So your brand has signed up to Facebook and LinkedIn, but now what? Mike Hall, partner and head of development at Verve, provides top tips on how to make the most of online brand communities
Online brand communities are arguably a more exciting and valuable medium for B2B than consumer marketing. For two reasons: A community will likely represent a higher proportion of your target market, so it’s a more effective direct medium. Secondly, because you probably don’t need to carry out research continuously, you’ll be forced to implement more varied marketing and business initiatives, which will amplify the campaign and brand effects.
Many brands set up a short-term community for a specific project. This is a good way to try out this new medium, but inefficient in the long run. You’re better off developing a plan for phased use of the medium as a permanent resource, which has the added benefit of building stronger cumulative response.
1. Understand their interests
You can carry out both quantitative research (emailing online surveys to community members) and qualitative (online focus groups, forums, even live video feedback on the community site). Surveys can cover usage and attitudes, decision-making processes, concept and product testing, customer satisfaction, pricing – the whole gamut. It’s like having a room full of your customers next door, ready for you to pop in at any time and ask them anything you want.
But be careful not to exploit their goodwill. Make sure the questions are genuine and professionally crafted or you’ll become an irritant. Make good use of a community’s unique advantage over traditional research panels and allow them to carry on their own conversations about whatever they want regarding the brand or business. Let them give the answers they want to give, instead of the answers you want them to give, which is what conventional research does.
2. Spread the word
You can start a word-of-mouth campaign with a viral, an ad, a new product seed or simply an opening conversational gambit (often best). Experiment and learn – make use of a community’s unique ability to follow how word-of-mouth spreads, and what gives an idea ‘pass-it-on’ qualities. Track effects as it goes viral, so you can turn users into committed customers and brand advocates.
3. Ditch your conventional clothes
Because a community is engaged with the brand, you need to think in campaign terms, not just interruptive banner ads. Develop the campaign with the community, exploring ideas together, showing them concepts, announcing the launch, then letting it go. You want to build up anticipation to accelerate impact. But you’ll need to change out of your conventional clothes – people who have spent time helping you can easily feel alienated if you suddenly switch into corporate ‘push’ mode and blitz them with your content while abandoning previous conversations.
This applies to DM campaigns – only more so, because they’re meant to be more personally targeted. As with advertising, you need to prepare campaigns with lots of creative executions and frequent copy rotation. It’s worth planning campaigns that build creatively rather than seeing executions just as variations on a theme.
PR (including corporate social responsibility) campaigns are perfect for communities, whether you’re responding to topical criticism or announcing positive initiatives – treat your message as a conversation-starter, not a complete storyline. If you embrace this, you may even get PR releases written less in corporate speak full of puff and spin. One of the benefits of a community is that you discover the language your target market actually uses and if you use it too they respond better.
4. Develop an elite group
Confidentiality is usually an issue with new product development, so it’s best to develop an elite group within the online community – generally brand advocates and imaginative contributors – to share ideas with early in the process. Embrace co-creation fully and get R&D on board and fully involved. It’s important to take online blinkers off – products can be delivered physically and discussed online; community members can be brought together for a physical workshop as well as a virtual one.
5. Consider going private
Online brand communities have two channels, which we can call public and private. A lot of marketing people instinctively gravitate to the public channels, such as Facebook or LinkedIn. While these are relatively quick and easy to set up, they can be difficult and more time-consuming to manage – and crucially – lack control and confidentiality.
The private channel – a purpose-built closed community – enables you to do more. It’s easier to set up an elite group (for new product development especially) and to activate it as a seed-bed for launches. Although it can be more expensive – which is why it’s better to set it up as an on-going rather than ad hoc resource – it’s more likely to produce the kind of effects you really want, and its more flexible for experimentation. A good way to look at it is as the modern way of test-marketing: involve your target market in idea generation and refinement, launch the initiative and once you have momentum roll it out into a public community channel, then into the wider web world and indeed into offline media.
