7 Ways Brand Communities Help Businesses
Does your company host an online user community? If not, you may want to consider investing in one. These communities can prove to be powerful spaces that help your business and your customers really connect and grow together. Here are seven fundamental ways communities can be a highly useful and unique resource:
1. Customer Engagement
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of engaging your customers, which is crucial for retention. Having meaningful conversations around your product or service creates a deeper connection that builds trust and long-term loyalty. Brand communities are a perfect place to have such conversations. It’s important to ask and answer questions and provide advice and expertise to show that your business cares about your customers and their opinions. And encouraging your community members to help each other is no less important. It’s usually a balance of being there for your customers, ready to help, but also letting them discuss things among themselves. That’s what makes a true community.
2. Customer Education
Businesses may not need to teach customers how to use their product or service, but they usually have some expert advice or best practices that they can share. A community is a great place to house such educational resources — especially if you have a dedicated community team. Customer education often goes hand in hand with engagement. Hosting webinars, providing access to e-learning courses, or inviting your customers to participate in Q&A sessions can help ensure your customers’ success. And company announcements or product release updates with detailed explanations are a great way to keep your users informed and engaged.
3. Customer Network
An online community encourages customers to build connections that help them be more successful using your product and beyond. These relationships may include customer-to-customer for insight and support and customer-to-expert for best practice options. The discussions can involve talk of your product or service and also industry-related topics. Your users are able to share creative solutions to issues and innovative ways to use your product, improving the value for both customers and your organization.
4. Access to Company Representatives
Online communities can also give your customers direct access to your company. If your community is managed by a company representative, users can tag them in a post for a personal response. That adds transparency that is hard to offer anywhere else and reassures your customers their voice is heard and valued.
5. Brand Advocates
Would you like access to brand advocates who love your product and are happy to leave positive feedback? Well, an online community is a great place to identify advocates like this. You can start by creating an advocate or reward program or leveraging your existing one. Encourage people to engage with your brand and be sure to reward them.
6. Support Deflection
Your customers possess a lot of insight into your product or service, so it’s important to provide a space where they can share knowledge and search for answers. Encourage your community members to search the platform before posting a new question their question may have already been answered. By providing this accessible, searchable resource, you’re encouraging your customers to self-serve. This can drive engagement customer satisfaction and can save your business money in customer support costs.
7. Product Feedback, Ideas, and Research
Online communities are an invaluable source of product feedback. Community members report bugs, share insight into the user experience, and often suggest product enhancements. A user community allows you to gather and act upon this feedback and make your customers feel heard. It’s a good idea to have a process in place to pass on feedback to your developers/product team and keep customers informed on progress, updates, and changes. You can also use a community to recruit for product research — users can participate in alpha and beta testing, reducing research costs. Brand advocates and highly engaged users are often excited to have the opportunity to test new features and share their insights and feedback.
In short, brand communities can provide a powerful way to build relationships and trust with your customers. They can help to engage and educate, build networks, nurture brand advocates, deflect support costs, and enable you to build better products, providing great value to your customers as well as your business.
