5 Things to do with your Leftover Online Community Budget

2018 is just around the corner with 2017 waving us goodbye and if you’re still left with some unspent budget for your online community, you are almost in a ‘use it or lose it’ kind of a situation.

Worry no more! We have a list of options you can still pick from to invest your precious bucks wisely and make the most out of your online community.

Let’s consider 5 ways you can improve your community.

1. Integrate Multiple Systems

The first and the best possible solution to spend your leftover budget is to integrate your online community with the rest of your tech stack – your CRM system, Service Cloud, marketing automation platform and other platforms.

A proper integration ensures a seamless flow of data across systems. Access to all the data at a single place gives the sales and support reps a complete picture of customer lifecycle helping them target customers better.

Apart from engaging your customers effectively, integrations also reduce staff workload. For instance, if you’ve a Jive community with its knowledge base built in Salesforce, you can integrate both the platforms to provide all the relevant help content to your customers and support reps in the relevant systems.

2. Use Enterprise Search

According to a report by Harvard Business Review, 81% customers prefer self-solving their issues before reaching out to a support representative. An ideal search solution ensures that all your enterprise information is available to your customers in a structured and secured manner.

It enables you to improve customer experience by creating customized and branded search results. You can also boost the relevant content to the top, making it easily accessible to customers and increasing your case deflection rate.

SearchUnify, an AI-driven search solution, with its advanced features delivers relevant search results to community members in real-time, improving users’ self-service experience and increasing case deflection.

3. Drive Community Engagement

Per M2 research, employing gamification in your online community can boost member engagement by up to 150%. Elements like points, badges, certificates, and rewards give members a sense of belonging and motivate them to actively participate in the community.

This motivation, further turns the engaged members into brand advocates who promote it through word of mouth, social media, or review sites. The best part is that all this promotion is free of cost.

Gamification is also an efficient means to crowdsource ideas and solutions from your target audience, which can be ultimately used to increase revenue.

4. Improve Community User Experience

Today, companies are experimenting with different ways to engage customers and deliver a consistent user experience.

Per a report, 52% users said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company. This means, that if your community is not mobile responsive, you’re deflecting nearly half of your total traffic.

This clearly indicates that before anything else, you should make your online community mobile first.

Next, you can use a customer-centric approach to readily cater to customer requirements. For instance, writing compelling CTAs that match with your customers’ needs help them effectively engage with your community. You can also try redesigning your community per their interests to make them feel associated with it.

Another way to provide an uncompromised user experience is to publish geo-specific content on your community. Multilingual content helps target customers on a larger scale and ensures enhanced user experience.

5. Create a Community Roadmap for 2018

What can be a better way to spend this year’s leftover budget than to plan your next year’s roadmap? Conduct a community audit to find out the gaps and work on them.

You can begin by detoxifying the irrelevant content that may appear in your search results through outdated content. Detoxification helps you deliver only relevant content while making it easily navigable.

Besides, you can also choose to redesign your community to improve user engagement.

Lastly, define realistic community goals and check whether or not your community’s activities align with those goals.

Leveraging these 5 strategies in your online community ascertains that you spend your leftover budget sensibly and boost your community performance.

About Grazitti Interactive®