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 isnt relevant. These are things that can erode your audience’s trust. In order to build your audience effectively you should:

• 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.