Aligning Your Enterprise Community Strategy With Your Customer's Career Journey
Use these three contexts to help create long-term value with your company's community.
Photo by Fabio Ballasina / Unsplash
When developing or refining a community strategy, it is critical to understand the larger market and business contexts the community will exist in. This sounds obvious and straightforward, right? Yet the needed research, discussion and development of shared understanding of these contexts rarely happens. As a side note, this concept was literally hammered into my brain by a former boss at Autodesk, Moonhie Chin, who was the SVP of Digital Platform and Experience. She always had a simple question for any data she saw: "What is the denominator?" - meaning, what is the whole, or what is the largest meaningful context.
I've been primarily focused on developing Business to Business communities during my career, and I've come up with three key contexts that I think are critical to understand the opportunity for community development.
1. Customer Career Journey
Understanding your customer's career journey, the number of distinct journeys, and how your product / service plays a role can help determine where in the journey community may play a valuable role.
Considerations:
Number of distinct Customer Profiles (~Personas)
Stages in Career Journey
Centrality of products / services to productivity & advancement at each stage
Key Questions:
Is product or service critical throughout career, or only at certain points?
How does / could the community support development and transition?
Can your organization support the full Customer Career Journey, or does it make sense to partner with complimentary organizations?
2. Criticality of Product / Service
Understanding the criticality of your product / service engagement by customer profile, can give insight into the level of effort, the specific motivations, and the needed resources customers need to master your product, and by extension, advance in their career. This understanding can guide what community experiences your offer (and what community investments you make).
Considerations:
Complexity of product / services
Effort required to attain skills / mastery
Amount of time spent using product / service
Amount of time spent in surrounding ecosystem - courses, conferences, meetups, online content, expert communities, etc.
Key Questions:
How much time will the customer spend mastering product / services and necessary skills?
How much time will the customer use the product in their work?
How much time is it reasonable to expect a Customer to spend participating in your community weekly?
What form factor and level of effort is required for quality participation?
3. Total Addressable Community & Crowd
Taking insights uncovered from the discussions in the customer career journeys and the depth of engagement categories, what do the opportunities and required investments look like at scale?
Considerations:
Overall Market Size
Current Customer Base
Projected growth (ideally segmented by Customer Profile)
Target vs Current Community Membership (again, segmented by Customer Profile)
Key Questions:
How big is the total addressable market?
What % of active customers are targeted for community engagement?
What business value can be realized at scale?
How can the community business case be optimized by extrapolating investment vs return at scale? At what point does the investment vs return reach equilibrium? Go negative?
How does the Customer value proposition change at scale? Is there a true Network benefit, or flat / diminishing return at a certain point in the growth arc?
Summary
In the simplest terms, the three contexts give you:
Customer career journeys: Where in the journey is community valuable?
Depth of product / service engagement: What community experiences are valuable?
Total addressable community & crowd: How many people can you expect to participate in your communities?
These contexts are for considering an Enterprise strategy, and you can imagine similar contexts for Medium & Small Business and Consumer. This approach doesn't replace a comprehensive strategy development exercise, but is intended to sketch out a future state and give relative sizing for future planning or assessing current efforts.
If you would like to discuss this sizing approach, or other advanced ideas for creating a bigger and better future for you community, please reach out.
