What excites me about building the Jatra Community Platform is the possibilities it unlocks for businesses.

Most of the entrepreneurs are aware of only the ‘user-engagement’ aspect and have not explored the true potential of an online community built around their business.

Did you know that an online community can help you generate leads, boost word of mouth, drive engagement, improve SEO, gather real-world feedback and more.

Curious? Well, tighten your seat-belt, ladies and gentlemen.

Online communities: Beyond the obvious

In the business world, online communities were mostly centered around customer support. Classic examples: Apple Support Community and Google Search Help Community. These communities work very well in answering the most common questions that people have.

However, in the past two decades, I’ve realised that communities do way more than support, if community building is done strategically.

Recommended reading: How to build SaaS community

Let me give you a few reasons why you should build a community:

1. Generate Leads on Autopilot

One of the biggest advantages of having a community is that it becomes a self-sustaining lead generation machine for your business.

Your members naturally share their experiences, recommend your brand and refer others. This user-generated content is a goldmine for SEO to attract organic traffic.

Keep in mind that when your members share their problems, questions and ideas - it builds a hub of knowledge and ‘painkiller’ content. Google and even the LLMs love this type of content because it’s real-world, authentic human-generated content.

Take a look at this graph of a community that is driving traffic purely through user-generated content:

It’s the main reason I recommend building an open community instead of a closed community.

2. Build Strong Word of Mouth and Customer Advocacy

When your users feel connected with your brand, they naturally help spread the word. If you wish to take a more structured approach, you can introduce referral systems and incentives to build your customer advocacy program.

People trust peer recommendations far more than traditional advertisements. We noticed this for a D2C community I helped build. Genuine product reviews, feedback and experiences shared by users helped the community build a strong word of mouth.

3. Gather Real-World Feedback

Your community is your natural gateway to gathering real-world, unbiased feedback for your business.

Members often freely discuss their challenges, preferences and expectations. Gathering this information otherwise requires expensive surveys or focus groups.

You can use the feedback received from your community to build your product roadmap, improve your product and stay ahead of the market trends.

Did you know that Jatra community platform offers native support for product feedback tool. Your community members can give you feedback, others can upvote it and track its development right within the community. How awesome is that? 🙂

4. Drive Engagement Like Never Before

Customer acquisition is cool, but engaged users are the lifeblood of any successful business. Community offers a safe, positive environment for your customers to hang-out, network with others, participate in activities, share ideas and engage in discussions with others.

It’s the reason Jatra offers multiple ways of engaging your users through discussions, chats, events, quizzes, directories and more.

5. Strengthen Brand Identity

An inclusive and positive community environment helps you strengthen your brand identity and reinforce your mission.

It allows you to showcase your core values consistently which resonates deeply with the like-minded individuals.

6. Create a Support System That Works

I quoted two examples of support communities from Apple and Google. They have created a strong support system for their user-base and it’s completely driven by other users.

Apple or Google do not pay these members to help others. When people receive value, they want to give it back. It’s a natural human tendency.

Users seek advice, troubleshoot issues and even celebrate success together. This mutual support system helps you build a strong network of engaged people around your brand.

7. Boost Customer Retention Rates

Most businesses deeply care about customer retention rates, but often struggle with ideas to maintain a high CRR.

I’ve often found that communities help you boost your retention rates. When the customers feel heard, respected and connected with your businesses’ mission - they are less likely to churn.

There is no better tool than a community to build a sense of belonging among your customers; and it works long term!

8. Understand Pain Points Better

Simply listening to your community lets you discover pain-points your customers have. It can open up opportunities you haven’t thought of. I’ll share my own example.

Prior to building Jatra, I regularly visited Reddit, Quora, Facebook and LinkedIn Groups. Simply by hanging out, I discovered various pain points people had. People were regularly expressing their challenges with existing community platforms.

While some of their pain-points were obvious, I found out that main of them were hidden in their questions. For example, a user frustrated with Discourse’s UI was looking for guidance on how to add channels. That’s how I discovered that they were looking for a Discourse alternative.

9. Build Customer Connections

I strongly believe that every business should focus on building a strong connection with its customers, and even go a step further by helping customers connect with each other.

A strong customer network doesn’t just drive emotional engagement; it also fosters long-term loyalty.

Have you ever come across people passionately defending the camera quality of iPhone? If you are active on X (formerly Twitter), you’ve probably seen users going out of their way to defend Apple - often engaging in heated debates with others just to uphold brand’s image.

Isn’t that kind of amazing?

This doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of Apple’s ability to create a deep emotional branding and sense of belonging among its users.

10. Create Competitive Edge

We live in an AI-led world. Anyone with access to an AI model with coding capabilities can quickly build features to compete with your business.

It’s super easy to steal features.

But it’s impossible to steal an engaged community.

Your community is your ultimate competitive edge over your competition. Customers often choose the brands that make them feel valued and understood.

11. Improve SEO

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aspect of community is very underrated. User-generated content has immense potential to rank in Google searches and attract natural backlinks.

Google and search engines like Bing along with chat-bots like Perplexity love user-generated content and refer to it in their responses.

Communities often have very unique content and in my own experience, have found that raw community content ranks better than well-written, SEO-optimized blog posts.

Final thoughts (and are there disadvantages?)

I’ve tried to shed light on the lesser-known aspect of community. Communities are more powerful than most people think.

You may ask, “If communities are so powerful, why isn’t every business building it?”

Well, your question is not 100% correct. I believe 99% of the businesses are building their communities; but not in a structured and strategic way.

The focus on online communities is growing every day. The only problem with communities is that they don’t yield the ROI immediately.

Communities need nurturing for several months before you see results. I often compare community building with setting a flywheel in motion.

Slow to start → but impossible to stop once in motion.

I’ve written about the negative aspects of community building. If you have questions, let me know.