There are two cores of a strong marketing position for your business. The first is a good business brand, which will continue to serve as the core of your marketing for as long as you’re in business. The second is your community, which is going to be the proof positive of the strength of your brand. However, your community can also be a strong marketing tool in and of itself. Here, we’re going to look at some of the ways you can best make use of it.
Make good use of their feedback
There are few things that a loyal customer likes better than knowing that their feedback is valued and you should always make sure that you’re using tools like Loop to collect feedback on how your business is performing, what you can improve, certain products, and so on. Stirring them up for reviews and testimonials is great, but publishing studies on what improvements you plan to make based on feedback is so much more forward-thinking and impressive from the consumer’s standpoint.
Finding your brand ambassadors
If you have done well at building up a strong customer base, then you are likely to find those who are a little more into your products, services, and brands than the others. With the right incentives, these people can become your brand ambassadors, helping to spread your brand and offer some credibility to it. Look at how to build a brand ambassador program that helps you systematically find and invest in those people who are going to help platform and promote you beyond what you can do yourself.
Build a community around them
If you can stir up enough buzz from enough people, you might find that a bubble starts to build around your brand, where people spend time specifically talking about your products, services, and what they think about them. To that end, you can start using tools like Disciple Media to formally build and manage community platforms. This way, you can create a dedicated space where people are incentivised by each other’s interests and also by direct involvement and feedback from your team.
Directly incentivise them to reach out
Of course, you don’t want to stay inside a bubble of the same size, you want to grow your bubble by pulling new people in. Brand ambassadors are one example but you can get more people of your community more invested by offering direct and real incentives to get involved. This can include vouchers for them but also discounts for new people that they reach through a referral program. Many of the people who will join your referral program are the types who already like your brand so you don’t need to worry about it coming off as ingenuine, too.
Turning your customer base and your community into a marketing tool is going to help you reach new people with much more authority and authenticity. Make sure that you start taking advantage of the assets that is truly unique to your business: those that support it.
