Are you overlooking the potential of customer communities? Whether you are hosting a branded customer community or engaging with your audiences through third-party groups on social media, online communities can be a powerful way to interact with your customers before, during, and after their purchasing journey.

But what role does content play in an online community and how do you ensure that community members have a quality content experience?

In this blog post, we highlight three takeaways from Tendo’s latest B2B Content Experience podcast episode, “Creating Engaging Experiences Through Online Communities.” The episode featuring special guest Scott K. Wilder, VP of Customer, Partner and Community Engagement at Base.

#1: Embrace User-Generated Content (UGC) in Your Online Community

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2020, 39% of consumers build more trust in a brand from peer-to-peer conversations than from a brand’s paid advertising. With trust becoming increasingly critical in today’s volatile business and economic climate, UGC will become even more important for brands who want to build trust and customer loyalty.

But there is a catch: Users who share their expertise through content and conversations in an online community must be identified as “experts” to ensure that the information they share is of high quality and is trustworthy.

“We write customer stories, and we hire these people to do it, and they do a great job. But I think we’re going to see more and more reliance on the users to create the content, whether it’s videos, or even writing it and putting it on the community site.” –Scott Wilder

#2: Personalize Your Customer’s Experience

Providing a robust content recommendation engine based on a users’ past preferences, or providing a personalized engagement in real-time is no longer a “nice-to-have,” no matter where one is in their digital journey. In fact, using personalization to draw customers back in after they left the community is just as critical for sustaining engagement as the personalized interactions that take place within the community.

“At the point of abandonment—similar to a shopping cart abandonment—when we knew people were leaving the community site or bail out of their online course, we used a light AI to send them relevant content to keep them engaged.” –Scott Wilder

#3: Co-Create with Your Customer Community

Online communities provide an effective way to enable your customers to easily provide feedback and ideas on how to improve your products and services. Whether you want your customers to help develop content or suggest product features, co-creation will be a key differentiator for brands who want to provide products and services that truly meet the needs of customers.

“The whole CLG campus is based on the principle of leaning in and co-creating with your customers and co-designing with your customers. When I worked at Intuit, we called that customer-driven innovation. And I think companies really need to lean into that.” –Scott Wilder

Listen to the Podcast

Want to learn more about how to provide a great content experience in an online community? Check out our latest episode of the B2B Content Experience with special guest, Scott Wilder, VP of Customer, Partner and Community Engagement at Base.