We're thrilled to have a Q&A with Helpstream customer Marketo, the fastest growing marketing automation company. Here, Jon Miller, VP of marketing for Marketo, answers our questions about their use of customer communities. Jon explores best practices in demand generation, lead management, and online marketing in his popular blog, Modern B2B Marketing, and is a frequent columnist and speaker at industry events.

What motivated you to build a customer community for Marketo?
When we founded Marketo, we wanted to build a Web 2.0 marketing automation company and technology that would be easy for marketers to buy and use. Ultimately, we wanted to scale the business and build a customer base of thousands – which had never been done in marketing automation, but was central to our vision. We knew we couldn’t scale to this degree if we were handling customer service the old-fashioned way. From the beginning, we knew we needed a customer community to provide customer support and enable great success, and there were a couple main elements where the community vision would play.

Our goal was to support our customers by providing a place they could go with problems or questions. Today’s customers should have the opportunity to take a self-service approach before having to call one of our agents. In addition, many of the questions we get from customers are about successfully managing leads and creating good demand generation campaigns – questions that are perfect for the community environment where customers benefit from sharing and learning from one another.

Another major factor that drove our community was the direct line of communication it created with our product managers. With so many customers, the community environment still allows for product feedback suggestions, and preferences. There’s no more clear and direct information you can get from your customers than through a community.

We also use our community as product documentation, so Helpstream hosts our product documents and enables our community portal. We felt strongly those two areas needed to be integrated into the same system so that when a customer went to look for something, could read through the appropriate product literature, then comment on the documents the same way they can comment on articles. This creates an entirely open and informative system.

What advice would you give other CMOs on investing in customer communities?
Quite simply, invest in the right platform. Identify what you want from your community, then find a platform that meets those needs. We went through two different community platforms before selecting Helpstream and neither scaled for our purposes – they weren’t delivering the customer experience we were looking for and they were making our internal team unproductive. It’s easy to be tempted by inexpensive off-the-shelf software, but we didn’t find anything else that had all the features we needed, including combining support and documentation.

How has your customer community helped Marketo?
It’s helped in several ways. First, it’s reduced the load on our support engineers and increased their ability to have people get their questions answered quickly. The Helpstream community has improved our customer support system in that it provides integrated case management, so customers get one seamless experience.

We’ve also become more efficient in authoring new product documents because we’re getting constant feedback and insights from our customers on what else they want and need in these documents.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we’ve created stronger customer relationships because our customers have benefited from the direct line of communication. They like submitting feature ideas, then voting and commenting on new features ideas while knowing that we’re listening and responding. It’s a two-way conversation and I think our customers have appreciated that.

How do you track the success of your customer community?
We track several metrics – how many customers are using the community, the frequency and depth of the engagement, how many customers are creating posts and making comments. We share these numbers with our team for a better understanding of the overall engagement between our broad customer base and the community. Our goal is to see the engagement levels increasing over time.

Though, in general, we consider it a success that we have a community where our customers can go and communicate directly with our team as well as other customers. The destination itself is part of achieving our service vision.

How do you see your customer community evolving over time for Marketo?
Over time, one of the things we’d like to build into the community is a way for customers to share ideas and best practices with each other, so that Marketo, our customers and partners can go to community, post how-to articles, best practices and ideas. We want to develop the community into a full-service resource, so it’s not just about Marketo, but about our industry and marketing in general. We believe this is a way to provide additional innovation for our customers and take our community to the next level.