Build Your Online Community with Drupal

You raised awareness for your brand, assembled brilliant sales & marketing teams, but work doesn’t end there. To make it all come together seamlessly with your current and potential customers, an online community is extremely necessary. A hub where current and future customers can share experiences with your products or services, ask peers for help in overcoming certain challenges, the ROI of such an investment, in a nutshell, will be lasting relationships. 

With a community of more than 200,000 people, Drupal is the best example of what it can do for the community platforms.  

The Symantec user group has 597,900 engaged members, spread remotely. Likewise, the Cancer Research Community UK has done a remarkable job at bringing together people to fight and eliminate cancer from the society. A couple of other examples are the University of Colorado, Star Insights community by (Mercedes Benz) and the Government of Bermuda.

Increasingly even the gaming communities are opting for Drupal. Read why gaming companies and communities are opting for Drupal?

Why is it Important for Your Product to Have an Online Community?

Community portals provide not only a domain your prospects are looking for but also help the product and community grow alike. The benefits of well-designed, modern community portals are numerous.

1. Customer Loyalty:

Acquiring a new customer is 5-25 times more expensive than retaining the existing one. 

Community portals not only give your organization a stage to prove its worth, they are a great platform to connect with the right (and targeted) audience as well.

2. Faster Growth:

When your audience is engaged at a higher level (say through contests and events) can the community move forward with increasing user engagement and ROI.

As shown by a study, by the year 2020 client experience will surpass cost and item as the key brand identity differentiator. Making the customer experience an essential element factor for your business’s development.

3. Channel For Increased Engagement (bringing in referral and organic traffic):

“A popular myth that revolves around the community portals is they are a place to complain and so it appears a problem to the community which might take away the traffic.”

However, a good community portal drives more traffic to other sites in the community that the portal links to. Should you still be worried about the ‘myth’?

It can possibly score higher in the search engine ratings because of its comprehensive and extensive approach to deal with community information.

4. Easier Marketing

Another purpose that your community portal serves is to inform and educate people within and outside the community about current activities, groups, events, and commercial activities.

One cannot deny the importance of community involvement in today’s market. The more the experience is personal the better it makes the person feel. This makes your relationship a lasting one. 

Remember relationships, in businesses, are defined by the quality of work and the comfort quotient.

Communities built Using Drupal?

* YMCA community

* Pinterest community

* eBay developers

* MakeMyTrip

* Intel developer zone

* ClearTrip

5. Product Ownership for the Client

‘People love taking control’

A study by the University of Texas on Consumer Control and Customization in Online Environments states that we can attribute our preferences of personalized and online experiences to ‘power of control’ over the product.

This is what the community platforms do in the end. Even though its a false idea of ownership that drives users, this is what makes the difference in the end.

Why Drupal for your Community?

Drupal has a remarkable collection of tools that enable smooth collaboration, and help eliminate spam content for both open and closed communities.

Not only can you build your website you can also use Drupal to build various intranet management frameworks as per need be.

1. Fast turnaround time: It is especially true for businesses when every second count. Even with a steeper learning curve, it is easier to build and customize content with Drupal.
2. User-friendly: Drupal is user-friendly. Like any community framework should offer, Drupal offers easy-to-use and merge. It is easy to customize and add modules to get a new functionality for the community framework. 
3. Distributions: Distributions come handy to the developers and community saving a lot of time which can, then, be used to work effectively for content and marketing strategies. OpenSocial is the best example for community portals. The United Nations is shifting its social community platforms to Drupal.  
4. Multilingual: It’s not necessary that your audience would be restricted to one geographical proximity. Drupal 8 gives you access to more than 94 languages. Keep the language factor as open as possible to drive your community forward. 
5. Mobile-enabled: Drupal 8 brings mobile responsiveness as an out-of-the-box feature. Mobile responsiveness is an important factor because 

More than 52% of the world’s population is surfing on mobile devices.

6. Seamless upgrades: It should not be difficult to upgrade the deployed technology. The Drupal community ensures that you don’t get to suffer and so updates are available every 3 months.  Because all it takes is to configure these modules, it saves a lot of time.

Improving sales and engagement is the primary goal of communities and portals. Using such portals as means of marketing can also help search engines point back to your business. Drupal’s collection of easy-to-use modules and distributions facilitate easy collaboration...

Read the complete article on https://opensenselabs.com/blog/articles/drupal-community-platforms