The Step-By-Step Guide For Your Brand Community Strategy

Your brand community is the perfect space to interact with your customers. All your customers are in one place, as members of your community. This gives you a golden opportunity to drive your customers to a specific goal that benefits your brand. But to achieve that you need to create a well-defined strategy.

It's not just something you make up on the go, but rather something you need to sit down and plan out — something that is as important if not more than your marketing strategy.

Take Apple as a study. They can be said to have one of the best marketing strategies, and have created a strategy that retains their customer community perfectly — making the most of acquisition and retention.

This can be applied to your community as well. Your community is a group of individuals with specific needs and goals. Creating a strategy to achieve your goals while satisfying them can be scary and risky. But the right decision would be to understand your customers and begin planning to grow with them.

Whether your community is new or old, when it comes to defining or redefining the strategy you're going to take, it is best to begin from scratch.

Follow the checklist below to be sure that you are on the way to setting up your community strategy correctly -

Define the Goals

1. Why do you need your community?

A community can be much more than a place for your customers to interact with each other. You can use it to reduce the support costs of your company, attract more customers, make it a source of ideas for product improvements or you can even build your community as a product itself. Identifying the needs of your community should be the first stage in developing your strategy.

2. What is the objective of your community strategy?

Now that you have decided why you need your community, you need to clarify what is your objective for the strategy you are planning. Whether it is to encourage your users to create more posts, attract more users or introduce users to a new type of activity in the community. A single strategy might have multiple objectives, so make sure to make each one clear, with specific metrics to identify whether you have reached them or not.

Check again whether the objectives of your strategy align with the goals of the community. If they are not, you need to confirm if the strategy you are aiming for is justified.

Lastly, quantify the metrics you have chosen for each objective into numbers, with a variable if necessary. These projections will give you an idea of whether the strategy you are implementing has a positive impact or not.

Allocate your Resources

1. How many resources do you have?

Resources are not just restricted to the monetary sense of the word. You need to consider these four things, collectively.

a) Time - One of the rarely included, but incredibly frustrating resources. It is better to estimate the amount of time it will take to execute the plan and see the results, beforehand. This gives an idea of the right time to measure gains and losses.

b) Attention of your Audience - People tend to get annoyed if they receive the same message too often.?Another thing to note is that everyone has a short attention span, so keep your message short, simple and brief. In short, any kind of notification or message you send out should keep in mind the attention of your users.

c) Money - Well, this one is to be expected but it is always important to mention it nonetheless. Do your best to foresee minor and unexpected expenses before creating a budget. This will help in avoiding a situation where you end up drying up your budget over small but important spends.

d) Internal Resources - It can help a great deal in reducing costs if you have internal resources, i.e. a web developer or graphic designer, to help execute your strategy. You will need the support of your boss on this, but if you have a strong plan, it shouldn’t be too difficult.

2. How much of the resources are you left with?

This is another thing you need to consider before defining how you are going to achieve your goals. It is very important to keep some resources to spare.

You might not be able to bring in additional resources at the last second, so it is safer to calculate an extra spending margin in the beginning. In case you do not end up using it, well, your boss definitely won’t be displeased.

Identify your Target Audience

1. Who are you talking to?

Your communication and engagement activities will greatly vary depending on who you are talking to. Take a seat back and look at the target audience of your community strategy. Where are they from? What is their age? What is their career? What is the common reason that they have come to your community for? Is your strategy targeted towards new members or existing ones? Create a profile on the basis of these questions?

2. How are you going to speak to them?

Your tone of communication will greatly vary depending on the profile you have created. At this stage of the strategy, you need to decide how formal or informal your language will be.

You also need to select the emotion that you will be pulling at throughout the strategy. Decide on the basis of

1. Average age, career and background of your users
2. The tone of their activities when they interact with your product

For some people making them feel excited about the content will work well, especially if they are looking forward to the release of something. On the other hand, jealousy is another strong emotion that can be used.

Create the Action Plan

1. What are the possible activities you can take to create the necessary emotion in users?

1. Ask yourself - Think about what makes you feel excited about an event. Is it the person who will be part of the event? Setting yourself as the sample is the easiest and an important option but might not always work. Your intent is driven towards achieving your objective and might interfere with your preferences.
2. Ask your sample - Select individuals from your community whom you know would be happy to respond. You can ask them personally what would instigate excitement in them. It can be that their excitement comes from the rewards they receive in participation — at least, this is a way to confirm.
3. Look into other communities - Your community is definitely not going to be the only one out there. Note down the activities that similar communities hold. You might not be able to identify their intent, but if you feel excitement, the emotion you are looking to target, you know that these activities are a viable option for you.

2. Which ones are the best for your community?

After creating a list of viable activities, select the ones that would be the best to achieve your objectives. At the same time, make sure that it matches the theme of your community. Unless your strategy is to encourage a new type of behavior from your users, avoid introducing a type of activity that is too different from your current engagement plan. If your action plan is not aligned with the intent of your users, you need to think twice before going ahead. If you are inviting an expert to interact with your community via podcast or video interview, make sure that the topic they discuss works in favour of your members.

Distribute & Execute Tasks

1. Which resources would be best for your plan?

By now, you would know what needs to be done. It is time to decide how you are going to get it done and by whom. Utilize every resource available at your end, including internal resources like developers to integrate any new feature you need in your community or graphic designers to set up your promotion campaign. Estimate the time and money that would go into the final execution of the action plan as well. In case you are falling short of human resources, consider using your monetary budget to outsource someone to get any technical task done.

2. How are you going to promote your activities?

You need to create awareness about your project if you want your users to actively participate in it. Social media platforms are a good way to let your followers know about any event that will take place. Setting up a countdown on your website and sending emails to your users can create a sense of urgency in your users to attend. If working on multiple activities for your strategy, make sure to plan the frequency of your emails in a way that you do not spam your users. You can also choose to partner with an influencer to share the details of your event on their page.

3. How will you execute your strategy?

No amount of time will be enough for preparation. But once you clear these important checkpoints, go ahead and set your strategy in motion. Do not go ahead with everything at the same time. Take it easy and introduce your activities one at a time. If you are introducing a new experience into your community, guide your users on how to engage and participate so that they are comfortable in navigating through the interface.

Measure & ImproviseAfter launching a strategy, it is important to check how it has been performing.

1. How has the strategy been doing?

Keep an eye on how your strategy is faring and be on the lookout for any unforeseen circumstances. If anything unexpected arises, note it down for future reference. Wait for the amount of time you have estimated and compare them with projections you have created for each metric.

2. Can you improve your strategy?

Your strategy will keep evolving as time passes. As you see the positive effects it has, there will always be something more you can do to improve it. In case you see a negative impact, take the time to go through your strategy again. Have you chosen the right objectives? Have you chosen the right action plan and activities to achieve the objectives? Are they aligned with your community members? Your answers will be found right amongst these questions

A perfect, complete strategy is a myth. The only perfect strategy is one that adapts to the times and evolves with it. Do not stick your feet down so firmly that you cannot move forward when the time calls for it. A community strategy is only as good as the amount of thought and research you are willing to put into it. After that, all that remains is to reap the results.