Many things are uncertain in the current macroeconomic climate, but one thing is for sure – meaningful relationships between buyers and sellers are more crucial than ever. Today’s buyers demand friction-free purchase experiences that are more personalized, while businesses are adapting to changes in data privacy policy and trying to stand out in saturated channels. With customer acquisition costs rising, it’s become increasingly difficult for sellers to scale marketing and customer engagement. Businesses need a way to connect with their customers that maximizes their marketing ROI without compromising the customer experience. One way to do that is by providing value through creating a community.
In our 2022 State of U.S. Consumer Trends Report, we found that during Q2 of 2022, almost a quarter of social media users surveyed actively participated in an online community. And when people join online communities, they expect to discover new things, find new sources of inspiration, and interact with others who share common interests – sounds like an ideal space for a business to reach potential customers.
We know there’s a clear disconnect between buyers and sellers at the moment, but a focus on building communities that educate, inspire, and foster connections can help connect those dots.
Our Investment in Community
At HubSpot, we believe true connection is the foundation for sustainable growth, so we're doubling down on our investment in community building, by investing in, well, Community.
With a mission to create meaningful connections through conversation, Community is an enterprise-grade SMS text messaging service that gives marketers the power to create authentic 1:1 customer engagement at scale. Already a trusted solution for global enterprise brands like Netflix and McDonald’s and public figures including the Obamas and President Joe Biden, Community is built to help marketers overcome the crisis of disconnection by moving away from the generic message blasts customers unsubscribe from and towards a personalized experience that’s more conversational and less transactional.
The people behind Community understand the value of building deeper connections with customers, which is core to our mission at HubSpot. Through its easy-to-use platform, Community allows marketers to authentically connect with their audiences by giving them the ability to create, customize, and distribute messages directly to customers.
Through both Community’s web-based portal and mobile app, marketers can compose messages and see AI-clustered customer replies, allowing them to send personalized responses at scale quickly. And by leveraging best-in-class SMS and MMS technology along with relationships with major network carriers, Community enables its users to send content-rich messages straight to customers’ mobile devices from a real 10-digit phone number.
One part of the crisis of disconnection businesses currently face is disconnected data and systems. Community solves that issue and enables marketers to gather insights into their campaigns by connecting customer responses and engagement data to a state-of-the-art platform for audience management, conversations, automation, and analytics all while monitoring and automating data privacy compliance and safety.
Community’s intuitive platform gives marketers access to valuable insights that allow for more personalized customer interactions.
Building the Future of Community Through Conversation
Through a combination of necessity and innovation, people are putting greater effort into community building in the digital space. And with global smartphone subscriptions projected to reach over 7.6 million by 2027, now is the time to invest in mobile marketing through conversational communities. Community is the tool that gives businesses the power to do so effectively. We’re thrilled to make this investment in Community as it also includes a future product partnership in which Community’s messaging tools will pull segment and marketing data from HubSpot and power 1:1, 1: few, and 1: many communications with our joint customers.
We’re looking forward to working with Community to help businesses strengthen their connections to their communities through the power of conversation.
Learn more about Community here or read the recent press release here.