How community websites effectively build brands

Community websites are an easy way to add value to both your customers and your brand. They offer you repeat brand exposure as your customers return to interact with your community site numerous times.

And communities also offer perceived value for your customers especially where there is no overt marketing message from your company. If you are upfront about your intentions and your brand involvement, provide interesting resources or creative entertainment, your customers will voluntarily begin to interact with your community and therefore your brand on a regular basis.

Communities are also lower maintenance than traditional corporate or campaign websites; once your site is established the community drive content creation, and often self-moderate, reducing the need for your company to actively provide timely content or review contributions.

In America community websites are taking off, with giants such as Dell and AT&T finding their community members are customers 50% longer if they are community members. Consider two successful local examples; Air New Zealand’s Get Amongst It and Vodafone’s One Tribe:

• Air New Zealand launched Get Amongst It off the back of its successful Grab a Seat website, which promotes specials on domestic airfares. The Get Amongst It site encourages members to add photos, videos and comments that give site visitors information on local attractions at each of the domestic destinations Air New Zealand flies to. The site has proved a hit with regular prizes for content ensuring it’s regularly updated by community members, continuing to provide interesting content for visitors.
• Vodafone’s One Tribe website celebrates Vodafone’s sponsorship of the Vodafone Warriors, giving fans a virtual home to keep up to date with what’s happening with the team with regular updates. They also get to interact with the site by posting to the forum, submitting and commenting on blog posts, uploading photos and engaging in tipping and fantasy competitions. The site has proved so successful that Vodafone is launching other tribes to support its sports sponsorships, launching with Vodafone Rugby Tribe in February 2009 and Vodafone Netball Tribe in April 2009.

Community websites also play a role beyond brand building. Leading research company Gartner identifies Voice of Customer/Community Marketing as one of the top ten marketing process over the coming five years. According to Gartner, from 2008 to 2013 “an important component of marketing strategy will be to represent the voice of the customer… establishing customer forums and using social networking and blogs to capture customers’ points of view”. That information will then influence other customers, as well as providing your company with useful insights for marketing campaigns and sales interactions.

Compared to traditional media campaigns costing millions of dollars, community networks are very cost effective to implement and administer, and can considerably increase both your return on investment and your brand value exponentially over time.

References

1. Gartner Research – Top 10 Marketing Processes for 2008 to 2013
2. Telligent Whitepaper – Increase the Impact of Your Digital Marketing Spend in a Down Economy: How to use Social Computing to Succeed in 2009 and Beyond
3. Advertising Research Foundation – Creating a Loyalty Metric That Is the True Measure of CRM Success