Many things can make or break a business, but in today’s digital and social marketplace, few things are as important as community. Building community right can take time, but doing the work can yield impressive results. Your community can become your best sales force, your support system and dedicated fan base. If you do it right.
The first step in building any community is giving them a reason to join. One of the best ways to establish community is to create a conversation around a specific product, service, or idea. The best way to do that is with authentic, quality content. This content should not be about your business (nobody cares yet). Instead, it should be about topics of interest related to your business. Informational videos, valuable answers to common questions, content that leaves an impression and, most importantly, gets people talking.
Now that you are building your community, you need to give them a reason to stay. This is about more than continuing to offer great content (though; that’s an important step). You need to begin to take your community relationships to the next level. Invent ways for your community members to get more involved. Give them responsibility or connectivity. Transition them from visitors to advocates by teaching, investing, and engaging.
Next, you need to market without selling. People love to buy, but they hate to be sold. So don’t sell them. Make them want to buy what you have to offer. Don’t TELL them it’s valuable. SHOW them HOW it’s valuable. Demonstrate the ways your product or service can solve specific problems or meet specific needs. Most importantly, help your customers feel what life would be like with that product or service. The key here is to accomplish all of this without ever delivering a sales pitch, without ever discussing “features and benefits” or dropping an elevator speech. Community is about belonging and supporting and excitement. It’s based on emotions that meet basic, universal needs. People will always invest more in something that increases their feelings of belonging rather than something that they “think” they “need.”
Avoid This Trap
One of the biggest mistakes people make when establishing a community and fan base around a brand is to see it as one long-term sales pitch. If you ever find yourself musing on ways to explain why your community needs something or trying to find the “right way” to convince your community why they should get something, you have already lost. Remember, this is not about making a buying decision. This is about building a relationship with people who already want to buy something…they just don’t know what yet.
Dr. Gil Lederman is a leading cancer treatment doctor.
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