Driving business value from your community
There are five main ways a community can drive value for your business, giving you a competitive advantage. Normally a community will create value in at least one of these areas but more often in multiple areas. These are all measurable outcomes of a community initiative.
Increase visibility, engagement and loyalty: A strong community creates a sense of loyalty and trust among its members. Engaging with customers through conversation and designing valuable community experiences, builds trusting relationships which increase your chances of making a sale or increasing sale value and repetition.
Customer support and success: When your community members are experts in your product they can offer support to newer members by answering questions and solving problems thereby reducing support costs and increasing connections between members.
Growth and sales: Acquire more customers by increasing awareness and traffic by hosting online or offline spaces and empowering community members to organise events, and creating and sharing content that advocates for you. A community greatly increases a business’s reach by connecting members with each other, as well as potential customers.
Product innovation: Empower your community to provide product feedback and contribute their ideas to speed up your innovation and development process. You can gain valuable insights into customer behaviour and preferences ensuring your product is targeting the needs of your customers precisely.
Collaboration: A community can be a great platform for businesses to collaborate with industry experts, customers, and other partners to develop solutions to common challenges and create new opportunities.
By engaging with customers, generating leads, strengthening brand loyalty, promoting collaboration, and expanding reach, businesses can drive huge value from a well-developed community.
I’ve developed a worksheet to help you sense check the value a community could drive for your business. This is a very useful exercise to do and can save you time and money in the future by ensuring you’re investing in the right activities.
