Building a Loyal Blog Audience Through Community Engagement

It is essential to create a community marketing plan, if your brand is hoping to build better connections with your audience. A community offers a space where individuals congregate around a common cause, life stage, or interest, this allows for engagement in meaningful conversation together with the ability to seek advice and share ideas on a range of topics.

Unlike communities that are influencer based, or those brand pages you find on social media platform where you will find things can be more one-sided community-based marketing is where you will find a more genuine form of communication. There is no pressure to present a perfect images and honest open discussion is preferred. This is essential is you really want authenticity and to be able to find collaborative solutions.

What is community marketing?

Community marketing or engagement is a growth strategy that is innovative and has a focus on bringing together brands, customer and potential customers in a way that is transparent and engaging. As an approach this allows you to use community as a channel which will allow you to build meaningful relationships and reach an audience.  

There are a number of benefits of community marketing, including:

1.     Enhanced customer service

2.     High engagement that is organic

3.     It can complement your other marketing strategies

4.     It helps make you customer voice heard

How do you engage this audience with a community?

When creating your community marketing plan, it is important to find the best tone for your audience. You shouldn’t be too promotional, nor should you ignore engagement or bombard your audience with content that isn’t relevant. These are things that can erode your audience’s trust.

Whether your audience is an individual in your local area or a major corporation you need to carefully consider the best way to engage those B2C and B2B audiences. Clearly, there will be a significant difference in the style, format and tone of engaging these different buyers but don’t assume that what you already see out there is best. Try out the different styles and especially tone of voice. Take Situ the business accommodation specialist as a good example of successfully going against the flow in the B2B world. Their tone of voice in all communications is about demonstrating they are real people not a cold, faceless organisation. They talk in a friendly, warm, and approachable way aimed at building lasting relationships and trust with their corporate clients. They have a “can-do”, positive, and action-orientated attitude that shines through in every communication. It’s a great example of what can be achieved when some real thought has gone into understanding their audience.

In order to build your audience effectively here are some quick tips:

• Contribute like a professional – once you have your community up and running it’s important to remember that you are the expert and therefore your contributions should add value and highlight your expertise. Pay special attention to helping your audience and ditch the marketing jargon in order to gain trust.
• Engage effectively – ensure your engagement with your audience resonates with them, do they prefer quick content then use videos, if they prefer reading use blog posts. Know how to read your audience so you don’t lose them.
• Create a space that is trusted – when you provide a community-owned space that allows your members to share knowledge and connect you create something powerful. This can help you with your word-of-mouth marketing.
• Host and take part in events – when you host events you can create not only shared meaning but also traditions for your community. In-person events offer the chance of face-to-face interaction. Online events are a good way to bring your community closer together and can complement in-person ones. Having a good mixture of both will help you to include everyone from your community.

It can be a good idea to look for the niche that exists in your community. This will allow you to really build a more loyal blog audience. And when you have that community, you can use them to help you do things like test new marketing ideas. If they like your ideas, then there is a good chance they will appeal to others as well.