Here’s your monthly roundup on everything Six Circles, from what’s happening behind the scenes to what’s to come on our ever-evolving community engagement platform…

Company News

In February, our new, structured email notification centre and further improvements to our email digest went live. More notification integration has now been included in the second wave of updates to this work, including alerts for:

• New forum discussions

• New direct message

• Connect request accepted

• New event created

• New event approved

• New news story created

• New news story approved

• New promotion created

• New promotion approved

In addition to our notification expansion, we’ve also included some additional Zapier integrations this month, such as:

• New user (including custom attributes)

• Update user (including custom attributes)

• News story created

Future Roadmap

In March, we’re working on the final wave of updates to our new notification centre, meaning you can expect notification integration for the following soon:

• New resource added (for admin and members)
• New poll added (for admin and members)
• New subscription sign up (for admin)
• New member sign up (for admin)

The rapid evolution of our notification centre gives you even greater control over more aspects of your community than ever before.

We always welcome any suggestions on what you’d like to see on the Six Circles platform over the coming months. Why not send your ideas to support@sixcircles.co.uk? We’d love to hear from you! 

Feature Spotlight

Each month, we’re shining the spotlight on a different feature of the Six Circles platform to ensure you’re always getting the most out of what we have to offer. This month, we’re focusing on the resources feature.

Did you know?

On the Six Circles platform, you have various ways of sharing resources with your community.

How to use this feature

When adding and sharing a resource for your community to access, there are a number of options available to you.

Firstly, you can easily upload a wide range of file types, allowing your community to instantly download and gain access to the resources with minimal fuss.

You also have the ability to create your resources within the Six Circles platform itself, meaning the content be viewed directly on the platform.

A popular approach we’ve seen from organisations in recent months is the use of video content to bring resources to life. Because of this, you can now embed videos from sites such as YouTube and Vimeo directly into the resources you create within your Six Circles community platform.

With the ability to better inform, educate and entertain your community through a range of resources easily added to your platform, purpose-driven community engagement has never been easier than it is when using Six Circles.

Here’s your monthly roundup on everything Six Circles, from what’s happening behind the scenes to what’s to come on our ever-evolving community engagement platform…

Company News

In January, we were excited to welcome a new member to the Six Circles family. Meet Thomas Mannix…

Getting to know you

Thomas is joining our sales team as a Business Development Executive. With a background in the software industry, Thomas is bringing plenty of exciting knowledge and experience to the table!

Growing up, Thomas wanted to be a detective. Now, fuelled by a champion combo of steak, chips and peppercorn sauce, he’s using those investigative skills to detect new opportunities to further grow our already expanding client base.

As a Middlesbrough FC fan, he’s used to his fair share of disappointments – luckily, his new chapter at Six Circles won’t be one of them!

Future Roadmap

Here’s what exciting new developments and updates are in the works for the rest of Q1:

Newly structured email notification centre

Our newly structured email notification centre is now live, along with some further improvements to our email digest.

But that’s not all – further updates will be added over the next few weeks, allowing you to tailor notifications relating to features across the platform.

Private groups within the forum area

We’re excited to let you know that the private group integration within the forum area is now live! This allows you to create closed areas for specific members, giving you greater control than ever before.

With all of these exciting developments, be sure to keep an eye on the Six Circles platform throughout February to be the first to find out more.

We always welcome any suggestions on what you’d like to see on the Six Circles platform over the coming months. Why not send your ideas to support@sixcircles.co.uk? We’d love to hear from you!

Feature Spotlight

Each month, we’re shining the spotlight on a different feature of the Six Circles platform to ensure you’re always getting the most out of what we have to offer. This month, we’re focusing on the Stripe integration feature.

Did you know?

You can handle payments within several different areas on the Six Circles community platform.

How to use this feature

If you’re looking to handle payments online and move away from manual processes, we can activate Stripe integration – this will feed payments directly from your platform straight into your own bank accounts.

This allows members to pay for events, packages and even subscriptions, all through the platform, with ease – keeping them on your platform instead of navigating to an external page (where that precious engagement may be lost!).

But that’s not all. This handy integration can also be utilised by admins to capture payments for any features that you wish to monetise within your community. Take the member offers/promotion area, for example. Thanks to our Stripe integration, a member can now submit an offer, then pay to have it promoted on your platform. Alternatively, you could set a fixed price for members who wish to publish their own polls or news stories on your platform – the important part is that you’re in control.

With the ability to monetise more elements of your community area, purpose-driven community engagement has never been easier than it is using the Six Circles platform.

Marketing promotions can be a super-effective way of bolstering your brand exposure and positively affecting your all-important bottom line – but running successful promotions can be a challenge.

Luckily, we’re here to come to the rescue, offering up 6 ways to ensure your promotion is a resounding success, keeping your brand community happy in the process.

Know your audience inside-out

Of course, knowing your audience is marketing 101 – but when it comes to running marketing promotions, understanding the different segments of your wider audience is key.

Many promotions adopt the mindset that casting the widest net possible is the best course of action. After all, if you reach enough people, eventually, some of them will convert – right? Probably. However, this is an incredibly inefficient way to run a promotion, and is sure to produce far less impressive results when compared to a more strategic and better targeted campaign.

With this in mind, look to reach a targeted, relevant audience for your promotional campaign. To do this effectively, conduct audience research to better understand them. Who are they? What are their pain points? What is their lifestyle?

This more comprehensive understanding of audience segments will enable you to better target your promotions by knowing what type of promotion will incentivise members of your community. As such, you’re likely to see far higher conversion rates, and this innate understanding of audience preferences and incentives can even inspire future sales promotion ideas.

Know your goals (and measure them)

Without clearly setting out your goals and knowing how to accurately track and measure them, how will you ever judge whether your promotion was successful?

This is particularly important, as no two promotions have the same goal. When mapping out what you’d like to achieve, be sure to consider the bigger picture, too. Is your goal simply to drive initial sales, or is your promotion designed to reap longer-term rewards such as customer retention or an increased average spend?

Establish your goal, regardless of whether it’s short-term or long-term, and identify the relevant metrics needed to measure your success. This will help you identify what works and what doesn’t – reacting accordingly where needed – to the benefit of your campaigns both now and in the future.

Champion exclusivity

Consumers like to feel special.

Considering that, look to utilise the psychology of exclusivity to your advantage, playing on FOMO (fear of missing out) and other triggers. What do we mean by this? Don’t just run a promotion such as a free gift – instead, make that free gift available for a limited time, or in limited quantity.

Doing this will incentivise your community to act on your promotion, and fast.

Promote, promote, promote

Sure, your promotion serves the purpose of attracting customers to your brand and service, but have you considered how you’ll attract attention to the promotion itself?

Successful sales promotion ideas rely on engagement, meaning you need to ensure your community and wider audiences know about it.

Remember: visibility is key to ensuring a worthwhile return on investment, so look to advertise your promotion like you would your products or services. From in-store signs and posters to blog posts, social media posts and emails, look to explore a range of physical and digital avenues for maximum coverage.

Demonstrate genuine value

Of course, to properly incentivise customers to engage, successful promotions must offer genuine value.

Utilising audience segmentation, ask yourself what types of offers provide authentic value to your customers. Sure, that free gift with every order is a nice idea, but does your audience really want that gift?

Find that precious middle ground between providing your audience with the utmost value and what you can feasibly afford to give them. Doing so will ensure a more effectively optimised campaign – both in terms of audience value and, just as importantly, cost-effectiveness. 

Review, critique and learn

When mapping out your sales promotion ideas, never go in blind. Aside from your audience information, look to also utilise lessons learnt from past campaigns. What worked and what didn’t?

With this in mind, be sure to schedule a review of your marketing promotions at the end of each cycle. Not only is this the best way to obtain valuable insight into the success of your promotion, but it also helps you provide more real-time, personalised promotions in future by reactively fine-tuning your approach.

Now you’re armed with the right know-how, your marketing promotions are sure to be a resounding success time after time – it’s all about understanding what incentivises your community and giving it to them.

The promotion feature on the Six Circles community engagement platform gives you this level of control. With the ability to tailor promotions to different community members, customising brand communications has never been easier. Request your free demo today.

Happy New Year! Before the doors closed on 2020, there was plenty going on behind the scenes here at Six Circles HQ and on our ever-evolving community engagement platform. Here’s the roundup…

Company News

In December, we were excited to welcome a new member to the Six Circles family. Meet Lucy Bramwell…

Getting to know you

Lucy is our new Business Development Executive, joining the sales team to help us continue to grow our client base. 

Often found with a black coffee in hand, Lucy loves finding new plant-based recipes to cook in her spare time, posting her creations on her Instagram ‘foodie’ account.

Fuelled by noodles in any shape or form, Lucy is sure to be a great asset to our team (and we’re hoping we’ll get to try some of that scrumptious cooking, too!)

Future Roadmap

Here’s what exciting new developments and updates are in the works for the quarter ahead.

Newly structured email notification centre

Our newly structured email notification centre and improvements to our email digest are now in the final stages of development. We’ll see all of this launch by the end of January.

Private groups within the forum area

The development of a private groups function within the forum area is also in the final stages, with this also set to go live by the end of January.

With all of these exciting developments going live this month, be sure to keep an eye on the Six Circles platform throughout January to be the first to find out more!

We’re busy finalising Q1’s roadmap, but we always welcome any suggestions on what you would like to see on the Six Circles platform. With this in mind, why not send in your ideas to support@sixcircles.co.uk? We always love to hear from you.

Feature Spotlight

Each month, we’re shining the spotlight on a different feature of the Six Circles platform to ensure you’re always getting the most out of what we have to offer. This month, we’re focusing on the Promotions feature.

Did you know?

As well as listing standard promotions on the Six Circles platform, you can now also set up tiered promotions and categories to help your members search for promotions relevant to them.

How to use this feature

Our promotions feature gives you greater customisation control than ever before.

Simply turn on tiered promotions from your admin panel, where you’ll find 4 options available – platinum, gold, silver and bronze. Once activated, you’re able to set different values against each tier, creating more ways for you to generate new revenue streams from within the promotions area.

You also can create your own categories for your promotions area, allowing your members to easily filter down the promotions by regions, sectors or promotion types, for example.

With the ability to tailor promotions to specific audiences, community engagement has never been easier than it is using the Six Circles platform.

Online brand communities can often be understated in their effectiveness in keeping customers happy, loyal and engaged – and more often than not, this can spell great news for your profit margins.

With this in mind, today we’re looking at 6 reasons why a brand community can help to give you that competitive edge, increasing your sales and improving your customer retention all the while.

Brand ambassadors emerge

One important consideration to have in mind from the off is that not every customer you have is part of your brand community. Some customers will shout louder about you than others, while some customers won’t shout about you at all.

Enter brand ambassadors.

Communities spearheaded by trustworthy brand ambassadors can help organically grow a following from your customer base. These people will not only be active within the community, but also active on social media, sharing your posts, starting conversations and the likes. And because your brand ambassadors are transparent and authentic, they’re more likely to obtain the trust of others, helping build your community and, subsequently, your brand as a result.

Fuels business growth

The math is simple – successful communities attract more custom. Mature brand communities can even attract as much as 70% traffic from search engines, providing you with the ideal opportunity to reach valuable users.

To ensure you’re effectively aligning yourself with the intent of these users, ensure your brand community is a rich informational hub. This will enable users to find solutions within the community, building brand trust and awareness as a result. Of course, this all amounts in fuelling the growth of your business by expanding the potential of your organic reach.

Emphasises customer care

Brand communities champion customer care, which when done correctly, can pay dividends on your overall profit margins.

Meeting customers on their terms and having readily available answers for all queries is a sure-fire way to impress, increasing the likelihood of customer retention as a result. Of course, it’s key that customer service teams are trained on community etiquette and best practices, but resources spent on this aspect of your brand community can bring significant return in the long run.

Saves company resources

New and old members can ask questions, make connections and solve problems within a brand community – all without consulting a member of your immediate team. Why is this a competitive edge? Well, by ensuring your brand community is self-serving, it frees up company resources – whether that be through your members’ organic creation of content or through the ability to source solutions to problems and queries themselves.

Of course, the benefit here speaks for itself. More resource at your disposal means more attention spent elsewhere in the business, giving you a competitive edge by enabling you to become more proactive and reactive.

Enables customer-centric innovations

One of the biggest advantages boasted by brand communities is the ability to encourage brand-consumer conversations.

With this in mind, seeking input from community members is common ground for a lot of brand communities – and while these thoughts, opinions and inputs always hold some objective value, they can be cleverly utilised for significant gain. For example, seeking customer feedback enables you to better align your new products, processes and innovations with the wants and needs of your audience. Why is this important? Because it’s a data-driven way of ensuring your meeting the wants, needs and expectations of your audience, likely boosting your sales all the while.

Emphasises the ‘human’

It is becoming more and more common to see AI bots answering user queries online. While this is sometimes a very cost-effective way to tackle customer service, it can also be implemented so badly that customers take their business elsewhere. Delivering a community service that combines the benefits of automation with human content is therefore the winning ticket, ensuring transparent and authentic brand-customer interactions.

Leading communities are ones that are now able to combine these two elements successfully. Doing so will ensure you obtain and retain consumer trust, giving you a competitive edge over those companies stuck in older ways.

Ready to begin brand community building to find that competitive edge? Get in touch with Six Circles today and request a free demo of our community engagement platform – with our platform, establishing your brand community has never been easier!

Online communities are becoming more and more common, especially in a COVID-19 world. Because of this, helping your brand’s community stand out in an increasingly busy crowd is becoming harder to achieve – however, it’s certainly not impossible. 

Community building can be made easier and more effective by creating content that is valuable to that community. But to do this, you need to ensure you properly understand your audience and produce content you know will engage users. How? Let’s take a closer look…

Outline your goals

Brand communities are all the rage right now, but what’s the purpose of yours? While online communities are set up for differing reasons, the main purpose is often to establish an informational and conversational hub around your brand, products and services. This is where your content comes in.

One thing is for sure, however – community building will be a whole lot harder if you only write sales content around your product/service. This is where having a clearly defined goal for your community is important. Without this, your content will quickly become unstructured and ill-informed, leading to low community engagement as a result.

So, define your community goals early to better inform the types of content you produce. From striking up audience conversations with user generated content to keepings users up to date with the latest in industry news, establish purpose and goals to ensure you’re producing the content that drives the results you want to see.

Know your audience

Of course, engaging content relies on your community being, well, engaged! To do this successfully, you’ll need to first ensure you know your audience. Now is the time to ask yourself: do I really know my community?

If you found yourself answering no, then you’ll need to spend time getting to know the ins and outs of your audience before creating any community content. An effective way of doing this is to look at your current content and who is participating within the community. Is there a common theme? Do the same people start conversations on a daily/weekly basis?

From this, you should be able to obtain a list of ‘super fans’ – these are highly active users within the community and people you know you can rely on. Quiz and poll these now trusted sources for insights into what keeps them active within the community (our handy market research feature enables you to do exactly that), seeking first-hand advice on how the community could better serve the audience’s needs, wants and expectations.

Of course, content differs depending on your target audience – you can have one piece that works for audience X, but not audience Y. All the content you produce should be captivating for the audience you’re targeting, meaning it’s useful to ask yourself these 3 simple questions before putting the proverbial pen to paper:

• Does this content reflect the brand’s personality?
• Does it provide the authority you want your community to be driven by?
• Does it speak to your audience and drive them to participate?

A community shouldn’t only be about selling products or services, but more a hub for brands and consumers to share knowledge and experiences with one another. Of course, it should still complement your business by driving sales and traffic, but this should never be your primary aim.

Re-imagine your content

At the time of writing, there are over 500 million blog posts online. 500 million and 1 once this is live.

With this in mind, bringing innovative and never-before-seen content to the table is by no means easy. However, this doesn’t mean your content on topics covered by someone else won’t be interesting or engaging to your audience.

On the contrary, you can bring a fresh lease of life to old topics and ideas through the re-imagination of your content. By this we mean, rather than recycling content that already exists elsewhere, how can you bring a new and unique perspective that adds genuine value? Whether it be expert knowledge, first-hand accounts or breaking news, there’s plenty of ways you can get creative to avoid your content being stale, outdated and lost in the crowd.

Utilise storytelling

One of the best ways to write valuable and engaging community content is to tell a story.

Curating a compelling story isn’t the easiest thing to do, but by using the audience knowledge you obtained from tip 2, you should be able to identify general customer personas. Look to utilise these as a way of aligning your stories with the typical problem points and interests of your users, ensuring captivating storytelling by tailoring your narrative specifically to them.

The application of this narrative depends on what you are writing and the audience you are speaking to. Whatever and whoever that might be, it’s always recommended that your narrative is felled by a desire to spark a response, build a connection and establish an authentic meaning.

SEO Friendly

You’ve got top-class content and your community is engaging regularly with it. What more could you want? Well, you need to ensure you have every piece of engaging content you create primed for SEO.On-page SEO best practice is ever-changing and incorporates a whole host of important considerations. The following factors should be considered potential SEO quick wins for any piece of content, ensuring you have the fundamentals set in stone to enable your content to perform well in SERPs:

• Meta description
• Meta title
• Page headings
• SEO friendly URL
• Keyword choices and placement
• Internal/ external links
• Loading speed
• Page Content
• Image alt text

Properly search optimising your content, whatever form it takes, is a super effective community building technique by helping you reach a wider audience and, in turn, grow your community members.

Encourage feedback

Gathering feedback on the content you’re producing is vital in ensuring your content is always hitting the mark.

So, reach out and encourage your community to give their opinions on what’s working and what’s not. This can be through polling and questionnaires, or by encouraging your readers to send in their thoughts and opinions in your CTAs.

Of course, some readers will provide negative feedback. Should this be put to one side and ignored? Absolutely not. If anything, this critique is more valuable than the positive feedback, as this will help you adapt your content topics and styles to better meet the needs and desires of your customers.

Whatever your brand, the above 6 tips are sure-fire ways to help build engaging content for any community. Why not get in touch to request your free demo of our community engagement platform and see how 6 Circles can help you along the way?

The GX Project is led by NewcastleGateshead Initiative, and supported by the Innovation Super Network. GX provides a range of opportunities to North-East SMEs and scaleups before, during and after the Great Exhibition of the North. GX supported Six Circles to develop a white labelled community platform with a grant of £2,800. GX is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund.