The SmartBear Community unites communities for various products built by SmartBear. We decided to add new content to the Community and involve different audiences.
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Company: SmartBear
Community: SmartBear Community
Lithy category: Social Marketing Champion
As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.
Our unique marketing campaign
The SmartBear Community unites communities for various products built by SmartBear. Our product communities were mostly support communities – people came there to resolve their technical questions. Once they found solutions, they would leave the community until they had more questions.
We decided to add new content to the Community and involve different audiences. We set up online community events with 12-14-hr duration and invited our Product Team, our customers, technical specialists, experts and industry influencers to take part. We named them Community Days.
Key event details:
- The Product Team was online for 14 hours to cover as many time zones as we can
- We promised our customers to answer any questions they post during the events
- We shared inspiring and useful content during the events
- We performed global promotion of the events to invite our customers, prospects and industry experts.
Benefits
*from the customer side
- customers had the opportunity to talk with the Product Team
- any questions to our Product Team, even the toughest ones, were answered within minutes
- participants felt the involvement in the product development process (we shared our roadmap, asked for their advice on the current and upcoming features)
*from the company side
- we built a customer advocacy group of loyal customers
- we got valuable feedback from people who use our products on a daily basis
- we boosted the community activity
- we increased the awareness of our products among our users
Our plan using Lithium to promote the campaign: We promoted the events using different resources: the Community site, the email market, social media, personal invitations, etc.
Community pages
Lithium allows changing the layout of any community page easily. This helped us modify the main product community page by adding a welcome part for participants of the events. We recorded a video along with a short description of the events, explained to people “rules” of the events. This welcome part was available on all community pages:
Twitter integration
The Lithium Twitter integration helped us share the content posted to the Community on Twitter. Also, it’s very helpful to see the Twitter feed on community pages to spot the latest tweets and react fast.
Webinars
During the online community events, we set up several free webinars. This significantly increased involvement of customers in the community life. At the webinars, we shared useful use cases, taught new users by showing them key product features. After the webinars, discussions continued in the Community.
Email Market
We did a huge email marketing campaign to promote the events across our target audience. We used the Lithium built-in functionality, as well as third-party services. These emails showed a very good conversion rate – 5%
The results
Such events showed great results. Our customers felt that we are a very transparent company. This helped us increase the number of loyal customers.
From the Community metrics, we got a significant growth in all key metrics.
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