In these times of rapid changes and frequent updates, you need to build and manage your community to stay ahead of the competition as well as achieve the ultimate goals set for your business. However, this process requires both time and effort, but the rewards of creating and boosting your brand along with lowering customer acquisition costs are too big to ignore.
You can create and manage your community with the following steps. You should begin by setting up goals for your entire business just as you may have done for your SEO or social media or content. You can split your goals into small projects as well as long-term projects that combine to help you achieve your goals.
While setting goals, it can be a good idea to take suggestions from various departments, which can then be analyzed, filtered, and implemented. Rather than merely listing generalized goals such as “We will provide better customer service”, you need to lay out details on how you plan to achieve this goal.
Your next step after defining your goals is to define KPIs that will help you measure your goals. In addition, you also need to define the type of data that you need to confirm if your change is indeed in the right direction. You must remember that KPIs differ from business to business and need much more than Google Analytics to measure.
Your next step must be to create an imaginative strategy to achieve your goals as well as choose the tools to execute and manage it. You can strategize by jamming with your team to kick-start this move. After a few sessions, you can finalize on a strategy that best suits your business, your goals, and your budget. This strategy can then be presented to your client and you may need to get back to the drawing board a couple of times before you can impress your client.
If you have developed a yearly plan then you need to check your course after every 2 to 3 months after the initial 2 months where you may need to monitor your actions on a daily and then weekly basis. You will also need to ensure that all your implemented tools such as SEO, content, outreach, social media, and email marketing, among others are in tune with your set goals.
Once you begin collecting and analyzing data then you need to compare it with your goals without going out of your way to adjust the goals or KPIs merely to match them with your efforts. You may not succeed with each tactic, but continuous testing and tweaking will help you remain on track.
Once your community building efforts start delivering results, you need to engage in managing your community. You can begin by allowing a community manager to oversee and manage all related tactics such as content creation and creating and pushing assets such as videos, infographics, etc., in a seamless manner.
Your community manager also needs to identify opportunities to expand your community. This can be done by identifying companies and influential people that can be followed on social media sites, engaging with them by sharing, following, communicating, etc. This move can help expand your community as well as gain heightened acceptance and respectability at the same time.
Your community manager also needs to monitor all aspects of your blogs including content, responses, filtering out spam, etc., to make sure that increasing number of people join up to read and share those blogs. Your manager must also ensure that the blogs are published on other sites that command high levels or respect in the eyes of readers and search engines alike. He or she can also engage in guest blogging to further the reach of your efforts.
Collecting feedback as well as acting on it is another form of action that can be followed by your community manager. Your manager can collect online feedback as well as collect it from face-to-face events such as seminars, exhibitions, etc. Analyzing that feedback can provide a goldmine of opportunities, which is possible only when your business has developed a large community of loyal and interested people including existing and prospective customers, and visitors.
Creating and encouraging brand loyalty is a must in these competitive times and your community manager can work with your marketing team to decide on how best to reward and encourage loyal customers. Again, keeping track of such efforts will help you improve your loyalty program and continue building up your community.
Of course, continuous training of all related teams as well as your clients will ensure that everyone has the required knowledge and skills to keep up the momentum of building and managing a community. The above tips will help you get motivated to build and manage your community in a structured manner, and achieve your business and SEO goals in the long run.