What do you think your customers are doing when they are not browsing your products or availing of your services? One word answer would be ‘surfing’ or browsing the internet, particularly social media. And, whatever experience they had, they are looking for a way to communicate to their peer about their experience.
Guess what will happen if your potential customers don’t find you on any social media, nor any update neither any response to their query, even for the pricing of your product? As a result, you’ll be losing money for sure. Hence, the only thing you can do is to devise a digital marketing strategy. Followed by the next step of setting up a community for your brand. This is the key to success and customer retention, which companies like Apple and Lego, even entertainment shows like Game of Throne (GOT) and BTS brand is using. And, their revenue is in billion. Additionally, they don’t have to invest much in new customer acquisition because of their community’s loyalty.
But the key is to show commitment, consistency, and patience, just like in a marriage. And only then you can expect your brand to get recognition, more importantly, trust that motivates your community to your favor.
Here in this article, we have crafted a step-by-step guide that contains all essential steps that you can take to establish a brand community or rebrand your community to make it more captivating for members to join. Along with this, to make the action part of the content creation, publishing, scheduling, and analytics, we have provided a brief review of Zoho Social that is designed for the sole purpose of social media management. For customization of Zoho Social with CRM, you can reach out to Techloyce’s Zoho CRM Consultants. We are among the top best and certified Zoho Partners, working endlessly to serve our clients with the best of best.
Also Read: Online Community A Source For Brand To Get Recognition And Awareness
A Complete Guide On How To Build A Brand Community
1. Start with Branding
The first step of building a brand community starts with branding. The purpose of this step is to ensure that you are all catch-up with what your business is, what values it holds, and what mission it is serving, along with the solution it aims to provide. And remember, ideologies and beliefs resonate with people’s hearts more than the products. Therefore, the first thing you need to do is to define your brand, mainly the story behind its establishment and how you reached the point where you are now. Make sure it is human because you are selling your brand’s image, not your product.
The core of everything should revolve around providing quality customer service and experience. To know where you stand in terms of customer experience, you can always consult the metrics available.
Read More On Customer Service And Customer Experience, Not The Same Side Of A Coin
2. Identify Key Metrics About Your Audience
The next step is to know who your customers are, what they do on social media, and when they are active. Hold on! for this, you don’t have to initiate any survey, because you already have all the right metrics available. You just need to download the reports of social media pages and you will know how many people are following you, including their ages and geographical location. Along with the estimated time when they interact with your content and behavior.
3. Chose Platform For Community
This is the most essential step, choosing the right social media platform. Hold your thoughts, if you are thinking of creating communities of all social media platforms because as a newbie, managing the dozens of social media accounts is not possible. Even if you think you have enough resources to dedicate one medium. So, the best option is to start with a twining, meaning you should start with either one or two platforms. This will help you know and understand what publishing practices are working and what people are expecting of you.
For the starter, we would suggest starting with building a professional community on LinkedIn, and Twitter or you can pair any of these either with Instagram or Reddit and Pinterest.
Pro Tip: Review your social media metrics and select the platform that is yielding higher engagement.
4. Create Content
The last step that you need is to create abundant content. And, again, make sure you are consistent. Initially, you can start with posting on alternate days, and modify to strategy to either increase or decrease the content posting quantity with time.
Another thing you can do, if you can create content, is to curate and share the content of others. Hold on, here you need to know and understand that not all trends are worthy of sharing, so share trending content that directly supports your mission and object, along with this, that provides value to your followers.
Pro Tip: Starts with basics, first create content for awareness, gradually build trust. Try to engage with followers (dedicate time, at least an hour or two). Lastly, make sure to provide value either through content or with communication.
Learn More About Social Listening – A Key Substance for Seamless Product Development and Successful Marketing
Here Is How Zoho Social Can Assist You
As we said, we will also give a brief review of Zoho Social then, here you go. It is one of the best Zoho social media management applications that Zoho is offering at a highly reasonable subscription. Some prominent features that we like best, and serves the goal of efficiently managing the social media community.
- First, you can create a content calendar, that not only help you visualize and track the content pipeline, but also allow you to organize and spread content creation, reviewing, and designing across the month
- Next, you can schedule the content for publication. If you don’t know when your audience is active then you can use the ‘time prediction’ feature that will help you efficiently schedule your content, even on holidays.
- Since you will be a managing community on multiple platforms, you can use a monitoring dashboard. It is sticky in design, contains multiple listening columns, that are designed to give you a complete overview of what’s is happening across the platform. And you can also engage with the audience in real-time. Additionally, you can host live streaming, and monitor viewers’ reactions through the listening dashboard, and send direct messages. However, for Instagram, you can utilize Zoho Social to monitor hashtags and post new or repost user-generated content by using the desktop.
- For team and client communication, Zoho Social offers audio and video call features.
- Lastly, with Zoho’s social analytics, you will get deep insights into who and how your audience engages with you on social media. For this, you can either use pre-built reports or create new ones from scratch.
In A Nutshell
For many brand community development seemed to be a secondary thing, when a digital marketing strategy is reaping quality leads. But, for a moment, try to put yourself in the customers’ shoes, when they want to buy something, they look for reviews, and when they stumble upon your community while searching for something, then they will surely buy.
And, to manage dozens of social media pages or communities of multiple platforms, you can use Zoho Social. It is a complete suite that helps you monitor, track, schedule, and much more. To get it integrated with your CRM, or to customize it to match your needs, feel free to reach out to Techloyce.
