The launch of your community is one of the most pivotal moments in the entire lifecycle of your community, so the communication should be planned and executed well in order to maximize the acquisition of new visitors and conversion to active members!
This guide is meant to show you strategies how to organize the go-live communication for your own community the best way. Arguably, you could have millions of visitors on the first week, but if none of these visitors actually care to sign up or even start posting, your launch could turn into a total failure. No worries, we will make sure that this will not happen!
Know who you are speaking to (and why!)
Before we start diving into the message, frequence, and all of that, we should make sure that we know exactly who we want to experience (and ideally become part of) your community. Again, it is super important to find the users which A) will get the most value out of the community when visiting and B) will have a higher chance of becoming active themselves and contribute by posting.
Internal vs. external audience
Needless to say, we should differentiate between the internal and external audience - not just in defining the target group / personas, but also the content as well as the tools we are using. For now, let’s start with identifying the external audience target group:
Customers
Are there specific personas / segments or any other categories of individuals you’d like to see engage in your community? Are we targeting the admins only, or teams involved in onboarding as well? Maybe even the end users of the products our customers are using? Are there any groups that are much more likely to become active (maybe with a dedicated message)? E.g. advocates or Beta testers?
Tip: Try to keep this list short, ideally you can identify the most important personas and focus on these roles (instead of overloading yourself).
There are also other groups that you could promote the community to. This also depends on your use case, content strategy and growth plan (some communities tend to introduce the community to these groups once the community is at a more mature stage, offering more content for these audiences:
Partners
Are there any Business Partners which could be invested in a community, maybe even contribute in a more organized fashion? Think about co-creation opportunities, maybe even smaller promotional activities that they could engage with.
Prospects
Should the community be open to prospects? If so, are there maybe pieces of content that you can already provide to them? Speak to your colleagues to decide if they should also be taken with in the announcement, maybe they can help to enable them in the community as well.
Industry
Some communities also target the wider industry with best practices that are agnostic to a vendor. In a go-live communication strategy however, this audience usually does not play a bigger role.
Looking at the internal audience, you can choose between a general message (to all colleagues), or a more specific message (tailored for specific teams your community needs to succeed).
Leadership
Sharing a more personalized message for the leadership team can help to get their attention and potential buy-in in future projects, again opening opportunities for co-creation of content.
Tip: A leadership quote can also go a long way in activating internal and external recipients.
Teams & individual contributors
You should seize the opportunity to enable your colleauges on the main use cases and goals of your community, ensuring everbody is not just aware of the launch, but also of e.g. the rules and guidelines for employees when engaging with users.
The why behind the message
It is crucial that you nail this task: Do not just say “We’re live, here is the homepage”, but try to match the message and the content to what your target audience is looking for. Ideally, there should be specific content presented, or maybe even a dedicated landing page for users to check out. In each case, users must have a clear understanding of what to expect after they click on something in your message.
Tip: Review if the content of your message can be tied back to the main use case / goal of your community, and that there is specific content that is relevant for the recipient.
When to announce the go-live
Now there are different ways to approach the timing of your go-live communication, and of course, this can also differ depending on the target audience. In some cases, you might even want to start communicating before the community is even live.
Soft launch
Some communities choose to have the community go live for a few days or weeks before announcing, inviting in a smaller amount of users (customers, partners, advocates) via outreach or via specifically seeded urls in-product or in other places. This has the goal to start populating the community with initial content, so that the big push will allow the majority of users to discover plenty of content and prevent users from experiencing what we call “empty restaurant syndrome” (undermining users becoming active themselves). If you choose for a soft launch, we recommend ensuring that you either invite enough “regular” users (e.g. customers) to ensure enough posts are being made (roughly 0,5% of visitors will end up posting, do the math), or that you activate users that are likely to be highly active (e.g. Beta testers or advocates) - but also here the number should be substantial (at least 50, better >150).
Pre-launch
Some communities have chosen to simply show a splash page long before the community actually goes live. Users can read when the community will go live, what it will have to offer, and maybe even a sign up page where users can pre-register, to receive a notification as soon as the community finally has been launched. These users can then be targeted with a dedicated email campaign (and might also deserve a “founding member” Badge to reward them for their support!).
In general, the timing of this communication should be orchastrated and occur in a matter of a few days, ideally, to maximize the momentum (number of total visitors per day) and increase likelihood of recent activity visible at the time of any visit.
Tip: An acquisition plan can help to give you an overview of when which message will be sent to which audience exactly.
Which channel to choose
When it comes to the channel to use, of course there are many options and most of them are typically also contextual to the industry and audience that your community is trying to activate. In general, the go-live communication should attempt to reach as many potential future users as possible in a short amount of time. Below a number of key channels and their unique characteristics:
In-product
This is the holy grail of your community promotion - however it also can be difficult to get e.g. a pop-up message implemented. Using tools like Gainsight PX however, you can target and trigger specific content promotions, to further increase the efficiency of your campaign.
Company Newsletter
This is almost the standard excercise at every community launch - and it can sometimes even define your go-live date, depending on the list of recipients. Tell your Marketing team that the clickthrough-rate of community content always is higher than usual, this should help getting a foot into the door.
LinkedIn can be a powerful resource to recruit your members, as here people will mostly see it only if they actually follow your company - which makes it more likely that they will also engage with community content. Others use paid ads as well as influencers to promote a community launch.
Similar to the example above, Reddit is a good resource for finding future active contributors - one of our communities actually found their first Super User by simply mentioning their community launch in their products Subreddit
Customer Success / customer-facing roles
Your CSMs, Onboarding Managers etc. should treat the launch of your community as a highlight - as this is a great opportunity for their customers to connect and learn more from their peers. Internally, announce the community to CS and other customer-facing teams to also help your colleagues with their own workload.
