How to build a successful community marketing strategy

Things that are better when sticky: Post-it notes, Band-Aids, rice with mango…and your community.

‍James Thornton, Typeform’s Community Manager, and Grace Porter, Typeform’s Customer Marketing Manager, know the value of an engaged audience. Together, they’ve helped to grow Typeform’s community from a couple thousand members to an online and in-person force of 40,000 people strong. 

With that growth, Typeform’s community has evolved from a humble support forum to a destination where users actively seek each other out to learn from and support one another. 

The secret? 

Selfless marketing that gives customers what they want, not what marketers want them to want. 

“There’s a tendency to think of community marketing as a distribution channel, rather than a relationship building tool,” James explains. 

But do that, and you end up only talking to customers about what’s on your mind, instead of listening to the problems they’re trying to solve. 

Below, James and Grace walk through the team's framework for building communities that customers actually stick around for.

The middle child of marketing  

Many SaaS companies have support strategies that only serve users at the two far ends of their sales spectrum: 

• High-value enterprise users get a dedicated CSM who guides them through features based on their unique needs.
• “Free” tier, low-touch users get mass self-serve options like Q&A pages, case studies, and online content to learn about product features and use cases. 

What’s missing is engaging that middle tier of medium-touch users with the potential to become valuable clients, even if they don’t qualify for the white-glove experience. 

James believes his team can fill that gap. “Community marketing lets you help those users in the middle be successful in a similar way to what you do at the enterprise level, but at scale,” he explains.  

This strategy is especially useful for SaaS companies, whose users often don’t see immediate value from the product. With community support and education—workshops, office hours, events, online conversations—community can help those users become successful at scale.

The community redesign that 4X’d user feedback

When the Typeform team decided their community strategy was due for a redesign, they didn’t wing it. Instead, they developed a systemic approach that hockey sticked user feedback and gave them a clearer roadmap for growth. 

Get better member feedback through better survey design

How do you hear what users want? You ask them. 

Typeform’s community team started their strategic community redesign with our favorite tool: the survey. 

Here’s how to write one that actually gets responses: 

• Test and refine questions internally. Have stakeholders review your survey questions for clarity and relevance. Cut questions ruthlessly.
  
  
• Structure for completion. James and Grace recommend front-loading with multiple choice questions that help respondents feel like they’re making swift progress. Aim for 50%–75% of your questions being multiple choice.
  
  
• Leverage AI for follow-ups. The team used Typeform’s Clarify with AI feature to generate personalized follow-up questions based on a respondent’s initial answer. This gathers more detailed intel while still maintaining a focused, efficient survey experience. 

• Offer meaningful incentive. Thank respondents for their effort with an incentive that matches their time investment. Consider fewer but more valuable rewards For example, Grace’s community survey offered respondents the opportunity to win a $100 gift card.
• Schedule a reminder. Following up to ask for responses can make a big difference in your total response rate.

By following these guidelines, Typeform’s community team saw a 4X increase year-over-year in survey responses—valuable data that laid the groundwork for their revamped community strategy.

Turn data into action  

Gathering data is the first step. Next is translating it into a plan to give users what they’re asking for and allocating resources to match that plan.  

“The survey made it clear that people wanted more product feature announcements and discussions, which we had dialed back doing,” says Grace. “Seeing the results allowed us to pivot back to creating that type of content.”

Typeform users expressed an interest in more: 

• Education content and guides
• Peer learning opportunities
• Product news and feature updates 
• Networking time with likeminded professionals 

The community team translated this into their strategy by:

• Ramping up publication of educational content. (Like this guide. Meta, we know.) 
• Developing a Champions program for users to learn from Typeform power users 
• Redesigning the online community platform to focus more on growth and conversation 
• Running the “Tune up your Typeform” series, allowing Typeform to get into the weeds of form building alongside users
• Building out a calendar of relationship-focused events and workshops 
• Sharing more product updates

It’s not enough to know what your customers are interested in; strategy is about figuring out how to deliver it. 

Build a cross-functional community engine 

The survey was just as valuable for internal marketing as it was for external. “It made it 100% easier to put together our community plan, present it, and get buy-in from senior leadership,,” says Grace. 

He adds, “In an ideal world, community would live independently and connect to everything from the center, as an engine that feeds into all the business metrics across departments.” 

After all, that’s what community is about: connecting people and ideas. 

To build this engine, community managers should develop metrics that serve multiple departments and create feedback loops that bring in perspectives from product, marketing, customer success, and more. 

True measures of success 

Community success metrics can get a little convoluted because the team can sit anywhere. 

Typeform’s community initially launched as part of the customer success team, with a heavy focus on support. Later it became part of marketing as a growth initiative. Community’s role in collecting user feedback naturally fed into product as well. 

All these teams track different metrics—ticket deflection, lead gen, sentiment around new features. But growth-focused communities will focus on metrics that help answer: 

• Are folks coming back? What do member retention and return visits look like?
• Are people answering each other’s questions, solving problems together, and digging into shared insights? 
• Are you engaging those mid-tier prospects? 
• Are marketing and research working together without prompting? 
• How is lifetime customer value changing? 

Strategic principles for community marketing 

Focus more on what you can offer your community versus what you ask for, especially in early stages. Generosity, attentive listening, and acting on user feedback are the ingredients for building spaces—online or in person—that people want to return to again and again. 

A few final principles: 

‍Give before you take. Build goodwill through value creation before extraction. Mining for testimonial quotes or giving the hard sell to someone who hasn’t figured out the value of your platform yet is an easy way to alienate users. 

Adapt to digital behavior. Communities on- and offline are constantly shifting. Regularly reevaluate and redesign your community strategy to meet changing expectations. (For example, James points out that launching a community circa 2020 lockdown requires a very different approach than event planning in our post-Covid era.) 

‍Bridge the customer success gap. There’s a lot of value to be seen in that middle tier between self-serve and high-priority enterprise users. Don’t neglect that hotspot.