Whether you’re a small-business owner, an entrepreneur, a creator, or a combination of the three, one of the key marketing strategies that brands need to focus on is community marketing. Community marketing focuses on uniting customers through brand-related topics in a way that’s engaging and puts the customer first.
Community marketing requires you to find a group of people with a common interest, bring them together to bond over that common interest, and work alongside them to achieve goals related to that common interest. Community marketing is driven by the innate human need for companionship and community, and when utilized correctly, it can facilitate massive growth for your business.
4 Reasons You Need Community Marketing
Leveraging community marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy provides you with valuable tools and information, allowing your business to thrive for years to come. With a full suite of digital marketing tools and techniques, Norby can help you grow this community and, therefore, your business.
Here are four reasons you need community marketing, and how Norby can help you achieve it.
1. Community Marketing Allows You to Collect Valuable Community Insights
When you use community marketing, you increase your likelihood of collecting valuable feedback, insights, and data that you can use to inform your business strategies. Creating consistent touchpoints allows you to build a community outside of social media while also gathering insights into what your community wants. Leveraging tools like surveys, polls, hashtags, and messaging gives you a way to get feedback from your community, which allows you to tailor your business as you move forward.
With Norby's sign-ups, you can collect audience data that enables you to connect with your audience in more personalized ways through text and email. Our text marketing tools are becoming increasingly popular for creators, helping them create consistent touchpoints with their followers and build a community outside of social media apps. You can also include custom form fields in your sign-ups or engage in two-way conversations to collect more in-depth information from your audience.
A great example of this is Female Startup Club and its Hype-Girl Hotline, which sends out quick inspirational messages every Monday to help cheerlead women in business.
2. Community Marketing Creates More Opportunities for Monetization
When you utilize community marketing, you can create more opportunities for monetization through community events and memberships that give superfans more access to you, one another, and exclusive content. This content can include things like:
- Articles and blog posts
- Courses and educational material
- Events, both digital and in person
- Guides
- Newsletters
- Online communities
- Podcasts
- Vlogs
By offering exclusive content to community members, you not only tighten your community but also expand the areas where you can earn revenue.
With Norby's charge-for-access and donation features, you can easily start testing paywalled content and experiences for your sign-ups and events. Two of our community members do this well: Evryman, an interactive online behavioral curriculum, and TheFutureParty, a news and media website. Though they have different goals and different communities, both use our events tools to bring their communities together for entertainment, education, and thought-sharing on weekly and monthly cadences, which fuels their lead generation and retention.
3. Community Marketing Protects You From Unpredictable Social Media Platforms
Community marketing protects you from the whims of social media platforms and their unpredictable algorithms. In today’s age, this is more important than ever. For example, it’s been hard to miss the real-time collapse of Twitter. If Twitter were to disappear today and creators could no longer collect contact information from their followers or engage with them outside of the platform, how would they sustain their business or online presence?
The reality is that they would likely have to start from scratch on another platform, which is any creator's nightmare. Creating a community with which you have multiple points of contact protects you from a social media crash or change in algorithm.
At Norby, we emphasize the importance of performance-driven landing pages for your link-in-bio content. Today, link lists are not enough. You need to optimize your link-in-bio content for your business goals and audience intent while providing your audience with a clear or low-lift opportunity to take action and enter the top of your funnel. Landing page marketing enables you to generate a healthy contact list of potential and loyal community members that you can always contact and activate.
4. Community Marketing Encourages Your Creator Journey and Fuels Your Professional Network
Community marketing encourages you on your creator journey and fuels your professional network, both of which are essential to helping you thrive through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship and the creator economy. Your customers and community are your extended support system, and positive interactions with your customers and community are often the birthplace of an entrepreneur's best ideas while serving as the best energy booster. Interactions lead to inspiration, which can help you develop new business ideas and strategies to boost your success.
Through Norby's inbox tool, you can streamline, tag, make notes about, and respond to these key interactions across all of your audience communication channels, including Instagram DMs, SMS messages, and emails. These, along with other simple CRM marketing tools, are incredibly helpful resources when you’re setting business goals and developing new content strategies because they create a single source of truth for what your audience wants, thinks, and loves about following you and engaging with you.
Conclusion
Community marketing is an essential tool for creators, entrepreneurs, and small-business owners. By forming and maintaining a community around your brand, you ensure a future for yourself. Community marketing gives you a way to naturally gather community feedback, allowing you to organically make changes that cater to your community. This also opens up new avenues for monetization within your brand. Community marketing protects you from social media platforms that have gone rogue and provides you with a community for support and inspiration.
Norby offers the best digital marketing tools and techniques for you to make this community a reality. With options like a CRM platform, landing pages, and link-in-bio content, we can help you grow and stay connected to your community so your brand succeeds. Join Norby today to unleash your possibilities.
