Customer Communities

8Law 4: Create Content That Educates and Inspires: Be the Best Thought Leader You Can Be

By Remco de Vries and Kenneth Refsgaard

In the last chapter, we discussed how important your community can be throughout the customer journey. For that to happen, there is one vital ingredient that you simply must have, and that's content. An active and engaged community will undoubtedly create a large volume of user-generated content as members ask questions, connect, and share knowledge with each other. But there's a significant opportunity and role for you to play in content creation as well.

As discussed, a community is a group of people coming together with a common purpose. If you create and facilitate a space for them, they will naturally form relationships and interact as a group. The content you provide, however, can help steer that process, to facilitate connections and guide the community toward the results and outcomes you want.

Therefore, your content strategy will broadly be defined by the use cases you focus on for your community. When you prioritize delivering self-service, you will require a specific approach to content, just like how establishing thought leadership within your category will need another distinct flavor of content.

Particularly in the early growth phases, your content will clarify and communicate your community's intended use cases to its members. It's a way to ensure that there is something for community members to look at and to start discussing from ...