It’s no secret that having a healthy, active community around your brand is a valuable asset. Among other strengths, an engaged customer community promotes strong value realization amongst your customers, while simultaneously providing you with a window into what they’re thinking and feeling. It’s imperative that your business has one, but where should you start?
This post will take a look at some specific tips, tactics, and strategies you should engage when trying to build your customer community. With these, you should be able to grow some loyalty around your brand and start reaping the benefits that an active customer base brings.
Empowering Your Branded Community
It’s natural for communities to form around everything, and this includes your business. In fact, it’s likely that some of your customers have already started to congregate in online spaces to discuss your brand and topics surrounding it.
The question for you, then, becomes how can you guide the growth of this community so that it benefits shared success between your brand and customer base? Here are some strategies that may help:
Consider Where Your Customers Are At
One of the great aspects of customer communities is that they can pop up anywhere. Your customers may choose to congregate on a forum or message board somewhere, but could just as easily turn to social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn.
What you’ll want to do is find the spaces where your community already likes to get together, and start engaging with them there. It’s a space they are familiar with, it’s a place they’re comfortable expressing what they think and feel, and meeting them where they are is one of the first steps to letting them lead and helping shape perceptions of your brand.
Be Sure To Get Feedback And Truly Listen
Insights about what your customers are thinking and feeling will prove invaluable in helping shape your business going forward. You’ve got to ask questions that will help you gauge the state of your community and whether or not certain practices are working out.
You’ll need to make sure you take that feedback to heart, however. If your customers are putting their thoughts out there but don’t see you making an effort to implement anything they mention, it will make the community feel ignored and work against your efforts to grow.
Give Customers Even More Reason To Join Your Community
While it may be natural for communities to form around your business, you’ll aid yourself by “sweetening the pot” and providing more incentive for customers to stay active.
Transforming your customer community into a place where they can get support, for instance, always works to draw people into your online spaces. Other strategies include offering sneak peeks at new products and services, or allowing the community to help shape the direction that new features will take, based upon their feedback and experiences with your brand.
Build Success Through Engagement
Be sure you’re giving customers a reason to engage with your community, and stay active within your own customer community to help foster the best results. Through engagement, you’ll be able to learn about what motivates your consumers and better cater to their needs as a result.