Scale Content Marketing with Community: A Strategy for Growth
Scaling content marketing is a sizeable program to take on, especially if you want to generate business results. However, one efficient and effective way to scale up is by utilizing your customer community for content creation.
Empowering customers to create content may seem like a scary proposition. What if you lose quality? Or it's not on-brand? But it should be a no-brainer. According to research, almost 50% of top content marketers are using user-generated content for best results.
User-generated content is content created by contributors outside your business—your customers, super users, fans, and advocates. The content can vary in type, from videos to pictures, blogs to FAQs, and more.
The beauty of using your community to generate content: it quickly amplifies your messaging and scales your content creation beyond belief.
Why Community-Driven Content Marketing Works
Putting Trust Back into Marketing
Unfortunately, trust in marketing is at an all-time low. However, empowering community content creation is an easy way to change your approach. Begone with unwanted marketing spiel and welcome in a new era of authentic, original content.
What modern audiences want are stories, use cases, and original content—all of which can be satisfied by user-generated customer content. People want genuine interactions with actual people, not faceless businesses.
The numbers speak for themselves:- 92% of people are more likely to trust a real person's recommendation over brand-owned content- Brand engagements rise by 28% when consumers are exposed to a mixture of professional marketing content and user-generated content- 70% of online adults trust brand or product recommendations from friends and family- 46% trust written online reviews- Only 10% trust brand ads on websites- Only 9% trust text messages from companies or brands
Simply put, people like real, human interactions.
Cost-Effectively Scale Your Content
As this method involves using your customer community to create content, it's an incredibly cost-effective tactic. Essentially, you're empowering customers to create content for you, unpaid. They're instead driven by other motives—financial incentives, the desire to share knowledge, or meeting like-minded people.
The real business value is that customers run the show while businesses don't need to throw more cash at content marketing campaigns to ramp up efforts.
And those who created the content are also more likely to share it on various social channels, meaning your business reach expands—no extra effort required. Think about improved organic presence and better SEO performance.
Put Customer-Centricity at the Heart of Marketing
Being customer-centric is a competitive advantage. What better way to put customers at the core of your business than by involving them in content activities?
Additionally, their generated content can be used to better serve their needs—you'll better understand what they're looking for.
Utilizing your online community also helps potential customers. Prospects increasingly turn to forums and online communities for self-service channels. As Forrester notes, "Peer-generated community content enhances and complements the power of online self-service. Question-and-answer community threads create a massive volume of content that a company's customer service, product, and marketing teams cannot hope to match internally."
Actually Become Authentic
You'll read it everywhere: "To cut through the noise, your content needs to be authentic." That's a difficult challenge for many businesses.
According to research, 63% of consumers would rather deal with a business they consider authentic over a competitor. Brands that really connect with customers have a much higher chance of cross-selling, upselling, retaining customers, and attracting new ones.
Customer content is a powerful, authentic, and personalized selling machine.
Close the Gap: Foster an Inclusive Community
Encouraging customer content fosters an "us" mindset rather than "them and us." No more businesses trying in vain to constantly impress customers—more of a "one big community" approach.
Using your customer community for creating content ensures the community makes people feel inclusive and part of a membership where they share knowledge, experiences, and expertise. It's all about closing the gap between businesses and customers.
How to Enable Community-Driven Content
Make Content Creation Easy
Getting customers to create content is relatively easy and extremely effective for improving engagement with loyal fans. Provide them with a top community platform to actually share their content.
With the right encouragement and the right platform, you'll find your customer community is an untapped resource of creativity, passion, and knowledge.
Incentivize Participation
Offer virtual currency incentives to encourage and empower user-generated content. Options include:- Points and badges for contributions- Recognition on leaderboards- Feature contributors on your website for added exposure- Exclusive access or perks for top contributors
Maintain Quality with Moderation
Content moderation ensures good quality all-around. Establish clear guidelines for what kind of content you're looking for and review submissions before they go live.
It's a win-win: customers get recognition and platform, you get authentic content at scale.
Repurpose and Amplify
Customer-generated content doesn't have to stay in the community. Repurpose it across channels:- Turn great discussions into blog posts- Feature customer stories in case studies- Share community insights on social media- Include community testimonials in marketing materials
Types of Community Content
Q&A and Discussions
Community members asking and answering questions creates a massive library of searchable content that addresses real customer concerns.
Reviews and Testimonials
Authentic customer reviews carry more weight than marketing copy. Encourage customers to share their experiences.
Use Cases and Stories
How customers actually use your product often reveals applications you hadn't considered. These real-world stories resonate with prospects.
Tips and Best Practices
Power users often develop techniques and workflows that benefit other community members. This peer-to-peer knowledge sharing is incredibly valuable.
Feedback and Ideas
Customer suggestions and feature requests become content that shows you're listening—and inform your product roadmap.
Measuring Community Content Impact
Track how community-driven content performs:
- Volume: How much content is the community generating?
- Engagement: How are people interacting with community content?
- SEO impact: Is community content ranking and driving traffic?
- Support deflection: Is community content reducing support tickets?
- Conversion influence: Does community content appear in customer journeys?
Conclusion
Using your customer community for content can be the answer to cost-effectively scaling your content marketing. Not only will you quickly create more original, authentic content for very little investment, but the content will cut through the noise much better as it resonates with your audience.
With the right encouragement and the right platform, your customer community is an untapped resource of creativity, passion, and knowledge. Content moderation ensures quality all-around.
Community platforms designed for B2B SaaS—like Bettermode—provide tools for enabling and managing user-generated content: discussion forums, Q&A, content moderation, gamification to incentivize participation, and analytics to measure impact.
Ready to scale your content marketing with community? Book a demo with Bettermode.
FAQs
Won't user-generated content hurt our brand quality?
Not with proper moderation and guidelines. Set clear expectations for what kind of content you're looking for, provide templates or prompts, and review content before it goes live. The authenticity of customer content often outweighs minor imperfections.
How do we encourage customers to create content?
Make it easy with simple submission processes. Incentivize with recognition, badges, or rewards. Feature top contributors prominently. Show that you value contributions by responding and engaging with customer content.
What if customers say negative things?
Negative feedback handled well can be more valuable than positive content. It shows you're transparent and responsive. Address concerns publicly, solve problems, and demonstrate commitment to improvement. This builds more trust than hiding criticism.
How do we balance professional and user-generated content?
Aim for a mix. Professional content provides polish and brand voice. User-generated content provides authenticity and scale. Use professional content for core messaging, user-generated content for social proof and community engagement.
