From customers to the community – this is how contact succeeds at eye level
Companies that only use Instagram and Co. as a mouthpiece for offers only communicate the most important information. You forget the most important potential of this medium, namely the social side. But this is precisely the reason for the popularity of social networks. People still search the Internet for exchange with like-minded people and they long for a feeling of belonging to a group. Companies can also help and meet this need. By building an online community, you get an important marketing and sales tool that you can use to attract new customers and strengthen your brand.
There are now countless sales strategies in e-commerce. Sometimes it’s difficult to see all the benefits at first glance. Community management also promises a lot: closer customer loyalty, strengthening of the brand and higher sales figures. The path to a good community shows that there are many other advantages for your company if you do it right. With a high interaction rate, you get valuable feedback on existing products and services. You can use this information to improve your product range and market it in a more targeted manner. With further announcements and good product presentations, you can then increase the anticipation of new products and services.
By talking directly to your customers, you and your company appear more approachable and familiar. This allows you to build a much more personal relationship as well as brand loyalty. Regular interaction with your target audience also helps you gain insight into their wants and needs. This information helps you to optimize marketing measures. In the best case, you can also save on support, since community members often support each other and give tips on your products. The more voices there are about your business, the better: negative opinions can also help gather important information about your brand’s reputation. Last but not least, the content also helps to increase awareness of your brand.
But first, back to the beginning: If you want to build an online community with your company, it must be strategically built, managed and maintained. This is where community management comes in.
Community management is about building an online community, but also about maintaining and managing it. With the aim of bringing together external audiences, such as customers or partners, and internal employees of a company, everyone involved should have a better experience with the company. If you do everything right, a loyal community can become your company’s flagship.
A community manager succeeds in bringing people together on the Internet and thus founding a small community. (Photo: NDAB Creativity/Shutterstock)
But building, maintaining, and managing the online community can take a lot of time and effort. This important task should therefore not be done “on the side” by a team member or intern. That is why community managers are often required. They stimulate discussions or moderate contributions. Above all, they uphold the rules and guidelines of the community so that no one is offended, for example. Communication experts are particularly in demand for the job. With the help of community managers, a link is created between stakeholders and companies on the Internet.
Of course, a loyal community around your brand doesn’t spring from a vacuum and takes a little work. Already in the preparation you can take many steps that will later give your company more success in community building. First, it is important to identify your target audience and their communication preferences. Which social networks do they use to communicate and what is the best way to reach them? This way you can reach a particularly young target group much better on Tiktok, while an older one is more likely to be on Facebook or Pinterest. Based on your target groups, you can choose one or, in the best case, several platforms that you want to use. The “how” is also important when addressing customers: A consistent brand voice, also known as tonality, can help with loyalty. So it is important whether you want to address your target group formally with “you” or with a personal “you”.
Before you fill all channels with content and let your customers interact, you have to get to know the needs of your audience. Do these people mainly want to be entertained or are they more looking for practical tips and tricks on how to use your product? While some questions are easier to answer and can be derived from your product, some questions are a bit more complex. If you value an interactive community, it’s worth asking what value members get from actively contributing to the community. Looking at other brands can also help to find successful incentives to increase interaction and learn something about your customers.
Even with the right tricks, community management can be a lot of work. If you integrate your social media channels in a CRM system, your employees have a much better overview of all conversations and they don’t have to switch between different social media platforms. Social CRM means the integration of social networks in CRM platforms (CRM: Customer Relationship Management). In addition to traditional communication channels, more and more CRM platforms now also support social networks so that customers can interact with companies via their preferred channels.
With Salesforce’s Community Cloud, you can easily create your own community for customers, partners, and employees, perfectly aligned with their branding. Build knowledge bases and give your customers self-service options for a seamless user experience.
Get to know Salesforce’s Social CRM now.
