Why a strong community is important when building a business

Posted on 9 februari, 2023 by Administrator

You’ve heard the saying ‘You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with’ . Well, this also applies in business and this is why having a community built around your brand is crucial for your business. A strong community is made out of people who love your brand and value your products, and those kind of people will be the ones to help you improve and evolve with each step you take. Forbes speaks more about why building a community is critical to your brand’s success here.

A look back in time at brand communities shows that not much has changed in the core principles. Ever since brands have existed, each brand’s community used word of mouth to promote their favorite products and to connect with others alike. In this article from the Harvard Business Review from 2009, based on 30 years of research, you can read about the myths and truths of brand communities and how much they can impact your business. After all, as it’s been already mentioned, in today’s turbulent world people are hungry for a sense of connection. Not only communities can forge connections within the user base of one brand but they help bring down costs: one company discovered that it was 72% cheaper to answer a question via the community than the existing support function.

How do you build a strong community for your brand?

The first, and most important step in building a community around your brand is adding value to your customers’ lives and creating a strong connection with them.

You can do that by:
    •    Teaching them about the benefits of using your product and how it can make their lives easier
    •    Teaching them how to use your product by making tutorials and sharing tips and tricks
    •    Letting them meet the team so they know who they interact with whenever they reach you
    •    Posting testimonials to increase their trust in your brand and products

The second step, is interacting with your community as much as possible. Once you give valuable information, you get the chance to receive the same from your peers. Many business owners forget to take a step back from the project and try to see it from a customer’s point of view, and this is how the community gets in place.

    •    You can receive and respond to questions either in a Q&A page on your website, or in Social Media via stories
    •    You can create polls to see what your customers would prefer before adding a new product to your website
    •    You can collaborate with influencers to promote your brand to their community, so more people that are interested can come and join yours too
    •    Your community will give you the encouragement to keep innovating and the strength to keep doing what you do best
    •    Since a community means diversity, each and every one of your peers can come up with different ideas or suggestions to improve your brand or product

Briefly, having a strong community makes your brand evolve and it also makes you a better learner.

What impact does a community have in an online marketing campaign?

Simbound, the Digital Marketing Simulator incorporates the Community Management module that lets you build communities based on your brand’s needs. After building a community, it shows you how it impacts the overall progress of your marketing campaigns. Let me show you how it works:

After creating a Simbound Participant account, you can check the CM (Community Management) module on your Dashboard. Once you find it, you’ll notice that you have a certain number of points named Sparks and Sense.

That is your currency to improve your skills and engage with your community. If you hit the Gamification button you’ll notice that you can activate plenty of game options like Trivia, Gifts, Badges, Avatars and so on.

What’s the difference between Sparks and Sense? We will show you how to obtain and spend these unique resources to reach your brand development objectives.

First, Sparks represent airtime and you can use them to promote products, services or messages within your communities. You can generate more sparks from posts and how your community interacts with them. The more Sparks a post generates, the more important it is to your community. Long story short, they let you send your message further and faster.

Sense, on the other hand, is what community managers use and can only be earned out of their work and depend on how many communities they manage. Sense can be spent on researching, creating new communities or recruiting new managers, so it basically is a form of community intelligence.

Each time you create a new community, you will be shown the resources that are needed in order to set it up and attract a minimum number of members.

There are six types of communities and you can choose the ones that fit your business most:

    ⁃    The first one is the Support community which improves brand perception and reduces negative sentiment and complaints
    ⁃    Second, there’s the Advocate community which encourages loyal customers to support the brand by posting positive reviews and boosts word of mouth
    ⁃    The third community is the Social one, which connects your brand to your customers and fans in their favourite online mediums
    ⁃    The forth type of community is the Marketplace that allows your customers and members to exchange or sell services and products in a safe environment
    ⁃    The Contest community increases audience participation and improves brand recognition
    ⁃    And last there’s the Insight community which helps you unlock new information on different market segments and their preferences.

Here is a video tutorial on how it works:

You can also see some examples of Brand Communities and how much impact they have in this article by Linkdex.

Now, knowing the importance of a community and how to manage it according to your needs why don't you start to plan and test your campaigns in Simbound?