Sonos is one of the world’s leading home audio companies. Its Play:1, Play:3, and Play:5 speakers offer a networked, easily configurable home listening experience with great audio quality.
Sonos has been selling home audio equipment since 2005, and it now has millions of customers around the world. The company launched a customer community to better support its legions of users, but since migrating to the inSided platform in 2016, it has realized two additional benefits from its community: low-cost content marketing and peer advice.
The Sonos community features a “What to get” section that lets new customers—or even prospective customers—describe their living spaces. Community members then weigh in on recommended speaker options for the space.
Not only do community users get feedback from Sonos enthusiasts about their audio setup, the content in the “What to get” subforum serves as a constantly growing knowledge base that helps other prospects and customers in the future.
Plus, the user-generated “What to get” content helps optimize the search ranking of community questions (and the community as a whole).
In this way, the “What to get” subforum serves some of the same functions as content marketing: It boosts SEO, while also providing up-to-date, user-friendly guides to Sonos product setups.
Best of all, the content in the Sonos community comes from real Sonos users. It therefore gives prospective customers authentic, trustworthy information—exactly what many consumers are turning to. According to UK PR firm WithPR, user-generated content is more trusted than any kind of branded content.