Being a startup can be an exciting yet challenging phase. Even if you have all your other ducks in a row, you must find a way to market and promote your business while building a brand that consumers can trust. However, most startups lack the funds to dive in headfirst.
Fortunately, community marketing is something that does not require a lot of funds. Depending on the moves you plan to make with your community, it may not require any funds at all, making it a great time investment for those just starting out.
Benefits of Community Marketing for Business
Read on to understand how community marketing can benefit startups and how to put it to work.
1. Grow Your Tribe
Since it can literally grow your tribe, using community marketing is especially wise for startups. When you are starting with no tribe, finding established communities where your ideal customer hangs out gives you the opportunity to build relationships with those customers from the beginning. When you start out in such a way, it is as though you are building customer loyalty before they even become paying customers.
2. Access and Engagement
In a day and time that is built around convenience, having easy access is a must. Long gone are the days in which consumers would order products from a catalog on the other side of the continent without truly knowing the company it comes from. Consumers want to know who you are, on more than a surface level and expect easy access to you.
Community marketing provides a way to give your customers what they want. It removes communication barriers between consumers and companies resulting in engagement and trust. Even merely being present in forums shows that you are human, and that is something customers want to see.
3. Word-of-Mouth
The fact that 84% of people trust recommendations from friends and family should shine a light on how effective word-of-mouth advertising can be. Consumers will much more quickly trust a fellow consumer than a company.
If you are searching for a product on Amazon, do you not scroll to the bottom to see what “real people” think about it? Most people do. In fact, 90% of consumers check reviews prior to purchase. With startups having a small or non-existent customer base, getting the word out so that your audience can further share is instrumental in your growth.
4. User-Generated Content (UGC)
Consumers love talking about brands and products they love. Sometimes it is because they want everyone their loved ones to use what they consider the best. Sometimes they just want to be the leader in discovering and sharing new items. Either way, every time your consumers create and share something about your brand or product, you benefit. User-generated content, or UGC, contributes to overall SEO rankings and inbound marketing. It also provides additional authentic promotion- a type of promotion that no amount of money can buy.
5. Mutual Benefits
As your consumers begin engaging with you and your brand, you can encourage them to provide any feedback, comments, or suggestions that they might have. This information is invaluable as you can use it to improve current products or create new ones. Additionally, as you ask for and, hopefully, use this information, your community will feel valued, which, in turn, creates deeper customer loyalty. Everyone wins as you get priceless insights and customers feel valued.
How Exactly Do Startups Use Community Marketing?
If community marketing is about engaging current customers, what do you do if you do not have any? How can startups take advantage of it? By answering the following questions and putting those answers to work in the suggested steps, your startup can benefit as much as a long-established business.
- What will you use the community for and why do you want to do this? Will it just be for discussion, for a private membership site, or something else entirely? Knowing what you will provide your customer beforehand helps determine your steps.
- Who do you want in the community- your ideal customer? Where do those people hang out? Are they found on Facebook in parenting community pages? On Pinterest with homeschooling and recipe-sharing groups? On Twitter with fellow entrepreneurs?
- What are their common interests and pain points?
- Join their current communities. Start to build relationships. Offer free products or samples in exchange for reviews or social media shares. Reach out to the influencers in those communities. It is important here, however, not to encroach on someone else’s territory. It is one thing to join and promote a knitting supply company in a knitting lover’s community. It is another thing entirely to do so in a group that already sells knitting products.
- Create your own community that your audience will want to come to. Besides sharing that community in other communities, also use proper keywords so the right people outside of those communities can find you.
Being a startup does not have to prevent you from taking advantage of community marketing. In fact, if you consider that everyone started somewhere, you know that even established communities were not always established.
If you are ready to begin using community marketing for your startup, simply start with the questions and steps directly above. Conduct market research and competitor analysis to determine what works and what does not for your ideal audience. This research will help you formulate your own community marketing ideas. After that, you will easily be able to find current communities and build your own.