Customer community best practices: KPIs, strategy, platforms, hugging your haters and more

The CMO Coffee Talk community did a deep-dive last week on....community! Customer communities specifically this time.

Below are chat highlights from both meet-up discussions including best practices on strategy, KPIs, who should own it, how to hug your haters and much more.

If you are a B2B CMO or head of marketing and want to join a community of 2500+ of your peers, let me know or click here to learn more and sign up.

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Build brand advocates

Start with customer engagement

Revenue will come from community, but it’s a secondary effect

Build a solid, loyal community and reciprocity will be an outcome

This all applies to a CAB too.?Starting with Why is important.?Engineering and Sales need to be aligned on that so they can support it.

Also true with NPS open-end feedback and responding to it cross-functionally

What types of pitches have worked to allocate resources to this type of community? Any successful ROI approaches outside of NPS scores?

How about lowering churn/improving NRR?

ROI most often aligns to retention metrics

We’re currently pulling together a client community - client marketing owning it and they sit in product marketing (which sits with me)

You can over plan anything, but the best customer community managers/builders I've talked to preach a solid plan (resources, content, etc.) to nail the first impression.

Does anyone have experience merging communities? My company acquired 5 brands over the past 2 years and now we are moving to a Branded House vs House of Brands and need to migrate all the followers from our social channels into our new brand. If you do, would love to chat.

Gong’s Visioneer Community is really well done. Combines community, support, academy, referrals, loyalty and more. Many backend technologies used here for a single customer experience - https://visioneers.gong.io/

I manage our community now and while I love it and people know me now, truthfully I don’t have time as we are growing other parts of the business. As our two new hires start (yay) how can I transition this to someone people in the community don’t know? On the other hand I have grown it 15x in a year and don’t want to lose momentum, and more importantly, the pulse I have on the community.

sounds like a team program where you stay engaged and introduce the new community managers as the team helping the members get the most from the community. You could hold listening sessions on a quarterly basis etc. to keep your fingers on the pulse.

So much learning and market intimacy to be gained by participating in your company’s communities.?

Question: We’ve established a community with 35% of our customers active but are stuck at a wall with no more signing up. What are strategies to incent more customers to sign up?

what have the non-joiners said about the community and value they might be looking for?

with different functions involved, does anyone have training guides or playbooks to make sure that your internal folks understand their purpose and can be successful

Personally I would be very happy with churn, NRR, NPS, and LTV improvements as KPI improvements!

Perhaps distribute exclusive content through the community?

A community/CAB can also be a source of reference customers

Our community signup form is a Hubspot form so we can tie community membership to user records then we can see what actions they have taken and what they’ve done. Then we compare that to the rest of the subscribers.

What’s the value of loving customers?

I also segment out this audience for emails because I speak to them differently.

Does anyone have a template of the investment required? I hear a lot of “just do community”

Thinking back, honeypots were a key element of the communities we built both internally and externally - so the ? is what content or topics would constitute a honeypot for the non-volunteer crowd? Similar the example of great speakers / topics.

seems like a survey might help uncover some of those ideas. Have you already gone that route?

Start by understanding your churn, the sources of it and how to mitigate…

With so much content being generated using AI, communities, events, podcasts etc where there are actual authentic human interactions will become more important.

Digital Hunger Paradox: the more we interact digitally, our desire for human interactions increase. Humans are meant to connect

It’s crazy haven’t done community marketing since 2015 but it literally was mostly WOM

This community is a success story.

This community is the best community on the internet

Since you mentioned support and crisis management, is this customer only community or a wider audience?

I would suggest that the younger you are you don’t view this as an either or, there are digital connections to humans that eliminate geographical boundaries. There is a difference between adopting new technologies and internalizing them

The VMWare CIO community and the Marketing AI Institute slack community are great too.

Another "why" - free therapy for your clients

Goal would be to build the space and then get out of the way (for the most part).

“who are the people you’re trying to SERVE” - serve being such a key word there

For sure some of it is also luck. I remember Snowden announcing he was a user and the numbers spiked like crazy and it just kinda happened.

Community as a defense against CHURN might be a great " justifier" to explain to Leadership why spend time and money to build a community.

Best Customers and their mindset - the best proxy for community target.?Let it grow from there.?Who wants what you do best?

Product feedback for roadmap feedback/input could also be a big reason

All depends on your PM team. I have some in my past that didn't care to hear the good, bad, and ugly. So Customers got mad that no one was acknowledging them

Our community is thriving and is very much about product feedback and roadmap

I love the primary message here that we can’t force any of this. We can set up an environment and encourage interaction, but we can’t force an outcome when it comes to community.

At Adaptive Insights we used Influitive to build the Adaptive Torchbearers community.?300 new customer engagements/testimonials in 3 months with the program.?Worth it just for the PR/endorsement value, along with the engagement at the upcoming user conference

This article from Insight Partners explains the important role of community in PLG + SLG + CLG motions. (Product Led + Sales Led + Community Led)

https://www.insightpartners.com/ideas/hybrid-product-led-growth-strategy/

I am trying so hard to tie community activity to the contact level in HubSpot

we used SFDC Communities to build a data integration community.

I love connecting with everyone in this community

you cant force it but you do have to curate it. SEED, SPAWN, GROW

Agreed that there needs to be a plan for acquisition (driving traffic, sign-ups) as well as engagement (keeping people back).

who owns the community??marketing? product? customer success??Other?

I would say it depends on the team and company.

Good question - there needs to be one central coordinator, that brings the others together and drives it.

Which team has "Help" in their DNA?

Anyone using Common Room for community? - I’ve been following the company and find it interesting

I would think it's less about who owns it (although someone has to monitor) but who's at the table responding to what's learned, actions required, etc.

Or per the comment earlier, which group will have a serve-first approach?

it seems a community can serve multiple purposes and getting the owner to collaborate across functions is key

Less about who owns it, but it is really important to properly resource for it! I have seen a lot of communities that don’t succeed because it’s supposed to be 10% of someone’s job.

Apart from product feedback and roadmap, are there any other elements that do well to attract members and foster interaction?

I always wonder who came up with the “one throat to choke” expression and why were they so cranky that day?

Would a community work if you have custom pricing versus transparent product pricing?

Helpful to get Customers on the Customer Community "board"

Topliners was an AMAZING community! Eloqua did a phenomenal job creating connections.

I do like it owned by marketing in that to get resources for it from the BOD, someone needs to make that case and CS/Product for example many times fall under CRO or CTO and it’s like a 10th point for them.

getting consensus about the resources required seems key.?how to sell this internally initially and ongoing..

Does anyone have resource estimation? We have a leader which will be the face and leader and have the existing marketing team, but I'm struggling to evaluate how much resources it will take from the team

in my experience, governance is super important! But when the community is truly communing, a sub-set will do a good job self-governing to make sure everyone feels safe there.

Agree with Marketing ownership to facilitate, but others who touch the customer experience must have a seat at the table on the learning & response.

You aren’t letting them complain, they are doing it anyway. The question is are you seeing it and engaging with it.

authenticity in the community is key??can’t duck criticism?have to be honest and accept it.?a good community will filter out the folks that are overly critical and out of line

Best communities rarely talk about their own products

a community needs someone to monitor and nurture it

one hard truth: if complaining is dominating your forum - that means they don’t have an appropriate platform to do it in order to get their issues met.

It must be more difficult to filter out the overly critical customers in the era of slack and social media customer communities

this is the exact same debate we all had about early social media

for sure, I remember creating a “complaints” forum in the group (this is pre slack days) b/c we were getting bombarded with negative reviews every time a product release wasn’t like but it was in the app stores and stuff which felt like every 1 star review auto triggered an email to the CEO ??

Create the community such that those who are not in it are in FOMO mode.

I think authenticity is acknowledging the bad but some of the communities I’ve seen have the feel of superficiality when it comes to how the team is trying to engage. Daily questions about personal stuff (e.g. who likes toast? What do you like on it?) in order to create connections. Really turns me off but I do understand how hard it is to make connections. Brainstorming here but perhaps early connection builders would be to take the 36 questions to build intimacy and make them related to your community. Could get very interesting

within B2B software, is there a type that just isn't well-suited to building community? For instance, where the users are not the beneficiaries, therefore lack of incentives?

How big of a team do you need to build/manage a community?

How did they track revenue gains from community?

cyber folks are tough to get into a community. They seem to trust a lot less and have a huge chip on their shoulders against social or anything "public"

I’ve found this as well. I’ve been in Cyber, and have found that folks have things like email hosted in Switzerland because they were so concerned about privacy and hacking!

I'm head of product marketing for a process automation vendor and we're pretty hidden from the end users and the IT folks are just charged with managing implementations - so having a hard time finding the target audience.

Has anyone saw a push back about using Slack epically with organizations that are more secured like cyber or financial institutions? if so what did you use for the chat/engagement side?

Comcast got a lot of flack for ignoring customer complaints in Twitter and then launched Comcast Cares and dedicated themselves to address issues publicly on social media - well known success story

you know you have won when advocates address the complainers without you having to do anything

Customers first, but if it is setup right, you invite others who join to learn from their peers

vendor led community vs... .Org led communities - they serve a different purpose

Always include partners in your communities!!

In a past CMO Coffee Talk, we discussed how to show the brand community (creating brand value) as an intangible asset on the balance sheet. A brand's value is just the net present value of all your current and future customer relationships. And isn't it always better to be building an asset you can own and which can grow than just spending money on eyeballs? ;)

I think there are a lot of best practices within the community and sub communities that we are all in on this call!???

Day 0. Include partners in community design and launch. They know your customers!

Agree.?We have to view the feedback as a gift!

Worry most about the quiet ones.

https://www.amazon.com/Hug-Your-Haters-Complaints-Customers/dp/1101980672

Yes!! There is usually a nugget of truth in even the most uncomfortable beef.

#rants is our favorite channel here, in all seriousness. There’s something powerful about venting together.

Communities have complainers and DEFENDERS.

I LOVE that, ‘make complaining legit’

They are vocal because they care

Love that.?Those Defenders can become your greatest advocates

Embrace your hate(rs)

my team ran a 100,000+ member community on reddit - networking/firewall space. commenters were brutal. but if you were humble and answered their questions genuinely, they would upvote you like crazy. wave them off and you pay.

If you have a great community, why not share it with analysts and investors?

can you connect the impacts of a community to a SFDC?

yes, and SFDC has a community platform that has native integrations.

I always tell folks that Marketing should follow up on Promoters from NPS, and Product should follow up with the Detractors.

Tactical question but what platform(s) have you had the most success using to host your communities?

We’re using discord - like all the cool kids

we’re using Circle.so right now. Pretty good.

The honest response part is key. I’ve seen some communities mismanage expectations.

Has really good built in analytics but it very much anonymous which drives this analytics marketer crazy

I see this like Yelp - people need to moderate Yelp (though many companies don’t) and the better that the moderator navigates the online conversation, then the better the overall experience will be, including addressing the issues.

this is MOSTLY true. There are some trolls who are gonna troll no matter what. Important to recognize that and not feed the trolls. Especially after midnight.

I think there value in trying to work them, and then letting then go. And if you have been bailing a decent community the rest of the community will see them for the trolls they are and tell them to go away.

There is a #community-best-practice channel on the CMO coffee slack, maybe people interested can continue this great discussion there

Certification offers can improve participation - help build resumes for participants

People who don’t join have NO idea what they’re missing...

Oh you should use an email showing “their 1st connections” are in the group. I think that would get a crap ton of signups

What other community has an ACTIVE menopause channel? I mean, talk about authenticity (and trust)

This group is my solace…my mentors, my professional best friends

this community is the one place professionally I can just be all of myself and I value that sooooo much!

Are their some "scaling" challenges we should be aware of, or look for?

i have worked where we had a very important community going back 30 years to the founding of the product line.?if those people had an issue with a product both product marketing, technical marketing and support were all over it until it was resolved.

This was an issue at AWS and also Oracle where we had to mitigate moderator changes. What worked better at both was to have people from outside the company who were passionate as moderators, and bringing them into the fold to help us.

totally agree outside moderators are key

consider rewarding or compensating those moderators.

Thanks, everyone! This was my first call and I'm hooked!

Matt, just a note to say that you and Latane do a great job making this community about the people in the comments and not about yourselves as facilitators. I think that’s actually a differentiator in this community vs others I’m part of. Thank you!!