Axero Pulse » web 2.0

The Role Of Community Software In The Online Marketing Strategy

Tim Eisenhauer — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:00:49 +0000

Why Your Online Community Can Be Your Most Valuable Online Marketing Weapon?

Budgets for online marketing are divided among the several options available from spending on more direct advertising, sponsoring banners and buying Google Adwords to spending on SEO, social media marketing and similar tools. While each business works out its balance with the right mix of these it’s good to take an aerial view of the external community for customers and partners and understand it’s role in the overall online marketing context.

Here is a typical flow of an online marketing strategy:

first generate awareness –> accelerate branding online –> generate interest (generate sales leads) –> engage customers / nurture interest (or sales leads) –> retain customers and deliver customer service / support

If this is the objective of a marketing plan, then where would “building and online community” fit into the marketing equation?

Surprisingly, almost through all these stages! While with the right SEO techniques an online community can also generate early awareness among potential customers, one would typically attribute those costs to SEO, online advertising, email campaigns, newsletters, PPC campaigns and more push based campaigns. When it comes to online advertising like PPC, Adwords, banners much like offline advertising like print, television and radio, they are effective for a very limited time period.

That aside, they can only communicate a very small (limited) marketing message and still be very expensive. In case of Adwords, it’s usually a word or two, on television a few seconds, in print a limited number of words and pictures and so on. Eventually, to go beyond just creating initial interest you need to direct people to a place where they can get a lot more information and where you can communicate a more complete message whether a salesperson, landing page or website.

Providing customers and users with an external community to come together, collaborate and have discussions goes much beyond simply providing more information around your business the way a static company website would do. Other than providing customers with a platform to interact and share, it provides marketing with a platform to execute on many stages of an effective online marketing initiative.

Accelerating Branding: Social software platforms for businesses and building communities tap into word of mouth effect and sharing aspect which has made web 2.0 technologies stand out in today’s world. Companies that offer an external community for their customers on partners on their website have observed that after working on building their initial membership, the community in turn helps spread the word and attract a larger base of users with similar interest around the website. Features such as RSS, sharing posts, photos, videos and other content through email and other social sites trigger the spread of awareness about the community and results in a growth in the number of users. In turn, there is an ever increasing number of users who are aware about a business’s brand.

Generating Interest & Generating Sales Leads: While this can also be done by a more static website which can carry a lot of information which can drive interest, an social software based website has the added advantage of a variety of web 2.0 content such as on demand video, podcasts, webcasts, discussions, blogs and more which can all add to helping sell the business and quite indirectly as compared to a sales person. A product or business which is clearly backed by a community of customers becomes an attractive option to any user who can clearly see third party support and not just representatives from the business saying it’s good because they work there. With the ability to freely interact with other customers, ask questions, get opinions and find solutions to problems on the community, it can be an extremely effective tool in selling.

Engaging Customers / Nurturing Leads: Perhaps the area where an online community platform can score over any other solution, keeping customers engaged and having their attention over prolonged periods of time is where many marketing organizations let potential business slip through. Even after initial awareness, a user will only buy if they need something offered immediately. As for all the others, you need a way to keep them engaged and nurture them till they are ready to buy. Whether to develop customer loyalty or to nurture potential customers till they are ready to buy, building an online community is a great solution to hold on to your customers.

Customer Retention / Customer Service: A well-built external community for customers can go on to deliver customer support and customer service which ultimately results in satisfaction. Creating a central resource of support documents, building a knowledge base and providing a platform for them to find solutions to not just issues around products or services but a wider support platform where the community helps each other can result in happy existing customers as well as other users who can turn customers.

With social community software platforms being such versatile tools for marketers to execute on their various objectives, more businesses are pushing their online communities as one of the most prominent features of their websites. Used in combination with advertising and other media to reach out to customers, it provides a central base to gather, nurture and hold onto a business’s most valuable component…..it’s customers.

Social And Community Software Platforms – When Time Is Money

Tim Eisenhauer — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:20:28 +0000

Developing Social Software Sites & Portals – From Concept To Launch At Light-speed

Several months ago, I had a phone conversation with an entrepreneur who was in the process of developing a portal specifically targeted at providing help and resources for women professionals who have just had a first child and trying to balance work and life. In terms of what the portal would need, everything was clear. From the technical side of things, the plan was to build a Web 2.0 community portal with social networking style usability as well as features like blogs, file sharing, instant messaging, and forums, which are central to building a web portal of this type. It was decided that the site would be developed from scratch so that it could be built exactly as envisioned. A small team of developers were contracted and the work began. And just recently, I had a chance to catch up with her to see how things had progressed with the portal. It turns out, the development process was still underway and there were at least several more months before even a beta launch could be done.

Whether it’s an entrepreneur looking to build a new Web 2.0 portal, a business looking to launch a community, or an enterprise creating a collaboration portal, time to market is a key consideration — there are plenty of advantages in being able to get your projects online and launched as quickly as possible. Getting projects online quicker by building your social network on top of an existing social software or community platform doesn’t necessarily translate into compromising on quality and your exact vision of how the site should turn out. A good social software platform will let you customize and incorporate all the features you need, and yet, give you the ability to greatly reduce the time to market. The architecture for social networking software is not always as simple as it may seem, and building a social site from the ground up can be quite challenging, even for the most experienced development team. It’s easy to overlook many development obstacles, testing time, and bugs, which is why development times for such sites often overshoot their expected time line by several weeks and many times even months. While building from scratch can give you exactly what you envisioned, the time, as well as the total cost of ownership in developing from scratch could end up being considerably higher than budgeted — which is an extremely important factor while deciding between building on an existing community / social platform or developing your own platform.

In today’s context, when so many business software initiatives rely on Web 2.0 and social software components that allow for communication and collaboration, it could make good business sense buying or investing in a strong platform that provides the base features to get your projects from concept to launch in the shortest possible time.

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Community Social Software – Towards Two Way Marketing Communications

Tim Eisenhauer — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:07:58 +0000

Turning Your Marketing Communication Into A Marketing Conversation With Community Social Software

I came across an interesting statement while browsing through conversations in a community on social software. It came from a sales communication professional working with a global hotel chain — and having seen marketing sales communications in the industry evolve in the 17 years she has worked there, she observed:

“Nowadays, no one wants another newsletter, so we’re hoping to make our online community a robust forum for sharing ideas and best practices in a conversational format.”

Marketing and sales communications are going through a change, just as they did some years ago with email and newsletters. As peoples in-boxes are flooded with marketing messages and SPAM’s, the effectiveness of these mediums have taken a beating over the last few years. Despite the practice of opt-in email marketing becoming more widely accepted, people who have been bombarded by push-based marketing communication are now moving towards pull based forms, where they can search for and consume the content that they are interested in rather than receiving these communications from businesses. The other real drawback that automated email marketing and newsletters have is in today’s context of Web 2.0 and social software, where conversation is the mantra — these mediums are more one-way communication.

Selling today is more about being able to solve your customers problems and less about pitching a product or service hoping they will take the bait — and this is where more traditional marketing and sales communication is losing out where online communities and social software enabled websites are making ground quickly. Communities that offer a platform for dialog between businesses, customers, and other stakeholders rely on this conversational approach and hope to solve problems and provide solutions to customers. It offers a platform to build stronger relationships with customers and helps them build trust in the businesses through this two-way conversation.

Communities used for marketing conversation can help address the challenge that many businesses face today with the change that’s become apparent with the way customers respond to newsletters and similar channels. Through blogs, forums, document sharing, videos, and other rich content that customers can simply access when they have a requirement or problem they need to address, business can strike those conversations using their community platforms. It needs a dedicated effort and may not be an instant shift, but the online community is looking like the platform of choice for customers and businesses — and marketing and sales communications will be more conversation centric in the days to come.