How do I turn a customer base into a community...
Ronan Wall
5 replies
I'm building a marketplace for people to connect and love the idea of making it a community (as opposed to just being transactional). Can anyone suggest some good community tools or share advice to help me make this the DNA of the platform. Thanks
Replies
Ronan Wall@ronanawall
Thank you for your thoughts everyone. Apologies for delayed response, I was out of pocket the last few days
Some more context to help with your thoughts.
@sreekar The platform is a fully integrated suite of tools for independent consultants in the knowledge community to sell their time / knowledge (in the form of advice, mentorship, one time consultations etc)
I know that being an independent consultant (particularly during Covid) can be lonely. Questions around how much to charge, keeping your advice fresh, finding a returning client base etc is made much easier if you have others in the same position to talk to. So I'd like connect the community of advisors on the platform in a meaningful way
All of your points make total sense. Outside of the obvious (social media, email newsletters etc) what tools tools would you recommend that help to maintain engagement and enthusiasm? I find some forums / blogs to be a little flat or one directional in terms of communication
Share
Could you please expand on your idea as well as your ideology behind the marketplace?
I work in community engagement and management as a part-time job. Here is a solid set of advice -
1. Try to be personal. Come to them as a human and not as a service provider.
2. Empathize with their culture and current news relating to your product. (For finance service I talk about hot stocks and news; For programming - talk about nuances of programming service; For real estate - I explore area related topics such as restaurants, hangout places)
3. Explore humour and meme into your exchanges with your customer in the social media
4. Create spaces where your customers can elevate their discussions from product discussion to other tangential topics
5. Pose open topic discussions and issues tangent to your service
The biggest tip I can give is to give people something to form a community around. Take Product Hunt for example, its a community around the sector of making cool things and also products.
If you develop a niche thats the first part to developing a community, from then you give the people a platform to form the community on
I think that it's a matter of branding here. I'm assuming that the people who are using this marketplace have some patterns, certain shared values or points of view on the world. You don't market to everybody, but to your target market.
So make sure the people using your marketplace know what makes them unique. What kind of people use it? Do they believe everybody can be rich and it's all a matter of work? Maybe you make sure certain values stand out like BLM and then they're anti-racism?
Figure out what makes them unique and make sure they know it. A community is just a group of people who believe a certain thing/s.