Growth Starts With Your Community
In today’s competitive landscape, advertising your services simply isn’t enough. Customers want more than just the service, but brands want more than just a sale.
Which is why building a community around your brand can be the fuel to rocket your business to success.
What’s an Online Community?
A group of internet users who form a community around a shared interest, in this case, your business or brand.
Within these online communities, conversations and discussions take place that would happen in person or social media. Communities are normally hosted on website forums, social media groups such as LinkedIn, or via popular platforms like Reddit and Discord.
88% of businesses have said that communities have helped improve customer experience.
The reason why online communities are so popular amongst growing businesses is because you may be able to turn the community members into advocates for your brand. It can also be a controlled environment for user feedback and sharing ideas to improve your business.
Do I need an Online Community?
For your business to grow, you’ll want to consider building a vibrant community amongst your customers. That way, you’ll be able to identify exactly what your target audience thinks about your product/service. Complete transparency and a great trust building opportunity.
By having an engaging community of users, it will help you fix the leaks in your business, helping you to action them immediately. Plus, it will promote meaningful engagement with your customers, which is incredibly important to build brand loyalty.
At Contapp, we consider our users to be part of the growth & success of Contapp. Now and forever. With our loyal users and their feedback, we’re able to shape our business tool into a platform for the people.
Benefits of Having an Online Community
- Easier and quicker communication with customers = better customer experience
- Identify top-level customers as brand advocates who can promote your business
- Access to ideas from loyal customers on how to improve your products/services
- Faster routes to potential new customers and higher likelihood of retaining current customers
- Can be a great place for users to seek help, rather than going to your business directly
- Increased cross-sell, upsell and add-on revenue
- Private communities will allow your users exclusive access to offers and news
Tips on Building an Online Community
Choose Your Platform
As we mentioned before, there are many platforms to host your community on. There isn’t a right or wrong answer, but it depends on where your customers will be more likely to join. The most popular platforms are:
- Discord
- Slack
- Quora
- Facebook Groups
- LinkedIn Groups
- Your company website forum
A Community Wasn’t Built in a Day
Be patient and give the growth of your community some time to grow. Building a community around your brand won’t be quick, but it will create an authentic, long-lasting relationship between your business and customers. Growing slowly will help you in the long run, as long as it’s worthwhile.
Embrace Engagement & Commitment
Some community members will be a lot more active than others. There will even be some users that won’t be active at all, but that’s normal.The important part of building an online community is to embrace everything that all your members have to offer.
The members who will just share constructive feedback, might not want to engage in general conversations in the community. Some will prefer to just share ideas. Others won’t engage at all, but will follow all the conversations. You have to value what each user will bring to the community, whether it’s a lot or a little. What you can do is fuel the conversation and get everybody involved in their own way.
Create Valuable Content
Giving back to community members is a great way of boosting engagement. People will be a lot more inclined to get involved or check back at the community if they know that they’ll be getting something positive from it. Share the latest news, blogs and even exclusives, to make sure engagement is high amongst community members.
It’s also a very good idea to encourage members to share their own content and allow them to lead conversations. By doing this, users engage together, which is great for any community.
Accept Peoples Different Views & Opinions
Although you should have rules in place, it’s important to let people voice their opinions and create discussions. Especially in business, users have different perceptions and ideas about products from past experiences.
As long as nothing offensive and negative is said to individuals, you should welcome users to voice their opinions.
Join Contapp’s Discord Community
This is a bit of an Easter Egg as it hasn’t officially launched yet. But seeing as you’ve taken time to read our blog, here it is.
Contapp has a new Discord platform which has been specifically built for users and business-minded individuals. It’s a dedicated space for users to share feedback, provide value to each other and general conversations about topics that make you feel at ease.
Click here to join Contapp’s Discord Community
For premium Contapp members, you will have exclusive access to premium channels within the Contapp Discord server. If you have not gained access to our premium community, please email the team at [email protected]
