At HubSpot’s INBOUND22 Conference, we heard of a shiny, exciting new concept: Community Led Growth.
And if you’re like many in the room (or on the screen), your immediate question is… how in the world can we make that happen?
From conception to connection to… CRM connection, this is our approach to helping you connect smarter so you can grow smarter.
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The idea of “why” may not be a big, shiny, sexy new-new, but to flourish, a community needs a why. Why are you building a connection point? Why are you the best place for that connection? This clear vision for your community is essential.
Remember, we just learned that communities don’t need to be huge to be successful - but they do need to be purposeful.
You know you want to build connections. You have ideas. Your team has ideas. And you think your customers have ideas. How can you refine those ideas into a big why?
We recommend starting with a brainstorm.
It may be wise to bring in a facilitator for this exercise, but you can also run it independently.
For your brainstorm, whether in person or virtually, start with a simple question: Why would you participate in our community?
From there, leave the door open. Brainstorms are for ideation, not evaluation!
Time box your session (45 minutes is likely all you need) then take your whiteboard internally and write up those draft “why” statements. When it feels right, you’ve gotten it!
Your community, of course, can’t thrive without… itself. Your community isn’t a billboard to promote your own content: it’s a space for conversation and connection.
You’ve defined why your community exists - that probably means you have an idea of who you are building for. But just as you’d build buyer personas for your products or services, you likely need community personas for those around you. As you define and grow your circle, consider:
Need help defining your circle? Have your HubSpot portal help: Review your contacts database to consider which contacts have read the most blog posts, who has frequented your help center, which companies have the most engaged contacts, which industries send in the most support tickets, documents and references your sales team shares the most often… use the data that you already have to understand who might be craving a community and how they will use it.
At this point, you’ve put some time and energy into your community… and you haven’t even started the conversation yet! This is the perfect time to tell your audience about your why. Some ideas:
Okay, there’s some technical stuff coming up. Not nerdy code-y things (we’ve got developers for that), but some decisions you need to make as part of your initial community setup. Because, of course, your community needs to live somewhere.
When we think about building a community and introducing tech to facilitate connections, we consider:
Do the interactions and content of your community live as part of your own website? Is it on a third-party platform, whether that’s forum software or social media? One of the benefits of self-hosting your community is that you retain ownership of the content and interactions that your community members generate.
We have way more on this below… but how do you connect your community members with your organization’s data? CRM connection could be your key (hint hint) - with CRM connection, you’re able to aggregate community post content and understand how often questions are asked, which companies or contacts have the most questions, who might be great beta users… the opportunities are nearly endless.
With the average company using 242 SaaS apps, bringing another tool into your tech stack might not be the answer. Look for ways to use what you have to #growsmarter. In fact, your existing HubSpot portal might be the perfect fit for building your community management platform.
Choosing a platform for your community can be fun and exciting… and it’s probably the first thing you thought of when you started considering building a community. But waiting until you’ve solidified the rest of your plans often leads to an even better experience.
Get to SaaS hunting with your community people in mind and the specific qualifications you need your platform to meet to give the most dazzling and aligned user experience.
Here are some of the most common options for community management platforms and ways to evaluate the viability of that channel and to make sure you land in the right spot:
Building a community based on live events, whether in-person or online, takes special channels for attracting registrants and tracking who actually attends. When choosing your channels for Event-based communities, ask yourself these questions to uncover your functional requirements:
For live event-based communities, some kind of data-based calendar is an essential component–the idea of “meeting up” is all about when that meet-up happens. Want to continue the connections? You may still need additional channels to make sure the conversations that start at your event(s) have a place to continue after closing time.
Forums may be the first software solution that comes to mind when you think of building an online community. They allow topics, responses, replies, member profiles and more, and may be hosted on your website or domain or within independent software.
Community software that stands on its own is, of course, an option. These solutions are typically designed to live as their own platform and may not integrate with your CRM (or may not easily integrate with your CRM), which could mean you’re missing some major benefits. Some solutions are costly, but standalone software can be fast to deploy.
Are you Team Build or Team Buy? In the world of community, it’s possible to build your own platform - which may work well if you have an in-house development team but can be a challenge if you don’t. The benefit of custom development: you own all of your code and software and can build any feature and function you see fit. The challenge, of course, is that defining and executing this project can be quite difficult if it’s not your typical project—and you may be facing an extended time-to-live.
We have some bias with CRM-connected apps, but this approach allows you to deploy your forum quickly and connect it to your CRM. If you’re using HubSpot—an app that uses your CRM’s data dynamically to actually build your topics and replies—means your marketing, sales, and service teams can access user-generated data and content while they’re communicating with customers and prospects.
“Oh, let’s start a Facebook group!” Is certainly one option in the community ecosystem. Same for LinkedIn, Twitter Chats, Slack Channels, Discord Servers… pick your poison. Starting your community in a social group makes it quick to deploy and mobile-friendly, but it puts you at the mercy of that third-party provider: if Facebook decides to shut down groups, you’re suddenly left without a platform and scrambling for a new solution. It also means the content that your community creates may be more difficult to get back to your team—are you able to listen, to automate, and to quantify the same way you can with sales, marketing, or customer success engagements?
If you are serious about community led growth, you’ve got to make sure your tech isn’t standing in the way of the authentic connections between your brand and your community members.
Too many times we’ve heard, “well… we really want our community members to have more power and freedom to control the community and not depend on an admin to make real connections…”
Yuck.
Why are these tools locking down the users’ ability to show up and be themselves? Why would a community manager want to be a technical admin, rather than a relationship builder?
The features you can’t afford to skimp on to build a growth-minded and experience-driven community:
Other features that can help you grow (and how):
So, we’ve covered a lot here about setting a strong foundation for community led growth and the pieces you really need to have in place. That being said, your community will be a total cost center if you aren’t listening. Listen to the conversations. Listen to the loudest voices and the quietest voices and everything in between. Listen for the way people talk, the words they use, the sentiments they share, and the connections they make.
Now, listening does always have to be actually lending your ear. The Choose Your Channel exercise above had a few questions guiding you to consider your CRM in building out your community.
Listening can look like:
If HubSpot apps are a key component of the tech stack that supports your growth strategy, expanding HubSpot to community led growth is a logical step. While this guide outlined some practical exercises for you to follow to assess how your growth-driven community should be built, you’ll also need to supplement your tech stack to make that vision a reality. Whether you develop a fully-custom solution for HubSpot that uses custom objects and a fresh website portal or look to pre-made add-ons that can be deployed quickly for your team, starting with the tech you already have means you can focus less on shopping and more on…growing.