An effective marketing strategy relies on building and maintaining customer relationships. The strongest relationships are built upon trust, transparency and consistent communication. For many businesses, a branded community provides a great opportunity to develop customer loyalty, increase awareness and drive sales. And yet, most businesses aren’t taking advantage of the different ways they can use branded communities to maximize their marketing efforts.

DNN recently created an infographic outlining “21 Incredible Ways Marketers Can Use Branded Communities.” In this blog series, we’ll examine five of these ways (in each blog post) in an effort to learn more about how marketers can leverage branded communities to unlock the value they have to offer.

1) Lead Generation: Turn community members into qualified leads

The easiest way to optimize your community for lead generation is by simply asking community members to share information or invite others they know to join your community. Those who know and trust you can best educate others and raise awareness on your behalf. Research tells us that when a friend or influencer talks, people listen.

According to the IBM Institute for Business Value, approximately 6 in 10 global consumers say that friends’ social media posts influence their purchase choices. Additionally, sales converted as a result of a referral from a friend or influencer are likely to be more loyal to a brand, spend more and stay longer than those who have no direct relationship to your company.

2) Revenue Growth: Generate revenue by creating demand in the community

It’s a common misconception that a company builds loyalty by driving sales; instead, companies drive sales by helping people meet their needs. Branded communities provide a forum through which you can learn more about what your customers (or prospective customers) want, what they don’t want and how they want it. If you can effectively understand your community’s expectations, you can work to deliver a product or service that meets their needs.

Conversely, branded communities offer companies an opportunity to experiment and test new features and services. Each improvement a company makes has the potential to unlock new layers of demand, which can create more incentives for customers.

3) Inbound Marketing: Create content that attracts new visitors and members

A typical inbound marketing strategy may include content creation and distribution that aims to generate, nurture, and close leads. The basic idea is that content you publish will align with your customer’s interests, so you can organically attract inbound traffic and potential sales from prospective customers. When you publish and distribute content through traditional online and social channels, it’s sometimes hard to know which content your audience finds relevant and engaging.

When content is published to a branded community, customers can interact directly with it, so you can see which content they look at, share, comment on or ignore. Additionally, since you know who these customers are and they (hopefully) know and trust you, it’s easy and comfortable to engage with them by asking questions so you can improve the quality of the content provided.

4) Customer Engagement: Create a deeper sense of engagement with your brand

It’s no secret that engaged consumers can positively impact consumer loyalty, satisfaction, empowerment, connection, emotional bonding, trust and commitment. And yet, so many businesses expect that these benefits will just happen magically. The truth is that communities are strongest when everyone plays a role. Companies can’t afford to sit back and pretend that customer engagement will just happen: they need to get involved.

5 Incredibly Valuable Ways Marketers Can Use Branded, Online Communities

Part 2

For customer engagement to be successful, both company and customer must get something out of it. Customers should be able to easily access the information they need to make an informed decision, while companies should be able to glean insights that can improve what they do and how they do it. If successful, a branded community will become an essential hub of information and communication, creating value for all who participate.

Read this customer case study, which highlights Microdesk's use of an online community for customer engagement:

5) Email Marketing: Build your email database by asking members to subscribe

When it comes to email marketing, we like to think that our emails are reaching the right people. The challenge of getting the right people to subscribe and engage with your email messages can be daunting. With a branded community, companies can encourage members to sign up for emails so they can receive relevant information. As your community grows, email can help to streamline announcements and notifications to those in your community who are interested.

Additionally, companies can use email marketing to promote their branded community to others who have yet to join. To entice others to participate, companies can easily leverage community member testimonials and provide examples of community engagement.

5 Down, 16 To Go!

As you can see, branded communities can have a lot of offer marketers. But we’re hardly finished. In our next post, we’ll examine five more incredible ways marketers can use branded communities.

The Infographic

Have a look through the full infographic, “21 Incredible Ways Marketers Can Use Branded Communities.”