B2B Communities: 7 Best Practices that

Boost Engagement for the Ultimate

Customer Experience

If you’re not focused on driving retention via your B2B community, you may be wasting your

budget. Why? Because while communities are amazing at driving engagement, fostering

loyalty, crowdsourcing innovation, and improving customer service―their greatest value to

your organization lies in their ability to help retain customers.

Retained customers are where the biggest portion of your future revenue will most likely

come from. Why?

In the B2B world, sales cycles can be long, and churn is a continual challenge that costs you

revenue. A focus on retaining existing customers helps you reduce costs and realize faster

ROI. According to Marketing Metrics, the probability of selling to an existing customer is

60-70%; whereas the prospect of selling to a new customer is 5-20%. Not only is it easier to

sell to existing customers, it costs far less to do so. Acquiring a new customer is 6-7 times

more costly than keeping an existing one, reports Bain & Company.

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"Earning customer loyalty is very important to B2B marketers. After all, loyalty translates

directly into referrals and new cross-sell/upsell opportunities,” says Forrester Research¹.

As a B2B marketer, how do you move beyond just providing support and focus on creating

great customer experiences at every touchpoint? One of the most successful ways is through

your community.

As you know, B2B customers are independent; they want to be able to find the solutions

they need without calling a customer care support line. Your community is the place where

you can help them self-serve on training, education, troubleshooting, or crowdsourcing and

you can interact with them to keep your relationship alive during the service period. We

found some outstanding B2B communities that are using innovative methods to drive this

kind of engagement in their community.

Here are the top 7 ways these B2B communities stand out from the crowd and how you can

follow their lead:

1. Be proactive.

Autodesk, one of the world leaders in 3D design, engineering and entertainment

software, delivers on customers’ needs for knowledge before they ask. The

company drives customer loyalty and product affinity through a strategy that

includes activations on Facebook, nearly 200,000 followers on Twitter, more than

40 million views on YouTube and a branded community that has seen its unique

visitors grow by 34% in the last year. Customers find their “How do I?” questions

already answered in the community and have access to a wide-range of “experts”

to solve issues and learn.

2. Focus on ideas and feedback.

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, is a networking vendor selling

enterprise wireless LAN and edge access networking equipment. Their “Airhead”

community has an Idea Exchange where they invite people to provide ideas, give

their opinion on technical enhancements and provide feedback. This engages their

customers in a vital way that helps shape the future of Aruba’s solutions to better

meet their customers’ needs.

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3. Communicate and share.

Autodesk also uses their community, social networks and other channels to

provide webinars that offer customers another way to learn about and experience

the company’s products. Similarly, Google AdWords uses webinars and videos to

educate their customers on the product and all its features. This engages their

customers through the community to gain deeper understanding and share

information about their products.

Educate and train.

Google AdWords’ Google Partners Academy is a customer education program

targeting Google Partners (certified AdWords agencies and certified marketing

professionals). The program consists of a series of Hangouts: On Air, where

Google specialists guide users through a range of product-related and online

marketing-related topics. This creates a strong educational offering to help users

become empowered and confident in using the product.

Centrify is a company that provides unified identity management across cloud,

mobile and data center environments with single sign-on services. By creating in-

depth community-generated how-to articles they have been able to provide free

support for their free products and built a strong community of volunteer

engineers around the world who contribute to the evolution and training on how

to use their products.

Upsell/cross-sell.

B2B communities are great for engaging other teams or departments for the

purpose of building awareness, upselling and cross-selling. SuccessFactors, an

SAP company, provides workforce management software designed to support the

employee lifecycle, from recruit to retire. They have used their community to

create a campaign that targets selling their cloud-based HR solution to their on

premise HR function within SAP. Their “Welcome to the Cloud" marketing

campaign invited their SAP HR family to join the community and learn more about

the advantages of cloud-based technology. They’ve seen an uptake in community

membership and anticipate increased revenue as a result.

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Celebrate your members.

Your customers appreciate feeling valued. Use your community to find ways to

celebrate them. Webroot is a market leader in cloud-based, real-time internet

threat detection for consumers, businesses and enterprises. They set up a

program called the Webroot VIP Program that recognizes and rewards the most

active, influential members via a ranking system based on a combination of posts,

kudos, accepted solutions and other factors. The rewards are a mix of moderator

abilities and gifts, and are based on members’ feedback on what would be most

valuable to them. Gamification is a great way to do this.

Remember milestones.

Optimizely is the world's leading experience optimization platform, providing A/B

testing, targeting and multichannel optimization for websites and mobile apps.

When their one year anniversary of their community, Optiverse, came up, they

decided to focus on the humans behind their members’ online presence and ran a

week-long campaign that celebrated their members. By bringing people together

to celebrate an anniversary, they inspired engagement by taking a human

approach to connection and belonging. At Lithium, we recently celebrated

7 years of the Lithium Community.

These are just a few of the ways B2B communities are getting creative in driving

engagement and focusing on retaining customers through great and perpetual customer

experiences.

For more information, please visit: http://community.lithium.com