Creating a brand community for your Business to Business (B2B) will only help you increase your company's ROI. Fostering a strong community spirit is the best bet for a B2B business to cater to its patrons better. Devoid of a supportive community, your business will likely appear irrelevant to your clients, while you will be forced to opt for more expensive support technology solutions. That is where creating a branded community plays a crucial role in helping you combat the issues mentioned above. No wonder, then, four out of five B2B founders believe that creating a branded community is essential to the success of their businesses. The actual outcome is that you will be able to forge genuine relationships with your clients.
Brand Community
It is beyond a mere powerful business tool, and a brand community is a place where all your patrons converge to interact, learn and share your brand. Also, this place will become an epicenter for you to build up hype for your next product rollout, interact with other satisfied clients and further educate themselves about your products and services before they make a call to buy your products. Once they start following your content, your customers will move up the customer journey from passive prospects to active and core brand loyalists.
The best part is that, at the peak of commitment, these committed followers will assume the role of brand ambassadors, who will start actively adding up new organic followers to your website's customer base!
Relevance
The key reason you build a brand community or online community is to offer or provide customer support, importantly in the form of testimony or social proof. Studies prove that 27% of buyers use dedicated brand communities to research products and services before buying. As this research is relevant, when compared to B2C companies, which have humongous social media followings, the B2B brands lack the same. You create a treasure trove of highly relevant information by surrounding your brand with dedicated customers who can share their product experiences. What's more, all this product information is cataloged inside your community. It means all the relevant information is at the fingertips of your prospects. Also, there are many benefits for members who join your brand community. They enjoy real-time product updates, quick tech support if they want to troubleshoot, more response time from your sales team, first-time knowledge about the forthcoming product rollouts, and more. It is also an authentication that your company cares about your patrons.
Purpose
Your primary purpose in building a brand community is to stay relevant and create top-of-mind recall amongst your members. That way, you can make your community work together with your company's larger goals. Your company's goals will vary from reducing technology support to rolling out new product innovations based on genuine customer feedback.
Setting Goals and Metrics
To build a brand community, you need to possess diligence and responsibility. Therefore, you need to monitor your members' needs and queries regularly. Also, you need to set up important KPI metrics aligning with your sales and performance goals if you are to make the most of your membership. If you want everything to work right, you need to keep your company and community goals in sync.
