Engaged communities can have tremendous impact on the health of a business. They have an impact along the entire arc of the product journey - from feedback for product improvement, pre-sale engagement to post-sale customer service.
And when the network effects of a thriving community are unlocked, the community flywheel can help generate new leads and grow revenue by helping businesses turn their community members into brand ambassadors. This helps supercharge business growth with your own social commerce platform.
That's not it. Brands shouldn't just be thinking from a community-led growth perspective to build a new engagement and sales channel, rather they should also be thinking of it as a natural step they must take for the long-term health of the business.
As digital consumer behaviour evolves, it is becoming very crucial for brands to build social experiences around their offerings and identity. It's important for brands to seamlessly integrate social, content & product discovery and commerce experiences. It's becoming the new benchmark.
While content and copy continue to be the building blocks of product marketing and brand building, community engagement is what is increasingly determining the visibility, longevity, relatability and impact of those building blocks.
While building a community-first strategy for business, it's important to remember the difference between audience and community.
Top benefits of adopting a community-first approach. We'll keep this short.
Creating a sense of belonging
Imagine strolling into a buzzing coffee shop where the barista knows your name, your favourite order, and your guilty pleasure of adding extra whipped cream.
Your online brand communities can provide that same warmth of belonging and being part of something extraordinary. Genuine recognition is great pull. When customers join a community, they're not just customers anymore, they become cherished members of a tribe.
The brand community network may become somewhat of a digital home where they belong. People spend their time where they belong. Everything else follows.
Facilitating customer-community engagement
A brand community - given its shared interests and values - also naturally lends itself to being a space for customer engagement throughout the customer life time.
When prospects discover a brand / business / product community, they can see how passionate the brand is about the subject. This is where a lot of authority building happens via the content a brand publishes, the way it engages the community and responds to queries.
It provides more visibility and this can help shorten lead times, help turn prospects into customers faster and help build trust to scale lead conversions. Subsequently, the same community can be a channel for customer service with catalogued information, resources and providing a welcoming space for question and answers.
As this journey from a prospect to customer to community member matures, members grow into brand ambassadors as the sense of belonging becomes deeper and affiliation becomes stronger.
Increased satisfaction, retention & growth
When customers feel engaged and connected, brand magic happens. Happy customers stay longer, they spread word about the brand and the products faster than viral cat videos.
This not only helps brands grow customer retention by providing social experiences, real-time access and responses, but it also helps transform satisfied customers into brand ambassadors. Network effects begin to take on a life of their own when that happens and can significantly help grow the business.
This is where providing tailored incentives and adding different types of member privileges can help build a brand community flywheel where members can also benefit and grow with the brand. It becomes a win-win solution.
Where MainCross comes in
The all-in-one cloud software bundle that MainCross offers includes everything a brand or business needs to start, grow and manage their own digital presence, offerings and community.
It includes your site, but is so much more than it. It's the coming together of your site, community, marketing and communication platforms. it's your own branded social commerce platform.
The no code network builder helps power vertical networks which integrate all the building blocks that are required today to build thriving digital properties - content, community, commerce and workflows.
With a comprehensive feature-set, there is no requirement of third-party tools and you can build your digital presence using just one easy to use tool. This helps you focus on the other important areas of the business, rather than losing time while trying to manage 10s of different tools.
There's more. MainCross network builder includes a dashboard that offers a robust view of analytics and engagement tools to help measure the growth of the community, recognize superheroes among members, and to reward their dedication with pro accounts, badges, social recognition or via other prefered means.
Embrace a community-first strategy to grow engagement and visibility, and to transform customers into passionate brand advocates.
Talk to us to schedule a demo today.
