Investing in your community (and your community team) is a crucial pillar for successful B2B companies. Activating the power of your B2B community will help you to better understand your users, amplify marketing efforts, and build better products.
B2B communities can take many forms. You can think of communities as groups of people who are all connected by their shared experience with your brand. This can include users, prospects, developers, partners, designers, champions, and more.
In this post, we'll look at three major benefits of building a B2B community with a customer focus. We'll also examine the early steps you can take toward building your own B2B community.
The benefits of B2B community building
Online customer communities can positively influence everything from your product to your marketing strategies. You can grow your business faster by using community metrics and insights as a strategic advantage.
In this section, we'll focus on three strategic benefits:
- Getting closer to users
- Amplifying marketing efforts
- Building better products
Get closer to your users
Personal relationships are the backbone of any successful business, so it’s important to invest in the right channels and programs to foster them. By creating opportunities to directly connect with your community, you can get valuable feedback and insights. This will help you better understand what your users care about most to nurture customers and prospects.
Through your community, B2B marketers can better understand the product adoption journey, including how community membership relates to and impacts product adoption.
Amplify marketing efforts
Successful online communities often have “product champions” or advocacy programs that recognize their most impactful members. These members are frequently experts on your product and can supercharge your community growth by helping others.
By nurturing and recognizing your champions, this relationship creates a community-led flywheel of education to grow happier, more successful customers.
You can leverage this flywheel in your marketing strategy by amplifying and sharing relevant content.
Build better products
Nurturing and deepening community relationships enables internal teams to more quickly deliver products and features that users love.
Users will often turn to community channels to report bugs or request wish list items.
By investing in your B2B community, you can gain insights to inform your roadmap, improve existing features, and address customer needs.
Your community is also a great place to find beta users, conduct user research, and proactively get product feedback.
Getting started with building a B2B community
Building your community can be a daunting task, and getting support from internal stakeholders can be difficult. It’s important to start with a clearly defined strategy, find ways to scale your efforts, and create measurable goals.
In this section, we'll focus on three core tasks for building a B2B community:
- Seeding
- Scaling
- Proving ROI
Seeding your community
Similar to creating a marketing strategy before creating content, it’s important to first determine your community strategy. This should focus on what your members will get from joining your community. It can also include your goals, desired outcomes, and planned engagement programs.
Once you have a strategy, you can begin seeding your community. This includes:
- Setting community standards
- Choosing your tech stack and community channels (like social media platforms and online forums)
- Deeply engaging with your earliest community members
- Creating success metrics
Scaling your community
Scaling your community is easier said than done, but you can start small by activating your community’s biggest advocates.
Consider these tactics:
- Build a nurture program to grow engagement
- Host events that are tailored to community needs and interests
- Segment your members to find top champions and deliver more personalized experiences
Give your champions opportunities to participate and empower other members, and acknowledge and amplify their contributions.
Proving the ROI of your community
As a community manager and leader, your job is to prove the ROI of your community to stakeholders to show the positive impacts your community has on your business.
You can do this by measuring community attribution and sharing insights across your organization. Using data and qualitative reports to show the impact of community on product adoption is key to getting internal support.
Community-led growth is the future of B2B marketing
Community is more than a place that people gather to learn and share; it’s how modern B2B companies build, grow, and create loyal, happy users. Online communities can benefit every team in your organization, like marketing, product, sales, customer success, and support.
Communities are an untapped resource that are key for growing happier customers and building better products. Companies that are community-led are those that center their decisions based on their community. These companies look to their online community members for insights, feedback, and inspiration.
Your community is out there, but it’s up to you to activate the power of your users, champions, contributors, creators, and customers.
Encourage engagement with your members by creating shared spaces to connect with your members. Scale your efforts by uplifting and amplifying your superfans, and prove the business impact of your community to key stakeholders. Users who are community members are aggregately happier and longer-lasting customers.
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If you’re interested in learning about how community growth platforms can help magnify the impact of your community, check out Common Room. Looking for more about building a community? Join Uncommon, the community for community builders.
