So you’ve optimised your community engagement platform to embody your brand and engage your audience.
Time to sit back and relax, right? Not exactly.
Whether you’ve just begun building a brand community or you’re looking for new ways to grow an established audience, knowing how to drive new users to your platform is key to its success.
That’s where this post comes in.
Today, we’re exploring 6 proven ways to drive users to your community engagement platform, providing a wave of new opportunities for your brand to foster long-lasting customer relationships.
Shout on socials
From Facebook to LinkedIn, Instagram to Twitter, your business likely has a social channel or two.
Whether you have 50 followers or 5,000 followers, your socials are the perfect place to shout about your platform to an audience with a proven interest in your brand – so do it.
Post about your platform frequently and enthusiastically, covering everything from what it is to why your audience needs it (accompanied by a handy link, of course).
Doing this will soon see you convert idle followers into engaged community members.
That’s not to say your message is restricted to your followers – far from it!
Believe it or not, social media usage is still growing – it’s expected there’ll be 3.96 billion users worldwide in 2022, up 4.8% from 2021.
Whether you rely on the power of organic shares, promote a post or run targeted ads, social media is a powerful channel to promote your platform (and brand) to a new audience.
Offer exclusive perks
Users need incentives.
From exclusive previews to special promotions, make your community engagement platform the place to be with a range of unmissable perks.
The best way to ensure your platform has a pull your audience can’t resist? Stir up FOMO (fear of missing out).
A mammoth 69% of millennials (today’s largest consumer demographic) experience FOMO. Most find it too powerful to resist, too, with 48% of millennials spending money they don’t have to keep up with others.
Use FOMO to your advantage by offering exclusive perks – emphasis on ‘exclusive’ here.
To ensure these perks incentivise your audience, conduct audience research to discover what your audience is looking for. Then, leverage it on your community platform and let FOMO work its magic.
Be responsive
Brand communities should never be a one-way street – it’s a sure-fire way of turning potential members away.
Demonstrate that you’re present in your customer relationships by always being responsive wherever you’re visible, from comments and threads to queries and reviews.
74% of millennials say that their perception of a brand improves when it is clear the company responds to customers’ social media comments and queries.
On top of that, 69% of consumers agree that responsiveness is “very important” when it comes to remaining loyal to a brand.
So, by demonstrating that you actively participate in customer conversations and problem solving, you’ll promote a positive brand image that incentivises loyalty.
In turn, your members of your audience will be better primed to convert into community members who regularly engage with your platform.
Promote at every opportunity
How will you drive users to your platform if they don’t know it exists?
Be sure to shout loudly about your community engagement platform at every opportunity – promotion is the best way to increase traffic to your hub.
Start with your website, ensuring your platform is visibly linked in your footer. If your design permits it, also look to include a banner on a suitable page (or two) to catch the eye of both new and repeat visitors.
Don’t forget about your onsite content, either. From page copy to blog posts, update with commanding CTAs (calls-to-action) that push more users towards your community engagement space.
Of course, there are countless other promotion opportunities at your disposal – perhaps most notably, engaging email marketing.
40% better at converting than social marketing, email can be a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal.
21% of emails sent are opened within the first hour of delivery, so, if you’re directly promoting your community engagement platform via email, consider your timing.
Launch email campaigns in tandem with publishing exciting content or unmissable updates on your platform. Give those recipients who’ve clicked through a reason to become a member.
That’s not to say you can’t promote your platform indirectly through email. It doesn’t have to be the subject of every email – a short and snappy CTA at the end of confirmation emails, newsletters and the like will work wonders when it comes to attracting new visitors, too.
Create customer-first content
We’ve already covered the importance of incentives when attracting new community members to your platform.
Exclusive perks are an effective short-term solution, but, for a longer-term approach to incentivising, look to create customer-first content.
Customer-first content offers solutions to your audience’s common pain points, becoming supremely valuable as a result.
The more of this content you create, the more engagement you generate and the more authority you build. As a result, customers are given a constant incentive to stick around.
For this reason, in a recent survey, 92% of marketers reported that their company views content as a business asset.
The format and style this customer-first content takes will ultimately depend on your brand, industry and audience. That being said, you can find out more about the types of content your customers want to see here.
Find brand ambassadors
Users trust other users – in most cases, more than they trust your brand.
In fact, 76% of people say that they’re more likely to trust content shared by “normal” people than by brands.
So, look to promote brand ambassadors who willingly champion your brand and platform, embodying your values wherever they go.
89% of marketers say this style of ambassador marketing is effective. That’s providing the approach is authentic, though – a quality that 91% of consumers are prepared to reward.
With this in mind, don’t turn to big-name social influencers who’ll plug anything for a quick buck.
Instead, recruit genuine members of your community to be your proud brand ambassadors, from enthusiastic employees to common customers.
This authentic use of brand ambassadors will see consumers built trust in their opinions, so make sure that they’re waxing lyrical about your platform wherever possible.
Your community engagement platform is a convenient and effective space that gives you the tools to foster long-lasting customer relationships and build a community around your brand.
Brand communities can be a powerful way of finding that competitive edge, so don’t miss out on all that yours has to offer by failing to promote your platform.
By following these 6 tips, you can ensure you’re sending meaningful traffic to your platform, discovering a wave of new users primed to convert into loyal community members.
With users on your platform, the next thing to do is engage them. If you’d like to see a short demonstration on how to make most of your platform, contact support@sixcircles.co.uk and your dedicated account manager will be in touch.
Alternatively, if you’re new to community building, get in touch today to learn more about what it can unlock for your business.