Nurturing Relationships: Building B2B Communities for Growth
Community is important. It’s a support network, a safe place to vent, and a useful resource. It’s also where we go to make deep and meaningful relationships with others.
Online communities can be as large or as small as you want, and for B2B startups, they can be an essential tool for creating partnerships, meeting leads, and attracting investors. Supporting community members and providing them with platforms to engage with each other means, inevitably, that you increase engagement with your brand, products, and services.
Why Build Your B2B Community?
Creating a digital community has a number of benefits:
First-party data — as third-party data gets phased out, gathering information directly from leads and clients is more important than ever. Communities allow members to volunteer information to trusted brands. Remember, you still need consent to use that data for marketing purposes!
Deeper engagement — interacting with community members directly transforms you from a faceless tech brand into a team of humans who understand the challenges of your clients.
Offer support — when you run an app or a platform, you’ll always have people who need help. Encourage peer-to-peer assistance and be ready to jump in to gently handle misinformation or less-than-helpful advice — it’s a great way to become known as a trustworthy, supportive brand.
You can use a number of platforms to engage with other businesses and create communities. Facebook offers Groups which are accessible, free, and allow you to allocate various moderators. Messaging networks like Slack allow you to invite people from outside your organization to create communities beyond your immediate teams. Salesforce offers online community forums as does Wix.
Some Inspiring Examples of B2B Communities
Data management platform dbt created a Slack community that’s now over 25,000 people strong. CEO Tristan Handy said that they never deliberately intended the Slack channel to be a demand generation tool. However, becoming community-focused has created organic growth that increases by 10% month-over-month.
Kahilla is a platform focused on increasing diversity in enterprise leadership roles. They’ve built a community of thousands of underrepresented executives and professionals, many reporting that they’ve gained raises, promotions, or moved to roles better suited to them after engaging with the community. It’s a premium platform and Kahilla runs every aspect of it, including the tech, so there’s no reliance on third-party providers.
The Collective Table is Arch Collective’s community of investors, founders, executives, and other professionals who touch the startup sphere in some way. It’s a perfect example of how B2B communities don’t have to be solely online. Meeting in person is a great way to make connections, share best practices, and benefit from each other’s experience and knowledge. The Collective Table events take an “Open Hands” approach, where guests are open to receiving good food, drink, and the insights of their peers — but also ready to participate and add to the conversation.
B2B Community Building Strategies
How can you create your own community that’s sustainable and, importantly, creates value for all members? That’s probably the first step — realizing that your community isn’t just a marketing tool. It’s a place where like-minded professionals can come together and share thoughts, challenges, and solutions.
Think about the pain points your tech offering addresses and how you became interested in solving those in the first place. Look into industry news in your niche. Follow thought leaders in your market and save links to some of their best posts. Use these insights to create talking points and posts that will get people engaging with each other.
If you host industry events or present a workshop or talk, make it a hybrid event so you can include your online communities. Record snippets of events so you can share them online to create meaningful discussions.
Final Word
Engaging with your community creates more opportunities to make connections and build beneficial relationships. Plus, you might be surprised at how these interactions organically grow your brand.
Work with experts who have a proven track record in B2B marketing and relationship building. Book your free 15-minute introductory call with Arch Collective and let us help you achieve sustainable growth.
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