If you are only promoting your products on social media, it will get to a point where your audience will get tired and stop following you. Therefore, you should stick to the original idea of why social media sites were created: build communities. Building a community around your brand will help you improve customer relations.
Importance of Building a Community Around Your Brand
There are several benefits of having a community for your brand. These are:
Increase Brand Loyalty
A brand community consists of like-minded people emotionally connected to your brand. When these people rally behind your brand, they will likely stay loyal to it.
Have a Communication Channel
A brand community provides you with a channel to communicate with your customers. Whether it’s a new product launch or an offer on your existing products, you can communicate this information to the people who matter most to your brand.
Better Conversion Rate
The community behind your brand consists of people who have interacted most with your brand. They have probably bought from you and believe in your brand. This makes it easier to cross-sell or upsell, as they are already at the bottom of the sales funnel.
A Great Marketing Resource
A community behind your brand can be a great source of:
- Repeat customers
- Brand ambassadors
- Recommendations
- Engagement
- Qualified lead
- User-generated content
All these will make your marketing efforts easier.
Improve Customer Experience
You want your customers to have a positive experience when engaging with your brand. If they can’t find answers to their questions or someone who can respond to their inquiries, you will have a frustrated audience. But when you create space for your customers to reach your team, you will enhance their experience.
How to Build a Successful Brand Community
Here are the top tips on building a brand community:
Understand Your Target Audience
As with any other marketing activity, understanding your customers is essential. Otherwise, you will build a community of people who aren’t the right fit for your business. Therefore, you should ensure you are directing your marketing efforts to those who matter.
Even within your community, you will still need to understand your followers better. Find the most active people who engage the most with your brand. Understand what makes them talk and always respond to their questions.
Understand Your Brand and Its Goals
Building a social media community also requires you to understand your brand. Some of the things to consider are your mission statement, brand voice, and personality. Understanding these elements will make it easier to showcase your brand to your audience.
As we noted earlier, you are only building a community to keep it updated about your brand and make customer-driven decisions. Some of the questions you should ask yourself are:
- Why am I building a community?
- How will you be keeping your community engaged?
- What value will you be adding to the community?
- How will you be measuring the success of your brand?
- Which metrics do you plan to track?
- What value will your brand community goal add to your overall business goal?
Engage With Your Audience
To start engaging with your audience, you must find a platform where you can find them. After that, you should give them a reason to stay involved with your brand. Ensure that you answer all their questions. Post engaging content that keeps the discussion going.
Avoid ghosting them or keeping them waiting for days before you can reply to their messages. When they mention your brand on their page, ensure that you respond. To create enough time to engage with your community, you can automate some responses, such as opening hours, product prizes, or descriptions.
Tips To Engage With Your Audience
Other measures you can use to improve engagement with your audience are:
- Create contests and invite them to participate
- Use hashtags to show what you are doing
- Encourage them to create user-generated content
Keep Your Community Safe
Now that you have built a community, you now created a safe space for it. You can do that by;
- Removing comments offensive, and spam comments that use specific keywords such as profanities.
- Automatically hiding comments with links.
- Redirecting sensitive comments to the respective team members.
Final Thoughts
One of the best ways of improving customer loyalty is by building a community, as it brings people who believe in your brand under one roof. While it can take time to build a community, it pays. By following our guide, you can easily create a community that will act as your brand ambassador.
