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Integration is key: Driving traffic to your community

Generating traffic is at the heart of all online strategies. Yes, you guessed it, the same goes for your customer community.After all, it’s this ‘traffic’ that is the people who expand your knowledge base, improve your support, make customers happier and help to grow revenue. To put it bluntly, without traffic your community is useless. A community without traffic is like starting a restaurant that entices nobody to step through the door, let alone have a meal. So, that begs the question: how do you drive relevant traffic to your community?

It’s time to integrate!

One of the best ways to do this is through integrations. Integrations are absolutely crucial when it comes to driving traffic and engagement to your community. Integrations in key locations will ensure a constant stream of new users and activity. A powerful integration will also present your community’s content in the exact areas where your customers might get stuck—resulting in faster resolutions to customer queries and a slicker user experience. What’s more, integration strategies are not only for new communities. They should be constantly tweaked and updated on existing communities to ensure they stay relevant and keep driving traffic to your site.

When you consider that many of the answers to customer queries can be found in your community, it makes sense to maximize the ways you point your users to this content—that’s where integrations come in. Integrations are a range of tools that leverage your existing community content in order to provide the right information to the right user, in the right place. Put simply, integrations are different ways to direct people to content they are looking for—from hyperlinks to widgets to newsletters. Easier said than done? Of course, however at inSided we have come up with a checklist to ensure you are covering all the bases when it comes to integrations and your community.

Our checklist will not just show you some inSpiring examples and best practices—it also includes new ways of steering users much more efficiently. Here are a few suggestions to make sure you are getting the most out of your integrations:

  • Hyperlinks to your help center (this could be from your support header for example). Not only the help center homepage of course, but also category specific help areas—you want to make it as easy as possible for the customer to get the answer they require.
  • Include links to the help center in your email newsletters and customer registrations.
  • Make sure customer support reply to queries with links to your help center. Help your customers help themselves!
  • Install embeddable widgets or link articles in the form of a “Help” button or a question mark.
  • Generate content that adds value, whether it be on your site, a guest site or social media, and link it back your knowledge base. 

Here’s a nice example of how Sonos use integrations to link to their community: 

Sonos Community integrations For more detailed explanations and more tips and tricks, download the full checklist PDF. Remember, while reading:

  1. Check that you are following all of the recommended basic integrations. These are an absolute must-have.
  2. Advanced/additional integrations will accelerate your success. While they are not as fundamental as the basic integrations, they are powerful boosts for traffic.
  3. Be sure to go through the list at the end of the document for more inspiration and quick wins!

When it comes to driving traffic to your help center, integrations are only one piece of the puzzle. It may also be useful to check out this Forbes article on proven ways to drive traffic to your site to make sure you are covering all your bases.

Share your experience

Do you have a cool integration which wasn’t covered in the document? We are interested! Let us know in the comments or post on our community. There are a whole host of ways aside from integrations to effectively add value to your community. To be sure you are getting the most from your community check out our eBook, the Ultimate Guide to Community Management. In all, the more input and integration you have with your community and its users, the more value it will give. As the old saying goes, the more you put in, the more you get out.