According to a study done by Higher Logic, you can get a 6,469% ROI by building out a community for your brand making online communities one of the most valuable assets a company can develop. The value that online communities have, has a significant effect on key business functions such as customer service, product ideation, brand evangelism, and content marketing. You have complete control over the data and messaging, particularly because the group is completely owned by your brand.

Online groups are very flexible and require constant community engagement. They must grow with the members to ensure that the members derive meaning from the group throughout their lives. A solid base for increasing the online community positions you for business success. If you want to understand the benefits when you create your own community platform with Tribe, discover more details as you read on.

What Is An Online Community Platform?

An online community forum is a virtual space where a group of like-minded people can connect and have open discussions about their shared interests, goals, or beliefs. Brands and marketing teams are often the ones that start online communities. This is because linked groups are perfect for gaining knowledge. Insights can be used to form marketing campaigns, assist with product creation, and identify overall business strategies.

External or customer-facing groups that seek to increase brand awareness often depend on attracting new members to achieve their objectives. To successfully create your own community platform, however, careful planning and sharp execution are needed.

What Are The Benefits Of Creating An Online Community Platform?

Obtaining a new customer is much more difficult than retaining an existing one. Look for a high repeat purchase ratio to increase consumer lifetime value. If your customers believe the marketplace is a part of their identity, they will return and buy more. Only committed members will return to your group, contribute to its development, and ultimately become loyal members.

If they feel a sense of belonging to a group, they are less likely to defect, even though a rival offers cheaper rates or other benefits.

Acquiring customers is critical, but it is also difficult to keep the acquired members engaged.

Your online community enables you to fully leverage this, allowing you to formulate various methods for community involvement.

Showcasing Your Brand’s Value And Your Community’s Worth

The main reason a member will join your group is because of the value it provides. As a result, it is important to highlight the value a member will receive as soon as the prospect lands on your group platform. This advantage could range from early access to new features and peer-to-peer support to the ability to learn for members of the developed community.

Engaged Users Trust Other Proactive Actions Of Other Members

Many public communities face significant challenges often due to a lack of confidence between consumers and providers. If your users believe they share the same values and norms, their confidence will grow. And if they trust each other more, they will transact with each other more often. If you’ve identified the people who share your goal, you’ll need to assist them in communicating with one another. You can have some kind of communication channel that allows people to communicate freely without the need for a transaction. This makes them know that they are not alone and that they are surrounded by those who share their goal.

Engaged Users Aid In Your Brand Development

Personal connections are much more important in any online environment than automated connections. Community building, on the other hand, can be a significant source of development for a marketplace. You want to build a virtuous loop in which high-quality providers attract more customers and vice versa. Users that are more involved care more about your product, which means they can have more reviews. When anything does not work well, they will immediately and loudly complain about it. People who send you angry reviews are showing that they care.

This feedback is by far the most effective way to prioritise what to focus on next. If you are not receiving input, it is most likely because you are not solving a problem for your users and they are not engaged. It is an indication that everything has to be radically modified.

Why Should You Create Your Own Community Platform With Tribe

Tribe is driven by a powerful collection of features that can be tailored to your specific business requirements and optimised to reflect your branding. The activity stream, member profile, subjects, groups (subcommunities), custom domain, gamification, and moderation are some of the most common features.

Here is a summary of which features can help create a personalised online community for your brand:

Use the machine-learned behaviour feed to provide a personalised, ever-improving content experience.

Allow users to create different forms of content such as blogs, ask questions, submit answers, participate in surveys, and share photos and videos.

Gamification: Use badges, ratings, and a leaderboard system to increase engagement.

Analytics: Take advantage of their efficient tracking capabilities to zero in on main metrics and take corrective action.

Virtual Currencies: Use virtual currencies to incentivise consumers to do certain activities and to enable them to reclaim the coins for your services.

Smart Suggestions: Using Tribe AI, locate the most relevant members to answer your questions and enable users to send requests.

User Management: You can quickly tag users, execute a bulk upload, send invites to join, and manage activities using their user-friendly GUI.

Moderation: Use their moderation platform to handle the environment effectively and maintain community quality when scaling user growth.

Track interaction and user behaviour to create accounts that can be used to target members through contextual communication and maximise conversions.

Integrations: By using direct integrations, webhooks, and API, you can simplify operations, seamlessly incorporate the online audience into your existing workflow, and provide a stable data flow.

Fully White-Label: To have a white-label experience, create the community with your branding. Colours and badges, as well as widgets and titles, can all be modified.

Public/Private Access: Define membership registration rules for a public or private community. Enable single sign-on to make logging in easier for existing users.

Allow users to form groups within your community to manage their private spaces, priority user groups, micro-interest groups, and everything in between.

Onboarding: Greet new participants to the community by telling the story, introducing key features, and including a list of action items.

Custom Domain: Use your own domain name to protect your brand.

Tools for Notification: Use segmentation to specifically target your members via newsletters, emails, and other ways.

Compliance: Maintain a secure atmosphere by following legal provisions such as GDPR and data privacy laws.

Data Categorisation: Use topics to categorise content and allow for smooth knowledge exploration.

Announcement Banner: Above the homepage feed, show a prominent message with a call-to-action.

Member Profile: This section wonderfully displays member profiles, networking opportunities, and all community activities.

Internationalisation: Build your party in the language of your choice. Choose a language from a list.

SEO Boost: Advanced SEO settings that let you customise how search engines crawl and index your community website. 

Tribe also provides ready-to-use widgets, allowing you to incorporate useful aspects of your culture into your product or website. This means you can have social evidence from your audience on product sites, as well as community discussions, user surveys, and product feedback on your website. Tribe also has a robust API, so pretty much everything you can imagine in your group can be done via the API.

In summary, business owners should use Tribe to build an online platform to:

• Increase Sales

• Create A Better Customer Experience

• Improve consumer lifetime value by curating information and obtaining user-generated content

• Make it easier to reach your core customers

• Reduce the number of customer service tickets

• Obtain product suggestions and ratings

• Word-of-mouth spreads organically

• Create brand authority by using an active group to back it up

• Make a stronger and more personal bond with your customers

Which Businesses Can Benefit From Tribe?

One of the most appealing aspects of Tribe is that it allows you to create your own community platform within your own site or domain. You don’t have to have an online store to link it to, and it can be a powerful way to create an audience of like-minded people around a niche you’re passionate about if you ever want to build a company related to it. Lots of companies nowadays establish a community first and then create goods to sell to them later; use Tribe to build the community first before starting a company.

Tribe can also be used to build a community around existing brands. If you already have an online company, you should gather your current and prospective customers in your Tribe group to get them talking, sharing, and engaging so you can keep them engaged with your brand and connected with like-minded people.

Final Thoughts

Online groups boost brand awareness, lead generation, and conversions. This group will become one of the most effective marketing platforms for your brand if they have a specific aim and are moderated properly. Their ability to build partnerships between companies and consumers makes them a tried-and-true marketing tool for companies of all sizes.

Many businesses and brands continue to create their own online community platforms to boost their business goals. It keeps their customer base engaged and returning to their website and brand. An online customisable community platform reduces customer care requests since people can ask and answer questions between themselves rather than always contacting the customer service team. It’s a win win situation, so don’t hesitate and start building your community today.