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8 Tips to Start a Successful Online Community

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | Online Community | 8 Tips to Start a Successful Online CommunityOnline communities boost brand recognition and help in lead generation. These communities are one of your most powerful marketing platforms if they have a defined purpose and proper moderation.

Below are valuable tips on how to create a successful online community.

1. Choose the best online community research software

It’s critical to have the appropriate tools to support your online community if you want to get the most out of it. Because each online community has unique requirements, choosing an online community research software with the appropriate functionality is critical. First, it should be mobile-friendly and must have enough levels of privacy and security.

2. Choose the best community manager for the job

Your Community Manager is critical to the success of your neighborhood. If your manager is not properly managing the group, members may be upset by other members, quit, and negatively perceive your brand.
Members will quit if they do not believe they are receiving the value promised to them when they applied for membership in the community. Members will also leave your community and forget about it if they are constantly bombarded with alerts.

3. Selecting the Best Platform

To develop your online community, there are literally thousands of tools and programs to select from. You might use a social media program such as Facebook or a custom software solution.

Consider the following questions while selecting a platform:

  • What platform and device do the bulk of my community members use?
  • Is the platform simple to use? (Single sign-on, as part of an app the person is already familiar with, and so on.)
  • Is it simple to share material and communicate with other members of the community on the platform?
  • Is the platform compatible with your CRM/database?

4. Set up reports to keep track of crucial community indicators

The long-term sustainability of the online community is heavily dependent on how you can demonstrate its worth in relation to your overall company goals. Do you want to enhance possibilities, decrease client turnover, or promote brand awareness?
Whatever your aim, you must define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will report on and utilize to measure your progress. You might want to think about the following:

  • Engagement (discussions, likes, comments, and shares)
  • Followers/members
  • Referral traffic
  • Active members
  • Conversion rate

These are just a handful of the essential metrics you should be paying attention to.

5. Satisfy a need

To begin with, you cannot build community if you cannot satisfy people’s desire for community.Every community meets a need. They assist us in staying educated about the world around us or assist us in feeling protected, proud, or good about the world. They assist us in carrying out more significant and more daring efforts. And maybe one of the most strong needs: groups make us feel less alone in the world.

6. Celebrate the members of your community

Your community exists to serve its members. While it’s a wonderful marketing technique for increasing product sales and brand recognition, it only works if you treat your members well.

Highlighting your community members is an integral part of maintaining a thriving online community. You may accomplish this by mentioning members who are successful with the product, performed well in a challenge you organized, referred the most new members, had the greatest participation rate, and so on.

What makes these individuals feel unique and respected is determined by your community. It might be showcasing them in a case study, providing them with a free month’s supply of products, mailing them a t-shirt, or making a post about how glad you are to have them as a member of your community.

7. Create a content strategy

The sort of material you provide is essential to your community’s effective activation and growth, so make it relevant to your audience. Before you reveal your community to the world, make sure you thoroughly understand your target demographic.
When crafting what you want to say, keep the community’s goal in mind, as well as your broader approach. Are you advertising a new product launch, informing your audience about industry trends, or generating fresh ideas?You most likely have a plethora of content ideas; however, bear in mind that how you contact your community, as well as the type of your material, may differ from typical one-way marketing interactions.

8. Participate in and learn from other communities

It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Several online communities have discovered the formula for success. You may take ideas from other thriving communities, put them to the test with your audience, and adjust as necessary. Learning from other communities may assist you in growing your community more quickly, increase participation, direct visitors to your website, and scale your business.

Conclusion

Building a community is a labor of love that takes time. Consider the resources you’ll require, from community managers who will live and breathe the community to having the proper design and content assets in place.

How Music Artists Use Strategy-Driven Tactics to Rise to Fame (And What Businesses Can Learn from It)

StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Strategy-Driven Tactics|How Music Artists Use Strategy-Driven Tactics to Rise to Fame (And What Businesses Can Learn from It)Artists are in the business of themselves and it is exceptionally difficult work. Showcasing and creating art and then making a thriving business model out of it is not something anyone can do, especially if they don’t have a big-name label leading you through the process.

Artists are the ideal business to look to when searching for new, innovative ways to expand your business and grow an audience.

Narada Rose, stage name Dertee, is a UK dancehall artist who has continuously pushed for his music to reach greater audiences, and his strategy-driven methods towards fame are something every business can and should take note of when designing their own expansion and marketing efforts.

Reinvention and Creation

One of the biggest lessons that businesses can learn from artists like Dertee is that to truly innovate and grow one must pursue their art again and again. Resting on your laurels is a sure-fire way to become innocuous in the future and to fade from the public eye as a result.

Only by trying new things again and again, and by creating work after your big hit even if it doesn’t succeed in the same way, can you push your business towards greatness.

Dertee did this after his successful EP, “Defeating Gravity”. Though his follow-up and first album, “Breaking Barriers”, did not see the same recognition, it did not stop him. Only a year later he collaborated with Bramma and they produced a song that received over 1 million views on YouTube (on a personal account, no less).

Once again, even with this success, he has continued to push and create and has only just recently released yet another single, even during lockdown. Businesses need to take this sort of perseverance to heart and lead forward with the goal of building a better tomorrow.

Building Recognition

Artists build recognition in a multitude of ways and that sort of diversification is exactly what businesses need to build the necessary trust signals.

For Dertee, it was winning the Best Male Artist Awards from the REYAC panel in Birmingham, as well as establishing his own account and publishing his own music. On top of digital success, he has also played at a variety of events throughout the UK.

This sort of encompassing approach is essential for businesses of all types. By aiming for rewards, certifications, and by partaking in events that increase your national and international infamy, you set the right groundwork for expansion and success.

Connecting Through Art

People respond to artists differently than most businesses because art, especially mediums like music, is evocative. Its entire purpose is to take the listener from one state of mind into another — to connect with them through the power of sound even if it only lasts a moment.

Businesses need to use art and this connection when trying to appeal to their customers. It is only by becoming living and organic can businesses effectively market to their audience.

Generating Social Media Buzz and Trust To Gain Website Traffic

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Increase Website Traffic|Generating Social Media Buzz and Trust To Gain Website TrafficSocial Media is one of the best ways to generate traffic to your website and to create brand recognition. Using social media sources to encourage people to take that big step from moving off of the social media platform they are on and over to your website is not an easy task.

Some people’s perception of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is one that only needs the creation of a Facebook page and a few targeted ads. If only it was that simple.

Facebook is arguably the easiest Social Media platform to encourage people to move from seeing your Facebook page to looking at your website. However, to successfully achieve this user action there are a number of elements you will need to include within your Facebook marketing strategy.

Likes and Followers

Likes and followers of your Facebook page are essentially people endorsing your brand. It doesn’t matter if you are an informational blog website like this one, an e-comm ship, travel website or any other niche, most people will not leave Facebook to visit your website if your Facebook page does not have trust.

Mistakes: Many people make the mistake of using Facebook ads for website clicks. They do this with very little social media content to begin with and no likes/followers. As a result, this type of advertising ends up being a waste of money.

The right thing to do: Start with creating some nice posts that represent your brand. Make sure you have a nice looking banner, contact details, and overall a Facebook page that looks complete and not half done or with important features missing.

To get an idea of how to do this correctly look at your competitors that have a lot of likes and followers as well as lots of comments from people interacting with their Facebook page.

Once you are ready and feel happy then start a ‘Likes and Followers’ campaign before going for clicks directly to your website. You can also use services such as Fast likes that can help build up likes and followers prior to your Facebook operated campaign.

StrategyDriven's Social Media Publication Timing Whitepaper


What Happens Once You Have Built Trust On Your Facebook Page?

The next step is to start to real in engagement from other Facebook users. You can start to create posts that ask questions or competitions. Anything that you think will get people within your industry niche to interact and possibly take the next step which is to visit your website if that is your aim.

You can also start to run a Facebook campaign that encourages people to click through to your website.

With people clearly engaging with your Facebook page, hitting the like button, and following your page, now they are inclined to trust your brand – more so compared to starting the Facebook website clicks campaign with no likes or followers.

What About Using Other Social Media Sites?

You can use other social media platforms to harness trust via likes and followers. Instagram is popular if you want to use images, then YouTube is perfect if you want to use video marketing, then, of course, you have Twitter.

Twitter is much more difficult to master compared to any other social media platforms we have mentioned here. It’s a fast-moving platform and messages can get buried quickly. It is extremely useful if you can master influencer marketing.

Plus, news channels and blogs find it useful to announce new content. It’s not impossible to master Twitter, but it certainly takes a lot more effort to get the right mix of posts and getting the timing of those posts right,