Welcome to the next episode of The CMA Newsletter where 612 marketers get better at building Customer Marketing programs and strengthening relationships with their customers in less than 5 minutes.
I’ll start with a fellow Director of Customer Advocacy Maria Munoz, who is looking for her next opportunity. Feel free to connect! Here is the list of folks looking for their next role from last week as well:
Minal Awasth, Customer Marketing
Lauren Turner, Global Customer Marketer
Karina Heavey, Community Lead
Tim Newborn, Global Customer Marketer
Rebecca Grossman, Director of Customer or Product Marketing
Asha May, VP of Customer Marketing
Marsha Druker, Community - Led Events/Program Manager
Before we start:
Okay lets jump in…
In episode 11 I talked about Slack Communities. If you are ready to scale your slack community and embark on a Community platform, this episode will cover Community platform pitch and how to select a platform (Zendesk, HigherLogic, Insided, SFDC Communities).
Disclaimer: While I believe I’m an expert at the pitch and the selection of platforms, thats it. We still have our slack community and are not ready to pull the plug on a scaled out community. I can take you all the way to executive buy in. Which is half the battle.
Another Disclaimer: I am a firm believer that Community should live in the Customer Success org and Advocacy can support it. If you are going to take this on bc some executive is asking YOU to look into it, you need to say the below is conditional on a community manager headcount.
As always, these episodes are to help you with a program brief or slide deck. It will help you stay organized and let anyone look up the details if they need to reference your program goals, timeline, etc.
Once you have gotten demos and pricing from a few platforms, gather your “committee”. This is usually the VP of CS, CMO, your boss, Support, CTO, Product any other stakeholders.
I like to come to the meeting with a presentation. I start with a powerful statement (something that grabs their attention aka what is most important to them) At Sendoso, execs love anything that is a competitive advantage and being the leader in a new emerging category. So I did the cliche thing and started with a quote…
Building community is one of the most powerful ways to establish your brand as the most trusted leader in a category, or to get people bought into a category that you’re working to create!
-David Spinks, The Business of Belonging Goals of a Community
Then I looked them dead in the eyes and said:
In order to stay ahead, we need to create a space for customers to communicate and collaborate in a trusted, proactive environment. A Community will aid in yet another advantage over our competitors. It’s the one thing they can’t copy and if they start one it will take them 12 months minimum to catch up.
I’m so dramatic! 🤣 Next, its best to get to the point on the vision:
Mission Statement
The Sendoso Community is streamlined and cohesive hub where customers can find support, advice, best practices, and give feedback. At every stage of the journey, they’ll become more engaged and aware of our sending options and strategies that will increase the value they get from Sendoso. To leave our product would mean leaving their people, their relationships, and sacrificing the social capital they’ve earned within our community. 👈 Another very powerful statement!
Why Now?
Say “Because everyone is has a community and we are LATE!”
Then I went into stats that will benefit different areas of the business based on benchmark data:
Next, if you have an advocacy program you’ll want to come up with stats on how active your advocates are as you will likely start your community with those folks. (Adding articles, answering questions, etc)
I told the exec team that the advocates in my program had a 34% increase in platform spend 3 months after they joined the program and thats compared to the 3 months before joining. 😲 (you would think that would’ve sealed the deal) 🤷🏻♀️
More Benefits
I love creating pillars. It’s such a clean way to get to get to the bottom of what people want to see. In this case, my 3 pillars of benefits were Adoption, Advocacy, Revenue.
Adoption
Content: Product Documentation (Resource Library), Discussions, Support, Blog, Thought Leadership, Success stories.
Product Feedback: Ideas, Beta Testing, Requests
Decrease Support Resources
Advocacy
Customer Engagement: Communication Channel, Build Relationships
Networking: Discussions, User Groups, emerging CAB members
Revenue
Cross-Sell & Up-Sell: Create FOMO on new features
Leverage insights shared into customer generated content
New Business Sales tool: Helps with SEO, Competitive win, Lead gen
Then of course you have to do your research on metrics. Here are some:
Metrics to Track Success of Community
# Active Members vs non active
% of top accounts engaged in the community
% of managed accounts engaged in the community per CSM
Overall Customer Engagement
Impact on Support Resourcing (Ticket Deflection/Self Service)
Retention Rate of Active Community Members
Referrals
Revenue Influence
Once you are done pitching the benefits and forecasted metrics, it’s time to start educating them on reality. Sometimes leadership has no frickin clue what goes into these programs sooooo we need to enlighten them. I’d start with what you need in a platform.
The ideal platform must have:
Profiles to Segment
Private Groups/Open Groups
Social Sharing (Open Group to Public)
Advanced Search - Related articles via tags
Mobile Friendly
Personalize Look and Feel Based on User
Marketing Automation email feature to drive engagement
Gamification (badges, awards, monthly contests)
SSO/ Auth0 smooth integration
Crisis Management
Next is my favorite slide. It will help the committee really make the decision if they are ready for this:
Learnings from Research
We will need 1 if not 2 people to make this initiative successful
This is a massive cross departmental project (3 months)
Community Moderator ( 8 hours a week)
1 Implementor (4 hours a week for 2.5 months)
1 Designer (Same look and feel as website)
1 Technical person (SSO/Auth0)
1 Content person (Building knowledge base, help articles,
1 Attorney to review rules and guidelines document
1 Marketer (Content Calendar)
It is incredibly hard to engage (pull in) busy customers
Next you pull in all the info from the 3 platforms you evaluated. Who has what, who is lacking, and your overall recommendation with pricing.
If you want to create a badass graphs or pivot tables, here is a Gsheet template to use when doing your comparison.
Next, I’d pick a launch date and work backwards from that. Execs like to see a slide outlining a timeline. It also creates a sense of urgency for the committee to make a decision.
You’ll want to think about a slow roll out with an internal launch first then a soft launch to Advocates. I always like to launch something major at a customer event. It’s fun to tease out that you have a special announcement at the end of the event.
Good luck. Hope this helps. I realized after writing this that it might not be applicable to the majority of you but feel free to forward to someone else in your company. 😎
Love your CMA Soulmate,
Leslie
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