We don’t just build your client base; we help you build an engaged community around your products or services.
We believe that a key marketing tactic for the successful companies of tomorrow is to build an engaged customer community today. We know how to build customer communities, and we can do this to help take your brand marketing to the next level.
Channels to reach your target prospects abound. There are innumerable ways for you to reach your current and prospective customers. Thanks to technologies like Mailchimp and Substack, everyone has an email newsletter nowadays.
Dependent upon which research you read, the average person follows between 350 and 700 people, brands and companies on social media. Your phone is probably full of podcasts you just haven’t quite got round to listening to yet.
But everyone else is using these channels, too.
If 2020 has proved one thing, it’s that you need to have digital methods of communicating, connecting and communing with your clients, stakeholders and prospects.
You need a way to cut through the noise, and have a dedicated space for sharing best practice, perspectives and personal connection.
We believe that the answer to this is building dedicated communities for your customers, prospects and stakeholders.
Community as a Service is a new approach to community marketing, enabling busy in-house teams to rely on expert external support to help them build engaged communities around their product, service or the issues that they help their customers to address.
Community as a Service from Hard Numbers, enables time-poor in-house teams to take advantage of the benefits of community marketing, connecting, engaging, and establishing long-term relationships with existing customers, prospects and stakeholders within an enclosed community of similar people.
But without having to invest the time, money and effort usually associated with this approach. Hard Numbers will do the hard work for you, so that you can get on with the core aspects of your day-to-day role.
Connecting, engaging, and establishing long-term relationships with existing customers, prospects and stakeholders within an enclosed community of similar people.
We know that busy in-house teams do not have the bandwidth to dedicate to building and then managing communities alongside all of the other priorities that they have.
To build a successful, vibrant, engaged customer community takes time, effort and investment.
Community as a Service means relying on a trusted third party to help you build something which adds value for your customers.
Community as a Service means working with a well-connected team to create a network-effect around your products and services.
Community as a Service means using a partner to help you provide the best and timeliest level of support and guidance to your customers and prospects to help them get the most from what you offer.
That’s where Hard Numbers comes in.
What is the purpose of the group, and what is the Ideal Community Member Profile (ICMP) that we are looking to recruit into the community.
Agree on the platform we will use for this community, based on the best fit for your business and target users; Research and identify the list of people you would like to be part of this community, and outreach to invite them to join.
Communities require management. We will be there to moderate and manage the community, start conversations and threads, respond to questions, and provide support as the community grows.
We will help your community to grow beyond the initial group using tried and tested methods to encourage those within your community to help enlist others to join.
Since this is a Hard Numbers service, you will get the best-in-class measurement of the effectiveness of our work, tied back to the original objectives for this community. Whether it’s overall community size, customer satisfaction scores, regular polling within the community, or other metrics we agree to measure the effectiveness of this activity, you will know what we’re doing
We will work with you to define the platform that best fits your audience and your needs, and then we will go from there.
Our service is platform agnostic. We have used a range of different platforms, including:
Discord: Discord is a invite-only chat platform originally built for gamers, but which has since become a general use platform for all sorts of communities. It's particularly powerful for companies who want to build followings in the developer community.
Substack: Substack is a platform that lets you build a community and engage with them via a newsletter. It can be used instead of - or in addition to - other community engagement platforms.
Facebook Groups: For B-2-B-2-C brands in particular, Facebook Groups offer a quick and easy way to build customer communities, because they are built on a platform with over 40m users in the UK alone.
Slack: Slack’s leading ‘email killer’ platform isn’t just big in the tech world, it’s now being used by lots of knowledge based businesses both large and small. Whilst not designed as a community platform, it has a healthy ecosystem of chat groups for professionals with common interests.
Guild: Guild is a messaging platform for professional groups, networks and communities. It is fully GDPR compliant, and is used by a large number of professional bodies, SaaS companies, charities and educational bodies.
