Here at Six Circles, we love hearing from our customers. 

Feedback helps us to grow our product, grow our business and grow our community. 

Put simply, customer feedback is invaluable to the success of our community engagement. 

Today, we’re offering up 6 reasons any brand hoping to build a thriving customer community should always be seeking customer feedback to learn how to better serve their audience. 

(And you can find exactly what you need to learn from your audience right here).

You learn who your customers are 

We hope you have already have a pretty good idea of your target audience and who your customers and community members are.

But customer feedback enables you to go deeper than generic customer profiles and top-level data insights.

Feedback enables you to discover who your customers really are – what makes them tick, how they interact with your product or service, and what they expect from you as a brand. 

As a result, you’re able to make worthwhile updates to your strategy – from your brand voice and message to your product or service development – to better align with your audience.  

This all leads to a targeted and ultra-effective community engagement strategy that will rapidly expand a loyal following of brand enthusiasts who subscribe to your values and message.

You receive honest insights

Customers don’t have an incentive to lie. 

This means the feedback you receive is likely to be impartial and honest, making it far more valuable than the input and opinions of family, friends and anyone with a vested interest in your brand.

The result? It’s far easier to obtain an accurate understanding of customer satisfaction, including what you’re doing right and wrong with your sales, marketing and community engagement strategies.

This all amounts to efforts that are more closely aligned with the wants, needs and expectations of your customers – the pillars of any successful community building endeavour.

You improve customer retention 

Customer retention is at the very heart of community building – after all, it’s those returning customers that form your devoted community.

Unhappy customers are, of course, unlikely to return – unless you can demonstrate a willingness to go the extra mile, that is.

Customer feedback provides you with a valuable opportunity to make amends with dissatisfied customers by addressing their grievances and improving their perception of your brand. 

Get this right and you might just turn an unhappy customer into a prospective community member – 70% of unhappy customers whose problems are resolved are willing to shop with a business again.

That’s not to say customer feedback only aids in mending damaged customer relationships. Those satisfied customers also need an incentive to keep coming back for more, and feeling unappreciated is the leading reason customers switch products and services. 

With this in mind, encourage feedback to strengthen your blossoming customer relationships and turn satisfied customers into enthusiastic community members.

You gain customer service experience 

The quality of your customer service has a major impact on how customers perceive your brand and how likely they are to join your community.

In fact, 65% of customers have switched to another brand after a poor customer service experience.

Regularly requesting and addressing customer feedback exposes you and your customer service team to an array of real-life customer issues.

Understand how to deal with different customer types by utilising feedback as a learning experience that can strengthen your customer service team moving forward. What are the common problems customers are facing and what can be done about them?

With this customer service experience, your brand will be better equipped to provide an above-and-beyond service that strengthens customer trust and increases your potential to grow a loyal customer community.

You identify brand ambassadors

Brand ambassadors are invaluable assets to any brand community. 

That’s because customers trust other customers – often far more than they trust your brand. It’s why 76% of internet users say they’re more likely to trust content shared by ‘normal’ people than by brands.

This only becomes more effective the more authentic your brand ambassadors are – and what better place to find genuinely enthusiastic customers than via audience feedback?

Encouraging customer feedback means you can avoid the big-name social influencers who do a little for a lot and instead recruit authentic community members proud to be associated with your brand.

This will send positive trust signals to your audience, reaffirming your brand’s trustworthiness to the benefit of your community engagement.

You appear more transparent and trustworthy 

Brand transparency and trust have become more than just a consumer preference – they’re an expectation.

It’s why 70% of consumers say trusting a brand is more important today than in the past – a belief shared across all age groups, genders and income brackets.   

A further 81% of consumers need to be sure they trust a brand before doing business with them (even once!), meaning trust must be successfully earned before community building can even begin.

Demonstrating that you value audience input by encouraging customer feedback is a sure-fire way to send your audience positive trust signals. 

But, like most things, actions speak louder than words. With this in mind, it’s not enough to simply say you value customer feedback – you need to prove it.

From actioning suggestions to addressing common complaints and pain points, to earn your audience’s trust and increase the likelihood of them becoming budding community members, regularly show how you’re embracing and valuing the input of your customers.

Whether it’s positive or negative, customer feedback is gold dust for any brand looking to unlock the power of community building. Begin leveraging your audience’s thoughts, opinions and perspectives today to begin implementing a more effective and targeted community engagement strategy.

Oh, and if you’re a Six Circles customer, we always welcome any suggestions around what you’d like to see on our market-leading community engagement platform. Send any ideas to support@sixcircles.co.uk – we can’t wait to hear them.

Successful community building is about consistently engaging your audience. 

You want to strengthen relationships between customer and brand by demonstrating value and understanding. In turn, this will help you build trust, authority and credibility within your space. 

Sounds easy, right?

And the truth is that it can be, providing you know a thing or two about your audience’s habits and behaviours.

That’s because successful community engagement requires you to know what content your audience demands and, as a result, what content you should be shouting about the most loudly.

In this post, we’re exploring 6 types of content always worth promoting to your audience.

Internal news 

Your brand is the heart of your community. It’s the hub your audience is built around and the driving force for its growth.

Keeping your community informed on all of your latest internal news and developments will put your brand front and centre.

Not only will this help to strengthen your brand’s authenticity (a trait that 90% of consumers agree is important), but it will also make your community members feel more valued. 

Giving your audience extra insight into your brand will make them feel less like consumers and more like community members, bridging the gap between you and your audience. 

This can create authentic brand ambassadors – an asset 89% of marketers agree is effective in growing a community.

Shouting loudly about your internal news also provides a distinct opportunity to demonstrate how you’re embracing your brand values.

Not only will this further strengthen your authenticity, but it will also help audiences to identify with your brand (growing your community as a result!).

External news 

Promoting external news is also a powerful way of engaging your community.

From important updates within your industry to current affairs that align (or contrast) with your brand’s values, share external news to position yourself at the forefront of your space.

Be sure you’re adding something new to the conversation, though.

The point is to demonstrate your expertise by providing valuable insights, opinions and solutions as a means of strengthening your brand’s authority and your community’s trust in it. 

Be sure this content is being produced and promoted with a quick turnaround – external news is rarely evergreen, so you need to participate in the conversation while it’s still happening. 

Providing you shout about it loudly, this finger-on-the-pulse content will likely drive plenty of engagement and conversation within your community.

Polls

Community members like to be heard – in fact, a significant 89% of consumers want companies to ask them for input.

Polls can be a great way of collecting audience opinions. 

Firstly, they give community members the chance for their voices to be heard without having to spend time on exhaustive forms and laboured feedback.

Secondly, polls are interactive and visually engaging, allowing them to drive active participation.

The benefits here are crystal clear. Your community relations will be strengthened by your members feeling valued and heard, which, in turn, builds greater trust in your brand.

Oh, and all the while, you’re collecting valuable audience feedback and insight that can be utilised to further enhance how your brand connects with its community.

Of course, all of these perks rely on your community actually engaging with your polls – so be sure your audience knows every time one goes live.

Resources 

If your brand community is growing, it’s likely you’re creating customer-first content. 

These resources provide your audience with solutions to common pain points, and can take the form of blog posts, ebooks, guides and more.

This content is driven directly by the needs of your audience and, as such, tends to generate meaningful engagement.

As long as these resources provide high-quality and high-value solutions, they’ll prove invaluable in asserting your brand’s expertise and authority.

It’s the reason 92% of marketers agree that their company views content as a business asset.

If you’ve taken the time to create customer-first resources, be sure to seize the opportunity for engagement by ensuring your audience knows where to find them.

Social posts  

Your brand’s socials are likely your go-to promotion channels. 

As a result, shouting about your social channels and your social posts can often be a long-forgotten afterthought.

This means there’s untapped potential for you to build a greater social following that helps to widen your reach and grow your community.

With this in mind, be sure to wax lyrical about your most-used platforms. Go further than merely linking your social icons in the footer of your website, though. 

Instead, directly promote your best-performing posts by integrating feeds across multiple platforms and channels.

With over 53% of the world’s population on social media, ensuring a strong social presence is key to asserting brand authority and trust. 

With this in mind, be sure to capitalise on your existing community by shouting about your socials to ensure a consistent and enthusiastic following wherever your brand’s visible online. 

Promotions 

We don’t need to tell you about the power of promotions. 

From unmissable perks to exclusive discounts, providing users with incentives to engage is a sure-fire way of keeping your community active.

Shout loudly and proudly whenever you’re running a promotion to stir up a healthy amount of FOMO (fear of missing out).

Remember: 69% of millennials experience FOMO, with the emotion driving purchasing decisions in a significant 48% of this demographic.

Make sure you’re highlighting active promotions to maximise the success of your offer and improve your community engagement to boot.

Successful and sustainable community building means consistently meeting the wants, needs and desires of your audience. With this in mind, don’t fall at the final hurdle by failing to promote what matters most to your brand and, of course, your community.

On the Six Circles community engagement platform, our latest update has given small and large business owners more community-building power than ever before. 

For example, our new featured tiles panel allows admins to pin important content (like the types mentioned in this post) so it’s the first thing users see when they arrive on the platform. Want to learn more? Get in touch today to find out how Six Circles can help your community building go further.

Establishing trust is vital to building successful long-term relationships with the modern consumer.

In fact, a huge 81% of consumers need to be sure they trust a brand before buying from them.

Community building can be a super-effective way for your brand to demonstrate these important trust signals and foster longer relationships with your customers.

In today’s post, we’re sharing 6 handy tips on how to build trust through community engagement.

Look to implement these tips as part of your own community engagement strategy for purposeful community building that drives your business towards its commercial goals.

Be authentic

Authenticity is key to earning customers’ trust.

90% of consumers agree that authenticity is important when deciding which brands they support. That’s up from 86% in 2017, too, meaning the importance of authenticity to the modern consumer is only increasing as time goes on.

One of the key drivers behind this shift is millennials – 64% of whom are ‘belief-driven’ buyers – becoming the largest consumer demographic.

This consumer group expects more transparency and authenticity from brands – they want to know who you are and what you stand for. They also want proof these aren’t just empty words.

A mammoth 92% of marketers believe the content they create resonates as authentic with their customers. However, a significant 51% of consumers disagree.

This is because marketers are more likely to believe their branded content is more authentic than user-generated content – 2.1x more likely, to be precise.

On the flip side, consumers are 2.4x more likely to believe user-generated content is more authentic than branded content.

The takeaway? Consumers trust other people far more than they trust brands. 

So, to earn your customers’ trust through community engagement, let your community members do the hard work for you – highlighting real customers and telling real stories.

Be consistent  

Consistency breeds reliability and credibility – both of which are key to building consumer trust. 

On average, it takes 5 to 7 brand impressions for a consumer to even remember your brand, let alone become a trusting community member. So, pursuing community engagement every once in a while isn’t enough to drive the results you want to see.

Instead, to build trust and grow your community, engagement needs to become a fundamental part of your brand’s online activity.

Meaningful customer relationships need to be nurtured, requiring you to repeatedly demonstrate value to assure consumers that you’re a trusted authority within your space (more on this shortly).

Be sure to keep your community building consistent, both in terms of your messaging frequency and the content of this messaging.

Not only will this help you to project the right trust signals, but it will also provide you with a bank of extra engagement data you can use to better target your community building approach in future.

Be a value provider 

Providing value is integral to your long-term community engagement. Why? The more value you provide, the more trusting your community becomes in your brand’s authority.

Creating and promoting high-value content and services wherever possible is the most effective way to achieve this.

Delve into all kinds of audience research, from polls and surveys to data deep-dives and trend analysis. Identify popular topics and common pain points – what solutions do your audience need? What types of content do they engage most actively with?

Look to satisfy these demands by providing relevant and genuine value in the content you produce and the engagement strategies you pursue.

Remember: you’re not the only brand in your space, so be sure you’re going above and beyond to provide the utmost value to your audience.

The aim is to be the best in your space – this is the most effective way to assert your authority and expertise, effortlessly building customer trust as a result.

Be a leader

From demonstrating thought leadership to being at the forefront of developments in your field, look to establish a sense of leadership in your community engagement strategy.

If you’re providing high-value, best-in-space content as part of your community engagement approach, your brand will be halfway to becoming a leader of your industry.

That’s because becoming a leader is all about strengthening your brand’s credibility, authority and, as a result, trustworthiness.

If you’re a B2B brand, this approach can be particularly useful in securing the trust of more community members – 83% of B2B buyers consider thought leadership to be a trust signal.

Once again, the key here is quality. 49% of B2B buyers said their opinion of a company had decreased after reading poor quality content, and 33% have removed a company from consideration based on its thought leadership output.

No matter whether yours is a B2B or B2C community, demonstrate why you’re the go-to option by going further than your competitors – offer unique insights, high-value solutions and fresh perspectives.

Be accountable

Always openly engage with your community, whatever the sentiment of the conversation. 

No brand gets everything right 100% of the time – the occasional misstep is only natural. 

Instead of trying to swerve negative feedback, comments and complaints, though, own up and demonstrate accountability – your community will think more of your brand as a result.  

That’s because accountability promotes a culture of transparency and authenticity – two integral elements to building trust among consumers.

Being accountable can often be about more than owning up to your mistakes. To really earn the trust of consumers, you need to demonstrate action. Don’t just tell your community that their voice is being heard – show them.

Be responsive 

Delivering great customer service is a tried and tested way to build consumer trust – almost 90% of customers report trusting a company whose service they rate as ‘very good’.

So, whenever a member of your community reaches out, be responsive – you want to look as accessible and attentive as possible. 90% of customers rate an ‘immediate’ (10 mins or less) response as important or very important when they have a customer service query.

This means it’s key to ensure you’re not just responsive in public areas (like the comments section) – you need to be just as responsive in private areas (like DMs), too.

After all, a customer’s trust is most effectively built through their own positive experiences, not those of others.

If you lack the resource and manpower to operate an instantaneously responsive service, consider auto-replies and chatbots – customers need assurance that their voice is being heard. 

Trust and community engagement go hand in hand, meaning brands who gain their audience’s trust are able to grow their brand community more quickly. The trick is to assert your brand’s expertise with authenticity and transparency.

If you’d like a short demonstration of how to make the most of these tips on the Six Circles platform, contact support@sixcircles.co.uk and your dedicated account manager will be in touch.

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.

In recent years, the consumer landscape has evolved, changing the way brands think about their marketing strategies and wider customer relationships.

With consumers expecting more than just a transactional experience, community building has emerged as an invaluable tool for accelerating growth.

And this trend looks set to stay.

That’s why, today, with the new year well on the horizon, we’re exploring 6 reasons you need to build a brand community in 2022.

There’s power in people

Traditional digital advertising tactics are becoming less effective.

Whether it’s consumers becoming numb to a constant flurry of ads or an increasing distrust (and even boycott) of scandal-ridden Facebook, brands are understandably anxious to diversify their marketing spend.

But focusing on yet another channel isn’t the answer. Instead, focus on people.

In today’s consumer market, there’s power in people. From influencers and ambassadors to friends and family, consumers view the opinions and referrals of real people as the most reliable trust indicators.

What easier way to spread the good word about your brand than building a brand community that actively wants to do it for you? Nurture your customer relationships correctly and you’ll likely be repaid with loyalty and referrals – the very foundation of growing a community.

Customers love a cause

Accounting for approximately 40% of global consumers, Gen Z has overtaken millennials and boomers as the largest consumer group.

This has significantly reshaped the consumer landscape. Why? Because ​​members of Gen Z tend to make purchasing decisions based on connection, ethical responsibility and an expression of self.

76% of Gen Z have bought a product to support issues that brands support, and another 67% have (or would) boycott a brand whose values clashed with their own.

Embracing a social cause that aligns with your brand’s values is a powerful way of engaging and growing a brand community in 2022 and beyond. Just ensure you’re doing it the right way – exploiting a cause is a sure-fire way to lose your community’s support.

The hard sell is less effective

If the past couple of years have taught brands anything, it’s that brands must be flexible to pivot their message.

A hard sell, one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t have the same impact anymore – especially in times of turbulence and unfamiliarity.

Instead, you need to be finely attuned to your audience, understanding their real-world needs and challenges. The focus is on providing value – do that and the sale will follow.

Community building is one of the most impactful ways of consistently demonstrating value. It allows you to keep your finger on the pulse and understand your audience in real-time to provide genuine value.

Consumers expect authenticity

Storytelling is becoming increasingly commonplace in modern business and modern marketing. But storytelling alone isn’t enough – for it to be effective, it needs to be authentic.

A brand story shouldn’t be created for customers, it should be created with customers. The modern consumer wants to feel a part of the brand, and recognising customers’ individual experiences and telling their stories is a powerful way to achieve this.

What better way to discover and amplify customer stories than with a thriving customer community that encourages participation?

Data is invaluable

Your customer community can be an invaluable source of data.

Whether it’s sentiment analysis, surveys and feedback, or members’ personal information, your community provides your brand with a whole host of actionable data.

This data can be used to inform a more optimised and targeted business approach, from the products and services you offer to the way you approach your branding and marketing.

Look to analyse any and every data point available to you – think engagement metrics, customer demographics and the likes.

This all amounts to a brand that better serves its community by more directly addressing the wants, needs and expectations of its members. In turn, this accelerates your community (and brand) growth.

The community building trend is accelerating

Community building isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

In fact, in a recent community intelligence marketing report, 70.4% of brands reported having an active community. On top of that, another 26.3% expressed a desire to build one.

With today’s consumers expecting more than just a brand, harnessing a customer community is becoming an increasingly powerful way of meeting consumer demands.

So, community building in the new year may be more than a good idea for your brand – to remain competitive, it may well be a necessity.

At Six Circles, community building is our passion – and our first-rate community engagement platform has made it easier than ever before.

Get in touch today to request a demo and see for yourself how we can help you take full advantage of brand community building in 2022.

If you’re a business owner, you might already know that content is key to building a brand community.

In fact, you might even know why content is key to building a brand community.

But do you know what content is key to building a brand community?

There’s a whole host of different content types at your disposal, and knowing which ones your customers really care about can be vital to keeping them coming back for more.

Luckily for you, we know a thing or two about brand community building here at Six Circles.

That’s why, in today’s post, we’re exploring the 6 main types of content your customers want to see, so you can shout louder about the content most likely to engage your audience and fulfil your goals.

Blog posts

Customers care about your blog posts.

That’s as long as you have a solid blogging strategy, of course.

Whether you’re creating keyword-optimised posts for SEO or just offering up some off-the-cuff top tips, your topic should always be dictated by the wants and needs of your audience.

Contribute to a popular topic, offer fresh insight and perspective, solve a common issue – whatever your audience’s trends and behaviours dictate.

This ensures, even when writing for search engines, the audience is still at the forefront of any strategic blog post creation.

So, providing you’ve created informationally-rich and high-value content, your customers don’t just want to know about it – they need to know about it.

Newsletters

Newsletters are super effective in building a customer community.

Your brand should be the heart and soul of your customer community. It defines who your community is and what it stands for.

So, keeping your members informed on the latest internal news is key to strengthening the relationship between customers and brand.

For them to embrace your identity and values, they need to know how you embrace them yourself. With this in mind, look to update your customer community on what you’ve been up to and where you’re heading, as well as any internal updates important to your brand.

Think of your customers as an extension of your team. This will form a closer connection between brand and customer, creating the impression that you’re all on a journey together.

Newsletters don’t have to be too regular, either – see how we do it once a month!

Case studies

Customers love case studies.

Case studies and testimonials act as your trust indicators. You’ve told your customers all about your brand, product or service – now it’s time to show them it in action.

To successfully build a brand community, it’s vital that you earn your customers’ trust. Case studies do this in two ways.

First, consumers respond positively to real-world examples – they begin to relate their pain points to the ones you overcome in your case study. Secondly, consumers are more likely to trust third-party opinion and testimony – it’s the reason review sites like Trustpilot are so popular.

Customers want to see case studies to establish, affirm or build their trust in your brand. So, look to share any you have at your disposal, and get into the habit of writing regular case studies upon the completion of projects, big and small.

News articles

Members of your community are more than likely to be interested in your industry and the topics close to your brand’s heart.

So, sharing relevant news stories can be an effective way to keep customers engaged.

We’re not just talking clicks here, either. News stories are more likely to spur community members to comment and contribute, sparking discussion and/or debate.

As long as it’s kept civil, this sort of active engagement can be great at strengthening community relationships and boosting its popularity.

Interactive content

Interactive content is like having a cheat code for engagement.

From polls to quizzes, surveys to interactive infographics, consumers can’t help but engage with interactive content.

So much so, a mammoth 81% of marketers agree that interactive content is much more effective at grabbing people’s attention than static content.

Engagement is key to the evolution of your brand community. No matter how big your community is, if members aren’t engaged, they’ll stop coming back for more.

A static brand community serves no purpose to customer or business, so ensure your community building remains effective by producing and sharing quick-win interactive content.

Video

Video content has been on a sharp rise in recent years for good reason.

1/3 of all online activity is spent watching video – just think about that statistic for a second. It’s little surprise, then, that demand for video content is so high.

With viewers retaining 95% of a message when they watch a video (compared to 10% when they read a message), it’s also little wonder why 85% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.

Video content is a win-win for all parties. Customers get user-friendly, easily digestible and attention-grabbing content, and businesses get an effortlessly engaging and goal-driving content marketing avenue.

So, look to incorporate video into your content marketing strategy to keep your community growing.

Knowing what content your community wants is only half the battle. For an engaged and purposeful brand community, you need to know what content types your community wants, too. Use the above tips to help you on your way, keeping a constant eye on engagement metrics to learn what does and doesn’t work for your specific community.

Here at Six Circles, community building is what we’re all about. That’s why we’ve made it easy to shine a spotlight on specific content using the featured content tool on our community engagement platform.

Get in touch today to request a demo and see for yourself how we can help your content go further within your brand community.

Adaptability and versatility are key to the success of any business – you only need to look back at the last 18 months to prove this.

The digital revolution was only further accelerated by the pandemic, and we’ve seen more and more professionals embrace technology as part of their everyday working life.

Digital solutions can boast a range of benefits when it comes to your market research, too. For example, they can transform your focus groups to unlock greater potential and more actionable outcomes for your business.

Online focus groups provide an effective means of amplifying your audience’s feedback to ensure your brand is surpassing expectations and staying attuned to your brand community. 

That’s why, in today’s post, we’re exploring six benefits of hosting your next focus group online, finding innovative ways to meet consumer demand and understand customer opinions.

Cost-effective 

Hosting focus groups online can offer financial benefits to your business when compared to face-to-face alternatives.

From travel expenses to space rental, in-person focus groups can quickly become an expensive practice for your business. This places extra pressure on extracting the most valuable input possible from your participants to justify the cost.

When hosting your focus groups online, this pressure is removed – you’re able to host on free video software such as Zoom or Google Meets, or even in private discussion areas on your community platform.

This all amounts to a less intensive back and forth between moderator and participants, which is likely to inspire more transparent and insightful feedback as a result (and all for a fraction of the cost to your business).

Not only that – with the money saved by hosting your focus group online, you may even have the funding spare to action the outcomes of your focus group for the same price it would’ve cost to conduct the research face-to-face.

More efficient 

From start to finish, online focus groups are objectively more efficient than their in-person counterparts.

For starters, you’re able to arrange virtual focus groups with less notice – this means clients, moderators and respondents don’t need to carve as much time out of their schedule or make travel arrangements. This enables your business to be more versatile, arranging focus groups quickly and reactively whenever the need arises (such as following an unforeseen change in your industry, for example).

Online focus groups also ensure outcomes can be communicated and actioned more efficiently. Real-time participation can be documented in an instant and, when held on community platforms, can be accessed collaboratively by all of those who need to be in the know.

All of this contributes to a more optimised process, helping your business to extract more value from each focus group you host.

More diversity  

The purpose of a focus group is to facilitate the sharing of opinions and perspectives of consumers on a brand, product or service.

The importance of ensuring diversity amongst your participants therefore speaks for itself – the greater range of perspectives you can invite, the better your understanding of consumer attitudes will be.

When hosting an in-person focus group, geographical restrictions play a role in the types of participants you attract. Of course, this isn’t the case when conducting a focus group remotely – participants can come from anywhere, enabling you to better represent the entire scope of your target audience.

Because of the geographical restrictions of an in-person focus group, the pool of participants available is naturally smaller. This can make it statistically harder to ensure your focus group is ethnically diverse. Again, virtual focus groups provide a solution to this problem, helping you to better represent a wider range of cultures and audience backgrounds, ensuring you paint a more rounded picture of audience reception as a result.

More valuable input

Not only do virtual focus groups boast a better pool of participants – they tend to generate more valuable input, too.

This is because, generally, participants feel more comfortable partaking from home. With physical barriers removed and an aspect of anonymity preserved, participants are less inclined to feel intimidated by group discussions or feel nervous about expressing a negative opinion. 

The more comfortable your focus group is, the more critical and transparent their contributions tend to be. This can be incredibly valuable to brands – not only will the feedback be more honest, but it may also contain fresh community perspectives you haven’t yet considered.

A modern method 

Virtual focus groups are also a great way of bringing your brand (and your business research skills) well into the 21st century.

By embracing modern research methods, you’re positioning your brand at the forefront of your industry in the eyes of your community and wider consumers. Hosting your focus groups on a community platform will only further this perception by embracing contemporary best practices – blurring the line between community and brand.

By embracing technology in your focus groups, your engagement scope increases substantially, too. With the ability to engage a larger number of participants at any one time, you’re able to enjoy the best of both worlds: quantitative data supported by qualitative insights directly from your community.

Encourage community participation

As we just touched on, hosting virtual focus groups can be super effective in blurring the line between community and brand.

By being able to amplify more voices within your community (thanks to the extra accessibility of hosting your focus group online), you can strengthen community engagement by not only telling your audience you hear them, but showing your audience you hear them. 

With this in mind, don’t be afraid to shout about it when you’re hosting an upcoming online focus group to let willing participants know how and when they can get involved. This all amounts to encouraging more community participation from your members, driving greater engagement and more worthwhile contributions as a result.

Focus groups have long been a tried and tested method for business research, but, with so many benefits on offer, now’s the time to bring this practice into the 21st century. Begin hosting your focus groups virtually to begin reaping the rewards of more valuable community input today.

Here at Six Circles, community engagement is our bread and butter. That’s why we’ve made it easy to host virtual focus groups within the forum and private threads area of our community engagement platform. Get in touch now to request a demo and see for yourself how your brand could unlock the power of community building.