Tag: Brand awareness

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

 

Posted on

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

 

 

Posted on

Why a Brand Community is the Business Strategy You Need

Communities keep your ideal audience all in one place, making it easier to communicate, market, and engage and motivate them to buy your products, use your services, and consume your content. All of this together shows you why communities are a valuable marketing tool and business strategy to adopt if you want to grow your business. Plus, having a brand-centered community is fun too. And who doesn’t want to have a little fun while making money?

 

The following are the top five crucial reasons to build a brand community:

 

To Increase Brand Awareness and Recognition

 

Building a community increases brand awareness and recognition by capturing your audience into a smaller captive unit that you can send information to easier than if they’re all out in the wild. For example, you might have to run an advertisement to capture someone to learn about your new product, but your audience in the community will know about it simply due to being part of the community.

 

To Engage and Interact with Your Target Audience

 

When your community is on a platform that you all use to talk to each other, share information, and engage, it makes it so much easier for them to interact with you without the noise from everyone else interfering. In addition, the community is only about what you make it about, so you don’t have to worry about pleasing anyone but your ideal audience.

 

To Influence, Inspire, or Educate Your Audience

 

Having a community that enables you to be a lot closer to a smaller portion of the available. Being closer to them makes it easier to influence them to buy your products or try something you think works. In addition, you can educate them better because you’ll get insight into what they need by observing their discussions and actions.

 

To Foster Trust and Brand Loyalty

 

Your audience gets to see you more often through the content you share in the group instead of through an advertisement or email. As a result, they feel as if they know you. When they think they know you, they trust you more and become very loyal to your brand.

 

To Grow and Improve Your Products and Services

 

One of the best parts about having an involved community of people who want what you are offering and need what you have is that you can get insight into making your products and services better simply by asking questions and listening to the answers.

 

These reasons should easily explain why building a brand community is the business strategy you should be adopting today. If you have yet to get your most loyal customers together, you are only missing all the potential your business can gain. Strong communities create trust, loyalty, and value that services you and those involved.

Automate Your Community Management

 

 

Posted on

Five Ways to Customize Your Facebook Stories

It is said that Facebook reaches more than half of the world’s social networking population. It is also the second most downloaded smartphone application in the world. Two facts that should show you why Facebook is still an important tool to utilize and understand fully.

 

Each day nearly three hundred million people and businesses, just like you, post to their Facebook stories. While still not as popular as Instagram stories, it is still a beneficial tool to understand as Facebook continues to be a leading social media platform worldwide.

 

The following are five ways to customize your Facebook stories to increase your brand awareness:

 

Use Text Creatively

 

Adjust the size and use more than one font style. Fix the position, add captions, add a background color. Consider learning more about graphic design so that your thumbnails look captivating or use templates you can find on Canva and other websites.

 

Add Motion

 

With your camera, text, or other stickers and graphics, guide your viewers’ eye to the parts of the content you want them to view and act on the most. For example, if you want them to take action, visual motion cues to guide them toward the right buttons will help.

Four Benefits to Using Snapchat Stories to Market your Business

Have Fun with Filters and other Effects

 

People are sometimes critical of filters and effects when you’re trying to make someone look different than they really look, but the truth is, these filters and effects are fun and grab attention. So use them as much as you want or as little as you want but have fun.

 

Selfie Filters and Picture Filters

 

Try out the various selfie and picture filters that you can use to make your stories stand out. Facebook offers multiple filters. Currently, it’s the magic wand on the bottom left when you’re in the app. The filters show up at the bottom of the screen. Try out some fun filters on holidays or other special days to make your content stand out.

 

Try Out Boomerang

 

This app gives a looping effect to your stories and images. It blurs the background and brings faces into focus with an extra glow. They’re kind of like animated GIFS but play your video forward and backward. It can grab attention for different stories that you share.

 

Ask Your Audience to Join In

 

User-generated content, questions, and polls, anything that gets your audience involved is highly powerful content. But, if you want engagement or action from your audience, remember that you have to tell them what to do, tell them what’s in it for them, and then tell them what to do again.

 

Be sure to follow these tips when creating your Facebook stories if you want to keep your audience engaged and fully interested in your business or services. Creating consistent, engaging, and valuable Facebook stories is vital if you’re keeping your audience interested and active on the platform, growing your authority and brand awareness within the industry, and generating more sustainable leads.

 

 

 

Posted on

How Powerful Are Email Funnels?

Email funnels are a set or series of marketing materials that inspire your audience to do something—most of the time in the form of a purchase or to benefit your company in some way. Your emails provide value that persuades your audience to purchase your products, follow your social media pages or become a loyal audience and customer.

 

At the start of every email, the funnel includes an opt-in that gets your audience’s attention and trust in exchange for their email address. Then once you grab their information, you can start going down the email marketing funnel through well-timed and targeted emails. These emails should be full of information to establish your authority and trust further.

 

Then you can lead your readers right out of the funnel to your landing page to hopefully turn them into brand-new customers. Lastly, the funnel repeats, or the reader is thrown into a new funnel to further continue the process in the hopes of a repeat purchase. The email marketing funnel never truly ends, as you should always be nurturing your readers and create new and interesting sequences to establish their loyalty.

 

As you can probably tell by now, email funnels are powerful because:

 

They Solve a Problem

Your audience is readers because you provide some value for them. You solve a problem in the form of entertainment, education, comedy, or more. It all depends on your niche and why you are starting an email funnel campaign in the first place.

 

They Are Personal

While you may be sending the same email to many readers, that is not how they see it. It goes directly into their personal email, and frequently they are reading it alone. Even better, it is personalized to them. Making them feel special, important, and connected with your brand. Allowing you to provide more value and then more easily convert them into paying customers.

 

They Create Brand Awareness, Trust, and Credibility

Emails are another great way to provide your audience education and resources, further increasing your industry’s brand awareness, trust, and credibility. The more you communicate to your audience, the more they get to know you and trust your authority, especially through quality content that solves a problem.

As you can see, if you want to build a loyal audience while turning them into paying customers, then email marketing funnels are a must. In fact, if you are not convinced yet, then it’s important to let you know that many businesses often see a return of forty-eight dollars for every one dollar they spend on email marketing — making it by far one of the most affordable and easiest ways to market and boost your sales.

Work On Your Funnel Each Week And Continue To Branch Out