Over a year working with startup teams, I believe that for any new products, the best way for market interaction is through community building.
To get new users, you may find that community building is the single best tactic if you are familiar with “do things that don’t scale” mentality.
It is clear that community building is the one thing that you should do rather than wandering around your first users for feedback that rarely covers everything you need to do. It is wrong statistically because the sample size is too small, and mentally because the job is too boring to carry out.
We also have to retain existing users because getting new users is costly and painful. When your marketing efforts focus on communities, the obvious goal is to strike for absolute loyalty. For early-stage products, the customer journey you want to build should be different as long as I observed.
It can be generalized into these phases:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Purchase/Install
- Usage
- Feedback
- Advocacy/Evangelism
You can take any app as the example for this journey. Marketers will have to do well on the first task that is making customers consider using the product. Next is the adoption phase when you let the customer interact with every feature of the product you sell.
It is critical to create an effective environment for learning. The third biggest task is the thing that every marketing wish for, the customer promote the product volunteerism. It’s the best way to reach the ideal critical mass.
Setting objectives is critical
It is a process of identifying and nurturing social assets for your brand, and your company as a whole. Community building guarantees that you will get the feedback from the first source, and more importantly, you can identify the pain points that are hard to explain with numbers.
In fact, you can observe the attitude of your community members rather than making hypotheses out of statistical data only. Rare cased might surprise you with the user insights it carries.
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If you are looking for a quick win, community building should not be the main vehicle to deliver your goal. It is about real relationships. There are three key outcomes can be generated through this kind of activity.
- Connect existing customer to prospects to activate sales
- Connect prospects to each other to enhance product knowledge
- Connect customer to customer to drive product adoption
How to implement it
- Social media is a must-have channel. It is clear that your users are very likely to be present on a social media platform. Your activities on social media will represent many things including your team status, your ambition with the product, and most of all your attention to customer response to what you are doing.
- The group features to make your target audience feel the exclusivity. Launching a new product is the process of iterating that adds more features to every release. We often need a group of customers who are willing to wait for the new feature to come. The best way I found is to grant access to special resources to selected members. There are many platforms allows you to do so such as Facebook’s secret group, email lists, etc.
- Design the governance for the community. When it comes to retaining members in a community, it is safe to say that they would not leave if they have something to lose e.g. community leadership titles. At the most basic level, entitlement generated for a governance system will help you keep some of the most valuable members who has a strong interest and knowledge about your product.
- Partners with other projects to offer more benefits. The collaboration will help you bring more benefits to your customers. As a matter of fact, your product solves a few problems in their lives, you can find other projects to form deals that both sides can win.
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