Think of a time when you connected with a stranger over love of a brand.
Maybe it was raving about your favorite mobile app at a networking event. Now, imagine a brand manager who initiates conversations about the products she sells and the feelings she fosters. That’s the goal of community building.
Community building with your customers dramatically shapes the work of the entire company, from the conferences your CEO attends to the new feature your team will build next. Community building allows you to delight customers and attract prospective customers.
Building a strong community means you go beyond preaching your product gospel. Communities enter the daily lives of your customers and users. They’re powerful. They build brand loyalty and thought leadership in a way customers remember.
The first step in community building is to listen to your customers. Whether you just launched and are listening to a handful of customers, or you aim to hear from several million, a solid foundation will help a team tackle the challenge.
WORKSHOP: Become your own media outlet and apply journalistic practices within your organization.
We want everybody to make information attractive, and to do that our community must be welcoming. We’re always looking for ways to be as helpful in our community as we can be. We’ve tried three tactics to build more enthusiastic communities. Here’s what works:
- Create a user-led event series. Hootsuite is an example of this. Consumers around the world interact with “Hootups,” local meetups organized by Hootsuite users. At these you’ll find people who meet with other enthusiasts in their area to share tips, tactics, tools, and experiences using Hootsuite for fun and business. Hootups bridge their online products to the real world. They give Hootsuite users ownership of the brand.
- Build collaborative partnerships. Community building requires the ability to spot connections quickly. To get attention, you must think how your audience thinks. Rolling out partnerships and collaborations is one way to do that. This can be new product features like our integration with SlideShare, which helps customers share their creations on social media.
- Reach out in personal ways. After attending a session by Max Maclean and Ran Stallard at SXSW 2016 about why clever communications are handmade, we were inspired. Handwritten information is far more likely to be read than emailed information. The speakers argued that “handmade” could be the next big marketing trend. We have started using Printfection to warehouse and mail t-shirts and stickers to customers and partners to get more #PiktoLove out into the world.
Creating a strong, supported community is crucial to your brand’s expansion. PR and marketing pros have a powerful opportunity to shape the way their brand is perceived by communities. To do that, they must make the strengthening of communities their first priority.
Jacqueline Jensen is the community evangelist at Piktochart . She is a prominent storyteller and relationship builder.
(Image via)
from PR Daily News Feed http://ift.tt/2h2p1bt
No comments:
Post a Comment