3 Ways to Reorient Your Business Goals Around Your Online Community

Online communities are more than just a platform. It’s a social unit of countless people with shared goals. So, a community runs through and around your entire organization, with all the people and stakeholders being a part of it.

That being said, customers’ demands and requirements can be dynamic in nature. With the changing customers’ requirements, your business goals should change as well.

But the main challenge is how to determine new business goals. That is where your community comes in handy. It can offer insights into your customers’ changing needs and requirements.

When you understand the changing requirement of your customers, you can re-arrange your priorities to meet your customers’ expectations.

Let’s dive deeper into how you can re-iterate your business goals that align with your community.

How to Reorient Your Business Goals Around Community

While it takes time and effort to re-arrange your business priorities, picking the right one is imperative. Thus, you need to know how to establish the right business goals and reorient them around your community.

Following are three proven tips to align your business goals with your online community –

1. Define the Role of Your Community Within the Business

Brands are communities and communities are brands. When an organization builds a community, they’re offering control to people through the concept of decentralizing. It is a way of defining a community as a group of people with a sense of belonging around a common identity. It depends on brands whether they want to treat their community just as an add-on or derive long-term value. For long-term play, brands need to stop limiting ‘collaboration’ to their employees and reach customers as well. That is how a community becomes an internal team of brand loyalists for an organization. As an organization, you don’t only define but also establish the role of your community.

2. Support Various Organizational Departments With Community

Typically, an organization chases top-level goals focused on monetary gains, specific business needs, or product relevancy. They’re all equally important and play a crucial part in the overall growth. However, they all belong to various departments of an organization. These goals can be categorized as –

• Business: Monetary gains, partnerships, market research
• Marketing: Case studies, brand exposure and promotion, lead generation and conversion
• Product: Idea generation, new product generation, feature development
• Support: Resolution, expenses, NPS score
• HR: Talent acquisition, retention, recruitment

Even though they’re categorized, these business fields tend to overlap. And, communities can be leveraged in the operational process planning for maximum output. So, identify the role of your community across these departments and reap inter-departmental benefits.

3. Get Internal Stakeholders Fully on Board

Lack of internal support can make community strategies inefficient. Sense of belongingness, brand loyalty, etc., may seem like intangible benefits. But, there are ways to track and measure the performance of a community. Metrics like unique contributors, most viewed pages, resource uploads, etc., can demonstrate the value communities provide in real-time. And, what’s better than facts and figures to get your top management fully on board? Calculating these metrics will not only convince upper management to invest in communities but also re-orient business goals around them.

Whether you are establishing new business goals or re-orienting your existing ones, ensure that you consider the input from all associated stakeholders. And, one way to do this is through your online community. Your customers must be placed at the heart of your business goals.

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