Community Marketing: The expression can even explain itself, but only some things are apparent. For example, creating a community around the brand goes through different stages of consumption.
Community marketing is more than just encouraging interaction among consumers of a company’s products. It represents bringing these people together at different levels of engagement and interaction.
Community marketing is about experiencing and connecting with consumers and potential customers through virtual or physical strategy. The strategy works best if it is carried out in both.
Good examples are there: Apple has an army of passionate supporters, to the point that its new products are launched in a global holiday mood.
Next, we’ll explain which spaces can be used to create these communities, what topics to consider, and the importance of understanding community goals.
How To Build A Community For Your Brand?
This takes into consideration what the audience’s expectation is in the first place. It is essential to make this expectation coincide with the company’s plans.
This commonality of desires defines what kind of positioning a company should adopt and the language it will use to communicate.
Afterwards, it is possible to nurture the idea that if the company grows economically, consumers develop as people. The famous win-win relationship that people talk about so much.
In short: doing community marketing is identifying where the public is with the profile outlined by the brand, understanding their difficulties, mapping their needs, understanding their priorities, how they communicate and introducing them to other people with the same issues and experiences. This breaks down into a few steps: the 3 Cs of community marketing.
Funding
This is the stage of knowing your audience. The goal is to get members to your community, which means distinguishing those with the desired profile.
Note that getting new members to a community is much more critical than attracting new customers. The first members of your select group should be the most promising among your consumers. You’re not just looking for new markets but disseminators of your brand!
Training
The second phase is much easier if you know how to select the right people. In it, you teach members to see your product or service beyond common usage.
A community is almost always founded by heavy users, those who take advantage of what your company offers by going deep into the advantages and disadvantages.
If trained, this type of consumer will reveal details about the product or service you never imagined when you conceived it.
Training is done through content, and it is much better when you make contact through multiple marketing channels: blogs, various social networks, video formats, text, images and much more.
Conversion
If the previous phase is successful, the conversion will be natural. Then members will know enough to bring your brand to others.
From then on, they will often create their content. After the conversion, you reap the benefits of community marketing, counting on an exponential multiplication of the audience with less effort than in traditional forms of digital marketing.
How To Manage A Community?
Let’s assume that everything is already working. Your role now is to keep the community marketing wheel turning.
At this time, ensuring the community is fed is essential. With that, we mean that the feeling of belonging, the differentials of your product or service and the values it reinforces in people must be nurtured.
The best way to “put oil on the gears” is to develop a marketing strategy. And here we have four more letters C to help: categorization, content, communication and curation. The goal is to maintain healthy levels of productivity and interactivity. See how.
Categorization
People in a group have a certain homogeneity, of course. But that doesn’t mean they are the same, and it’s good to have mechanisms to differentiate them, showing respect for their individuality.
Audience segmentation does just that. So, it is interesting to create categories to carry out this differentiation. For example, you can distinguish the youngest from the oldest, the most active and passive in the community, those more frequently involved and those more distant, etc.
Note that the idea is to carry out this survey using something other than value judgments. The idea here is to get to know your community better, highlighting the characteristics of each of its members, not choosing the best or worst.
Content
If we think about it, content is at every stage of community marketing. But it’s worth mentioning again to remember that it’s a two-way street.
Your community learns from you as it teaches. They create their content and often have a much more detailed view of your company, products and services than your own.
Communication
If there is content and community, one thing becomes inevitable: communication. Like content, it is also a two-way street.
You must listen and pay attention to the community’s needs, placing yourself as a proper mediator. Remember, the community doesn’t belong to the brand; it’s organized around it and now has a life of its own.
So make sure this message gets across. By doing this, you ensure that the sense of belonging increases.
Curatorship
Curating is not just about content. It is the monitoring of transformations within the community, and this analysis you do from the categorization.
The relationship between this group of people is ongoing, so as time passes, members assume different roles, and situations tend to change. The most engaged can become dissatisfied, and vice versa.
Also Read: How To Put Together An Efficient Digital Marketing Strategy?