What is the fruit that all companies and brands want to taste? I believe it is to make people love them and their product. In pursuit of this, they all plan a ton of strategies. But, why? When you can ask the customers what they like and want directly to them itself. This is where a community comes into the picture. A community complements the efforts a marketing team puts to reach its goals.
A marketing team has a whole lot of strategies planned out, but I bet the most effective one can be none other than ‘Community’. Cause here you get to have a close relationship with your customers. This relationship is going to mint gold for you and your customers, a two-way win for both. Your business makes sense only if people are going to buy it, and that is why meeting those people and cherishing the relationship is important.
So here we have pointed out 13 reasons to prove that community helps marketing
- It gives the audience a picture that you value them
We all love it when our parents ask us our thoughts when making a decision right? It’s the same, customers feel loved and valued when you give them a space to express what they feel. When building a community you show the customer the sense of commitment you are ready to take in order to make them feel happy. This act makes them feel valued and they inevitably start reciprocating value for you in return.
2. It lowers the number of currency you toss
Every business hoards bundles and bundles of money to make the brand known to its customers, you wouldn’t believe that it a community can do without hurting your pocket. Okay, let’s first take a look at places where we spend money, social media marketing, email marketing, support service, ads, product making, bringing brand awareness, and whatnot. You do all this so that people will know about the brand, try it, associate with it, stay with it, love it. But would you believe that all these can be achieved with a community in place? You’ve got to.
3. Easy to pitch
People who end up in your community are not new to your brand or the product you sell. People here already know you and are interested in you. This crowd makes your job very easy. You need not sell the idea or the brand, you just need to nurture them in the right direction. This effort in nurturing will result in nurturing your band.
4. Improves customer experience by establishing a relationship
As a brand, your job is not done once the customer purchases a product, but has with it a journey after that. A good customer experience with the product and the brand decides if the person is going to stay with you or not. A community here will take care of that job by constantly connecting with the customer on a regular basis. Here they don’t just like the product they like the brand as a whole.
5. Saves your brand image
We need to accept that no product is perfect and to accept that and try to solve it is the smart thing to do rather than hiding it, cause one day it will reach daylight. Now how does your community help in that, when you have a community for your brand people come there if they find an issue they don’t fill the social media with negative comments about you. People never do that at the very first, people get furious when all their customer calls are gone unanswered and when they can’t find a solution. But when you have a community where you cater to your customer’s needs they come here to get things done and leave happy, by this you make your customer happy and at the same time create a good image about your brand to the customers.
6. You get to earn trust and establish loyalty
- In a community, you get to meet your customers and include them in your journey when you get vulnerable people will feel okay to get vulnerable to you.
- When you constantly engage and answer customer queries they feel satisfied and you gain trust from their side
- When you trust people’s gut and make decisions that you establish loyalty
When this cycle is achieved people will tend to stick to your brand and your product no matter what. Even though it is super buggy people will empathize with you and stand by your shoulder
7. Reduce churn
Have you given a thought as to why church occurs? When people get fed up with your brand, not your product. A community doesn’t let your customers reach that phase. If you have successfully made your customer like you
I’ll share something a friend of mine once said, why do people fall in love, is it because the other person is flawless, no love happens, and eventually oversees mistakes and flaws. This is the same scenario we are trying to achieve with the community, this doesn’t mean the product is always going to be bad always, no community helps both the brand and the customer to take the steps together.
8. You higher the count of repeat purchases
When people love the product they buy it and go away. But when people love your brand, service, concern, and experience they come back again to go through all of those again. And a community is sculpted in a way that it meets all these set points for a customer.
9. Helps you know deep about your own target audience
As a brand, you build something to make life easy for a customer. But how would they know what makes their life easier without even knowing them? I wish we all have the power to read others’ minds, now that we sadly don’t let’s rely on a community. A community is a place where people join in, share emotions, have conversations, and provide feedback. To be honest, it’s a place where they let their hearts out, now I think we might have the power and we have just not realized it. A community gives you the opportunity to look deep into your target audience to find what they need? This will lower the ambiguity in your product or service.
10. Helps to know how people perceive your brand and your product- There is a saying that our customers know more than you yourself about your product, no doubt cause they are the ones who are handling and closely associating with it on a daily basis. You only know the solutions, they are the ones who created a problem statement and they know better if the solution is working or not. When you are closely associated with them, it will be easy for you to know how the users perceive your brand.
11. Increase brand awareness- Brands run campaigns, events, do social media marketing, provide offers, and more to take the name of their brand to the customer's mind. This whole world is full of brands that compete to put their name in the customer’s mind when they think of a product for example when you hear the word building blocks the first company that comes to your mind is Lego, to make this happen for you is not an easy cakewalk, but I’m sure community will buttercream that process. When there is a healthy conversation between you and your customer is it possible for them to forget you.
12. Peer-to-peer support (word of mouth)- Write this somewhere, people trust peers more than you no matter what, I say again people want peer advice and not brand advice. Where their peers are, there they are. A community is a setup that brings together such people.
13. Your customers turn into advocates/ evangelists
When your community flourishes it gives rise to advocates. These advocates are people who have used your product in your community, love what you do and so genuinely on their own start referring about your brand and products to other members. This is 10 times more than a marketing team can do because people take in advice more easily from them than the brand. These advocates are unpaid marketers for your brand.
We have given you 13 reasons that prove community helps in marketing. I bet you don’t even have one reason to neglect the community for your brand.
Get this cleared in your head
All brands think that the whole idea of community is something new and is in a dilemma thinking if they would succeed or not. You need to hear this, you have been a part of a community all your life, a family is a community, your school is a community, you come together whenever you hear someone speak your language. Being part of your community is there in everyone’s blood. We are human animals who find joy in meeting people, tribes and religions are a few examples of those. We all have been doing this all this while and we will continue to do it. If you still think you might lose this game, I’m sorry you’re wrong.
Building community is a joy in itself, hope you choose joy for your brand!