Tag: community building

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Questions to Answer to Build a Successful Brand Community

Taking the time to question your motives, inspirations, ideas, and goals is important to building a solid and successful business. Developing a brand community that benefits both you and its members is no exception to this fact either. It allows you to truly identify what you need to achieve your goals more efficiently. In addition, creating a solid plan of action ensures you build a strong and active brand community from the beginning.

 

The more you understand and work to improve before building your community, the more likely you will succeed. Online communities allow you to form better connections with your customers while giving them a sense of purpose. In addition, they increase your brand awareness, recognition, and trust as long as they start with the right foundation.

 

Here are five questions to answer and evaluate to build a successful brand community:

 

Question One: Why do you need to build a community, and how will it support your target audience?

 

Knowing what’s in it for your group is really important because that’s how you’ll sell the idea of joining your community to them. When you tell them why the community exists and exactly how it will support them, they’re going to be more likely to want to join because you’ve told them why.

 

Question Two: Where should you start and grow your community and why?

 

Knowing where your audience likes to get their information and which social media platforms they use most will help inform you about what type of community you need to build. For example, some audience members are more likely to join Facebook groups over joining a community on your website. It will depend on what your audience wants and needs.

 

Question Three: What kind of actions do you want your community to take and why?

 

What do you hope each member of your community does to make their lives better or solve their problems as part of your membership or group? As people join, it’s imperative that you tell them what to do next. Whether filling out their profile information, creating an introductory post, or answering a survey, letting them know what to do and why you want them to do it will ensure more do it.

 

Question Four: What products or resources do you need to form an engaging and active community?

 

Make a list of all the products, services, and resources you need to create the engaging community you want to create. For example, do you need to invest in a customer service bot, create a self-serve FAQ, or something else?

 

Question Five: What key performance metrics should you track to ensure you achieve your community goals?

 

There is much more to success than likes and even engagement if none of that leads to sales. Therefore, your metrics should include matching your actions with increased revenue, but you also want to study engagement.

 

Filling in these questions is essential to outline the initial framework of your online or brand community. Understanding your value and showing how you can match that value with the needs of your audience ensures you have the resources and understanding to build a successful community. The community only returns what you put in. Therefore, starting with the right framework and knowledge secures maximum returns.

 

 

Six Strategies for Successful Community Building

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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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How Community Member-To-Member Engagement Grows Your Business

Building a community is today considered one of the biggest industry secrets to growing your business. There is good reason this is true too, the fact is, communities foster the power of word-of-mouth marketing through member-to-member engagement and turn influence into dollars.

Why a Brand Community is the Business Strategy You Need

Community building is a crucial strategy that promotes trust, increases your credibility with your member size, and boosts revenue exponentially. Without word-of-mouth marketing or community involvement, many people won’t make a purchase or contribute to the success of your business because most people often rely on positive reviews or social proof before they feel confident purchasing or getting involved.

 

The following are four powerful ways member-to-member engagement within your community grows your business:

 

Customer Loyalty

 

A loyal customer is worth more than ten new salespeople because they will shout about how great you are from the rooftops without you ever paying them a dime. Just the fact that you delivered the right product or service in the right way at the right time to them in a way that met or exceeded their expectations is enough for them to keep buying and tell everyone they know about you. Likewise, inviting your customers to your groups and community will encourage satisfaction and increase loyalty because they feel heard.

 

Customer Retention

 

Keeping delighted customers is far less expensive than finding new customers. Even if you only have one product today, understand that having long-term customers hungry for every product or service you offer is your key to sustainability and success. A community helps you do this because people enjoy feeling like part of something important, and active communities serve that purpose.

 

Brand Advocacy and Word-of-Mouth Marketing

 

Thrilled customers become brand advocates without you even asking them to. With a vibrant community, you can actually develop your loyal customers to become brand advocates by asking them directly to tell others about you and rewarding them for doing so.

 

Enhanced Customer Service and Experience

 

Most people hate calling anyone on the phone to deal with a problem, so don’t worry, you don’t have to do that, but having a community will make your customers feel safe because they will feel as if they know right where to find you at all times of day or night even if you’re sleeping. It feels like a direct connection, and for the customer, that feels good because, face it, big business makes everyone feel unheard and unimportant.

 

As you can see, member-to-member engagement or getting your community members involved with each other positively is a powerful tool that can grow your business beyond your own capabilities. Not only is it powerful, but it is relatively affordable and simple to do with the right content and contributions from you or your brand community team.

 

 

 

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Three Ways Online Communities Improve your Products and Services

One major benefit of online communities to the owner and business is that all the members’ information is available when engaging with others in the group or the content you publish. This information will help you re-work and improve your products and services to keep them interested and buying more.

 

When you think about this fact, it means that communities are just as important to you as they are to the members who join. It’s simple, the more you know what your audience wants, the better you can deliver a high-quality and valuable product or service to them in the way they want it to be delivered.

 

Online communities improve your products and services in the following three ways:

 

Through Specific Feedback and Reviews

Day 3 Increasing Traffic, Subscribers & Customers To Boost Your Bottom Line

Generating various ideas and insights by asking for and receiving feedback and reviews from your community is very effective. If you make it easy for them to leave their thoughts and even reward them for doing so, you can encourage them to provide deep insight that can affect future products and services substantially.

 

You can take an especially well-written and delightful review and turn it into a blog post, place it on your website sales page, or even turn it into a case study to help encourage more people to buy that product or service.

 

Through Commonly Asked Questions and Frustrations

 

Being a part of your community gives your audience a chance to ask questions and even express frustrations. You can do this by using simple Google Forms if you want to or using your own website and another form creator. Just provide the link to the group members and tell them how to submit their questions or frustrations to you.

 

When you do get the questions in, or the frustrations are expressed, use that information to help each person directly but also use it to design a current blog post with information that solves these problems or directs them as to where they can find a solution if it’s not through your products or services.

 

Through Education and Member-To-Member Interaction

 

Each time you provide content that educates your members, always participate in discussing the information you provided. Encourage the member-to-member interaction and discussion by calling out particular experts or members who have already been educated in that regard. And remember, all of the discussions and user-generated content on your membership site, community boards, or groups are yours to use as you will as long as you set up permissions when they joined.

 

As you grow your community, please take advantage of these options to see how your members feel about your current products or what they are searching for to help solve their problems. These options provide you with more information that can be used to generate even more content. It also gets them engaged and makes them feel like they are valuable and a part of something important.

 

 

 

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Four Ways Community Building Improves Customer Service

Proper and effective customer service can make or break your business. In 2019 Forrester Consulting surveyed over a thousand different customers across two-hundred enterprise brands to learn what customers really want from brands.

 

One important takeaway was that nearly two-thirds of respondents reported how one unpleasant experience with a brand caused them to switch brands instantly while also warning their peers to stay away — showing you just how important proper and effective customer service helps you retain your customers and keep them happy.

 

In addition, growing a community for your business can instantly improve your customer service and build more content members that foster a more successful and sustainable business.

 

Here are four ways community building can improve your customer service strategies:

 

Increased Availability and Communication

 

Real-time support is possible with online communities – meaning problems can be solved instantly even if you or someone from the business is not responding directly. You can set up automation using bots in most communities to answer frequently asked questions that allow your members to serve themselves when you’re not there essentially.

 

Increased Self-Service Tools and Resources

 

You can also incorporate files and written FAQs that enable your customers and members to check out the rules themselves any time they want to. If you offer these tools, make sure to post about the tools and resources you have in your group and how they can access them. Not everyone understands how these tools and platforms work, so a little education can go a long way.

 

Increased Engagement and Education

 

Within the enclosed privacy or at least imagined privacy that a group provides, members will feel more at ease about engaging with your content and you. Because of this, the information and education you provide within the group will be much more useful due to instant feedback.

 

Improved Products and Services

 

When you start regularly speaking with your customers in a community setting, online or offline, you’ll begin to understand how you can improve your products and services. Not to mention you’ll end up with a never-ending stream of new product and service ideas because you’ll know the audience so much deeper.

 

As you can see, all of these options work together to provide superior support to your target audience. Through communities, your customers can find information faster and get the solution they need easily without frustrations. Access to nearly endless education, materials, and superior customer support makes community building a must-have for business.