Strong customer communities are really powerful for marketing. Brands that foster a good relationship with their customers and create a healthy community around themselves see better profits than those that don’t.
That’s corroborated by the fact that customers in a brand community are more likely to recommend the brand to others and have a 300% higher lifetime value compared to non-community customers. That’s because of two reasons; they spend more, and they stay with the brand for a lot longer.
Another solid reason for creating a customer community is that if you publish their user-generated content (UGC) on your platforms, that can improve lead conversions. So, now that you know the importance of building a customer community, let’s see how you can create one with the help of content marketing.
How to Foster a Customer Community Around Your Brand?
From a high-level view, to build a customer community you need to do two things:
- Attract customers
- Retain the attracted customers
So, all the tips that you see from now on will address either of these two points.
1. Content Marketing Educates the Audience as a Community
How does one instill a sense of belonging in a group? By making that group participate in activities together. Content marketing can help immensely with that.
Group activities where users can engage with your brand and with each other are the best for fostering a customer community. So, what are some things that can be done?
- Allowing comments on your blog posts.
- Holding webinars with your audience
- Live Q&A sessions
All of these are forms of content that you allow your audience to engage with. Published a great blog post? Comments underneath will let your customer community share their thoughts on the post.
A live webinar that showcases how to use your brand’s products and services as well as their practical applications can foster a strong community. If your audience is allowed to interact with the content during the webinar it will encourage them to collectively engage with your brand as a community.
They can ask questions not only from the webinar host but from each other as well. It also enables like-minded people to find each other within your customer community and create stronger bonds with each other.
All of this ends up with your customer community becoming stronger.
2. Role of Unique Content in Building a Customer Community
Customers want to feel a sense of belonging in a community. However, the said customer community must be special enough to warrant being a part of it. Many customers will not be willing to become a part of your brand’s community if you do not provide them with good content.
If they can find a similar type of content as yours in other places, then they have no real reason to stay with you. That’s why you must ensure that your content marketing technique is to create plagiarism-free (unique) and valuable content. Your blogs, articles, and newsletters should offer a valid reason for your audience to want to stay with your brand and be a part of your customer community.
To ensure that your marketing content is unique, simply use a plagiarism detector and check your content with it. If it contains anything that is similar to other published works, it will get flagged. Then you can either remove it or edit it to ensure that your content is unique.
This type of content marketing generates trust in the audience and makes them more likely to stay loyal to your brand. However, the content must be actually useful and valuable as well. But we will talk more about that later.
3. Valuable Content in Your Marketing Encourages Community to Keep Coming Back
Your content marketing strategy should involve creating and publishing valuable content. But why valuable content specifically? If you remember, we talked about the importance of unique content for building a community, the point was that most people will not bother to become a part of the brand community if they do not have unique content.
Well, the same thing is applicable to valuable content. A community thrives around value. As long as your brand provides value, it will have a strong customer community. The best way to provide value aside from your products and services is to invest in valuable content.
Educational posts, and articles explaining how to solve certain problems and issues that your audience may be facing provide value. Value is what drives your customer community to come back to your brand and it drives engagement.
So long as there is valuable content to be had, your customer community will come together to consume and discuss it with each other. This forges strong bonds between them and enables them to become a stronger community.
4. Engage Your Audience by Using UGC in Your Content Marketing
Nobody said you have to use just your own content for marketing. You can attract and retain a larger audience by using UGC (user-generated content). Many people who are looking to make a purchase conduct some in-depth research first. Approximately 8% of consumers do online research about products they want to buy. UGC and testimonials give such customers a huge green light to go ahead and buy your product.
People trust other people more than they trust brands. So, if you use real UGC, then it will vastly improve the chances of converting new customers into leads, thereby retaining them.
UGC also has the benefit of making your customers feel like they belong in your brand’s customer community. It encourages more people in your community to engage with your brand by creating their own UGC.
Some types of UGC that you can use are:
- Blog posts are written by your customers
- Reviews and testimonials
- Case studies showing the influence of your products on your customers
Use this content with permission of course, and if it is monetized in some way, then share the rewards with the people whose content you used. In this way, you can use content marketing to connect your customers with each other and build a strong community.
5. Conduct Surveys and Q/A Sessions to Tailor Your Content for Your Audience
Nothing makes a customer stay loyal than a company that listens to them. If you can do that successfully, then you can easily retain customers. By conducting Q/A sessions, your brand can gain two main benefits:
- Encourage people to become a part of your customer community
- Gets you the data about what your customers want from your brand
This data helps you to create a content marketing strategy that will not only engage your current audience but also help you to attract new ones too.
Periodic surveys also make your audience feel heard, so they are more willing to engage with your brand as a customer community. To conduct a survey, you can do the following things:
- Open a poll on your platform that registered users can vote on. Allow comments on this poll so that if you have missed anything in the poll, then users can comment on it instead.
- Send a targeted survey to your audience via email. Be sure to offer some reward for completing the survey to encourage users to complete it.
- Show the results of the poll and surveys so that you appear to be transparent. Transparency does wonders to build trust with your audience.
Then don’t just file those results away. That is valuable feedback and it will give you insight into what your audience wants from you. This feedback may give you an idea of how to improve an existing service/product or create a new product that will go over well with your customers.
While not exactly considered content marketing, surveys, and Q&A sessions are types of content that your audience can engage with and come together to discuss. This can foster better relationships with each other and your brand so long as you do your due diligence.
Successful Brands that Have a Strong Customer Community
Now we will check out some brands that have a strong customer community which they created in part with content marketing.
1. Starbucks
This household name is an American multinational company that was founded in 1971. Starbucks is not only known for its good coffee and café delights, but it is also renowned for its culture.
It has a strong customer community which they maintain and promote to improve customer engagement. As for content marketing and its role in building its community; Starbucks uses a lot of UGC. They simply post the UGC on their own platforms along with captivating captions and titles. This attracts more people from both within and outside of Starbucks’ community.
2. Rod Stryker
Rod Stryker is a yoga instructor, and now also a brand. This guy used content marketing to its fullest and became so famous. His brand has a large community surrounding and there is a special app for people to interact and learn from each other in his community.
Rod Stryker posted a lot of content that was instructional in nature. He posted content that was related to training and online classes that audiences from all over the world could access. He even published a book.
Conclusion
So, in summary, content marketing is a really useful tool for creating and maintaining a strong customer community. Brands should invest in content marketing and aim to engage their audience.
Using UGC created by their own audience, brands can show that they are authentic and trustworthy. Any UGC used for this purpose should be authentic and not fake. Other brands have achieved success in this way, and so can you.
