Tag: blogging

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Five Important Principles of Authentic Community Engagement to Learn

With more social media and online communication, being genuine and trustworthy are two important characteristics many consumers are looking for from businesses more than ever.

 

With authentic engagement and communication, you can foster communities that work together to empower each other and your brand. It provides the knowledge you need to improve your products while also helping the members solve problems that can then be used to improve their lives and others. It’s about being real, inspiring your community, and doing your best not to mislead or misdirect them.

 

The following are five important principles to learn and incorporate to inspire authentic community engagement and grow your business:

 

Get the Community Involved and Active Right Away

 

Don’t wait until you have a lot of members to start publishing information and activating the community. At first, your community may feel a little lonely until you get more members but keeping it active and full of information that will still be there when people join is very important to building a dynamic and vibrant community.

 

Encourage Trust and Integrity

 

Set the rules of your community to establish trust and highlight your integrity to the group. As you communicate openly with members of your community, others observe and become more trusting of you as they notice how much integrity you have.

 

Foster Community-Led Solutions

 

As a business owner, you need to create and or find solutions for your ideal customer’s problems related to your niche and your expertise. The impressive thing about having a community is getting input to create more solutions from the people who need them.

 

Be Consistent, Clear, and Open with Communication

 

It can help to create a branding guide that includes your business personality and voice to ensure that all content and communication are consistent, clear, and accurate. It’s a lot easier to be open when you know for sure where your values lie and how to ensure you stick to them.

 

Empower and Support Your Audience

 

The best thing about a group is that you will have one of the best advantages in empowering and supporting your audience. After all, you want them to succeed, and if they succeed, you do too.

 

Create powerful and informed content that serves your members and only your members — meaning don’t just automatically share content that has been shared in other places unless you changed it in some way or added additional meaning to it by connecting it to a success story or a point you want to share. The more personal the content being shared in the group, the more likely your members will come back and engage with each other. Content is how you keep your target audience interested and involved, so make it worth it.

How Community Member-To-Member Engagement Grows Your Business

 

 

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Common Business Problems that Building a Community Can Solve

If you are struggling to build your business and looking for ways to improve, building an online or brand community may be the best solution. In fact, it is likely the tool you’ve needed all along.

 

The following are five common business problems building a community can solve:

 

Poor Return on Investment

 

While email lists, advertisements, and your blog are all fabulous ways to generate interest in your offers, there is nothing more effective than truly getting to know your customers more intimately. If your ROI is not what you want it to be, but your customers are otherwise satisfied, a brand community can help you fix that problem.

 

You can create the community free or for a fee. It’s up to you. It really does depend on your niche and your business model, but you can test out various ways to run your community. Once you have a captive audience that you can communicate with regularly, they will start buying more, and your ROI will improve.

 

Poor Cashflow and Intermittent Revenue

 

Whether you provide services or products, or you’re an affiliate with no products of your own, if you work within a particular niche, your income is likely not consistent if you have not built a community of avid and hungry buyers. Having a membership-based community, whether paid or free, can stabilize your cash flow like nothing else.

 

In your communities, you can offer them the first peek at new products and services, get more feedback, receive more customer reviews, and even get your members to become brand advocates and recommend you to others much easier than you can without having a community.

 

Poor Credibility, Trust, and Awareness

 

Communities humanize businesses, and once that happens, your audience will start trusting you more. The credibility that you end up with after creating more awareness through community building will jumpstart your creative juices and end up helping you become even better in the eyes of your customer base due to all the inside knowledge you’ll gain by being part of your community.

 

Poor Business Growth and Stagnation

 

If you have grown as far as you can with what you are doing, consider building a community. An active and engaged community can really boost your growth and end the stagnation you’re experiencing. Even if you haven’t sold a solitary product yet, building an active community will generate new revenue.

 

Finally, you can vastly improve your customer service by setting up an active and involved community. Not only will your members offer each other community peer-to-peer support, but you’ll also be much more in tune with what is going right and wrong and learn better ways to help your members in the way they desire.

 

 

Four Ways Community Building Improves Customer Service

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Four Ways Communities Improve Customer Experience

Just one bad customer experience can destroy your reputation as a brand or small business owner. Research suggests that consumers are willing to spend more revenue on businesses that have excellent customer service.

 

In fact, a report conducted by The Economist states that 59% of the consumers surveyed are willing to reach out or find other businesses in hopes of a better customer experience. Building a brand community provides the customer experience you need to prevent this from happening.

 

Here are five ways communities can improve your target customer experience:

 

Communities Humanize the Support Process

 

Most consumers are very tired of being just another number or worse, a wallet, and not even thought of as humans. Small business owners are uniquely positioned to offer customers the most human support possible through their use of communities. If you participate, they’re going to see you as a real human with real feelings, and due to that, they’re going to buy more.

 

Communities Improve Customer Engagement

 

Not only will your customers engage and discuss your products one-on-one within the community, getting current ideas and insight into making use of your products and services, but they will also be more likely to respond to you and answer your questions due to the ease of communication in a group environment.

 

Communities Provide Clear Customer Insight and Understanding

 

While the community is mainly for your customer, the truth is, you will gain a lot from having a community. You’re going to learn more about your customer, and that will help you understand what they truly need from you within the bounds of your niche.

 

Communities Streamline the Customer Service Process

 

Offering more avenues of customer care to your customers will make them feel even more heard. It’s hard to provide phone support as a small business, but the next best thing is a community that allows them to publish their questions and find answers in your FAQ or by using your bot. Plus, sometimes you’re going to be there live to help.

 

In the end, making sure your customers have the best experience possible when communicating or engaging with your business prevents you from destroying your reputation or business altogether. Remember, most businesses have to shut down within ten years. The major contributing factors to these shutdowns include poor customer service and not prioritizing your target audience. Building a community provides you more control and tools to ensure you give the best customer experience at all times, anywhere around the world.

 

Four Ways Community Building Improves Customer Service

 

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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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Building Trust Within Your Community Is Vital

The secret to creating more revenue, attracting more customers, and creating high brand recognition starts with trust. Showing your customers by your actions that they can trust you and that you will be there to support them is how you grow loyal advocates for your brand. The brand advocates then do a lot of the marketing work by sharing your content and making purchases.

 

When consumers believe in your brand, product, or services, they are more likely to share them with others. Without trust, you simply won’t have customers or a community. In fact, a 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Report states that 81% of consumers reported trust as their main contributor to making a purchase. Thus, showing you just how important trust is to your success as a company.

 

The following are five ways to build trust within your community to grow your business successfully:

 

Offer Superior Customer Support

 

First and most importantly, your customers or community members must come first. Your support should be as consumer-centric as you can make it. Use the technology at your fingertips by using automated systems like FAQs, Bots, and files with information to help your audience and members feel supported. If your community is very large and active and you’re spending more than 30 minutes a day on customer care, it’s time to hire a customer service, virtual assistant.

 

Share and Encourage User-Generated Content

 

One of the advantages of having a community is all the user-generated content created. You can use a lot of this content in numerous ways, from creating a new blog post answering someone’s question, compiling your members’ answers to questions into a blog post, and even creating a joint book that you can publish on Kindle. It’s really up to you and your imagination to accomplish all the user-generated content you will cause to be created.

 

Ask for Honest Public Reviews

 

Use your community as a way to get genuine and honest feedback. If you seem open to criticism, your community who already loves you will be happy to assist you with making your community and products and services better. You just have to ask and listen.

 

Show Behind-The-Scenes Content

 

This is a fantastic way to get closer to your members and make them feel like true VIPs. Bring them behind the scenes and show them what you do daily. Even if they never want to do it themselves, people love this humanizing content as it brings them much closer to you on a human level.

 

Keep Your Branding Consistent

 

Remember that within your communities, your branding should be very consistent and noticeable. Whether you’re on Facebook or YouTube or your own coded message board community, your audience needs to realize it’s your brand without much thought due to your strong and consistent branding efforts. Your messaging, imaging, and content all need to have the same message regardless of where it is published.

 

Overall, there are several ways you can establish trust within your community. Listening, supporting, and guiding them to success is the only way to establish it. In other words, putting your customers first and making sure they are successful will lead you to success as well. Building trust shouldn’t be hard if you have good products that truly solve your target audience’s problem.

 

How Community Member-To-Member Engagement Grows 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