Branded Digital Customer Communities Why You Should Consider One and How to Get Started

By Kathy Barton

A branded social media community is like a private Facebook community, where you own the content, define the rules of the road, and moderate and curate the content. These communities offer many benefits to companies looking to promote business goals while providing members with information, support, interaction, and comradery.

Some of these benefits include:

• Increased brand engagement and loyalty, driving sales and wallet share
• Direct access to the “voice of the customer”
• Increased reach for internal resources and expertise
• Reduced support costs
• Increase collaboration across the organization

Private, branded communities should not be viewed as a substitute for public communities like Facebook or LinkedIn in an overall digital marketing strategy. However, they offer several advantages as a complement to public social media platforms.

Related Articles: Private Digital Customer Communities: Your Best Lead Nurturing Platform

Getting Started With Your Private Social Community

To be effective, branded communities must be properly designed, built and managed. This requires managing the people, process and technology aspects of the project.

The starting points are the creation of a vision, identification of target segments, development of specific use cases, approval of the business case, and the implementation of a robust community governance structure.

Next, it is important to build a strong engagement plan, create appropriate branding, messaging and “voice” for the community, and identify the required community structure and content.

Private social communities are built on technology platforms such as Higher Logic and others, typically run in the cloud, and are accessed from your company web site.

Once the community is live, it is important to continuously moderate the interactions, maintain and refresh the content, and assess and act on the community metrics.

Best Practices for a Branded Community

A variety of best practices can help drive the success of your branded community. Several of these, as outlined in a recent Forrester paper include:

• Persistent link to the community in the main navigation of their websites;
• Use social media and email to promote their communities;
• Dedicate at least one full-time community manager;
• Integrate the community with the rest of the marketing mix;
• Define and measure active and super-active members; and
• Have extremely passionate affinity audiences.

ISM has built private, branded communities for global, best-in-class companies including ExxonMobil, Heinz-Kraft, AAA and others. To learn more about how a private, branded social media community can enhance customer and employee engagement and increase revenue for your organization, don’t miss our informative Live Webinar  on Oct 23, 2018. Click here for more information on our Social Media Community Focus.

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