Online communities have become a requirement in today’s world; think about how frequently any engagement you find with any brand.
What is an Online Community?
An online community is a virtual platform where members or subscribers communicate with each other. In this internet era or computer age, even businesses are conscious that they cannot remain underdeveloped in any field. By building an online community for their customers business understand and share information with the customers.
Building an online community helps a business to reach a new customer, influence customers, broadcast any information or to get the feedback of the customers and establish a reliable brand name. According to the Higher Logic report, the average EBS (Engagement benchmark Score) is 80 plus for 2019. Measuring EBS includes an algorithm of the standard factors of the community Activity, Numbers of Members, Feedbacks and distribution.
Reason for the growth of online communities:
- Customer Bonding: In today’s business world customer wants to have a specific place in business decisions. Many companies have started to focus on customer relationship through online communities to keep customers engaged and updated.
- Cost-Efficient: reducing the investment cost and still driving the sale is what business has been looking for years now. The online community helps business to reduce their cost by proving customer service to the customer online.
- Feedback Helps Improve: Feedback for any business is very important to improvise any product. Many companies allow community members to use their product and provide feedback so they can improvise on their innovation and provide better customer experience.
Top companies have understood the importance of having an online presence. Still, it’s not essential to have a big brand name to build a community. There are many small scale businesses which have their community as they know the importance of the online community and how it helps to brand a business. Below are the few essential tips for growing your community and gaining more customers:
- Picture Your Brand: Your community members should know of what your companies’ mission stands for and how it is beneficial for him. Make your online presence felt by being brand-oriented. Branding helps a business to gain customer trust and brand value. To grow your community, make sure you keep your community active and interactive.
- Be Social: This is one of the critical steps in the growth of any community. Pick the best social media platform where you can find your target audience and start promoting your community, start by following influencers, customers and business similar to yours and comments from your business profile onto the others to gain attention.
- Build Responsive Design: According to a report by ComScore, an American media measurement and analytics company, providing marketing data and analytics 65% of the digital media time accounts for mobile phone and 35% for desktop. Therefore, your online community design should be responsive and easy to understand for your member.
- Gamification: Integration of the gaming mechanism into something that already exists to motivate your present subscribers. Gamification is one of the best techniques to grow your business as your current members have trust in your brand and promoting your brand would be an easy test for them.
Excellent customer experience leads to the fast growth of the business and engaging customers by having an active online community will amaze you when you see the results you have achieved. Everyone loves it when they know that someone is there to hear them and to build such communities where members feel satisfied by speaking their voice help in boosting sales and brand growth.
