More than a few clients recently have been told by an exec:
“The goal now is to drive growth – make sure the community drives growth!”
But this raises a problem.
If you’ve set up your community to serve support goals, there isn’t a switch you can magically flick to drive growth.
It’s like telling a factory owner to produce thermos instead of kettles.
Yes, they sort of look the same but the entire production process is different. It takes a complete rewiring of the system and a new approach to make it work.
This doesn’t mean a hosted community can’t drive growth – it just means we need to change our mindset, processes, and approach to make it work.
Why Is Driving Growth From A Hosted Community So Hard?
In the exec’s head, I suspect the mindset is:
“Let’s get potential customers to join our community and then send them to our website”
But there’s an obvious problem with this; the people in your community are already your customers.
They’re already buying from you.
Sure they could buy more. There are things you can do to encourage that as you see here:
However, you’re going to face two problems here.
- It’s hard to prove the impact. Many things impact retention/increased spending – isolating the impact of community is tricky (but not impossible if you know what you’re doing)
- You’re still limited to the number of people who reach your community in the first. As we’ve already mentioned, community members are often your best customers already.
So, while it’s possible to drive growth from hosted support communities, it’s rarely the most efficient approach to growth. You would first need to get non-customers to join and participate in a community by a brand they don’t buy from. And pretty much nobody participates in a brand community they don’t buy from.
Honestly, how often have you engaged in a brand community for a brand you don’t buy from?
And even if you could drive non-customers to your community which would then influence them to make a purchase, why not just drive them to your company website to make the purchase and cut out the community entirely? Wouldn’t that be more efficient?
It’s hard to argue that these things drive growth better than other marketing channels.
The obvious solution is to convert the support community into a topic (non-branded) community – one that would naturally grow over time without you driving people to it.
But now we run into the factory problem again – you would have to revamp your entire community. This runs into two new problems.
- If your brand is featured, people will ask support questions about the product. You can try hosting a topic area as part of the community – but these aren’t popular because it’s still your existing customers engaging these. People rarely participate in the brand community they purchase from.
- If your brand isn’t featured, people might be frustrated when you try to sell to them. This isn’t impossible to overcome – but it can create a conflict when people realise your goal is to influence them to make a purchase.
None of the above is an insurmountable challenge – but they are challenges which blunt the effectiveness of trying to turn a community designed for support into one which drives growth.
So how can a support community drive growth?
Think Community Programs Instead Of A Community
The first step is to realise that simply trying to start different kinds of discussions or telling to post somewhere else isn’t the answer. That’s only going to cause frustration for everyone.
The second step is to realise that it’s not about turning your hosted community into a growth engine but using the advantages you already have from a hosted community to drive growth.
The problem is we often hold an outdated idea of a community as a single, hosted, destination site vs. what it is today (or the big C vs. little c debate).
The question isn’t how we can drive growth from our community, but what community programs we can implement that leverage our hosted community to drive growth?
The difference here is key.
What Drives Growth?
Essentially, if you want to drive growth you need two things:
- To reach an audience you can’t already access. The key to this is finding people who can access the audience(s) you want to reach – or are willing to invest their time build their audience for a desired reward.
- To persuade an audience to take an action they weren’t planning to take. The key here is to figure out where in the buying journey you can positively influence the audience. There are plenty of options from awareness to retention – but it’s good to be clear about where this impact is going to come.
Combine the two and you’ve got a powerful drive towards growth. This is where community-driven advocacy comes into play.
A community program doesn’t mean you need to build the community yourself – it increasingly means you’re helping others build their communities.
The Problem With Current Advocacy Efforts
Customer advocacy isn’t a new idea, almost every major brand will have some advocacy effort in place. These programs are often based on simple exchanges of rewards for advocacy.
The Influitive diagram below shows this approach well.
Essentially, these programs are an exchange. You give people stuff in exchange for them taking actions that benefit you.
Advocates are expected to progress up the pyramid to earn higher tiers of rewards.
One challenge with these programs is the rewards are often so frivolous that most people don’t bother. It creates an exchange mentality. People aren’t advocating for you because they want to help you – they’re advocating for you because they want the benefit.
Once they get tired of the benefits, they stop.
The second challenge is the desired actions are usually a combination of
- Publishing reviews.
- Giving customer references.
- Creating case studies.
- Participating in testimonials.
There’s value in this – but also limitations. First, it doesn’t fill the pipeline – it simply improves the conversion rates of people in the pipeline. Second, there are only so many percentage points by which you can optimise conversion. Past a relatively low amount of social proof, there is a law of diminishing returns at work for each additional case study.
Improving conversion is good – but what if advocacy campaigns helped to fill the pipeline in the first place?
What if they were geared towards building a network of advocates across the industry ecosystem?
This is where community-driven advocacy comes into play.
Community-Driven Advocacy
Community-driven advocacy is a program you run that aims to achieve several things:
- Increase the number of advocates.
- Help advocates build a bigger reach for their contributions.
- Drive new business to your brand through both social proof and outward promotion.
The approach isn’t an exchange of a gift card for review, but the promise to help build an audience and a prominent role within the community in exchange for sharing the best brand messages, stories, and expertise.
There are two major differences between a community-driven advocacy program and a typical advocacy program.
The first is a community-driven advocacy program leverages four major assets you already have in your community. These are:
- Access to smart, passionate, members who already help you and each other. These are members you’ve already established positive relationships with and are eager to help.
- A large audience you can promote the contributions of advocates to to help them get started. As we’ll cover shortly, this is an incredibly powerful way to support the initial group to build an initial following and get over the initial enthusiasm dip.
- Documented knowledge. Your current community contains a huge amount of knowledge which advocates can use to help others and share their expertise.
- Resources. If you have an existing community program, then you have resources (notably the time of the people running the community) which can be redirected to a community program.
These four advantages mean it’s a lot easier to launch a program to drive growth if you already have a support community – but you shouldn’t expect the support community itself to drive growth.
The second major difference between an advocacy program and a community-driven program is the approach. Instead of offering immediate tangible gifts in exchange for promotion, you instead help advocates build their own followings (even their own communities) and become prominent voices in the ecosystem.
The goal is to populate your ecosystem with influential brand advocates who continue to grow their audiences and share expertise and messages which impact the entire sales funnel.
Another major difference is the size and scope. Whereas a traditional advocacy program aims to attract as many people as possible, a community-driven advocacy program might target a few dozen at most.
That’s because a few dozen people building audiences of a few thousand people is a big win.
The measure of a successful implementation of the program is the size of the audience advocates are reaching.
Implementing A Community-Driven Advocacy Program
The approach to implementing a program will feel familiar to most of us.
- Identify and invite prospective advocates
- Profile their motivations.
- Supply them with best practices, resources, and connections.
- Boost their early and best contributions throughout the ecosystem.
- Share up-to-date information and resources.
- Measure the results.
You can see these outlined here:
Step One: Identify Potential Advocates
The best way to identify potential advocates is for those who meet any of the following:
- Highly engaged in the existing community (or responding to comments elsewhere – this is where having an existing community can be a huge advantage in driving growth)
- Have high NPS or CSAT scores.
- Long-term customers or high-profilers customers.
- Heavy users of the product.
It’s typically hard to predict who will be the best advocates at first – so it’s usually a good idea to cast a wide net.
In the long term, it’s a good idea to create an advocacy page on your site for people who are interested in advocacy to learn more about the program and sign up.
Wikimedia perhaps offers the best example of this. They have a destination of their site where anyone looking to be involved can be involved.
Once you have the list, you can send out the invitations (or ‘Hogwarts letters’ as one client recently called them). This is usually an invitation to a kick-off call event where people can learn more about the program and decide if it’s right for them.
Step Two: Profile Motivations
Once you have a group who have shown an interest, it’s good to issue a survey and profile motivations.
You can use Forrester’s four advocate personalities if you like:
- Educators. Those who like to publish advice and expertise.
- Status-seeker. Those who want to build their own following and reputation.
- Validators. Those who like to give feedback and engage in the contributions of others.
- Collaborators. Those who want to engage with others on projects and ideas.
It won’t be precise, but the survey will help you categorise your invitees into rough groups as per the above.
This will help you engage and support each group the right way.
Step Three: Equip Them With Resources
It’s best to imagine an advocate as a typical customer who uses social media frequently but doesn’t have any unique skillset or knowledge of building an audience.
They’re also not likely to sit through extensive courses to figure it out. They need great examples to follow more than extensive documentation of how to use the platform or engage with the program.
- Expertise. I’d suggest a short playbook of best practices for engaging on each platform and lots of examples of great posts and contributions people can learn from. Once advocates see examples, they can quickly see how to adapt those examples to their circumstances.
- Assets. It helps if you can provide them with photos, videos, and other multimedia assets they can use to support their posts. This isn’t essential, but it can help and multimedia assets are often a win.
- External list of people to follow. Create a curated list of industry folks they might want to follow, learn from, and engage with. The more engagement they have with people in the ecosystem, the more likely they are to get support to build their following. This might also include any staff they want to engage with.
- Internal Connections. Provide a focal point for any questions they have about the brand. This should be someone who is tasked with helping these people with anything (practical) they need to make great contributions.
This isn’t a comprehensive list – but it provides advocates with the essential ingredients they need to build and grow their following.
Step Four: Boost early and best contributions
Most people when they create any online property, make a few posts, don’t get much of a reaction and quickly give up. They quickly find the effort it takes to build an audience is more than they’re willing to invest.
Anyone who tries to build any sort of audience must overcome the dip.
Typically, someone begins with a high level of enthusiasm. They publish a few posts, don’t receive a huge response and decide it’s not worth the trouble. This is the dip.
The problem is building an audience takes time. For example, these are the subscriber numbers for my consultancy newsletter (richardmillington.com).
Do you notice how long it takes to reach 1k+ people? Every boost helps.
A couple of advocates will always drop out in time – but getting a good boost in a prominent place helps people overcome the dip.
This is where having an existing community helps. You can promote good contributions from new advocates to the community and help them build a quick following.
Another obvious win is to promote the best contributions from advocates. There should be a reward for people who invest the time and resources to create great vs. average contributions. That reward is the opportunity to go viral and have their contributions featured in more prominent places.
Step Five: Influence Them To Post The Right Messages
Building a network of advocates who have their own following is all well and good – but it doesn’t help you unless they’re sharing positive messages.
This creates an obvious challenge.
How do you persuade advocates to share the messages which matter to you while still seeming authentic to the people they want to reach?
You can try simply asking them to share information and news. But that creates a risk of annoying advocates (no one likes to be told what to do). Even if it succeeded the advocate wouldn’t feel authentic if they’re reciting your marketing materials.
The better approach is to influence them to share information in any way that they choose. You can do this by many of the tactics we’re familiar with already.
- Providing exclusive information or access in advance.
- Asking them for feedback on the best way to get the word out.
- Asking what they would need to help spread the word and working with them.
The real goal is to incentivise them to share information – not through the promise of rewards – but because it helps them build (and impress) their followers.
Step Seven: Measurement
How do you know if any of this is working? There are a bunch of different metrics you can track depending on the level you want to work at.
- The number of advocates. The number of advocates reflects the success of your recruitment efforts. It’s a leading metric to track.
- The size of their following/audience. This reflects your ability to help advocates build their following / size of their audience.
- The total reach (or engagement) of their contributions. This reflects your ability to train and motivate them to engage well.
- Message pull-through rate. This reflects your ability to influence advocates to share messages which impact the sales process.
- Relationship between advocate activity and the sales pipeline. This reflects whether the program itself is achieving its goal of influencing the sales process (requires a lot of data).
- Asking new customers how they heard about you (or discount code for each advocate). This provides a direct means of tracking which advocates are having the biggest impact.
This means of measurement will let you see if the program is working and, if not, what the barrier might be that you need to fix.
Summary
- It’s very difficult to drive growth from a support community.
- You can leverage your existing community assets (audience size and existing top members) to create brand advocates.
- You want to nurture dozens of advocates who become influential figures in your industry.
- Identify existing top members/great customers and provide them with a great set of tips, examples, and people to follow.
- You need to help advocates build an early audience by promoting their contributions to the existing community.
- Share exclusive insights, and information, and solicit their feedback to influence advocates to post messages which most help you.
- Measure each aspect of the program. Track metrics from recruitment to impact.
Hope this helps.
If you’re looking for help to drive growth from your community, contact us.
Good luck!
