How Community Building Gives Your Business a Competitive Advantage

When you hear the title "CMO" these days, it may not refer to the "Chief Marketing Officer" of a company, but rather its "Chief Community Officer." The emergence of this new CMO role was inevitable, as more and more brands have begun to understand the difference between building a community versus simply building/buying social media followers. And today some communities are so powerful that they can influence a company to change its product design as well its overall business marketing strategy.

Whether you're building your community on a free community platform, such as Facebook, or on a private community platform that users must log in, there are many benefits of community building for a business.

3 benefits of community building

1: Closely monitor market trends, customer wants and needs

Want to know what features your users want? Want to know what your users think about your products and services? Who is dissatisfied and is going to churn? Instead of (or in addition to) subscribing to expensive churn prediction tools or sending email surveys that won't get opened, you can track everything by observing and interacting with your community.

Communities increase engagement, make your customers feel valued, and help you make decisions your users care about.

2: Support your customers beyond emails, live chat, or phone call

All these communication methods - email, live chat, phone -- are perfect, with only one exception. They allow only one-on-one conversations, not one-to-many and many-to-many.

When you start hosting regular live Q&As, webinars, or interviews, you stop being just another vendor. You can make your live events more engaging by:

• Answering FAQs

• Receiving questions from users in a live mode

• Interviewing industry leaders

• Sharing members-only content

• Previewing new features

In addition, you can repurpose your live videos into on-demand webinars, YouTube videos, social media posts, and whatever else that comes to your mind.

3: Get a ton of ideas for your content (directly from your consumers!)

Working on a new blog post? Writing a book? Organizing a public event? You may be unsure about what title to choose or what topics to focus on.

Ask questions such as this isn't just for creating engagement and picking people's brains; it also helps build anticipation among your community members and make them excited for the final product. People tend to support what they helped create.

4: Get testimonials in no time

It's hard to get customers to write reviews, and businesses are constantly looking for new tips and tricks to solicit testimonials from customers. When you're connecting with your users on a daily basis, the review-request process becomes much easier.

Publish an engaging post that asks customers to record video testimonials, or ask them to provide feedback on a review website. As long as your users are satisfied with your product and are connected with you, getting testimonials shouldn't be a problem. And there's no need for "high-level, secret strategies" to increase your feedback request response rate.

5: Make life easier for your customer support team

According to SuperOffice, the average response time to customer service requests is 12 hours and 10 minutes. Yet customers want answers within a few minutes, it not instantly.

An online company can help make your users happier and lessen the workload of your support reps. Once a member posts a question in the community and your support rep answers it, the response not only helps the original poster, but other members who may have the same question. Also, it's very likely that other community members will answer the question before your support reps do.

The best part of all this is tat the "customer community" you've cultivated feels like a true community, one in which people know and help each other.