Engaging with your Community for Dummies = Bring people closer to your brand (4/10)
Sharing passion, experience, and information are all focused to generate more stickiness and engagement between consumers and brands. That’s the first step to generate business leveraging social media efforts (we should be saying social networking abilities but “social media” has been generalized). Second step is to get benefits from sharing to bring people closer to your brand and by that generating opportunities to turn your “followers”, as we now say since Twitter, into customers/ fans/ admirers/ advocate/ ambassadors. But for each cluster of people you’ve appealed and make join the conversation, there are ways to turn them from listeners, contributors, word spreading facilitators, or just a passerby, into useful people for your business.
Having done the first step generating appealing and then engaging with people (I call visitors people because we’re not sure in which status visitors come around, being returning visitors, customers, frequent users, power user, influent people like A-list bloggers visiting for reviewing, contractors, or any other possible user status) gives you a chance to create interesting and useful relationships with them. They’ve all made a step closer to your company and your products, but you still don’t know why they’re here and hardly who they are. Bringing them a step closer again would let you know what they want and how they can help you grow faster and better.
Now you know what’s interesting for you in bringing people closer to your brand: know who they are and what they can do to help you. But there’s still the question of “how”. The “how” would be then answered by your design and website ergonomy. Managing people to drive them to the right place -the place they’re looking for- the fastest possible gives you many advantages. First you show them you know them, though you don’t (that’s the miracle of the Internet), and second you’re addressing them content they want quickly and are able to request them for time to help you since you did spare them some time. And they will.
They will because you’ve given them what they wanted:
- If looking for the about page: send them to your profile page and then suggest them to go read some news on your blog. You bring them a step closer to your brand by giving one more info about your brand, and creating an opportunity to turn them into contributors or trial users.
- If looking for the sign up page: send them into a sign up zone and provide with some useful testimonials from other users (with link to their profile, activity, or whatever they’ve done on the website to facilitate their judgement about the product). You bring them a step closer to your brand suggesting you know what’s in your product/ service for them (though you don’t know, still the Internet magic) or tell them that’s not for them (which is a great move, explaining fast what’s in it for who, it’s a chance to generate positive word of mouth).
- If looking for using the product/ service: send them to the service and provide them with product reviews with user profile page so they know whether they’ve got similar point of interest (which is another reason to stick to the review). You bring them a step closer to your brand proving you do not have anything to hide.
- If already a regular user: generate a new door to request them to add a review (the most guiding review form is the better) or send a feedback, while showing them other people have done it already (leverage social pressure to invite people to help you, and for the real first people doing so, take time to send them email and take care of them). You bring them a step closer to your brand friendly requesting their help and then turning them into advocates and advisors.
- If already a power user: create a dedicated zone as well as creating visibility for them (badge, icon, or a blog post) to them showing you know them well and they’re part of the company (not meaning they’re driving the company, keep it in mind). You bring them a step closer to your brand highlighting them and giving them visibility, which would definitly turn them into fans, ambassadors, and evangelists.
You’ve now manage to define your clusters of visitors by sending them to different points of content and then leverage those clusters providing them something more than what they were there for. You’re starting to shape your brand community and are already able to leverage it for your business development as well as your brand image tuning.
Next time would be a focus on how to highlight your regular users and develop your visibility leveraging the word of mouth power you’ve gathered around your brand.
Photo Credit: Loutseu
