How do you promote your community?

Well, you’ve built that community pretty well by the looks of things. Nice one!

I’m Blastoise186 by the way, good to meet you! I actually don’t own or run any community myself, but I am a Super User on the OVO Forum and I’m quite well known over here too. My position is rather… Unique… :)

When it comes to the OVO Forum, the fact that it’s already an SEO Powerhouse really speaks volumes by itself and inSided helps a ton there. If you search pretty much anything smart meter related in the UK, that forum is almost certainly going to be on the first results page. Powerful SEO by itself is definitely a very strong tool for promotion - but it’s also the hardest to build up as you have pretty much no control over it. But high quality content also helps too - thanks to one of my guides, we literally knock one particular manufacturer down to third place for pretty much all keywords related to one particular meter model. XD

Word of mouth also helps. We do see a few people over there who said that a friend recommended the forum for getting advice. A lot of people are also drawn in by the fact there’s some very good advice given whether you’re with OVO or not. There’s quite a few volunteers on there as well, some from rather… Unexpected places. But all the more helpful nonetheless.

But the main thing that works in terms of active promotion, is the fact that a certain @timcavey has a ton of passion for the place and he actively encourages the forum to be made more visible everywhere. There’s references to it in the billing platform, in the app, email marketing (sometimes!), help centre content, main website, social media and even the Support Team sometimes recommend it to members. You’ll be surprised how often they suggest it to me without realising that I am one of the forum volunteers!

The other secret? The forum plays a big part in OVO’s Plan Zero strategy and there’s a big interest from certain internal teams in making use of the forum as a highly valuable resource. It’s not just how you promote the place, but also what you do once you captured the attention. Now that’s where the real skill comes in! And that’s before you can even engage a user for long enough to become a regular.

Now then… I think there’s a few other people who might have some ideas here… Let me see...

Heya @adam.ballhaussen and @Ditte , I think you might also both have some useful thoughts too? 

Hey @Taylor Lecky, 

nice thread! Looking forward to some more inspiration on this. 

We’re promoting our community via the following channels: 

• Our Company Website under support
• In our Tool (our company is providing a HR - Human Resources - software) in form of a support Hub and via In App Notification
• In our Help Center (we use the embeddable widget here) 
• We share the community on several company events (for customers and leads) and share the content of these afterwards always in the community which is a very important thing for the registrations
• We also do SEO, because we want to get also more HR professionals in our community to drive discussions not just around our product but also around HR 
• One of the tool implementation steps for our customers is also to register in our community, because they can find every important information they need for the start there. This also one of our key drivers for registrations.
• We share our community and some special community announcement also via social media (like LinkedIn and Instagram). 
• We invite our customers in several mailings, e.g. our product newsletter, event mailings to share follow-up content, community invites (like one time a year), etc. 
• Also every customer communications is somehow connected to our community. 

It’s also important to combine the above mentioned channels with the right message to catch the customers. We try to focus on the advantages of the community for our customers and reasons why they should be part of it. Sometimes it’s also helpful to add activities like lotteries and fundraisers. It’s fun for the users and the possibility to win something is always motivating. 

Hope that helps. :) 

Hiya @Taylor Lecky!

Just to offer another perspective - my community is private, it requires you to log in before you can see anything. That severely limits our options for promotion, as our community can’t be indexed by search engines! It also means that the barrier to entry is very high - you have to have a strong intention to join our community before you would go exploring.

By far and away the most impactful promotion tactic for us is the inclusion of our community in new customer onboarding. We walk through the core benefits of the community, share examples of those benefits in action through community content and pitch our community as a core benefit of being our customer (eg - it’s part of what you’ve purchased). 

If you do any sort of professional services, onboarding or even new user welcome journies - they’re a really impactful place to shout about community.

Good luck with your promo adventures!

Wow @Selina what a fantastic level of integration your community has with the product and customer experience. You’ve listed everything I would hope to have (and a few we already have in place) for promoting the community. 

Can I ask when and how you went about integrating this deeply, was it prior to / at community launch, or after it had launched in a step by step approach? Any obstacles you had to overcome? 

Hi @timcavey,

we started the promoting of the community one month before the offical launch. We had everything set up and had a beta test with some of our customers and some of our colleagues running to get the final feedback and make necessary adaptions. We had a lot meetings with all our internal stakeholder - also with the ones that didn’t know that they are stakeholders. 

Since then it’s an ongoing process where we’re maintaining existing relationships and building new ones when necessary (our product team became more involved just a year ago with the launch of Ideation). We make sure that every team which should be involved (in our opinion) sees the potential and is enabled to use it. We’ve agreed on one contact person per team who is involved in our community alignments. It was really time consuming and a lot of work, but it’s worth the effort from my point of view. 

After almost two years now we have the lucky situation that our community is settled and almost everyone knows the value companywide. 

What a great place you’ve got your community in, @Selina. I’m sure this is straight out of the community best practice textbook (it’s probably an online course or blog now rather than a textbook). 

How big was the community team on launch, and how big is it now?

Haha, or a podcast 

At that time our community team consisted of 3 people and meanwhile we have grown to a team of 10. However, not all of them are responsible for our communities (since last year we have published an international community in addition to our DACH community), but also for customer events & communication. The pure community team currently consists of four people.