community building online

Community Building Online /vboutcom vbout www.vbout.com

CONTENTST A B L E O F

What is an

online community?

3Why build an online

community?

4 6How to get started

How to grow your

community

How to keep the

conversation going

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29Moderate your growing

community

How start the

conversation

18 22

What is an online community?

“An online community is a group of people with common interests who use the Internet (web sites, email, instant messaging, etc.) to communicate, work together and pursue their interests over time.” Jul 7, 2003, Commoncraft.com

From the date of that definition, you can also see they’ve been around a long time.

The oldest, most active communities are in the gaming world.

Many brands and companies now run their own communities as they bring value to their brands and bottom line.

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Why build an online community?

Great way to grow your business and keep loyal customers and followers engaged with your brand.

Build an active community and gain value by:

1. upselling existing customers

2. increasing brand awareness and loyalty

3. testing out new ideas with your most loyal brand advocates

4. developing new products with a forum of those who will care the most about providing insight and feedback

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Additional reasons:

1. Meeting your traditional marketing goals

2. Connecting with a web-focused audience

3. Beating out the competition

4. Attracting the right customers

5. Lowered customer acquisition costs

6. Increased trust

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How to get started?: 2 Approaches

Create your own community and build up the site

Examples: Etsy.com, Amex – Open Forum, Inbound.org, iFixit.com, Fantasyfootball.com

Pros: Significantly enhance your brand, fill a niche need that doesn’t exist, directly relate content to your product or service

Cons: Higher costs, more time and effort to build and manage

Create your own group on a popular site for your industry

Examples: LinkedIn, Slack, Reddit, Facebook groups, MeetupPros: Set-up can take a few minutes, little to no start-up costs, leverage users

from an established site

Cons: Less flexibility with design, lower impact on your personal brand, compete with other established groups on the same sites

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Examples: Building Your Own Community

Companies that have created their own, robust

communities that have greatly impacted their bottom

line and brand equity.

In the next slides we look at a few of the best examples

of these communities.

Each is unique in design and the intended goal for the

company.

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Best in Commerce

Purpose: When your community IS your product or service.

Community is the heart of Etsy’s brand.

From their website: Our mission is to re-imagine commerce in ways that build a more fulfilling and lasting world.

We are building a human, authentic and community-centric global and local marketplace. We are committed to using the power of business to create a better world through our platform, our members, our employees and the communities we serve.

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Best For Small Businesses

Purpose: When loyalty is a core part of your brand.

Amex has long known the value of loyalty marketing.

The goal of Open Forum, from its launch in 2007 was to help one

of their core target markets grow.

Mary Ann Fitzmaurice Reilly, SVP of Partnerships & Business

Development for American Express OPEN, said, "We already

have a large part of the pie so our biggest opportunity is with

small business growth—if they grow, we grow."

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Being

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Best For Inbound Marketers

Purpose: When you are in a niche market without a community.

Two experts in a niche market are better than one.

Founded in 2012 when Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz and Dharmesh Shah, the founder of Hubspot came together to create a community specifically focused on inbound marketing.

Both Moz and Hubspot make tools for inbound marketing and marketing analytics, so they were experts in this field.

They’ve used the forum to help others learn from their expertise and grow loyal followers who also use their tools in addition to their advice.

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Best DIY Experts

When becoming an expert at fixing EVERYTHING is your main goal.

IFixit worked with their large community to learn how to fix everything.

Founded in 2003 iFixit sells repair parts and publishes free wiki-like repair guides for electronics. Founder Kyle Wiens said his goal was to reduce electronic waste by teaching people to repair their own gear and offering tools, parts, and a forum to discuss repairs.

Their community has been essential in helping them produce guides, become experts, and serve their clients better.

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Best Interactive Games

When you want your loyal fans to have fun and be more engaged!

Fantasy Football is a way for fans to participate in live games by competing with other fans.

“Players” use their own strategy and tactics to participate in live NFL games against other members who can be in the same group of friends or in a larger community.

The amount of brand recognition, time spent and revenue for engaging passionate fans in this way has had a great impact on the NFL.

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How to get the conversation started

Interesting content.

Make sure to post interesting content, topics and ideas. Start a

challenge, ask a question, ask for advice and opinions.

If you are going to post anything that isn’t yours make sure it’s

cited properly.

Original content is good for branding your business and

displaying your expertise.

Remember: this is about the community participating, not just

selling your unique strengths vs your competitors.

Continually test your niche market and see what they

appreciate the most through with KPIs.

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KPIs – Key performance indicators

Set goals for your community according to what you want

to achieve.

Make sure it is growing by measuring your performance.

If you are not reaching your goals, determine the cause

and change tactics or strategy.

KPIs are great indicators of the health of your community

and the efforts you are putting into it.

Make sure your goals are achievable and remember,

growth takes time.

On the next slides we go over a list of items you can

choose to measure for your KPIs.

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KPIs – Examples of Items to Measure

Engagement

1. Followers

2. Shares

3. Likes, favorites

4. Traffic driven to website from

social or email

5. Brand mentions

6. Subscribers

7. User influence

8. First and return visits

9. Views for pages and content

such as email

Micro conversions

1. Downloads

2. Form completions

3. Watched videos, etc.

4. Advanced segments

Finally, measurements for ROI:

1. Conversions

2. Cost per acquisition

3. Brand equity or getting your

brand known

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Additional Items to Discuss

Solve your customers problems.

Make it clear you care about solving the problems your customers have.

Ask opinions about new products or new features they would like to see.

Gather the feedback and make sure you act on it, this builds trust.

Share interesting and useful info about your company.

Don’t be afraid to be authentic and bring out your personality.

Share ideas and topics that are fun/interesting/useful.

Make the content worth saving, sharing, and revisiting as a resource.

Share causes or initiatives you support that are worth checking out.

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How to grow

Use social media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

They are extensions of your communities and a way to increase followers and get the word out.

Additional tips and benefits:

Gain knowledge of the best channels for your distribution.

Target content specifically for success on these channels.

There are many outlets to choose from, but these big three will maximize your ROI and time spent.

Getting into smaller channels can provide greater niche market opportunity when done correctly (examples: Medium, Quora, industry blogs).

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Remember:

Have fun and frame topics in a way that make people take interest:

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Physical Communities Help You Grow Online

Networking and Events

Physically meeting people at events is still very important.

Putting a face to your company is important if you are just

starting out.

It builds trust and can be really effective for reaching your

target audience.

Word of mouth is incredibly powerful marketing.

These questions that can be asked in a simple conversation.

Ask about their problems and you will almost always gain

useful insights.

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How to keep the conversation going

Email Marketing

Use email marketing to update members and keep them

coming back to discussions.

Notify them as new topics come up, in case they aren’t

checking in, they can decide to join the conversation.

Metrics from email marketing allow you to understand in

which topics your community is most interested.

On the next slide we give an example of what your email

metrics could look like.

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Example of email metrics in Vbout.com26

Grow Your Community

Targeted Outreach

Design and package your content specially for your target

market by covering the topics they care about and solutions to

their main challenges.

Use your pre-market research and your buyer profiles to

decide on your content and discussions.

Think of what the beginning of a play on a stage looks like. Put

all the right pieces into place. The same goes for your content

and your community building efforts.

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Targeted Outreach Questions to ask:1. Who’s out there and active online?

2. Who is worth connecting to offline and how do we meet them?

3. Who shares similar tastes and interests?

4. Where do they hang out?

5. Who do they hang out with?

6. Who do they follow/respect/admire?

7. What content have they liked in the past?

8. What type of content do they share?

9. What type of content do they ignore?

10. Who is listening to them?

???

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Moderate your growing community

Hire a Community Manager

If everything is set-up and you have a large, growing, active

community, consider hiring a professional community manager to:

1. Relay reports and fix issues like bugs or bad feedback.

2. Respond to community members in a timely fashion.

3. Be the presence of your brand continuously engaging and

moderating conversations as needed.

4. Understand the goals and the community values it shares.

5. Know that you cannot control a community.

6. Let’s the group thrive on its own, but shows that your

company is listening and cares.

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Moderate your growing community

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Get started!

It will take time to build a community so get started right away and be

patient!

You don’t need the community manager now, that is for when you have

a large enough community to need moderation.

You can start simply by posting on social media that your company is at a

meetup event learning about building a community.

Then, decide the main target and purpose for your community and start

posting.

Get the word out, network, invite people, start posting interesting topics,

and keep in touch with e-mail marketing.

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Main takeaway: Make it known that you care about solving

the problem your customer has.

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