This article comes from Pida Pairawan’s insightful talk at our Customer Marketing Summit, Las Vegas 2023, check out her full presentation. At the time of the talk, Pida was the Customer Marketing & Community Manager at Rubrik.
Within customer advocacy, community risks getting overlooked.
However, I treat it as a mini customer advocacy segment within the larger advocacy whole.
Just because a customer buys something doesn't necessarily mean they know how to use it effectively. This is where community comes into play. Going beyond the transactional aspect, a community can significantly help your customers succeed by providing the resources they need.
These resources can include platforms with Q&As, educational content, and more. Your role in making a community impactful and successful goes beyond just inviting people to join. It's about creating value.
For your company, the value can manifest in several ways: gaining industry awards from third-party reviews, generating new referrals from leads, and more.
In this article, I’ll give you a crash course on community building. I’ll cover what a community looks like, different platforms you can use, foundational impactful experiences, activities you can implement, and best practices to make your program indispensable within your organization.
Understanding customer communities
At its core, a customer community is a dedicated space that hosts a relationship between a brand or company and its customers. Pay attention to the keyword here: relationship. You're not just offering a service; you're offering an experience.
A community can allow for questions, answers, and networking with others. What makes a community impactful varies from business to business, but generally, a successful community fosters relationships by providing member value and benefits, giving a sense of belonging, and delivering positive outcomes for its members.
This relationship can be built on various platforms, such as emails, websites, and online platforms. To put this into community terms, there are multiple formats your community can take.
Types of communities
Social community
A social community functions much like a social media platform, where you, as a brand or company, engage with your audience on social media accounts. This can involve encouraging likes, comments, shares, and interactions on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The goal is to use social media to understand what's trending and what's important to your target audience - What do they care about?
Support community
As the name suggests, a support community is designed to help customers support each other. This doesn’t necessarily involve extensive advocacy efforts. Instead, it might mean that if you don't have enough customer representatives, you can utilize your support community to assist with customer queries. This can be done through your website or a support forum.
Advocate community
My favorite type is the advocate community. This platform or space engages your loyal customers, giving them a place to rave about you. Advocate communities are versatile and can support both social and support functions, often in a fun and gamified way.
Whether through social engagement, customer support, or advocacy, the goal of a community is to build meaningful relationships with your customers, providing them with value and fostering a sense of belonging.
