The Definitive Guide to
Community
Management
Table of Contents
03 The definitive Guide to Community Management
04 Back to the Basics
07 Can you afford not to?
08 Types of Online Community
09 Keys to Community Success
11 Find your Community’s Mission
12 Uncover your Audience
13 Set your Goals
14 Measure your Goals
15 Choose your Technology
16 Benefit of using Zapnito as a Community Platform
17 Launch
18 Riding your Launch ‘Buzz’
19 Promote Peer Connections and User-Generated Content
20 Communicate your Success!
23 Org-wide Communication
24 Common Misconceptions
26 Community Management Changes over time
The definitive guide to
Community Management
Leading brands today are building branded communities to engage and grow their
customer base. Why? Because customer communities improve customer interaction,
connect customers to other peers, create brand advocacy and stickiness that
boosts retention.
The key to unlocking this is having a community management strategy that engages
your audience in a unique and consistent way, keeping it growing over time and
ensuring it meets its objectives and the brand’s goals.
To support this, we’ve created a comprehensive guide of all the major things you
need to know as you embark on your community management plans.
Back to the Basics
What is community management?
Community management is a powerful way for brands to build lasting and meaningful
connections with their people, including customers, employees, partners, prospects
and experts. It develops these connections through various interactions like posting
content, hosting events, and encouraging discussions.
Why invest in community management
To understand why community management is vital to all organizations, we must first
look at the benefits that an engaged community offers.
1. Engaged Audience
An owned community creates a ready made
audience of customers and potential customers
that know you and your experts, come to you for
help and advice, and participate in conversations
and events.
2. Social Proof
Online communities leverage the power of peer-to-peer and peer-to-expert connections.
Instead of traditional marketing techniques that rely on a brand communicating its unique
selling points (USPs) to potential customers, peers can recommend the brand organically
in the course of a conversation. It provides added social proof, with 90% of people saying
they are much more likely to trust a brand recommended by others.
A recent GlobalWebIndex report found that community members prefer using online
communities over other communication channels like social media because they get
more meaningful conversations (36% higher), feel more appreciated (21% higher), and
develop a sense of belonging (18% higher).
36% 21%
higher
higher 18%
higher
Meaningful Feel more Sense of
Conversations Appreciated Belonging
3. Differentiation
A community can add value to your brand beyond the product or service it offers,
differentiating you from yout competitors and increasing the lifetime value of
customers. Sova Assessment, for example, have differentiated themselves using their
community through the use of its Innovation Board, which allows brand advocates to be
involved in the company’s product roadmap. Sova also use their community to nurture
leads until an opportunity arises to convert them to customers, showcasing the power
of the community to differentiate the brand by demonstrating the expertise it offers.
Can you afford not to?
Brands that don’t have an effective community management plan risk missing out
on opportunities to:
Win over prospects
Build brand authority and share expertise
Turn customers into loyal advocates
Get valuable and authentic customer feedback
Manage customer complaints and troubleshooting
Types of Online Community
Generally speaking, all communities seek to unite like-minded customers, prospects,
partners, and employees to collaborate, share expertise, and network, in an owned
space. However, there are six types of expert community that you can build to meet
your brand’s unique requirements:
� Expert communities - spaces that engage and grow customers by bringing together
learning, knowledge-sharing, and collaboration between members.
� Event communities - to complement in-person events and hold virtual events.
� Membership communities - enabling members to meet one another, collaborate and
connect.
� Support communities - places where people can get advice from one another and
troubleshoot any issues — works as an additional support resource for a customer
success team.
� Communities of action - uniting people under a collective mission and goals.
Depending on your audience and business needs, your community might be a mix of
these different types.
Community Management
versus Social Media Management
Community management and social media management each have
their own priorities, so it’s important to understand how they differ.
Social media management involves producing and distributing social
content to meet new customers and build brand awareness. Your
focus here will likely be on reach and the amount of traffic driven to
your website through social channels.
Community management is what happens afterwards to encourage
prospects to convert and build lasting customer loyalty.
Keys to community success
At the core of every successful community is three key characteristics:
1. People: A group of people with common goals and interests come together and
differentiate themselves identity-wise from those outside the community.
2. Acts and behaviors: They carry out specific acts and behaviors that solidify their
culture and the meaning of the community.
3. Belonging and accountability: People understand the need to help other community
members and work together to achieve goals. This fosters a sense of belonging to
the community.
Understanding how each works is the secret to building a successful community.
START
Step 01
Find your
Community’s
Step 02 Mission
Uncover your
Audience
Step 03
Set your Goals
Step 04
Measure
your Goals
Step 05
Choose your
Technology
Step 06
Launch
Step 07
Riding your
08
Launch ‘buzz’
Step
Promote Peer
Connections and
User-Generated
Content
Step 09
Communicate
your Success!
FINISH
Step 01
Find your Community’s Mission
Did you know that 64% of people find brands that actively communicate their purpose
more attractive? And that 62% want to see companies take a stand on issues that they
are passionate about?
To stand out and attract the right audience, your community can’t simply exist - it must
stand for something. That mission must go beyond simply plugging your products and
services, as the inauthenticity will quickly put community members off. Instead, your
community can offer a trusted, shared space for like-minded people to meet and work
towards common goals, concerns, and interests - and your brand will benefit
organically from this.
To understand what mission your community could stand for, ask yourself (and wider
leaders in the organization) the following questions:
� What can your community offer that no one else can?
� Why would members join?
� Why will they stick around?
� What does success look like?
Your mission and brand can be closely linked, or simply share a similar target audience.
Some of the communities that Zapnito has helped to shape include a community for
GMC-registered doctors to share trusted information, which was set up by Wilmington
Healthcare, a data intelligence firm for healthcare professionals. We’ve also supported
Springer Nature with communities that complement their publications, such as
sustainability, cancer research, and ecology. Finally, WildHub is an online community
set up by WildTeam and Zapnito to give conservationists the skills to design and
improve conservation projects and save more wildlife.
Step 02
Define your Audience
Setting your mission is a lot simpler when you understand your audience - specifically,
their values, needs, goals, and desires. In the case of Wilmington Healthcare, the
company understood that doctors and other healthcare professionals need a source of
trusted information, to remain updated with the latest treatments, research, and
thinking, and to access trusted information quickly due to their busy schedules.
Cultivating a branded community around these needs creates value for a key audience
for the organization.
The simplest way to understand your audience is to ask them directly what they’d like
from a community. Focus groups and feedback surveys will help you pinpoint their
needs, desires, and challenges.
It’s also vital to gather information on their online habits and preferences. Do they tend
to use email over social media to communicate with others? Do they engage with
specific websites or blog topics? How have they previously interacted with your brand?
Historical marketing data will prove useful here, as will any insights you can gather from
sales, customer success, and account management colleagues.
Step 03
Set your Goals
For your community to have the right business impact, close alignment with the
business goals is needed. That way, any value delivered by the community has a clear
effect on the bottom line.
A SaaS company that wants to grow its customer base among IT leaders (its business
goal) would set a community goal of targeting and attracting the best leaders and
experts in the IT sector to join the community and collaborate with peers.
Step 04
Measure your Goals
The next step is to track the performance of your community. KPIs (Key Performance
Indicators) will indicate whether your community is on track to deliver on expectations
and goals or whether you need to change your tactics. Ensure your KPIs link to your
business goals and check them at least quarterly, but ideally monthly to see how your
community is progressing.
The best KPIs are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound).
A good community KPI, therefore, might be to increase membership by 150% in the 3
months post-launch. Another might be to increase engagement (measured through
comments and likes on posts) by 20% month-on-month for the next year.
KPIs will differ from organization to organization, community to community. That said,
some common ones across many communities include:
� Member growth - The total number of users acquired over six months, or new user
growth month-on-month. Inactive members in the past month would also be a useful KPI
to track as this impacts the stickiness of your community and, by association, your brand.
It’s one of the most important measures you can track if business growth is your goal.
� Member engagement - Total number of likes and comments in a week or month, or
how many members posted comments? You can also look at these as percentages of
the total member base or measure it week-on-week or month-on-month.
Try not to have too many KPIs. The optimum number for your community will be between
four and ten.
Step 05
Choose your Technology
The tools you use to build your community can make or break it. So, choose it carefully,
based on your community’s goals and members’ needs and preferences. Different
platforms will offer different features, so pick one that will enable you to communicate
effectively with your members, keep content updated and organized, and provide
valuable data for your organization. Likewise, if your platform needs to integrate with
other solutions like a CRM or payment system, make sure it can deliver this seamlessly.
It’s worth noting here the difference between a community platform that’s set up to
provide customer support, and an expert-driven one. A community built around its
members’ expertise can still offer the support that a traditional support community can
provide, but it goes a step further to empower and teach its members. It becomes a
space for people to visit, not just to troubleshoot an issue, but to learn how to use a
product better, to get feedback on a strategy, or to discover new insights that will
improve their work.
Benefit of using Zapnito
as a Community Platform
Zapnito is the community software platform built to showcase expertise.
So it offers unique benefits over other community vendors:
� Features to promote expertise: Including expert profiles, peer-to-peer
learning, and video panel discussions that showcase experts and
organizations.
� Intuitive content authoring: Empowering members to produce
stunning multimedia content with ease. This is complemented by
commenting and conversation tools that are simple to engage with.
� Flexible design: Mirror your brand design with your own custom
theme, fonts, and colors.
� Fast implementation: Set-up your new community in hours and launch
in weeks, with out-of-the-box software.
� Easy-to-use interface: Quickly add and configure functions and
features to easily create a thriving community.
� Revenue options: Add additional revenue streams to your organization
through sponsorship, advertising, and e-commerce.
� Personalized support: Your expert Zapnito team will always be
on-hand with support that’s specific to your needs.
Step 06
Launch
This is where your groundwork will pay off with a launch strategy that’s tailored to
your audience’s preferences.
Your launch is essentially the time when you put your best foot forward, declare to
your target audience that you are out there, and what they can get from joining.
Having a well-thought-out launch strategy will ensure your community gets off to a
flying start.
In most cases, a ‘big bang’ launch won’t have the long-term impact that a slow and
considered approach will. A soft launch with a few close members will put in place
the right foundations to build lasting bonds in your community. Hold a few intimate
events and discussions with your first, core members. Then, encourage them to
contribute to the community and invite other peers.
Step 07
Riding your Launch ‘Buzz’
Ideally, your launch event will have given the best first impression of your community
and attracted your core members. The focus now shifts towards continuing to deliver
for your existing members, while consistently attracting new ones.
Unique content and expertise will really help you to provide something extraordinary
for your members that also encourages them to spread the word about the
community. Promote any speakers and industry influencers in your community to
highlight the exclusivity of your space and shine a spotlight on active members who
deserve to be recognized for their community contributions.
On a practical note, creating a content calendar that tells you the daily, weekly, and
monthly posts going live will help you keep the community engaged — particularly in
the early days when community generated content may be low.
1. Email: Make email outreach the foundation of your recruiting efforts.
2. Social media: Use existing channels like Twitter and LinkedIn to
encourage followers to become community members.
3. Customer team: Customer-facing teams should drive customers
towards the community for education and engagement.
4. Internal experts: Enlist your experts to contribute and promote their
thought leadership and updates.
5. External experts: Allow influencers in your field to contribute to the
community and promote their involvement to their networks.
6. Organic Search: Make sure that search engines can index your
community’s content so that people find your community via search.
7. Events: Leverage the halo effect of an event and use it to drive sign
ups, using exclusive post-event content and news for community
members.
8. Website: Your website should prompt visitors to sign up to the
community quickly and easily.
9. Customers: Give customers an easy way to promote the community
to their networks, and even incentivize them to do so.
10. Employees: Many of your employees have expansive networks, so
make sure they are actively recruiting their connections to join the
community.
Step 08
Promote Peer Connections and
User-Generated Content
Eventually, your members will begin contributing their own content. You can
encourage this by regularly posting open-ended questions, polls, and discussion
threads to the community. This ties in with the second characteristic of a community
(acts and behaviors). As members post more to the community, the culture of the
community will evolve and their sense of belonging will get stronger.
Events, whether virtual, physical or hybrid, give members something to gather round
and discuss with others later on. You can also spotlight different expert members and
hold Q&As so others in the community can get to know them.
Springer Nature promote peer-to-peer interaction within their communities using their
‘Behind the Paper’ scheme, which allows authors to tell the personal stories behind
their research. This means more content is published and extends the discussion
around research published to the community, meaning it is engaged with for longer.
By showing the human side of their authors, Springer Nature are able to build trust
between their brand and the editors, researchers and members who make up the
various Springer Nature communities.
Step 09
Communicate your Success!
Measuring the success of your community and reporting this back to stakeholders is
as important as building and managing it in the first place. It cements your
community’s place in the organization.
ROI
One of the most common concerns about starting a community is an uncertain return
on investment (ROI) compared to, say, acquisition marketing. Making the case for your
community, therefore, requires a well-considered, tailored argument that’s backed up by
data. Anything you communicate back to your stakeholders needs to be easy to digest
and speak directly to their priorities.
Some potential returns you can
communicate are:
Always-on engagement: communities can engage with
members any time, anywhere. They can extend the impact
of one-off events like webinars or spark further discussions
around a piece of content. Engaged members can also
become a resource for the organization as a ready focus
group to inform marketing, sales, and product, or as a peer
support option to improve customer success.
Cost-efficiency: leveraging community members to
answer questions and offer advice can help to cut
customer support time and costs (while leading to higher
levels of customer satisfaction). Ad spend will also
fall, as brands can market to their already
engaged community audience instead of
spending thousands shouting into the
social media and advertising void.
Improved NPS and CSAT scores: with greater engagement and value-added
interactions happening in your community, your customer satisfaction will likely increase.
This will translate into higher NPS and CSAT scores.
Monetization: advertising, sponsorships, events, and subscriptions can all diversify
your revenue streams. If you choose to go down this route, it's worth testing a few
monetization ideas with members first to make sure your community remains valuable to
them, trusted, and authentic. For example, Wilmington Healthcare’s OnMedica community,
an independent peer-to-peer space for doctors, allows them to create highly targeted
sponsorship packages based on members’ specialisms and online behavior.
Data for other departments: an online branded community is a rich source of
member data. This data can be used for big picture stuff like improving your sales pitches
and marketing, developing and testing products, and informing product launches.
Moreover, looking at the most popular discussions or most common questions can
provide ideas for your content marketing or even help with customer support. Leveraging
your community in this way means it adds value across the organization — and increases
buy-in for future community plans.
Insights for your business: beyond using member data to inform your product,
marketing, and sales strategies, you can also directly ask your members to test and
feedback on different products and ideas. This gives the opportunity to design your
products exactly around their needs and build customer loyalty.
Of course, to support in-depth reporting you should check that your chosen community
platform has the right analytics features included. Otherwise, you may have to incorporate
another tool like Google Analytics or Hubspot to help you measure your success.
Org-wide Communication
Once you’ve got a good cadence of reporting figured out with your main stakeholders
and decision-makers, you can experiment with wider communications to your
organization. A weekly summary, for example, of the community’s top discussions
might spark some interest among your colleagues. Or you could share some of your
community’s recent successes at an all-hands company meeting. Long-term, letting
people know how well your community is doing and how it is helping the business will
ensure widespread buy-in for its growth and future plans.
Common Misconceptions
There will be some challenges that are unique to your community. After all, every
community is as unique as the brand behind it. However, many brands find
themselves making similar mistakes as a result of buying into certain
misconceptions around how communities work.
1. If we build it, they will come: Simply creating a community site isn’t enough
in today’s noisy market. You also need a marketing plan that targets and
encourages members to join, and a community growth strategy that will ensure
they remain engaged.
2. Going in big: It can be tempting to perfect everything in your community
before launch, but this can delay your site going live… and hinder growth. Don’t feel
like you have to build every feature from the start. Indeed, as your community
grows and provides feedback, you may discover that some features are redundant
and others become more important to your members.
As a side note here, this is where having a flexible platform like Zapnito can make
all the difference. Zapnito allows you to keep iterating and updating your
community as members’ needs change. Your community manager can also test new
features and remove them if they don’t work out.
3. Treating it like a side project: For your community to continuously grow
and improve, there needs to be at least one person with responsibility for it. You’ll
also want to have a clear community growth strategy that sets out your goals for
the year (and, ideally, broken down into quarterly KPIs) and outlines responsibilities
and accountability. That way, your community isn’t at risk of being forgotten when
work gets busy.
4. Losing trust: When creating the conditions for your community to grow and
share with one another, consider how you can build and maintain trust in the space.
This will encourage people to share their insights and experiences authentically —
which drives up the value of those interactions.
And remember, trust is hard to build but easy to lose. Ensure community rules are
followed — any defamatory remarks, too many sales pitches, or unwelcome
approaches, can quickly undermine trust in your community. And that means
people will stop engaging with and will leave your community.
Community Management
Changes over time
The role of a community manager evolves as a community matures. In
the early stages of a launch, a community manager will work to shape
a community’s mission statement and values, define its audience, and
set goals and KPIs. A large percentage of time will be spent on
researching audiences and, immediately post-launch, building the key
group of people who will become the core of the community.
Longer-term, a community manager will continue to refine the
community strategy and content to align with what they’re seeing
members most engage with. A vital step here will be setting out the
next actions for members to complete in the community, like joining a
focus group or attending a webinar. There is little point in building a
branded community without clear next steps that drive value for your
organization in some way.
Zapnito is the SaaS community platform for intelligence-driven Saas.
We power branded, expert communities that engage, retain and
grow Saas customers, driving ARR and NRR growth.
An all-in-one community and learning platform, Zapnito turns
customers into brand advocates by allowing them to learn, share
knowledge and collaborate.
Ready to see what
Zapnito could do
for your business?
Learn more