Tag: Barbara Genest

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Brand Community Examples and Why They are So Successful

Building a community around your brand is vital in today’s marketing and consumer world. Consumers are looking for trust, credibility, and authenticity. Without these factors, you are unlikely to make any sales or make an impact within your industry, which is why many of the top brands today work hard to build a specific community around their values, products, services, and more.

 

Dissecting how the top brands take advantage of their communities can provide you with more tools and resources to grow a winning brand community of your own. The following are four brand community examples to emulate and why they are so successful:

 

  • Airbnb – You know all about this community because everyone talks about verified hosts. Verified hosts take part in this private community to learn how to make the most of their Airbnb business and rentals.

 

  • Once they make it to a certain point, YouTube- The creators on YouTube are invited to a private creator’s community that gives them motivation, tips, and more to make their channels better. In some communities, this is taken outside the online community right into co-working hubs.

 

  • Lego – This community enables enthusiasts to share what they are creating with Lego and helps drive product creation and innovation. Members can submit ideas, and they can win prizes and contests.

 

  • Airstream – They offer owners or wishful owners a community that allows them to share the interest and love of their airstreams. They can also learn about events and places to stay less expensively.

 

  • Harley Davidson – This close-knit community offers a sense of connection to Harley riders and their loved ones. They use the group to inspire loyalty, market the latest items, and more like big events and gatherings.

 

  • Trader Joe’s – You can join a discussion board, listen to their podcast, and find all about new products and how to use them before they come out. People love TJs so much that even in areas without a store, yet they build a fanbase using communities so that before they even break ground, they know they have enough customers to make it work.

 

  • Gone With the Wynns – This YouTube sailing couple spends a lot of time within their communities on YouTube publicly and privately within Patreon. Due to their active community, they have raised money to help animals and clean up the ocean.

 

  • High Carb Hannah – This YouTube star has a fabulous community based on her website where she has generated enough income through her offerings to build a house and live a very happy and active life outside of just work.

 

  • Apple – This community is very large and full of users and would-be users who love everything about Apple products. The community offers peer-to-peer support and a place to hang out with other like-minded folks.

 

Now that you think about it, you can find many communities for any product or service, or problem that you have. The advantage to creating a community yourself for your brand is enormous to you and the customers you want to help. The more they know about you and feel safe with you, the more likely they will buy and become repeat and long-term customers.

 

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Three Important Brand Community Practices to Follow

A strong brand community increases your reach, business revenue, and loyalty. However, to achieve these benefits, you must nurture, support, and commit to providing value to it. Only when you do the right work for a community can you expect anything positive in return – adopting the common practices that many find success in can get you started in the right direction.

 

Here are three important brand community practices to follow for increased member satisfaction and success:

 

Listen to and Engage with Your Target Audience

 

Everything you do in your business is about ensuring you’re reaching your ideal audience. The only way to be sure is to actually listen to and engage with your members in a deep way that ensures you find out the information you need to help them most.

 

While you can outsource to a community manager VA to get help with your community, you are the one who needs to show up occasionally to engage with the target audience because it will make them feel like VIPs that you take the time to be with them.

 

Address the Needs of Your Audience

 

Once you realize what your audience really needs, it’s time to address those needs with your messaging, education, products, and services. Everything you do is designed to provide solutions to your audience to help them solve their problems as easily as possible.

 

Use analytics, surveys, questionaries, freebies, engagement, contests, and more to determine what gets your audience’s attention based on the information and data you collect. The data you collect will inform you what their needs are and help create amazing content for them.

 

Choose the Right Platform or Community Structure

 

Today, community-building platforms are ubiquitous. Because of this, you can choose your perfect community to help you promote your business to a captive and interested audience. It really just depends on your own criteria. Do you want a message board that can be threaded? Do you have concerns regarding using the technology? Do you want to allow your members to make in-platform purchases? Do you want the ability to accept uploads or provide downloads? Whatever it is that you need to deliver to your audience is out there.

 

Write down what you need in a community, and then compare your needs to what’s available. You can always start easy with a Facebook Group, but there are many other options. Don’t assume all the different options are too expensive. Facebook may be free for you to use, but there are compromises to using anything free, just like there are compromises to be made even if you pay for a platform.

 

Many brands can get a community started easily; however, keeping it organized, engaged, and beneficial to your core audience is where many fall through. Not following or incorporating these top three community practices will only lead you down one road: failure. Adopt them today to build the brand community you want to achieve all your goals and more.

 

 

Community Engagement is Key to Growing Your Business

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Five Tips to Creating Engaging Content for Your Business Community

The content you share within your online or brand community is important. However, it can stop your success instantly. If you don’t have content to share, you don’t have a community worth joining. Customer or member interaction is far from the only thing you need to rely on to build a successful community around your brand.

 

The content you share can make a powerful impact even if you don’t see any engagement right away. Maintaining useful and valuable content can be overwhelming and stressful. As long as you know your target audience, their needs and pain points, and what your business is all about, you shouldn’t have a problem.

 

Here are five tips to creating quality and engaging content for your community members:

 

Start with Your Member Persona

 

A member persona describes who your ideal customer is and who you want to attract to your community. There are several ways your ideal customer may enter your community. For example, they may become buyers based on an advert they answered, they may join your community first and then find things they need, or they may have bought from an affiliate of yours and now are part of the community.

 

The main thing is that the only way to ensure you attract the right people is to develop ideal customer personas that fully describe them as they travel through their buying journey. Some people will be in the awareness phase, some people will be in the choosing phase, and it’s on you to ensure you create the right content and information for each of your ideal customers regardless of the place they are in their buying journey.

 

Use Visuals and Video

 

Use a variety of content types, including interesting and unexpected videos and visuals. These get your audience’s attention and keep them engaged. Any content you already have can be made into visual content too. For example, if you post five ways to do something, you can easily create a video and a meme to go with it. When content is easier to share and looks great, it gets more attention.

 

Solve a Common Problem

 

You don’t have to conduct brain surgery to help your customers. You can solve the most basic problems for them and make them customers and community members for life. Take the time to collect a list of the issues based on your community members’ questions and discussions. They know what their problems are, and you’re just the expert to discover and promote the solutions to them.

 

Get Personal and Ask Questions

 

Once people join your communities, please don’t ignore them. Instead, they should almost immediately be welcomed to the community and asked relevant questions that can get the ball rolling on open discussions and engagement within your groups. Remember, these questions can also promote blog posts and even help you develop new product and service ideas.

 

Always End with A Call-To-Action

 

Even within your groups and communities, it’s imperative to remember always to tell them what to do. Your call to action is all about the reason for your post or communication in the first place. What action do you want them to do next after consuming that content? Don’t leave it to chance. Tell them what to do.

 

Make sure you follow or incorporate each of these tips every time you share or create content within your community. The more quality content you create with your target audience as your main priority, the more beneficial your brand community will be to the success of your business.

 

 

 

 

 

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Communities Foster Customer Success: Here’s How

Building a community around your brand may sound like a personal choice and more valuable to your business than your customers. However, it is quite the opposite. Your community allows your customers or members to be more successful in many different ways.

 

Well-run communities are packed full of valuable information and engagement to enable your members to feel more important and empowered. In addition, maintaining their loyalty is easier in a community as you can provide both traditional and self-serve support — meaning you no longer need to rely on normal business hours to value your customers.

 

Here are five ways communities foster customer success:

 

You Provide High-Quality Relevant Content

 

By using your communities as a distribution platform for your most relevant and high-quality content, you’ll be keeping your customers engaged every single day and, more importantly, twenty-four hours a day by giving them access to the vital information they need to solve their problems.

 

You and Members Build Strong Human Connections and Relationships

 

The exchanges with your members and the interactions members have together build strong connections and even develop relationships outside of your membership, forum, or group. When your members become attached to everyone else in the group, you truly will build brand advocates who will tell others about your community.

 

You Can Develop Improved Products and Services

 

By hanging out with your ideal customers, you will receive the most amazing insight into what they really need. When you see problems that they talk about, it will generate more ideas. Make it simple for your members to ask questions, comment, and discuss all the issues relating to why your community exists, and soon you’ll have a never-ending supply of product and service ideas.

 

You Can Provide (and receive) Inspiration and Empowerment

 

Having a captive audience via a forum, group, and community is one of the most powerful ways to provide your ideal audience inspiration and to empower them with the knowledge they need to use your products and services (or the ones you recommend) to create the life they want based on your particular niche.

 

They Receive Daily Communication and Motivating Interaction

 

Finding a way to stay at the top of your audience’s mind is another reason community building is effective. When your members receive daily communication from you that encourages them to act on their goals and dreams and to brag about it or ask questions about it within your community, it’s very motivating to everyone.

 

When it comes down to it, brand communities support your customers more while also taking your business to the next level. The improved customer support, daily interactions, and communication through publishing unique and useful content drive your customers to success. What is even more important is that communities prevent you from ignoring your customers. The more you listen and prove that you are hearing, the more successful your business will be. Likewise, the more successful your customers are, the more successful you are.

 

 

How Community Member-To-Member Engagement Grows Your Business

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Four Simple Ways to Create Brand Awareness Through Communities

The first step to every marketing funnel includes creating brand awareness. Brand awareness is essential to growing a profitable and sustainable business. When potential customers know who you are, it is easier to form deep connections that prevent them from running to your competitor.

 

In other words, brand awareness influences the trust and credibility needed to make purchases, create loyal customers, and maintain a competitive edge. Building a community is an affordable and powerful way to get the brand recognition you need to be successful.

 

The following are four ways to create more brand awareness with your online or business community:

 

Ask Your Members to Share

 

This is the simplest way to get more brand awareness. For every piece of content you share with your audience, ask them to share the parts for public consumption. When you ask them to share and even incentivize them by developing a referral program, you’ll start building your community fast.

 

Create Surveys or Feedback Forms

 

While some members will offer their thoughts without your asking, the truth is, even inside a group, people are more likely to give you this information if you ask for it via a survey or feedback form, depending on what you want to know. So don’t be shy about creating surveys either.

 

If you’re trying to develop a new product, for example, use your community to help. Give them three choices on the title or ask them for feedback on the branding. This accomplishes two things. One, you will make a better solution with your audience’s help, and two, you are promoting it and developing excitement in your audience.

 

Develop Engaging and Shareable Content

 

Use the information you glean from your audience inside the community to develop more engaging and sharable content. Turn compliments into memes, take data and create an infographic, and try to produce content that your members want to consume and, more importantly, want to share.

 

Take Advantage of Platform Features

 

Depending on what platform you use, it will have a variety of features. Facebook, for example, enables you to create a variety of types of groups with assorted options to use bots, have forms, take payments, and so much more. While a platform like Mighty Networks offers a whole host of options too. Use the features within the platform. They are there for a reason.

 

It is easy to see that communities can create brand awareness that leads down a more successful path. It’s simple: if your customers don’t know you exist or have value to provide, you won’t be able to build a sustainable and profitable business. In addition, brand or online communities using social media make it easier to find and reach your target audience.

Six Tips to Improving your Social Media Story Content

 

 

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Five Important Ways Communities Increase Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty is what makes the effort of building and moderating an online or brand community so important. Member-to-member interaction, social proof, and the quality content provided within the groups inspire them to stay around and seek more.

 

These relationships also fuel them to share your communities or become brand advocates. Thus, saving you even more money while also increasing your potential to reach more people.

 

In other words, brand loyalty is essential to not only solidify current success but future success too. To grow a profitable and sustainable business, building a branded community is essential.

 

The following are five important ways communities increase brand loyalty:

 

Business-To-Member Communication

 

Communicating with your customers directly is an amazing invention of modern times. In the old days, you had to advertise on TV, radio, or various print means and wait to see what happened. So, it could be hard to tell if it worked for the reasons you think it did.

 

Now you can simply tell your members directly about your offers without the go-between. You can see when they view a message or respond to it and even see them talking to their friends in the group. But most of all, getting to send them a message right now that they’re going to get directly from you is an amazing thing and will keep you at the top of their mind.

 

Valuable and Engaging Content

 

It’s very important to understand that publishing anything just to put it in your community is not the goal. You want the content you publish and share with them to be valuable and engaging. You want them to look forward to seeing the latest content you share every day.

 

You want them to wait for it, excited for it to appear. However, that will only happen if you take the time to create desirable content based on what you know about them and how it relates to their need to use your solutions and products.

 

Member-To-Member Communication

 

This is one of the most important parts of building a community that will change everything for your business. Once your members start talking to each other about their lives, and your products and services, and how they help or don’t help, you’re going to end up getting the most invaluable information ever that will help you improve your products and make them think you’re a mind reader.

 

Special Offers or Member Discounts

 

If you promote outside your membership group or community, a terrific way to make the members feel special is to offer them some form of reward or a loyalty program. So many big businesses don’t understand how much it harms their relationship with their customer when they offer the new deals only to their new customers. Offer your members things you don’t offer anyone else because they are important.

 

Superior Customer Experience and Service

 

When you engage and spend time with your community every day, you provide customer care directly. As a result, they will perceive their customer service as better because they feel heard.

The more you nurture your customers and seek a relationship with them, the more likely they will become loyal customers or followers of your brand. Loyal customers advocate for your business and ensure the success of your brand now and in the future. Work always to keep your community engaged, be involved in the process, ask for feedback and reward them for improving your brand loyalty.

 

Six Ways to Use Communities to Promote Your Products

 

 

 

 

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Community Building Equals High Return on Investment

According to the stats, it only takes most membership communities and groups about four months to break even on the initial investment when starting and running an online brand community for business.

 

In addition, a 2014 online communities benchmark report found that nearly two-thirds of companies manage some form of an online community, and the bigger your company is, the more likely you are to have one. However, don’t let that intimidate you. Bigger isn’t always better.

 

These communities are used to test and improve their products to serve their target audience better. Thus, allowing the business to save more money as they take fewer risks due to the helpful information they get from their communities.

 

The brands focusing most of their effort on their communities can see an average return on investment of 6,459% — showing you just how important community building is for business.

 

Building a community for your brand provides a high return on investment due to the following reasons:

 

  • Low Acquisition Costs – The technology that exists today to build your community is available for free. You can also use paid solutions if you prefer or want to overcome any restrictions other branded platforms have inexpensively. You can use Facebook Groups to get started. Once your community is large enough or you’ve tested the concept enough, you can then build a community using any number of platforms, from plugins to your shopping cart software to full-fledged active social networks using software like Mighty Networks.

 

  • High Engagement Potential – When you are running your own community, you are in charge of the tone, the engagement, and the mood. The noise created by outsiders will be eliminated so that you can focus on the best engagement possible with each member.

 

  • Quality Content Ideas Generated – Once your group gets moving and people get to talking, you’re going to find so many quality content ideas just in the comments and discussions of your group members. Customers will tell you what they need from you if you just ask them and listen to the answers.

 

  • Brand Loyalty and Retention Increases – When your members see you interact with others in the group, even if it is just printed on a computer or smartphone screen, the immediacy and personal responses you give will make them stick to you like glue. Since it’s easier to keep a customer than getting a new one, this is golden.

 

  • Increase Marketing Potential – Sharing your content and products within these communities provides another space to put your information into the hands of the people who need it but in a more captive way. You only have to promote the community and not each individual product if you don’t want to when using this method.

 

Overall, starting a community around your brand is likely to produce your best return on investment. The low acquisition costs and high engagement created work together to make it happen. You gain so much insight into your customer that you can develop amazing products and solutions for them. The more you get involved and keep your community members engaged, the more value you provide, the more you will increase your return on investment.

 

 

 

 

 

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Six Ways to Use Communities to Promote Your Products

Using communities to promote your products is by far one of the most effective ways to increase your revenue and loyalty to your brand. Sharing products within your community, or similar ones as an affiliate, is successful because the people within these groups are already interested and likely looking to purchase.

 

However, just because you share the products doesn’t mean it will automatically be successful. Sometimes you need to think creatively to promote your products without being so direct. Over promotion or creating content that looks too much like normal advertisements won’t get you anywhere. In fact, that will likely turn your audience away.

 

The following are six ways to use your brand community to promote your products and services more successfully:

 

Run a Giveaway

 

This is an effective way to just get the word out about your products without having to spend money on an advertisement or even a sales page. What you do is host a giveaway that you ask for entries too.

 

The entry can just consist of them providing their email address and name or other information that you decide. You can make this work using your email marketing software like Aweber, a Google Form, and your website to host the form.

 

Please keep it simple, but every single chance you can promote the contest, which is also promoting your business since entries are completed on your website where they can clearly see your offers. Plus, once they enter, they are now on your email list too.

 

Then when someone wins, promote the winner too, and again, this gives you a chance to go over what the product is and why it’s so great in public. You can then take this chance to give everyone who submitted a coupon and then everyone who is currently reading, a different coupon to buy.

 

Host a Contest

 

You can run the contest a lot like the giveaway in terms of the technology you use. You just need to make a form using a form maker like Google Forms, Gravity Forms, or even Acuity Scheduling. The concept is much the same, but you’re asking for something more than email addresses to participate this time.

 

The prize you offer should always be one of your products, services, or an affiliate’s products and or services so that each time you promote the contest, you are also promoting the product or service.

 

The other way to host a contest, with a required entry fee. For example, let’s say you’re an art teacher and your main product is courses for doing art in some way. You may want to offer your students a chance to win prizes that you can either buy with the fees collected or that you can ask vendors to sponsor, or you can pay for yourself. The press you get from promoting the contest, and the participants and winners will be worth it.

 

Hire Someone

 

One way to keep your community hopping is to hire people to work in the community. For example, you can hire a VA who will run your contests, promote your products, and drive engagement on your behalf. Outsourcing and reducing your workload will help you earn more money by freeing you to create more products and services and participate in engagement more.

 

Develop an Affiliate Program

 

If you have even one product, especially if it’s digital, consider having an affiliate program. When you set this up, you can promote all your products and services individually, or just some of them, or just the membership community itself. Again, it’s up to you, but having this type of system will increase revenue exponentially, even if it’s only used as a referral system for your members.

 

Ask for Feedback and Reviews

 

Use your group and the discussion boards you create to ask for feedback and reviews on your products and services that you can use on your sales pages, in promotions, and more. If you sell your products anywhere outside your group, you can even use the group to point out all the places you sell them, so they will feel free to give you reviews on those other platforms, too, where permitted.

 

Run a Live Demo or How-To-Presentation

 

A really fun way to use your brand community is to “go live,” as they like to say on Facebook to demonstrate your product, talk about an issue, or give a how-to presentation on using something you sell or are promoting as an affiliate. People love participating in live events, even if they’re unplanned and last minute. The good news is that they are recorded and can be enjoyed and repurposed at any time.

 

If you plan to build a community or use other communities to share your products, you need to create content that doesn’t feel too pushy or promotional. The more you understand your target audience, get them involved, and provide real value, the more you gain more revenue. With these six selling techniques, you can be sure that your promotions work every time.

 

 

 

 

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Building a Community is The Competitive Advantage Your Business Needs

Research and statistics show that you must have a competitive edge to make it in business. No businesses succeed without fierce competition, especially with the advancements in technology and online communication.

 

The truth is, many of these exciting advancements destroyed common barriers to entry that most businesses had in the past – meaning you can start a business with next to nothing. Unfortunately, due to that, the competition only gets worse as more tools and resources are created.

 

Building a community around your brand will provide you with a competitive advantage because customers are increasingly dissatisfied with the kind of customer care they are receiving. A branded community can help you provide better customer care because as you build a community, you’re also building relationships that advance trust, which increases your ability to influence sales.

 

The following are a few ways community building helps you stay ahead of your competition:

 

  • Through Strong Member Connections and Relationships – People like feeling as if they belong to a community. Unfortunately, building community in our private lives is harder than ever. Everyone is busy, but creating these customer-centric communities can make your customers feel more connected not just with you but with the other customers as they converse and comingle.

 

  • By Being a Source of Endless Lead Generation – Every single person you get into your group is a source of more members. Because of this, once you start building a community, your reach will increase as your leads grow.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Landing Pages

  • Word-of-Mouth Marketing – Even if your customers only talk about your products and services inside the group, new members will still see the discussions, which will reduce their fear and help them make a purchasing choice for the products they see discussed within the group community. However, once a member becomes your loyal customer, they will start asking their friends to join them in the community because it feels good to share what’s good in your life.

 

  • Through Community Feedback and Engagement – One of the most important aspects to you, and from your viewpoint as a business owner, is the ability to read your customers’ minds. Of course, you really can’t do that, but by watching the discussions take off that you prompt and experiencing the feedback generated, the information you glean will become invaluable. Eventually, your customers will start claiming you can read their minds, and then you’ll stand far out from your competition.

 

  • By Being Unique, Fun, and Helpful – Face it, most businesses are not unique, fun, or helpful. But you have this amazing opportunity to stand out and be that for your customers in a way that benefits you both.

 

Overall, community building shows your target audience that you want to support them and their needs. Your community shows, and the information you provide shows them that you are willing to listen to them and serve them instead of your own needs. The more you focus on your target audience, the more you can easily stay ahead of your competition. Which is why building a community around your brand is the competitive advantage your business needs to be successful.

 

 

 

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Five Ways Communities Increase Business Revenue

Communities provide more to your business than just brand awareness, credibility, and loyalty. A branded community also offers more potential to increase your business revenue. And hey, you want to make money, right? I mean, that is part of the reason to start a business.

 

The possibility to increase your revenue means building a brand community is not something you should avoid or skip over, even if it sounds like a lot of work to you. It can be a lot of work, true, but the payoff is enormous if done right.

 

Communities offer one of the largest returns on investments and monetizing it will only provide more value to your members anyway. The more you make, the more you can give your community.

 

Here are five ways to monetize your brand community and increase your business revenue:

 

  1. Digital Products – Promote various digital products from eBooks, reports, templates, images, art, infographics, software, and more. If you can create it or pay someone to make it for you, and it’s digital, you should do it. Digital products are the best type because it doesn’t cost more to generate more of them. Your cost is tied up in the first creation, and that’s it. So, you can promote every single new product you create right in your group without paying for one advertisement.

 

  1. Entrance Fees or Competitions – You can actually monetize your community by making part of it members only for a fee. You can also host various competitions around your niche and ask for a fee for processing the entry – alternatively, you can ask for sponsors to pay for the competition. Be sure to read the rules of the platform and your locality before asking for contest fees, but in most areas, especially in the arts, it’s acceptable to ask for a small entrance processing fee.

 

  1. Exclusive Access Content – If you want to host a workshop, a webinar, or even private YOUTUBE videos, you can provide a special link for people to pay for entrance to view the exclusive VIP content. Using tools like Patreon and other platforms that allow you to provide access to exclusive content is key here.

 

  1. Brand Merchandise – Don’t laugh, but once your community reaches a certain point, they will want merch like t-shirts, coloring books, mugs, stickers, journals, and more that you create and offer to them because they like you that much. It really depends on your niche, of course, but if you have a great tagline and responsive members, try a t-shirt campaign first using drop-shipping instead of spending money upfront for the merch. Then, once you know you have enough interest, you can look for better options.

 

  1. Affiliate Products or Sponsored Content – A really fun way to make more money is to promote other people’s products by signing up as an affiliate or by accepting a fee upfront for sponsored content. Influencers do this all the time, and even if you don’t think of yourself that way, you are an influencer as a business owner who runs a brand community.

Choose Affiliate Promotions That Make Sense for Your Business

Overall, the potential to monetize your community is nearly endless, and the possibilities ultimately depend on your niche and goals as a business. However, these options can work for just about any industry and take your business to new earning potential. The great thing about promoting items for sale in a branded community is that customers who join these communities expect to see promotions and be offered amazing deals. They are ready to buy if you’re ready to provide them with what they want.