Are you still relying on traditional marketing strategies to turn in a profit? Airlines sending out mass emails, businesses plastering flyers to any flat surface possible, and companies targeting randomized demographics–these strategies just need to produce what they used to. What if there was something new that could be revolutionary for your business? Something more targeted and refined? There is! Enter the concept of community-based marketing. Community based marketing involves creating focused campaigns tailored for specific audiences to make an impact beyond average reach. In this article, I will explain exactly what community-based marketing is and why taking steps to shift your current strategy towards it can have a lasting positive effect on your business.
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What is community-based marketing?
Community-Based Marketing (CBM) is a marketing approach that focuses on leveraging the community of people around an organization’s products or services to create mutual value and meaningful relationships. CBM leverages various digital channels, such as social media and digital advertising, to build trust between the brand and its stakeholders by creating unique insights, experiences, and content for them.
At its core, CBM aims to bring people together around a shared purpose, place, product, or circumstance to develop deeper relationships with prospects, customers, and other stakeholders. This helps organizations collaborate more closely with their communities to gain valuable insights and deliver excellent organizational value.
Why Shift Towards Community-based Marketing?
Community-based marketing has a lot to offer brands and businesses. They can create a community to engage their stakeholders, customers, and potential audience.
Many brands have a wrong idea about CBM and think talking to customers can help foster a deeper connection. However, CBM helps them build effective relationships and develop a business hand-in-hand with their consumers rather than establishing a company that talks to them.
Here are some significant benefits of using community-based marketing:
1. More in-depth consumer understanding
Customer data analytics is essential for gathering customer information and buying habits. Building relationships with customers on a personal level through online communities can give you significant insights into who they are and what they need from a product or service. This relationship can allow you to create a personalized experience for your customers to meet their needs better and strengthen your brand loyalty.
Additionally, forming connections with customers via online communities can provide valuable feedback about the performance of your products, services, or website, which can help you make adjustments to improve your offerings. By taking the time to understand your customers through engagement in their online community, you will be able to foster strong connections which will keep them coming back again and again.
2. Additional influential connections
Additional marketing forms like social media or email marketing don’t help you build different influential connections with your customers. However, community-based marketing solely focuses on building meaningful relationships rather than an “oh ya, I know you” connection.
When you shift your focus to building more meaningful relationships with customers, it gives them an array of reasons why they should be loyal to you. Customers appreciate when companies take the time to listen, address their concerns or questions, and make them feel valued. This type of engagement helps create positive associations around your brand while also creating opportunities for conversations that open the door for future sales.
It’s also important to remember that community-based solid relationships can result in word-of-mouth advertising — one of the most powerful tools for driving business growth! People who have enjoyed connecting with your brand intimately and feel appreciated are more likely to recommend you to family and friends.
Also Read: Marketing With Social Media: Establish Relationship with Your Audience
3. A more increased consumer lifetime worth
Customer relationships play an essential role in community-based marketing. Moreover, the community-based marketing concept is solely based on building customer relationships.
A positive customer experience and meaningful customer relationships are the basis for a successful business. They will bring people back and increase customer lifetime value. In addition, creating a community allows people to connect over their interests and builds loyalty.
Thoughtfully nurturing your community will create an engaged audience, leading to word-of-mouth marketing, referrals, and recurring business.
Also Read: What is Social Networking?
4. You get user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) has become an essential factor influencing customer purchase decisions, particularly online reviews or word-of-mouth recommendations. This shift from brands being entirely in control of their customer’s perception offers the benefit of authenticity and effectiveness for businesses.
To capitalize on this, businesses should focus on promoting the creation and sharing of UGC on various channels. This is because genuine user reviews set brands apart from competitors and help to establish trust with potential customers.
Additionally, engaging in conversations with customers around their shared UGC can further strengthen relationships with existing communities. By leveraging UGC, businesses have the potential to reach a much wider audience than ever before.
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How to start with community-based marketing?
Getting started with community-based marketing is simple, and it won’t take more than an hour to create an online community website. Here is how you can start with community-based marketing:
1. Determine your target audience
Firstly, you need to determine your target audience so that you do not end up confused after creating an online community. Make sure you understand what your ideal customer wants from you.
Create a WordPress website
To set up an online community website, you need the things mentioned below:
- Purchase web hosting services
- Purchase a domain name
- Install WordPress on your web host
2. Choose a theme- community-based marketing
Although it is possible to use elementor and other plugins to create a theme for your WordPress website, for most brands and businesses, the most technologically and cost-sense efficient way is to choose a pre-made theme.
The Reign Theme is one of them; it is a white-level community-building solution supported by BuddyPress and WordPress. That means you must use the BuddyPress plugin to create your community.
Also Read: 8 Secrets For Creating a Thriving Community
3. Create content for your members
Next, you need to create personalized content for your community. It will motivate your members to create and post content too. Your content strategy will determine how you will lead the community. Content is king, and we all know it. Hence, developing an effective plan for your community website is crucial.
4. Moderate your community
The last step towards achieving community-based marketing is to keep moderating your online community. You can choose to moderate manually. However, we recommend you use moderation plugins or hire community moderators.
Community-Based Marketing-Wrapping It Up
In conclusion, understanding what community-based marketing is and why it’s a fundamental shift from traditional marketing methods is vital to keeping your business competitive. Communities bring potent insights on how to market to the right people in the most effective way. They give businesses a great platform for engaging with customers and potential ones too. If you want to stay ahead of the competition, embracing community-based marketing is essential.
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