4 Forums Every Brand Community Should Have
Online brand communities provide a powerful way to build relationships and trust with your clients. They can be a space to engage with your customers, help them to get the most out of your product, create and curate educational resources, and share knowledge. You can read more about how a community can help your business here.
Here are four key pillars you should focus on to make a digital community work for your brand.
Knowledge sharing
One of a brand community’s primary goals is to provide customers with the ability to help each other. Whenever someone has a question on any functionality, they can post it on one of the forums. For example, the Wrike Community has a “How to” forum where members can answer each other’s questions and provide assistance. Such a forum benefits all parties — customers get answers to their questions and threads become online networks of people interested in the use of a particular functionality. This also helps decrease support tickets as people can find their own answers without contacting the Support team.
Users can also share best practices and discuss how to get the most out of our solution in the Community, and we have a dedicated forum for that too. Different teams use our product in slightly different ways, so there are often innovative solutions that our members share and discuss.
The Community team members are also on the lookout and ready to provide a helping hand when needed. Members engage with each other and with the company, and it helps them be productive using our solution.
Keeping your customers up to speed
It’s generally a good idea to have a space where your customers can check out the latest releases and important announcements. A separate forum can facilitate this for your brand. Wrike’s Community team shares a list of all the newest Wrike features and enhancements on the “Weekly release notes” forum every week. This helps our customers stay up to date with the latest releases, discuss them, and ask questions.
In the forum called “Brought to you by Wrike,” we feature interesting case studies, big product releases, and events that might interest our community members.
Feedback and insights
Online communities can be a great source of customer feedback. Members often report bugs, share insight into their user experience, and suggest product enhancements. The “Product feedback” forum is very popular in Wrike’s Community. It allows users to suggest and vote on ideas, and the Community team tracks this and reports all the data to our Product team.
The threads that our members start in the Product feedback forum allow them to connect directly to the Product team and get updates on the feedback they’ve shared, as well as network with fellow Wrike users united in their use cases.
The team often invites the community members to participate in product research too.
Brand advocates
Every member contributes to make the community a space to learn and engage. That’s why it’s a good idea for community managers to make sure that everyone posting and commenting gets recognition.
At Wrike, our Badge program does just that and also helps us motivate the members to be more active. We have different levels of community badges — Orange, Green, and Black. Green and Black badge holders have access to the private forum where power users network and share best practices and solutions. The Wrike team also shares exclusive content here.
To sum it up, the forums for sharing knowledge, posting announcements, providing feedback, and becoming advocates are the most important for a brand community. You can have others of course, but these four provide the foundation for a thriving community. There are no two identical companies, so brand communities will differ, but having an online space for your customers can be a great opportunity to build your brand.
