If you’re thinking about starting a community for your partners or customers, you are probably asking yourself, "What's the point?"And you’d be right in doing so. The worst reason to create a community would be for the sake of creating one – or just because everyone’s doing it. To make sure your community creates value for you, your customers and partners, careful planning is the first step.

A successful community meets the needs of both your business and the community members. Explore those needs, and see where they overlap. That’s where your community should be.

Step 1: Map out goals - find the sweet spot

Your goals 

Define the business goals you want to achieve through the community. Tie your goals to the ones your business already has, such as to drive repeat purchases through increasing customer satisfaction. Don’t operate your community in a vacuum – relate it to the rest of your business. Ask questions like:

• How will this community support your company’s vision, mission and brand promise?
• How can this community add to your core value proposition?
• How will this community complement and expand your customer experience?
• Does this community put customers at the heart of your business?

Member goals

Next, learn your members' need and want. Ask them directly and talk to customer facing employees in your organization. Answer questions like:

• Who is this community for?
• What value does your product (and partnership with you) provide for them?
• How can you support/serve them?
• Why would they come?
• Why would they come back?
• What motivates them?
• Why would they participate?
• What else is competing for their attention?

Going through this exercise will ensure that you are creating a community that people actually want to use. Just because you build it, they may not come. But if you design with them in mind, you drastically increase your chances of success.

Now that you know what your business needs and what your members need, design a community experience that can help everyone meet their goals.

Identify initial use cases

Identify a few use cases to help focus your efforts in the beginning. Doing so will help you assign financial and organization responsibility – and ultimately figure out where the community team will report (or perhaps it becomes its own function). Understanding your goals will help anticipate the types of interactions, structure your team in the right way, and come up with KPIs that make sense. While focus is important, don’t feel handcuffed by it -- your community will evolve.

Step 2: Consider the entire customer experience 

Being in a community with your customers is a great way to build trust and loyalty. To customers, what you do is more important than what you say – so be consistent and show who you are through action. Remember that your community is a touchpoint along with many others, so look for ways to create a holistic customer experience. Connect it to:

• Your product or service. Community invitation should be part of the signup process.
• Retail locations/office branches. Include collateral and educated staff to work it into their interactions with customers.
• Service/support. Gartner says that customer service accounts for an average 75% of all customer interaction with the enterprise, so this is a big one. Make sure that your support agents and self-serve experience references the community, and create ways for agents to interact with the community directly.
• Website. Prominently feature your community on your website and make sure the community has a look and feel consistent with your external assets.
• Events. Take this opportunity to educate and invite customers and partners to the community -- they are most engaged at events.
• Social media and email newsletters. Tie social and email activities with community activities. Highlight notable members and achievements from the community with the world and promote signup.

Inconsistency of customer experience is a major cause of customer attrition, so make sure you are putting your best foot forward everywhere.

Step 3:  Going from goals to results -- building a community of action

Now you know where you are starting from and where you want to go, but how do you get there? To get and provide real value, think of your job as facilitating community of action – a community where people work together towards a shared purpose vs. just talking about their interests.

A community of action provides the conditions where members trust each other and the environment, and choose to spend time and contribute. Creating a trusted environment where it’s easy to meet the right kind of people is key. People who trust each other share what they know and spend time creating something together – even in the face of competing priorities.

As you map out your goals, they will most likely lead you to tactical use cases, which help you get started and against which you’ll measure success. But the secret ingredient to creating a thriving community of action is the depth of relationships.

Relationships matter

Today, relationships matter more than ever before. As competitive intensity continues to increase, and there’s more and more data produced every day, customers and partners have choices in whom to work with, and they don’t exactly need your marketing messages to help decide what to buy. But they will always buy from whomever they trust and have a better relationship with. No wonder customers in communities spend 19% more than customers who aren’t.

Step 4: Navigate technology choices

Now that you have an overall community plan, it’s time to select a technology platform. Be sure that this platform meets your business requirements, meets members’ needs, and is appropriate for your members’ level of technology sophistication. Consider:

• Functionality & UI
• Signup flow (gated, public, private)
• Integration into systems
• Connection to business processes
• Ability to scale and evolve

One thing to remember: Community technology is a tool that enables many-to-many and one-to-one relationships at scale. But it takes real people working individually and collectively to build those relationships.

Goal setting is just the first step of developing communities that thrive. Download the ebook to learn the rest of the steps, and check out the digest on Slideshare: