essentially, we had to contract the size of our online community. By the time we finished consolidating forums - a long process that involved collecting feedback, mapping a large number of old forums to a small number of new forums, and emailing each group of forum subscribers about the benefits of the change – the online community contained around 140 discussion forums. What a difference, right?

Over the course of the next year, we continued to track how activity in our reconfigured discussion forums changed. The results were remarkable. Reply rates skyrocketed and we solved engagement problems in sub-communities we had struggled to crack the code on for years.

How Can This Lesson Apply to Your Online Community Strategy?

If you are preparing to launch a new online community:

Don’t assume that “If you build it they will come”. Talk to your target audience first and get dedicated buy-in. When considering topics for discussion forums, keep it broad. Wait to build out your community until you notice specific topics start to repeatedly prevail in community-lead discussions. This might mean starting with just one general forum.

If you have an existing online community:

Review data on your discussion forums regularly. If you notice reply ratios going down, a decline in active members and/or a slowdown in new subscribers (or your sample data is so small you can’t even reasonably measure any of these key performance indicators) consider minimizing the number of forums in your online community in favor of higher social density in fewer spaces.

Conversely, if you notice discussion forums that have an extremely high level of activity and, likely, an increase in members unsubscribing, consider breaking out the forum into multiple spaces. Be sure to reach out to a sample of active forum subscribers to validate your plans before making any changes.

Most online communities that I have assessed build to a size greater than the demand of their audience, then wonder why they have trouble getting engagement. If this sounds like an issue affecting your private online community, don’t be afraid to evolve. Listen to the voice of your online community’s majority by looking at behavior-based data and getting direct feedback. Not everyone will accept change easily, but the benefits tend to far outweigh the cons.

Are You Making These Online Community Management Mistakes When Engaging New Members?

Katie Bapple — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 13:14:00 GMT

In last week’s blog article, we covered four quick tips to convert new online community members into regular visitors and contributors.

Since this initiative relates to your online community's member engagement strategy—the source of our most frequently heard questions—this week, we’re covering the topic again by tipping it on its head.

What Are The Biggest Mistakes Organizations Make in Turning New Members Into Regular Members?

Here are three of the most common offenses that have big impact on the health of your online customer or member community:

Mistake #1) NOT Establishing an Onboarding Process

Someone just finished registering for your community—now what? That’s exactly what your new members will be asking if the community manager doesn’t have an onboarding plan in place.

A welcome message is a good start, but turning new members into regulars takes more than just one email. Create a 30 day plan that has least 3 points of outreach targeted towards a member’s first month in the community. Suggest a new, simple, and specific action in each message.

Mistake #2) NOT Tracking Related Metrics

Even if the community manager has a new member onboarding process in place, do they know that it is working? Most companies don’t track the necessary online community metrics to know whether their efforts are yielding maximum results.

There are a few different data points I would recommended recording and comparing over time:

# of contributing new members monthly
% of contributing new members monthly ( = # of contributing new members/total # of new months for given month)
Click through rate (CTR) on all onboarding emails
Open rate on all onboarding emails

Capturing these numbers over time will help clarify what is working and what is not. Adjust and evolve the onboarding strategy accordingly to ensure these community building efforts are getting the best results.

Mistake #3) NOT Making Time for Micro-Level Tasks

When trying to build a community on limited bandwidth, it can be hard to prioritize tasks that impact a limited number of people, and rightly so. Community building is a numbers game. However, integrating one-off member outreach into the community manager’s schedule is necessary and ultimately worthwhile, especially in the early stages of an online community. Don’t skip it.

Building relationships with members creates a positive experience that will make them want to return and, in the long run, become valuable repeat contributors.

Set a goal to personally reach out to at least 5 members each week. Prioritize by contacting members who have made their first contribution; speak specifically to their contribution and express genuine interest in their overall user experience. Over time, this micro-level task will add up to major results.

How to Fix These Community Management Mistakes?

Does your online community management process contain one of these mistakes? Don’t worry, implementing new member engagement strategies doesn’t have to be strenuous or time consuming.

Start by finding an effective welcome message (via data indicators) and move towards creating repeatable targeted and 1:1 outreach tactics. Look for opportunities for process automation once you have an effective plan in place, just be sure not to cut out personal human interaction.

Once your organization realizes the ease and value of correcting these three mistakes, you’ll see that small changes can make a big impact in your online community.

Happy community building!

You can hear Katie discuss more community-building advice during Socious's on-demand webinar, How to Increase Actvity in Your Online Customer Community.

Customer Experience: Are You Addressing These 12 Critical Points?

Joshua Paul — Tue, 23 Sep 2014 19:04:00 GMT

Customer experience. It’s the new buzzword on the tip of everyone’s tongue—and not without good reason. The Customers 2020 Report claims that by the year 2020, experience will expand its lead over price and product as the key brand differentiator. However, “creating a better customer experience” is a lofty goal that can be difficult to define.

Common Customer Experience Challenges

Most B2B companies or businesses that sell complex products to consumers would probably identify customer experience as a priority when asked, but then struggle to take practical action on improvements. This is likely due to the fact that the various ways people use products complicate a business’s ability to create a customer experience that fits its entire customer base.

For businesses with multiple products or target audiences, customer experience is notoriously vast, nuanced, and difficult to scale.

Throughout their entire relationship with your company, customers’ expectations are high. Prior to making the sale, customers’ research is likely extensive and the decision to purchase might be made by several different people or in groups.

Once the product is purchased, product usage is nuanced, the learning period is extensive, and expectations remain high.

Because of all these variables, your company can’t just do one thing well and expect to “fix” customer experience. You have too many different types of customers who are all in different phases of the customer lifecycle and have different needs. Their expectations can’t be met with a single approach.

The 12 Critical Points of Customer Experience

To make improving customer experience more approachable, we’ve broken it down into the 12 critical phases. Think of these as the 12 places you want to get it right to have a complete and effective customer experience strategy. You can then build your strategy around each phase using your sales team, social community platform, call center staff, and marketing communications.

Before the Initial Purchase

These six phases all lead up to the purchasing decision and are critical for making the sale.

#1) Awareness

In this phase, a prospective customer is aware that they have a problem, but haven’t yet begun to seek out solutions.

#2) Research

Here, the prospect begins their research to find potential solutions to their problem. This is an opportunity for your company to provide quality information and content that helps inform their decision.

#3) Short List

While conducting their research, the customer will likely create a short list of solutions that could solve their problem. The information they find on your solution will dictate whether or not your company gets to this phase. Both improving the experience with their initial point of contact and social proof of the positive experience that existing customers are having are important in this phase.

#4) Consideration

During this phase, the customer whittles their list down to the final selection. The customer experience your company offers can help you stand apart from the competition. The experience that existing customers have plays a big role in this process—think customer reference program.

#5) Selection

It might seem like the important part of the customer experience is almost concluded as the purchasing process is initiated, but this is where experience can influence future purchases. The customer has selected your solution once, but their experience continues to play a significant role.

#6) Pre-Conception

This phase takes place in the moments after purchase, before use. The pre-conception phase is defined by the customer’s expectations moving forward. In many cases, their expectations are built from what your sales and marketing departments have led them to believe about what they’re getting in your product.

After the Initial Purchase

At this point, the customer has purchased your product, but has not become a repeat customer or someone who advocates for your company or product based on their experience.

#7) Implementation/Set Up

Now that your customers have your product, it is your job to help them get to the point that they are starting to use it. Often this means providing a positive onboarding experience and communicating where they are in the implementation process. As they begin using your product, they’ll likely run into many of the questions listed below.

#8) How Do I Get Started?

Once your new customer is ready to begin using your solution after its set up and configured, this is likely the first question your new customers will have as they begin to use your product. By over-communicating a tangible set of steps to take next, you can help improve their early experience. Tip: Don’t forget to focus on some quick wins.

#9) The First Roadblock

At some point, your customer will probably run into a roadblock or complication in how they want to use your product. How this is handled on your end can make or break their experience.

#10) How Do Other Customers Do It?

Even if your customers are perfectly happy with how your product is working for them, they’re probably curious about how other customers are using it. Forums and discussion boards in your online customer community are highly effective for sharing information and success stories between customers.

#11) How Far Off Am I From Achieving The Results That Were Sold To Me?

There are two factors at play here.

Customers bought your solution to get a specific result.
We live in an instant gratification society.

Your customers are going to want to know how much time and work needs to go into using your product before they’ll see the results they want. Providing a platform to learn from other customers’ experiences and clearly setting expectations can help improve this aspect of their overall experience.

#12) I’m Seeing Results. What Else Can I Do With This Solution?

If your customers get to this phase of their experience, they are satisfied with their purchase and are now looking to your company for additional results or further solutions.

This might mean educating customers on additional features, upsell opportunities, or implementing partner add-ons. It is important to be prepared for this step, so you can capitalize on this window in the customer’s lifecycle.

Customer Experience Takeaway

Customer experience is an important, but complicated, discipline. Make it more manageable by mapping your tools and processes to each of the stages listed above.

While this guide helps you make sure that customers in specific phases of your relationship don’t fall through the cracks, it also provides a guide to ensure that you are addressing your customer experience in a holistic way. By helping customers engage your community, communicating more valuable information, and proactively providing support along the way, you can convert more customers before the initial purchase and turn first-time customers into repeat buyers.