The foundation of social media is conversations. As a B2B marketer you should look toward social media, in particular communities as an opportunity to create dialogue between your organisation and customers.
Marketing is, after all, about understanding and satisfying customer wants and needs. What better way to do this than to provide your customers with a community where like-minded individuals can come together and interact with both the company and each other.
Great organisations such as Dell, Oracle, IBM, already use communities as a channel to communicate with their customers on equal terms. At the same time providing a collaborative work space where their clients can provide feedback and assist in the development of future products and services.
Where to start?
Well I’m certainly not going to follow the tired formula of ‘build it and they will come.’ B2B marketing is all about initiating the program, pulling the strings and orchestrating the story so here is the best way of building a community for your company:
First, as with any plan you need to define your business objectives; do you want to co-create future products/services with your customers, build stronger relationships or identify current trends and understand how your products or services are used? Next you can look at resources and what investment you can realistically dedicate to the community as time and effort play a large part in the success of a community.
The cost to develop a community can be minimal and can be launched immediately for free using tools such as Facebook brand pages or groups. So, if budgets are tight or, you do not have time to wait for budgets to be signed off for a bespoke interface as part of your corporate website, you can start building your community immediately.
Create a stir
Having identified your objectives and platform you then need to target your key influencers; these will usually be the customers who provide regular feedback to your company via e-mail, surveys or have an active presence through blogs and will be willing to participate in a community. Furthermore these key influencers will help you to build the community through dialogue with other members.
Contact the key influencers via e-mail informing them about your new community and invite them to join first. Seed content such as company information into the community to kick-start the conversation and educate the key influencers on how the dialogue should take shape. When the community starts to buzz, use your CRM e-mail database to inform all your customers about the community and invite them to participate in the discussion.
Promote, promote, promote
Once the conversation is taking shape you still need to maintain the momentum. To do this you can run promotions or competitions amongst the community. Set up a tiered system whereby members are ranked or rewarded based upon their contribution to the community. Make the recognitions public to encourage other members to follow suit.
If you gather real insight into emerging trends within your industry via the community why not write a report and issue a press release to raise awareness of the community’s value. Through effective digital pr you can boost community activity whilst at the same time recruiting new members.
Integrate other business units
Your community should shape what your business will eventually become – open, honest and highly effective. More importantly the community should be integrated with not just marketing but other strategic business units, for example: customer service/support, product development and finance, this is because all units can benefit from the knowledge, insight and collaboration of the community as they are all brand touch points.
Fundamentally history shows us that those businesses that go on to succeed and reap the benefits are authentic. If you provide a platform where customers can share values with your company, meaningful conversations with different business units and interact with other community members then they are more likely to stay loyal to a brand. We’re all well aware that it costs twice as much to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer. A community based approach can help lower costs at the outset but when budgets are tight they may increase rewards when (if) success blossoms.
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