How to integrate your community to your marketing strategy

The definition of a marketing strategy is an essential step, whatever the company and its sector. But have you thought about integrating the presence of a community at the heart of this strategy?

In this article, MeltingSpot explains why and how to incorporate Community-Led Growth into your marketing strategy ⬇️

The community: the asset of a successful marketing strategy

The marketing strategy is an action plan deployed by the company to achieve its commercial and marketing objectives. It aims at strengthening the company in its market, defining a precise positioning in the mind of a target, promoting products or services, and creating value by responding to the needs, desires and expectations of customers.

To deploy such a strategy effectively, it is therefore essential to listen to your ecosystem. What do partners think? What do customers want? How are the internal teams organized to deliver the strategy?

Often, the answers to these questions can be found through a simple action: the creation and engagement of a community. With a community, the company can build strong relationships, facilitate listening and then implement specific action plans with a target audience.

Whether it's a community of customers, a community of partners or a community of employees... A community approach is an asset for any marketing strategy.

The idea is simple: to bring together members who share the same interests within a specific group, to support the development, the achievement of marketing objectives and the growth of the company. This is called Community-Led Growth.

Community-Led Growth: what impact on marketing strategy?

Community-Led Growth will almost always have a positive impact on the marketing actions of a company. This strategy directly feeds the different marketing action plans.
For example, thanks to the creation and animation of communities over time, companies can :

• Develop their Inbound Marketing strategy:
  to satisfy a community of customers, a company can create and share online content such as blog articles, guides, webinars, etc. This is the strategy of CFO Connect, Spendesk's community of prospects and customers. The company creates a lot of content, which it makes available to its community.

• Supporting the development of influencer marketing: does your B2C company want to leverage the power of influence by bringing together opinion leaders? The ideal would be to create a community of influencers, to guide them and allow them to exchange with each other throughout the year.

• Activate word-of-mouth marketing: engaging members in a community optimizes the participative and interactive marketing strategy. For example, in a customer community, the most engaged members go from "consumers" to "Consumers". They naturally promote the brand. This is notably the case of Too Good To Go: the most committed members have taken the initiative to create regional groups to exchange with each other and share good addresses.

• Improve their differentiation strategy: Differentiating yourself from your competitors is a key objective, both in B2B and B2C. For example, many companies seek to differentiate themselves to attract candidates. Creating a community of employees is a differentiating asset that strengthens the employer brand and reassures candidates: once recruited, it is the promise of a real team spirit, thanks to a close-knit physical or virtual community!

• Strengthen the emotional marketing strategy: Emotional marketing is a key strategy to creating attachment and a strong bond with your target. But to create emotion, you need to know what moves your customers. To discover them and get to know them, the creation of a community of customer ambassadors is a golden lever.

• Develop a cause marketing strategy: the community can be a golden lever to develop and make known your commitments. It is also an opportunity to gather a supportive and involved ecosystem, ready to support you in this "marketing cause" strategy. For example, Faguo is a company committed to Fast-Fashion. To make this commitment known, it has created a community of allied brands that share the same values, thanks to its "Make Friday Green Again" collective.

Here is Will Curran talking about The New Era of Event Marketing being Community at the CLG Summit 2023 by The Community Lab where you can find the full replay. This video is specific to event marketing but it's true for any marketing strategy in a business.

How to combine marketing strategy and communities?

You've got it: communities help you deploy your marketing strategy, regardless of the objective or action you're pursuing.

However, creating a community does not have to be complicated. By choosing a Community-Platform like MeltingSpot, you are choosing simplicity.

Indeed, a Community-Platform is a tool that facilitates the deployment of a community. This solution integrates naturally with all of your company's marketing tools to provide a unified experience for everyone.

Internally, the employees in charge of community building can manage all community actions without multiplying the tools. For users, the experience is also facilitated in a single place, to exchange, participate in events, get inspired, etc.

Do you want to deploy a marketing strategy that integrates the creation and animation of communities? Discover our MeltingSpot solution, without further delay ⬇️