Tag: engagement

Posted on

Why Blogging as an Entrepreneur is Still Important

Blogging is an important marketing tool that entrepreneurs can use in many ways. First, it is a great way to share your ideas and knowledge with the world. It’s a way for you to build your personal brand, establish your expertise and reach your target audience. Finally, blogging is another way to gain feedback from your customers and stay on top of the latest trends.

 

In other words, blogging is one of the most powerful ways for entrepreneurs to grow their businesses. This is because blogging allows you to connect with potential customers and develop a following that cares about what you say.

 

The following are four vital reasons why blogging as an entrepreneur is still important:

 

Blogging Improves Communication and Understanding

Blogging is a powerful communication tool that allows people to express their emotions and ideas about social issues. Bloggers use writing as a form of self-expression and an outlet for their thoughts, feelings, and expertise. It allows you to generate content on assorted topics and provides a platform for you to reach the world. Blogging is also a great excuse to use SEO, increase traffic, and create brand awareness.

 

Blogging Increases Trust and Credibility

In a world where people are more skeptical than ever, blogs provide authenticity. The blog format is easy to read and allows readers to scan through posts quickly. Blogs also will enable the writer to be open about their own personal experience, which gives readers a chance to get insights into what it’s like to live a particular life. Being open and transparent makes readers trust you.

 

Blogging Means You Own Your Content

While using social media is important as an entrepreneur, it is important to note that you are no longer the sole owner once you share content on these platforms. If their platform were to go down one day, so will your content and the following you created. Creating a website can help eliminate this possibility, as you own it.

 

Blogging Can Be Monetized

Once you have a loyal following, monetizing becomes easy. One of the easiest ways to monetize is through Google AdSense and affiliate links. Blogging also leads to other opportunities, such as interviewing experts for your blog or even being hired as a freelancer for companies in your niche.

 

As you can see, the importance of blogging starts with finding and connecting with your target audience. Doing this helps build your personal brand by showing your authority, trust, and credibility within the industry. Furthermore, blogging is also an easy and affordable way to increase your revenue.

 

 

Posted on

Essential Community Building Statistics to Know

If you want to grow a community or build one around your brand, you must know the facts. Statistics show that if you’re going to start a business, building a community around it is vital if you’re going to succeed. Fortunately, many consumers are looking for more information directly from the source to build relationships with honest and valuable brands. They seek trust and validity before they can make a purchase or commit to a brand.

 

The following are some essential community building statistics to know to further promote and grow your brand:

 

  • Nearly a 1/3 of Users Follow Brands Using Social Media – Because so many social media users and those who love being part of communities follow brands using social media, it tells you that if big brands are doing it, it can work for you too. So, you really don’t have to be Red Bull to benefit from building community.

 

  • Ninety Percent of Buyers Report Using Positive Online Reviews to Make Their Purchase Decisions – Reviews work according to buyers’ own words. They like reading positive reviews to help make their choice.

 

  • Almost Thirty Percent of Online Customers Report Using Brand Communities for Research – Many people who want to buy things feel more comfortable going to a community run by the brand to find out what customers are saying and get a sense of the integrity of the creator.

 

  • The Common Community Objectives Include: Customer retention, lower support costs, and innovation – People who create communities cite these reasons for spending a lot of effort developing engaging and informative safe communities for their customers and interested parties.

 

  • Only 40% of Small Businesses Compared to 75% of Large Corporations Build Communities – This is likely because it can be a lot of work to set it up and keep it running. However, with the advent of so many options, it’s getting a lot easier to do it.

 

  • Over 95% of Adult Smartphone Users are Using Social Media and Brand Groups – Because so many people in the USA (77%) have smartphones having a mobile-friendly community will pay off since most users love being involved in brand groups using their technology.

 

  • Almost 90% of Business Leaders State Community Building is Essential to Growth – The main reason for this is that it’s one more way to help lead your ideal customer through the buying journey successfully.

 

The fact is, online or brand communities are what sets you apart from your competition and can further solidify your chances of success. If you want increased awareness, recognition, and loyalty, then running a community is vital. Overall, these statistics prove the power and benefits online, or brand communities can provide to businesses.

 

A Comprehensive Social Media Influencer Checklist

 

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

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

 

Posted on

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on

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.

 

 

 

Posted on

Four Reasons Why Communities are Crucial to Your Business Success

Community building is a fabulous, fun, and effective way to get to know your customers, grow your business, improve your products, and stand out against your competition that you needed to incorporate yesterday. This community-building strategy requires building a community around your brand that puts your customers’ needs first.

 

You will unlock powerful resources, tools, and information that will only lead you to ultimate success through community building. In the age of technology, you must do everything you can to stand out and stay ahead of your competition. Fostering a brand community is nearly a requirement if you want to succeed in this day and age.

 

Here are the top four reasons why communities are crucial to your business success:

 

Communities Promote Word-of-Mouth Marketing

 

Nothing is more powerful than word-of-mouth marketing. People like the Kardashians are billionaires because of word-of-mouth marketing using social media and community building. They were smart enough to tune into the idea that they were building a community of followers on every social platform that they can influence easier because they’re a captive audience.

 

Communities Save Revenue

 

It doesn’t cost that much to set up a community. In fact, you can do it free through most social media platforms today, like Facebook and YouTube. So, if you already have these platforms take a look at the features, you may have been ignoring. The only thing it costs is your time.

 

Communities Establish Credibility and Trustworthiness

 

When you are part of a community, people get to know you more because you share more. When your audience sees with their own eyes the evidence you post in the groups and how helpful you are to the members of the group, they will begin to trust you more by observing. However, just the existence of a large, engaged, and friendly group gives you an edge on credibility and trustworthiness.

 

Communities Initiate Brand Loyalty

 

When everyone in a group is talking about your brand and what they like about your products and services, it becomes kind of like a club in that each member’s identity is tied up in using your products and services. When that happens, they become loyal to them.

 

Engagement and interaction are crucial to successful brand companies. This is how you grow a community that advocates for you while staying around for the long term. In other words, valuable engagement reduces customer retention while attracting new ones. Thus, making it easy to grow your brand sustainably and profitably.

 

In the end, these reasons establish just how crucial communities are to your success. Without one, you may not find your customers or continue to build the business you need to stay around long-term. Communities are your connection to more revenue, recognition, reach, and business potential.

 

 

 

Posted on

Four Benefits to Using Snapchat Stories to Market your Business

Did you know that there are nearly three hundred million active daily users on Snapchat, making Snapchat among the most popular social media networks worldwide, just behind Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok?

Almost forty percent of the world’s leading brands already know this and use Snapchat to market their products on a daily basis.

 

What’s even more powerful is that those who use Snapchat use the application for more than twenty minutes a day, right behind Facebook users.

Yet again showing you that Snapchat is still a powerful business tool to be taking advantage of.

 

Here are four more benefits to using Snapchat stories to market your business:

 

Drive Traffic and Boost Engagement

 

The purpose of social media stories on many platforms is to increase your audience engagement and boost your traffic or sales. The high number of daily active users means your chances of success on this platform are quite high if you use the platform right and market to a younger audience.

 

Connect to a Younger Demographic

 

Many of the users on Snapchat are said to be between the ages of twenty-four and twelve, which means if millennials and generation Z are the people you need to market to, don’t delay using Snapchat.

 

Offer a More Fun and Unique Customer Experience

 

Snapchat offers different and more unique features than other platforms. Their additional AR filters are by far the most popular. These are artificial filters that change how you, others, or animals look when shown on camera. They can even change your background, make it look like you are doing a certain action, and change the sound of your voice – making it a fun way to communicate with your audience and be less formal. While other platforms offer this, the ones created on Snapchat are often said to be more creative, fun, and easy to use.

 

Add Personality and Keep Followers Updated

 

The features Snapchat offers allow you to be more relatable and show your personality more. It is also a better way to share new and upcoming information about your brand or business. In addition, offering your audience your human side makes it more likely to grow an audience that trusts you and your credibility.

 

These benefits should inspire you to give Snapchat a try for your business. If you have a product-based business that anyone under thirty-five can use or would be interested in, Snapchat is the place to be. Its unique features make it a fun and personal experience for you and your target audience.

 10 Ways to Get to Know Your Audience Better

 

 

Posted on

The Importance of Email List Segmentation

Separating your email list subscribers into different segments of your audience is the process of dividing up your subscribers or customers into other flows or email sequences. When subscribers sign up to your email list, they will not receive the same emails as everyone else at the same time as they go along with the email campaign. Thus, segmentation allows you to better market and communicates to your new potential customers and readers.

 

Most lists are organized based on three different factors: demographics, geographics, and behavior. Depending on your niche and marketing goals, you will need to organize them differently. However, the most popular way to segment lists includes how they behave on your websites and with your emails.

 

Once they are opted-in to your campaign, readers are then divided based on how they interact. Do they open more often than others? Do they click-through links frequently? Then it would be good to put them on a different path than those who are less likely to open or click-through your emails. They likely don’t need an aggressive approach and are clearly interested in your products or information.

 

Reasons list segmentation is an important step of the email marketing process:

 

It Allows You to Send More Targeted Information

Most businesses will have more than one buyer’s persona, which means not every email you send needs to go to every lead or customer on your list. It also means you likely have more than one goal in mind when it comes to email marketing. Segmenting allows you to pick certain keywords or information in order to organize and better target them with different key pieces of content.

 

For example, readers who have bought your products are more likely to get content about the products they purchased or new products to try. While new subscribers who have not purchased a product will be reading content on why the products benefit their life and possibly information about you and your business or other emails to get to know them better to further convert them into paying customers.

 

To Increase Overall Conversions

List segmentation better targets your readers, which allows you to communicate more effectively. When you understand at what point of the buyers’ journey they are on, then you have a better chance at maximizing your opportunity.

 

To Improve Engagement and Reputation

Clear communication and understanding your audience are key to increasing your conversions and running a successful email campaign. Better communication provides more value to your customers, further building your reputation and improving your engagement—two important metrics for running and creating a sustainable business.

 

As you can see, the key to list segmentation is to ensure the right emails are being sent to the right people to achieve your email marketing goals better. If everyone receives the same emails and you ignore primary information about your target audience, you are likely not communicating to them effectively enough to produce results.