I recently was combing through old data at my company to see how people heard about our services. More than a quarter of those who registered for our trainings selected "Word of Mouth." Other options included our website, social media, a cold call, or at a conference.
That information wasn't too surprising. We knew that we had some passionate fans who were talking us up to other organizations. At our user conference, attendees swarmed our founder to get a selfie with him. Our blog posts average thousands of views, many comments, and dozens of shares. Our e-books and webinars are downloaded faster than we can create them. Our audience is hungry for content and passionate about our product. It's a dream scenario, really.
But, we weren't capitalizing that passionate base. We had a decent social media presence, but the response to each post was quiet. Where was that excitement that we had seen from customers at our annual summit?
Thankfully, a couple of attentive colleagues picked up on this inconsistency. They knew we had customers who referred others to us, but we couldn't see those conversations happening. My colleagues also understood that our super-users didn't have a shared platform where they could discuss our content.
Our company has since made an investment in a community. In the past year, we created a short-term community (living in an active Facebook group) and are building an internal group (living on our platform). The Facebook group has not-quite one thousand members—40% of whom are active each month.
I'm excited to have joined the Community team while it's in its infancy. We've only started harnessing the power of our delighted customers.
Do you have a base of happy customers? Are your new customers finding you by word of mouth? If so, you might also have an untapped community. As the voice Field of Dreams once said, "If you build it, they will come." Invite your passionate users together and see where they lead you.
You will don't want to miss their conversations. You can't afford to leave them out of your strategy.