Vanilla Forums Blog

In a world where everyone’s talking about the benefits of digital marketing, it can be easy to forget the pitfalls. Although digital marketing is an essential tool for modern businesses to forge personal connections with customers in the way they expect and deserve, it does have its limitations.

In fact, these limitations are the reason overreliance on digital marketing can cause blind spots. And one of the most common blind spots is community management efforts.

The world of B2B sales is more complex today than at any other time, which means closing sales is more difficult than ever. The B2B buying cycle has grown especially perilous (if you’re the one selling, that is) because your customers are increasingly educating themselves online, rather than relying on account executives to do it for them.  

On one level, this makes B2B selling in all sectors much more difficult. But if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll discover there’s just as much opportunity to set yourself apart as well. You just have to enter the arena intelligently.  

The key to success in any endeavor is measurement.

I mean that quite literally. Without a quantifiable sense of where you are vs. where you were, you can’t know (in any meaningful way) whether you’ve succeeded or not.

When it comes to digital marketing, this truism barely needs stating. No marketer in his or her right mind would walk into the CMO's office without a set of precise measures indicating the success (or failure!) of last month's new campaign.

Self-serve customer support communities can be an essential support tool for any brand. But managing a community that grows around a social media page is challenging for many reasons. One of them is that successful B2C community forum management requires a delicate balance between the professional and personal.

Creating a vibrant, loyal, and vocal online community is one of the most important steps you can take in driving brand loyalty and engagement.  .  As we’ve previously discussed, an active online community acts as an incubator for new ideas, deflects customer support tickets, drives brand loyalty and facilitates personalized  marketing opportunities, and more.