Acquiring Customers With An Online Community

Acquiring customers can turn out to be quite expensive for most small companies. The process usually involves identifying the target audience that might be interested in buying your product, convince them to make the purchase, and then hoping they come back and do it again. Luckily, the web has made a lot of this easier. Many brands in the last few years have built an online community for their customers, that helps them retain existing customers, as well as acquire new customers.

Online communities are a great way to capture traffic, as it also allows brands to more authentic and updated content that the customers can engage with. Online communities also help build trust among customers. Plus, for smaller brands, it is a very efficient and cost-saving idea to grow customers. In this article, we will look at some key points that can help your brand acquire customers with an online community.

What do you need to do in an Online Community?

Your online community can be an excellent tool to acquire new customers. All you need to do is go through the following key points and use them as per your needs and goals:

1. Systematically cover topics using a content calendar:

 

A content calendar helps community managers to create high-quality content consistently. While planning content for your community, evaluate a few keywords for the type of content you would like to create. Think about certain topics that have not yet been covered on your blogs or website. The goal is to keep a track of the keywords that you want your community pages to rank for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and plan your content around that. You may pick topics like reviews about exclusive features of your product, or AMA sessions. In terms of SEO, you may want to keep in mind the following points –

 

• Your community pages offer the best page experience.
• The title and URL slug are perfectly optimized.
• The right kind of schema markup is enabled. (Schema markup is a code that you place on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for the users.)

If you can create high-quality content on your online community consistently, the chances of improving search engine optimization are higher.

2. Incentivize your community members to contribute content:

 

Customers trust online peer reviews as much as recommendations from their friends. If you can get your existing customers to contribute content to your online community in the form of reviews, asking questions, or answering the questions of other users, it can boost your SEO significantly. But why would anyone go out of their way to promote your product? Well, because they will not be doing it for free. Rewarding superusers within your community for the contributions they make towards the community is the best way to motivate them. If their contributions are valued and praised, they will create even more content and also inspire other members to do so. This will also help you increase engagement in your community, which is our next point.

3. Boost engagement in your community:

Your online community engagement is one of the most important aspects of acquiring new customers. You must try and ensure that there is enough content for the readers to visit your community regularly. As discussed above, rewarding certain customers for their contributions is an effective way to boost community engagement. You can also introduce a superuser program in your community to motivate fellow members to do better. Another tried-and-tested method to boost community engagement is gamification. You can have reputation scores or badges that the users can earn for contributing content. You can also send out virtual currency, in the form of discount vouchers or redeemable payment points to motivate customers

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4. Add social touchpoints:

Utilizing your online community on your website is another effective way to acquire customers. In all your blogs and articles, try to include something of value for the customers. For example, you can add a link to your product or reviews of certain customers from the online community in your blogs. You can also embed certain testimonials or FAQs inside your site to showcase the backing of the community for your product. With the help of this, you can showcase how people across different industries have analyzed and recommended your product. The aim is to make them aware of the existence of such a community. People who come to read your blogs occasionally may discover the online community, and become a part of it in no time. Eventually, they turn into customers.

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With the help of online communities, business owners are now realizing that they can save a fortune on acquiring new customers. All you need to do is Incentivize your customers by giving them rewards, increasing and maintaining the engagement in your community, and leverage this engagement into boosting the confidence of newer customers.

We hope this article helped you with your questions. Thank you for reading and all the best with your brand!