Understanding your “buyer/persona” is one of the biggest challenges marketing experts face. Knowing demographic data, such as gender or age, is currently insufficient. To achieve effectiveness with marketing campaigns, you need to deeply understand needs and wants as a basis for true connection. It is encouraging to know that today we have multiple means to achieve this goal.

This information becomes a very useful strategy that defines customer communities. We will see what Customer Communities are, why you should consider them and how you should create them step by step.

What do customer communities consist of?

A customer community is a space to build relationships between a brand or company and its customers. They are characterized by including questions and answers, knowledge sharing, customer training, advertising opportunities, product support, reviews and much more.

In recent years, the online customer community has grown due to the popularity of the Internet and smartphones. Additionally, companies have moved towards more customer-centric marketing. The customer plays a more important role in the relationship, thus gaining significant influence.

Online information is not only controlled by brands or experts, customer reviews and opinions also play a key role in this field. Customers are flocking to communities to find real-time information and interact directly with companies, instead of using conventional communication channels.

Why consider customer communities?

Customer communities allow users to make the most of each product and enjoy a better experience. For example, many fashion-related products have communities where outfits are shared.

They are a great place to learn first-hand what customers think of your products and services and to discover potential needs that have not yet been identified. One of the most interesting uses is to ask customers questions and use the information they provide to develop new products and services.

It is a point to capitalize on and stand out from the competition, improving the customer experience. Users benefit from information and content resulting from active interaction with other people who share the same interests. All of this ends up benefiting the brand.

Data collected from user behavior in your customer community can allow personalization at each customer touchpoint with a greater level of detail, resulting in efficient marketing actions and exceeding customer expectations.

How to create a community of customers for your brand?

Establishing strategies to create customer communities is essential. Currently there are multiple ways to generate interaction and extract valuable information. Here we share some channels that can be productive:

Blog
A business blog can serve as a platform to provide information or for customers to express their opinions and share their impressions about your products and services.

Surveys
Surveys have long been the go-to resource for collecting customer feedback. Currently, there are several tools for creating guided online surveys and analyzing the results using personal dashboards.

Email
The email database can also be used for community actions. Soliciting opinions on the most important issues for a selected list of customers can produce interesting results. Often, the most constructive responses come from highly engaged, loyal customers. It's a strategy that works when you implement the necessary changes to your products and services suggested in the answers.

Debate groups
Debate groups are a classic method of dynamically obtaining greater information and understanding from buyers, nowadays they are much easier and more practical to organize. In these groups, brands can get valuable feedback from customers who can then ask questions directly to the brand experts.

Social media platforms:
Social networks are a natural and popular vehicle for organizing communities where customers interact and express their opinions. They also include built-in features such as sending, uploading and sharing files or comments.

10 concerns to analyze before building a customer community

• What is the main reason why you want to create a customer community? For example, to improve the quality of your products or services, to make your brand more visible, to increase customer loyalty, etc.
  
• What will users receive when they join your community? It's important to define a meaningful value proposition that encourages customers to participate and provide as much information as possible.
  
• What type of users do you want in your community? For example, your goal might be to create professional communities for people with certain job titles or expertise in certain hobbies.
  
• Is the goal a private community or an open community? In the first case, the brand controls access to the community as selected members, while in the second case anyone can join. Another possible option is for existing users to add others.
  
• How big will your community be? It is ideal to maintain realistic goals for the number of participants, such as anticipating the number of topics, posts and other content to share so that the community can grow.
  
• What is the content strategy for the community? How and when will the brand publish content and when will users publish? Will publications be archived periodically or will all content be made available?
  
• Do you need to actively moderate your community? It is important to think in advance about the resources needed to successfully maintain the common site.
  
• What protection will it provide to community user data?
  
• What system will users use to log in? Is a brand-specific user account required, or can they use other social networks or email accounts to log in?
  
• What data do you want to obtain, a priori, from the community? One of the main functions of customer communities is to obtain individual and value-added data, so it is essential to plan what information to request, how to obtain it and how to evaluate it.
  

Conclusion:

User communities give companies a strategy to connect with their customers with the specific goal of generating additional information feedback. Customers can voice their concerns or ask for advice in the community. On the other hand, companies can use this interaction to allow the customer service and loyalty team to communicate directly with the user who requests it.

In order to plan good strategies, it is necessary to keep in mind what the person responsible for purchasing the product or service is looking for in the area where the company offers its services.

Creating a customer community is a fundamental step in a digital marketing strategy to generate results. Potentially, it is about sending the right message and satisfying the experience of the target audience and thus generating an increase in the chances of success.