Community marketing is a powerful strategy that brand owners should not miss. Community marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on creating and maintaining long-term relationships between a company brand and its customers.
Savvy marketing agencies center their offerings on creating spaces and communities, virtual and physical, to facilitate the creation of relationships between companies and consumers.
Community marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on creating and maintaining long-term relationships between a company brand and its customers.
Community marketing is essential because of the opportunities it brings to honest conversations with your target market, in contrast to traditional, one-way advertising. Moreover, Latino, LatinX markets are very responsive to efforts to get their voices into developing marketing strategies and product or service improvements. Please read our blog about the LatinX communities here.
Myths are very insidious.
Do not allow myths to derail your good intentions in search of a robust strategy centered on community marketing. Community marketing is often not implemented because brand owners do not know what they should do or think it will not work along with other marketing strategies.
Here are five misconceptions that can negatively affect your plans:
Myth #1: It is Impossible to Create Marketing Communities
Brand owners can create communities of customers, especially in digital spaces. These product communities sometimes spring up organically but need the intervention of marketers to achieve desired results. It is possible to create a quality online community. There are many examples of successful community building by expert marketing professionals armed with good ideas and a sense of engagement.
Myth #2: Community Marketing is the Same as Social Media Management
While Community Marketing involves Social Media Management, the biggest misconception is that they are the same. Social media is present, but it goes farther than posting on Facebook. Community Marketing involves creating a strategy and messages, collecting customer experiences, monitoring their opinions, and following up on changes in messaging and how the consumer receives them. It also involves data analysis and evaluation of your marketing strategy and even suggests product changes and adaptations guided by consumer input.
Myth #3: Experts Know What is Best for Your Customers
If it is true that you need to inform and educate your customers, do not try to overwhelm them with wisdom. Let the spaces be a healthy exchange of information and ideas. It may get to the point they may use the information to become advocates for your product to others. This point of conversation, when they become spokespersons for your business, is the ultimate goal of your marketing efforts.
Myth #4: One Community is Enough
It is common to think that managing one online community is enough, and there is no need to add more conversation spaces. This idea is just another myth, and the reality is that there is an opportunity to create niche groups. But make no mistake, the online marketplace thrives on the competition: Success or failure is related to the quality of the messages you send and opening a forum for hearing the voices of the people members of the community you form.
Myth #5: We are Here to Sell
There is nothing further from the truth. The spaces you create in community marketing are spaces of respect and forums for real people to interact with. You owe them respect, their voices incorporated in your marketing strategies. Consumers are savvy. Any attempt to dismiss their input will be noticed and can destroy the community. Your customers interacting in the community spaces are there to have fun and engage with others who share their interests. Community marketing entails marketing, but you are there to have productive conversations that will enrich your marketing strategies.
__________
Novle, Community Activators is a marketing agency centered on the community.
Follow our dynamic social media postings on Instagram here.