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Foreword: Nathan Anibaba
“Community building is the key to successful content marketing”
What is it that differentiates you from your competition? Is it your people? Your innovative product and its features? The relationships you build with your clients? I think that every category has, to some extent, become commoditised.
When you do come up with an innovative product, it isn't long before your competition catches up. This leaves little for the customer to base buying decisions on apart from perceived value.
And let’s couple this with the fact that there is a lot content out there. Marketers are pouring more and more into content strategies, but most of the time they simply add to the sea of content which most consumers are becoming more accustomed – and immune – to.
The Challenge?
If traditional marketing is getting tuned out, how do we create a unique positioning to become the go-to supplier for our products and make the competition irrelevant?
Of course you can do so through excellent customer service and world class retention strategies, but the most powerful ways to do this are through the emotional and psychological bonds marketers can build by creating a sense of community around their brand.
The smartest marketers have realised that it is possible to build a thriving community based around values and belief systems which initially attracted them to your brand.
Many marketers are ignoring one of the building blocks of human existence: the need to belong.
So why should marketers care about building a community around their products and brand?
1. To increase perceived value
When you increase the perceived value of your product in your prospect’s mind, you increase the actual value.
What is the difference between Colgate and Toothpaste X? Aren’t the ingredients the same? The only difference is the way the consumer thinks about the product. Colgate product communicates trust, family, expertise, and research, meaning the consumer is more likely to choose it over Toothpaste X.
2. To create an adaptive content experience
If someone visits your website and then returns two days later on a mobile device or tablet, how can you identify them? The best way is to build a membership community which requires the user to register for access. This is the same way so many positive experiences on the web work: Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, and Google (among many others) require you to be logged in to get the benefits of the service.
3. To create a deeper level of engagement and the next stage in the customer experience
Everyone opts in now. We give our email addresses in exchange for an ebook which we always intend to read, but rarely do. Creating an experience is key to delivering a deeper level of engagement. Marketers should build a destination so that prospects feel like they belong to a thriving community where people share their values.
Introduction
“Developing loyal customers means tapping into one of the deepest aspects of human nature – our desire to belong”
What gives great brands their edge? A strong product or service is essential, of course, but the pace of innovation is fast and new features don’t stay unique for long – no matter how good they are.
Good people are important, too – but they’ll move on. Increasingly, businesses are producing content to engage potential customers by providing them with useful information. But it can be hard to get heard among the ever-increasing noise – and even once you have someone’s attention, how do you hold it?
Marketers are now realising that developing loyal long-term customers means tapping into one of the deepest aspects of human nature – our desire to belong. The key to developing and retaining loyal customers in the long-term is to develop a community of people who share your values, and feel that they like and trust you. That’s when they’ll listen to what you have to say.
According to Vanessa DiMauro in her 56 Lessons From 20 Years of Online Community Building: People come for content and stay for community.
What is a B2B community?
The popularity of LinkedIn groups and email lists for discussing industry interests (and the popularity of websites like BuzzFeed and Mumsnet) shows that people truly value coming together with like-minded folk in many different ways. The strength of these groups rests on their shared interests, values, and desire to share content that they feel is relevant to them.
80% of marketers indicate that building brand communities has increased traffic. According to Hubspot, one way to drive traffic to your website to increase brand recognition is to engage your loyal customers through community platforms.
“Community is what keeps your content marketing thriving, forever”
People feel comfortable asking for advice, and develop camaraderie through knowing that there are people with similar experiences facing similar challenges. Through this, they build up long term loyalty and trust.
But size isn’t always important. A micro-community with only a small number of members can be very successful as long as it has the right audience, and that audience is engaged.
Step 1: Identifying Your Customers
It’s important to get a good idea of who your customers are. It’s helpful to know key demographic information such as their age, income, and occupation. And even better if you understand people’s lifestyles, attitudes, and beliefs. You want to develop a detailed picture of the kind of person you are engaging with.
One way of making sure that you’re doing this is through creating buyer personas – fictional profiles of the people who you want to sell to. A persona helps you understand a customer’s point of view and the problems they need solving.
Step 2: Your Values
As well as knowing what makes your customers tick, it’s also essential to get clear on what your company’s values are. An established company will have developed values over time, and even if your business is a start-up, you’ll still have an idea of how you want to do things. However, your values may not be explicit. Putting them into words is a good way to get them crystal clear.
Step 3: A Sense of Belonging
When you know what your values are, you can use them to create a sense of belonging by showing your customers how they tie in with their own worldview. They may not appeal to everyone, but that doesn’t matter. In fact, it can actually be helpful to alienate some people as it can strengthen the community’s sense of belonging. Harley Davidson's anti-conformist image has hardly dented its profitability!
Step 4: Creating Purpose
Let’s take IBM as an example here. It lists one of its values as ‘innovation that matters for our company and for our world’. So they created a branded community around their innovative products with a view to creating a sustainable world for everyone.
This was delivered through their ‘Smarter Planet’ big idea
It acted as a beacon for all business leaders, scientists, nobel laureates and technologists who want to make a better world through technology. This is credited as being one of the most effective B2B campaigns ever.
Step 5: Opting In
While some content should be freely available, customers should need to opt in to your community to access other parts of it.
Opting in is not onerous – it will probably only mean providing a name and email address and perhaps signing up to your newsletter. Quality content that helps your customers solve a problem is the key to encouraging them to opt in.
Step 6: Logging In
Logging in is a step up from opting in. People log in to access popular services like Facebook, Google, and Netflix – and the fact that they are willing to do this indicates that they highly value the experience.
From a marketing point of view, it is very useful when customers log in because you gain a large amount of valuable data and are able to track people across different devices.
Step 7: Experience and Engagement
Once people have logged in, they need to feel they are getting value from the experience. This way, they’ll return and begin to make a long-term investment of their time in the community.
Quality, not quantity
When developing membership of a community, quality, not quantity is key. It’s better to have 100 members who regularly log in and contribute, than 1,000 members who only do so occasionally.
Step 8: Monetisation
Once your community has developed, your customers will know and trust your brand, and feel they share an outlook. This can help in a number of ways, because you’ll know more about your potential customers and will have an effective channel for sharing new developments with them.
Harley-Davidson was facing extinction in 1983...
...but 25 years on it was valued at $7.8 billion. This is down to a community-based brand strategy. The Harley Owners Group now has over 1 million members and has opened up new revenue streams for the company.
Use content and develop conversation
Don’t make the mistake of pushing too much sales information on the community once it is established. The important thing is to keep using great content to develop discussions, so that your customers feel they are getting value. Once they trust you, they will feel an instinctive affinity to your products and services, and your brand will come to mind when they have a problem to solve.
Developing a logged in B2B community will be a new direction for many businesses. The CMO has a key role to play in championing this innovation and advocating the benefits of the approach to colleagues. Even CEOs may not understand the full value of a community. The CMO may need to explain counterintuitive concepts, like why it can be good to alienate some people if it creates a more powerful sense of belonging.
Create the strategy
The CMO will also need to plan the strategy for building a community, including determining the company values, getting to know customers’ key concerns, and planning how these can be brought together under a shared purpose.
The CMO will recruit the community manager, who can begin the process of getting core members on board, to help the group develop strong roots. One of the CMO’s most important roles is to oversee a vibrant content strategy: a thriving community is underpinned by great content.
Data, data, data – and then some more data
Data is crucial to this because it helps CMOs build an accurate picture of customers and the information they are looking for. The good news is that as the community develops, the more accurate and timely data you’ll have about the people within it, and the better you’ll understand them.
All companies need good customer data but not all are confident that they have it. In our survey, an average of 26% of respondents felt that their total data might be inaccurate.
How customers and your business both gain from community building
A flourishing B2B community brings benefits to both your business and its customers at every stage. Here’s how:
1. Spark of interest
Some content produced by your community should be shared with the wider world - for example, on social media. It will grab potential customers’ attention and encourage them to investigate further. If people are impressed by a thought-provoking blog or social media post, they’ll share it on their networks
Customer benefit: New knowledge and learning
Business benefit: Greater awareness and interest in your brand and community
2. Opting in
The next stage is to encourage community members to opt in by providing basic details like their name and email address, in order to download an asset such as an authoritative guide to a specific aspect of their industry.
Customer benefit: Deeper understanding
Business benefit: New leads, communicating authority and expertise of brand
3. Logging in
If they are impressed by the content, customers may then decide to become a full logged-in member of the community, giving them access to a much wider range of material that could include articles, videos and webinars. If the content is good, they’ll visit regularly to catch up on new material, and the latest discussions.
Customer benefit: Chance to take control of their career by deepening knowledge, contacts and industry expertise. See behind the ‘velvet rope’ - feeling of belonging to an exclusive club.
Business benefit: Rich customer data, strong regular engagement with your brand, customers develop trust
4. Co-producing content
Once customers are established community members you can leverage their expertise and mine their experience to help you produce content. Members may contribute ideas or author content themselves. This way you will know that your content is reflecting industry concerns. And when members are invested in the content they are more likely to share or refer to it outside the community, building further awareness.
Customer benefit: Networking, name recognition, useful content, chance to have their say
Business benefit: Compelling expert content, attracting new members and stimulating engagement
5. Developing and selling products
You can also involve community members in discussions about your product development, receiving prototype feedback and getting insights into what customers are looking for and which problems they need solving.
Customer benefit: Input into product development to make sure business needs are being served, exclusive previews and early access
Business benefit: Respond sensitively to market demand, happy customers, ongoing sales opportunities, cross-sell and upsell
Look at Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Google, and iTunes....
You are constantly logged into those services to get access to their main benefits. A logged in experience has the ability to measure usage behaviour across device to optimise the experience and put relevant content and products in front of your audience.
But it’s not just a one-time thing. Brands need ongoing engagement. Brands need a way to continue the conversation with their community to build advocacy, engagement, and lifetime value.
Right content, right time, right context
Replicate that community experience and belonging via a branded mobile application, increasing engagement levels. You can communicate with prospects at different stages of their lifecycle and promote the right content, at the right time, and in the right context – and to the right people.
Takeaways
- Developing loyal long-term customers means tapping into one of the deepest aspects of human nature – our desire to belong.
- As well as knowing what makes your customers tick, it’s also essential to get clear on what your company’s values are.
- Creating a shared purpose is an excellent way to bring your customers closer.
- It is very useful when customers log in, because you gain a large amount of valuable data and are able to track people across different devices.
- Once they trust you, your community members will feel an instinctive affinity to your products and services.
According to Hubspot research, 80% of marketers indicate that building brand communities has increased their traffic, but builing a community for community's sake won't do. Harness data, understand your audience, and maximise your marketing ROI.
Download research: Is data the key to content success? And we'll show you how.
