Nowadays, companies that successfully build a community can simply use the conceptual prototyping method. Conceptual prototyping is a successive structure that is conceptually predetermined and can still react to new developments. WordPress is ideal here as a central point where all communities converge. Of course, WordPress can be integrated into any corporateHomepage integrate.
1. building community - environment and influencing factors
The first step is to look at the company's target group and determine which communities are most likely to be suitable for a link. "Where can the majority of my target group be found?" is the key question here. Of course, you could use sinus analyses here, as in the classic advertising sector. However, the Internet offers sufficient tools, some of which are better and more realistic than the approach used in traditional advertising.
When defining and searching for the target group, you usually notice that forums also represent a kind of community. We will come back to this later in the advertising section.
Communities analysis
You can learn a lot from analyzing other communities. However, you should never forget your own ideas, as these will later set you apart from the many other communities and prevent the new community from looking like a copy of all the others. During the analysis, we identify the most important points in a Ranking and at the same time get many new ideas, which we should also rank in order of importance.
Aim and purpose of the community
The overall objective or purpose of the community should be defined so that you know what the most important criteria are for the various rankings you make over time.
A goal is a desired state after a process has been completed. For this purpose, a starting point must be defined and an aspired goal must be named so that the achievement of the goal and success can also be measured.
Targets on the Internet can be measured in terms of page impressions, clicks, unique users, addresses generated, turnover generated, basket size or loyalty effect. This allows success to be measured much better and more accurately than in traditional advertising. Above all, you know where the success comes from.
Determining the needs of the target group
What is the motivation and what are the motives for participating in the communities analyzed? Here you can find out how to ensure growth in your own community and how to retain participants in the long term. What topics do you need to offer, work on and prepare? The needs of the community can be diverse. But one thing is certain. The participants need to feel that you are paying attention to them, which means intensive and permanent support for the community.
Now it's all about communication, measuring success, the successful set-up, advertising, success control and optimization and the embedding in the marketing mix of the company.
2. communication and promotion of the community
In the first step, a community member registers as a normal member. This means that the new member usually has the right to write comments in the community and may also be allowed to explore the profiles of other members in greater depth (e.g. on Facebook). Of course, the new member can soon gain further rights through loyalty and possibly by writing posts. erlangen such as deleting your own comments, writing articles or pages, editing articles and pages or even the complete administration.
As an administrator, you then have all rights and could even delete the forum or blog. For this reason, this status is rarely granted or only with a contractual obligation.
This results in a certain hierarchy in the community. This has the advantage that you can organize better, but it can also deter new users. You therefore need to maintain a balanced relationship so that the community grows. The leading roles are particularly important here, as they should also ensure a pleasant atmosphere in the community.
With WordPress you can organize these roles quite easily. There are several plugins that make life easier here, such as the User Role Manager or WP Sentry.
Measuring the success of communities
The success of a community is usually measured by the number of members. A distinction is made between A, B and C members, whereby the classification should be made according to the objective.
Example:
- A = writes more than 5 comments a week
- B = writes more than 1 comment per week
- C = does not write comments
Each group receives a specific treatment. The groups can of course also be subdivided according to other criteria:
Examples:
- Number of members recruited
- Number of pageviews
- Purchase of products or services
- Frequency of return to the community (loyalty effect)
It is important to set a goal and a time and/or money budget. This allows you to calculate later on how much a user is worth or whether or which users are worth the investment of time and money. In most cases, this value can only be determined once the long-term value of the user has been established, i.e. what the user contributes in the long term and how large the budget is that he or she spends on the services and products offered in the long term. Suitable criteria for measuring success include Google Analytics.
We continue with successful community building and the promotion of communities. These two points belong together, because without any kind of advertising, community building is less successful. True to the motto: A printed brochure should also be distributed.
3. successful community building
The success factors for building a community are:
- Passion.
- A virtual community lives from reality in the long term.
- You create a community for a niche and not to copy the market leader.
- You have to ask the right questions.
- You have to listen, even if it hurts.
- Thematic change must take place at the right time, with the right reasons and content
A community can arise from frequently asked questions (FAQ), for example, because there should already be communication here anyway. If you answer these questions with passion and make them available to everyone, you already have the basis for a community.
Differentiations and bonding in community building
Now you only need community functions such as registration, login, news, profile, roles etc. and you already have a well-funded community. Users who feel answered and taken seriously will come back and produce free content. Content. They are also happy to receive news or e-mails.
You will quickly realize that the best way to retain users is to provide content that is unique. You can even ask questions, conduct surveys and find out users' preferences. The better you do this, the greater the long-term effect.
Sometimes you also get criticism and that is very positive, because criticism means the chance to improve. Criticism is also an eye-catcher and attracts new users. We know this from all media - good news is bad news. Critical things are the most frequented by users and it is important to take care of the criticism and improve products and services.
As soon as there are innovations in the community environment, you should respond to them, even if possible as the first community in the niche. In most cases, the reasons for changes in content can be found in the frequency and type of requests and contributions. Here you should be flexible but not erratic. Changing content and navigation points too quickly confuses the user. However, having no change in the medium term is not good either, because then the community appears lifeless. A balanced style is important here. The right time can be recognized over time by the user statistics.
Communities promotion
Promoting communities is important. However, it is more important to find the right users who will get involved and stay involved in the long term. Advertising can take place in a wide variety of advertising channels:
- Contributions in other communities
- Tests
- Invitations from potentially interested parties
- Regular support for the community
- Participation in the major social communities such as Facebook. (Choosing the right communities is important.)
- Advertising in communities
- SEO (Search engine optimization)
- SEM (Search engine marketing: Adwords)
- Banner advertising
- Newsletter / E-mail marketing
- Competitions in connection with contributions
- Events
- Merchandising
- Offline advertising (very diverse)
A good advertising campaign is success-oriented and has a sufficient advertising budget. This means that the status and target must be determined and the campaign or the Online Marketing-Optimize the mix then.
We will now continue with the success control and optimization of the community, after we talked about the successful establishment and promotion of the community in the previous part.
4. success control of a community
The performance review is derived from a historical status quo and the objective. We should therefore start our activities by analyzing the current state of the community and defining one or more goals.
For example:
- Number of page impressions per month
- Number of users per month
- Number of registrations
- Number of comments or articles
- Turnover
- Turnover per user
- etc.
All of these goals should be linked to a specific date in the objective so that success can also be determined. This is very important, as recommendations for action or conclusions can be derived from this, for example:
- Increase/decrease in labor input
- Increase/reduction of the advertising budget
- Long-term planning of personnel and budget
To measure success on the Internet, you need a statistics tool such as Google-Analyticswith which you can measure all success-relevant criteria. If Google does not want to provide this insight, there are a number of other better and worse analysis tools.
Community optimization
The optimization of the community is derived directly from the analysis of success. The analysis shows rankings, strengths and weaknesses. However, you should never forget that the analysis tools can only show values that are actually offered. This means that if content is not offered on the Internet, it cannot be clicked on.
The arrangement of the content is also important. Successful and potentially successful content should be displayed prominently, otherwise success will not materialize as it could. We are therefore giving away our success, however it is defined. You can also put it like this: If you don't open the doors, success can't happen.
Be inspired by the behavior of your users
So we analyze our community in detail and form Ranking-lists that we use as a guide for optimization. This allows us to optimize our community point by point like a checklist. For example, if it turns out that our users prefer to access our offer on Sundays, we can increase the activities of the community on Sundays. If you already have the most activity on Sundays, you can choose the second most popular day and consider whether there is still potential there.
If most of the registrations come from a certain large city, you can concentrate more on this target group and the moment the additional effort no longer corresponds to the additional success, you always look for the second largest city in your statistics against the background that there is also potential there, because the second largest city in the statistics is not necessarily the city in which there are even more potential registrations.
The optimization initially looks very diverse, although clear priority lists that emerge from the analysis soon show us crystal clear in which direction it should go and which actions belong at the top of our priority list.
5. embedding the community in the company's marketing mix.
Communities in product policy
In product and service policy, it is important to provide the right products and services for the target group. It is certainly possible to build a community that corresponds to the existing target group. This means that classic marketing would have to be used to persuade customers to register in the community.
Normally, however, the target group in the community differs from the classic target group, as the Internet community in Germany does not correspond to the general public. So we have to find out which products or services the new target group is interested in and make the corresponding product portfolio available to the new community. This usually works by combining the relevant offers from the existing portfolio into a community portfolio and developing new variations or innovations based on feedback from the new target group. Differentiation can also arise. Product elimination does not occur in the short term.
Communities in pricing policy
The Internet community is very flexible. One click and you're at a competitor. This also means that new customers are a little sensitive when it comes to prices. A small change in the entire purchase process, whether it's the price, the shipping costs or the composition of the offer package, leads to reactions. However, this has an advantage. You can learn from these reactions more quickly than anywhere else for all other environments. If you behave seriously in all aspects of pricing policy, the customer will thank you with loyalty, which will significantly increase your success.
Particularly aggressive subscription designs are not at all well received by the Internet target group. Criticism is quickly voiced in the community. You should therefore conduct surveys to find out exactly what customers want and adapt your pricing models accordingly.
If you use a good tracking and analysis tool on the Internet, you can learn a lot from it. In particular, the long-term customer value can also be calculated, which can lead to prices that go beyond short-term cost coverage and thus provide decisive competitive advantages.
Communities in distribution policy
Direct sales are considerably simplified, especially for online services or virtual products. However, there are also advantages in the traditional sector, as the customer can shop 24 hours a day without this having a direct impact on the supplier's working hours. There are also considerable advantages in indirect sales, depending on the definition, because if you define indirect sales as sales via virtual sales assistants, you suddenly have many more options. E.g. through affiliate programs or other Partner programs and cooperations.
Communities in communication policy
In principle, a community is a communication channel, and is therefore classified here from a scientific perspective. In particular, the community is an online communication channel. For this reason alone, it makes the most sense to advertise the community online. At least 80% of the advertising budget should therefore be invested in online advertising.
This means starting within the community with good support for the community, advertising in the same community but also in other communities and forums. This is how you collect active community-affine users. Then it's like normal online advertising, depending on the industry, usually with SEO, SEM and Banner advertising further. Newsletters and e-mails are also appropriate if they are not used too intrusively. In certain cases, communication can also extend to other media.
However, you should also mention the community in your normal traditional advertising. This is usually not a major additional effort. You simply use classic advertising more efficiently.
To summarize, you have to be clear about one thing. A community that is advertised is more successful than a community without an advertising budget. The community must therefore be included in the budget from the outset. The decisive argument in favor of such advertising compared to traditional advertising is that you can measure exactly how successful every euro invested is. Both in the short and long term.
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