8 Reasons Why You May Want Your Own Branded Online Community
August 26 2010 by Jason Peck ~ 2 CommentsWe’re currently in a revolution. Social media is changing the way companies are doing business. It’s having an impact on just about every department, including:
- marketing
- customer service
- sales
- employee hiring
- product development
If you agree with the above statement, then you should be thinking about how to best integrate social media with your business and goals. Should you engage people on Twitter? Should you set up a page on Facebook for your company?
Probably (if it fits with your goals and your audience is there). But you also should be thinking bigger and long term.
Community is too important to be thinking about it only from the perspective “what can I do on other websites/platforms?”
You should also be thinking about how you can integrate community features and functionality into your own website–moving from a corporate website to a branded online community for your customers and prospects.
But why would a company want to do this when it’s “free” (Obviously not true. It takes time to set things up, keep things updated, measure results, etc) to set up a base on a site like Facebook and call it their social home?
Increase Trust
When you create an environment where your customers can talk with each other (and with you), share best practices, respond to content, rate your products, ask questions, answer questions to help you improve, this brings them closer together. In addition, everyone benefits from idea sharing. Think of a nice coffee shop environment – people openly share stories, make recommendations and meet new people. You want your website to be like a virtual coffee shop–not a boring, static brochure.
When you’re customers are closer to each other (and can hear/see how others use your products and services), they start trusting you more. When they can hear from you and speak to you directly, they start trusting you more. As trust and relationships grow stronger, so do sales.
Acquire New Customers
Just as adding community features to your own website and taking a true community approach to things can help bring you closer to your customers, it can also help you identify and find new customers. People visit websites for a few main reasons: to find information, learn new things, get entertained, etc. Potential customers may visit your site multiple times to check things out before they’re interested in buying from you. If they can see the great things your company and customers are doing, then they’re more likely to become a customer themselves.
Your current customer’s friends and family are your best source for new customers. Make it easy for people to share content in multiple ways and invite their friends to participate in your community. You can even identify and reward people for helping you bring in new prospects and customers. When prospects participate, you should get to know them so you can figure out the best way to help them.
Give People Exclusive Content, Offers and Products
The focus of your branded online community should be giving your audience what they want. You may have some content that you give everyone; but maybe you hold back some of your very best studies, research and insights for people who pay for it. Or who are giving you something (feedback, ideas, opinions) in return.
The community shouldn’t be only focused on selling, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give people coupons, discounts and other offers from time to time. Sometimes you want to give people special offers that are only for them. This can make people feel appreciated, and can help bring them into an even closer relationship with you.
People who participate in your company may be such avid fans of your brand that they would buy products that others wouldn’t want. How do you find this out? Ask and test. You may find that there are additional things you can sell exclusively to people in small numbers. Maybe this ends up becoming an incentive for people to participate or buy from you, or maybe it turns out that there’s enough demand for this exclusive that you should sell it to a larger market.
Add More Value To Your Loyalty Program
A major problem for most loyalty programs is that people need to stick around for 6-8 months to buy enough products/services for the programs to be profitable. People who are a part of your online community and actively participating should trust you more and remain customers longer than people who may not have the option to get close to the people they buy from.
Loss of accurate data is also a problem. A customer may fill out a paper survey with important information (address, cell phone, preferences, etc), but if he or she moves or if things change, the data isn’t helpful to the company anymore. If you give people a way to easily notify you of any changes in their information, you’ll have better data, so you can get to know them better. Then you can personalize and give them more relevant advice, content and offers as part of your loyalty program.
Lastly, integrating your loyalty program with your online community gives you new ways to encourage loyalty and reward people. Instead of creating a program only based on purchases, why not reward people for their participation, feedback, ideas, etc? You can give people real world rewards (coupons, discounts, etc) or other rewards, such as virtual badges or the ability to join in on calls with company experts. This makes your loyalty program much more powerful, and more interesting to your customers.
Give Customers Privacy
In some cases, people are fine with sharing details on products and services they use online and in public. In other cases, they may want to provide feedback, ask questions, complain, get help, etc. in a more private environment. Think about if it makes sense to create a private area on your website/online community where people can take comfort in the fact that what they say is not public knowledge.
Control of Creative and Functionality
Facebook pages are great for many things. But sometimes you may want functionality or features that aren’t available there. Maybe you want to have some simple pages where there is one call-to-action, with no other distractions for people to see. Maintaining your social home on your website (rather than on an outside site) enables you to have full control over how pages look and how things work to give people the best user experience possible. This also enables you to add functionality as needed, rather than having to wait on another platform to develop it.
Control of Data and Metrics
Having 10,000 Facebook fans is great, but do you know which ones are actually customers? Do you know if their spending habits and engagement actions are changing based on the content you’re putting there (and what content is actually changing behavior)?
If you’ve got your own branded online community, you can track, measure and report on whatever it is you want to track. Sales from community members (vs. non-members), sales before vs. after joining the community, actual items people bought, etc. You can see who is inviting the most friends to join and who is participating the most, in case you want to reward them. Just about anything you’d like to track can be tracked in the manner that works for you. Unfortunately, this is not the case on many other social sites where brands have a presence. I’m not saying don’t use them; but if you really want to full metrics and data, you may want to house your community on your own website.
Aggregate Social Content
Maybe you’re doing some cool things on Facebook. Maybe you also have run some promotions on Twitter and engage people there. Maybe you also are uploading some great behind-the-scenes videos to YouTube each week. But what are you doing to leverage this content together and show people what you’re doing? Simply adding links/logos to the sites on your website is not enough, in many cases.
On your own community (using feeds and APIs), you can pull all your social content into one area, so people can see everything you’re doing without going to 10 different sites. This is also a great way to convert fans on one platform (ex: Facebook) to followers on another (ex: Twitter). People may be following you on Facebook but not know that you’re doing some really cool things on Twitter. Bringing your content together in one place is a way to show them.
I hope you see the value in creating your own branded online community. For companies with the right mindset and resources, this can be a home run. I’m definitely not saying that companies should stay away from other social websites; they definitely need to be there if the sites fit with their goals and objectives. But in many cases, they should use these sites as tentacles to draw people back to their own community.
What do you think?
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