Without wishing to sound too cynical, if you have created a vibrant online community of people all interested in whatever your business is about, you’ve got a great pool of focused, targeted people right there are your fingertips to whom you can market to.
However, it goes without saying that you don’t want to do this in a blatant way. If you constantly send out obvious promotional offers and hard-sell sales pitches, your online community will quickly abandon you.
What you need to do is get people excited about your products and services by building relationships, and they will seek you out and buy from you.
Let’s say for example, that you are running a vibrant community of people interested in running gear and you are contacted by a company that makes sportswear. They introduce themselves and tell you a bit about what inspired their company. You like the sound of what they’re doing and have a look at a few of their promotional videos, which you decide to share with your own community because they are informative and well made.
This sparks off some good reactions and slowly the brand is introduced to a group of highly targeted potential customers. It is all done without it ever seeming like a hard sell. And in turn, your brands and products are being introduced to another potential community in a virtual circle that feeds off itself. It is a win-win situation.
So being involved in a community can be a way into other markets and potential customers that you might never have reached otherwise, because of the other communities you can share stuff with.
What You Need To Build A Good Community
To build a good community, you need to start with the right components.
First of all, you need good content. This is absolute key. You can’t have a community built around something insubstantial – it just doesn’t work. So what do we mean by having good content? Well, good content could be blogs, articles on your website, bios, videos, infographics, you name it. However, the point is, it needs to be good.
The reason why it is so essential is because it demonstrates that you know what you are talking about (never underestimate how important that is to community building), you are passionate about the subject and you care about the readers. It also shows that you can be fun, your stuff is worth coming back for and whatever your recommend will be worth checking out.
For example, if you own a company that sells skateboards, good content could be a video showing how to maintain and care for your skateboard after each ride or it could be a blog post about Nyjah Huston or any other skateboarding champions. You get the idea. The only real limit for what qualifies as good content is your own imagination and what you think your community would like.
It is quite possible that you already produce this kind of content, but you might not be using it to its full potential if you are not sharing it to a wider audience on social networks.
You can easily get your information out there by posting on Facebook, Twitter and others such as Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Tumblr. Remember that you don’t need to be on all of them, just the ones that work best for your particular business.
Another tool for community building is good old-fashioned email newsletters. Contrary to popular belief, the email newsletter is far from dead. If people have signed up for your email newsletter, there is a high chance that they’re so interested in your products and services that it would be criminal not to offer them the chance to buy something.
The key to success in email newsletters is managing your list. Rather than sending out blanket emails to your entire list, you need to segment it, so that you are sending out the right message to the right parts of your community. Never forget that while some people don’t like or participate in social media, it is very rare for them not to check their email.