4 Ways to Leverage Online Communities to Generate Quality Leads

There’s no shortage of tools and strategies for B2B lead generation. In fact, the abundance of strategies made it even more challenging to pick the right tools for generating quality leads.

That’s when online communities prove to be a holy grail for organizations. They go beyond self-service and member engagement.

Customers like networking with their peers, sharing reviews about products, and expectations from brands. As a result, communities have now become an ideal lead generation platform, thanks to unique insights, SEO benefits, and a lot more that they offer.

But, the main question is how to leverage an online community to get quality leads?

Let’s dive deeper into how you can truly provide value to your community while leveraging it to boost revenue for your business!

Why Communities are Important for B2B Marketers?

Online communities are a goldmine of ideas, opinions, insights, and knowledge. Brands get the opportunity to indulge in meaningful conversations with the members and know more about the ideas that they have. Here are some benefits that brands can experience by leveraging online communities, the right way!

• Gaining the Spotlight: The sudden rise in content marketing has made it difficult for brands to stand out. Marketers must find a way to reach the right audience and beat the competition through ‘useful’ content promotion. Community makes it possible.

• Building Trust: Buyers only buy from the sources they trust. A community empowers an organization to represent itself as a trustworthy and knowledgeable resource by offering true value of investment to the members and winning their trust.

• Benefitting Through SEO: Google’s algorithm gives preference to reliable and trusted content, and communities can enable you to leverage unique SEO benefits. It enables you to collect user-generated content, generate brand advocates, and more.

How to Generate Leads in Online Community?

As mentioned above, online communities are an ideal platform to connect with your targeted audience and generate leads. But, navigating successfully through the lead generation process can be challenging.

So, here are some ways to generate leads without compromising the quality of content and engagement efforts –

1. Prioritize Providing Value Over Selling

You might be tempted to promote your services or products every time a member posts a question. But, you need to present yourself as a business and thought-leader. Focus on solving your members’ problems in an authentic, humanized manner rather than advertising your services or products. If a blog post mentions your brand out loud or reads too sales-y, rewrite it to tone it down. Keep in mind that it’s okay to answer a few questions relating to your brand as long as it genuinely helps your customers out. This way you will be able to natively put the word out there about your products and services.

2. Ask Questions and Listen to What Your Members Have to Say

Once you’ve established your community as a helpful and valuable space, start asking questions to your members. Ask them –

• What their interests are?
• How was their experience with your products/services?
• How they would like you to help them?

Come up with useful questions that can entice engagement and net you some candid feedback. Use interesting ways to ask questions like polls, surveys, etc. Be transparent about what you’re asking and how it can help your business. It will build trust and encourage more members to participate. The more trustworthy you are, the more organic leads you will be able to gain.

3. Acknowledge Your Members’ Opinion by Taking Appropriate Action

When someone joins your community, they wish to seek true value for their investment and time. Be it knowledge-sharing, support, networking, or connecting with their favorite brand, you as a brand need to deliver consistently. If they are posting issues, ensure that you extend help to them in the form of solutions. Or if they are complaining about their negative experience with your brand, acknowledge it.

Your members’ honest feedback is a goldmine of insights. A negative review can damage your brand’s reputation. But a negative review followed by a helpful and actionable solution can enhance your reputation and generate leads.

4. Humanize Your Community

Communities are built for people. As a brand, you might target people with certain demographics but they all come from different backgrounds and experiences. Keeping that in mind, communicate with them like you would in real-life. Ditch business jargon to avoid sounding like a bot and inject your voice and personality while communicating.

It will take the engagement to the next level by instilling a sense of belongingness. When people feel more than just a customer, they bond on an emotional level. Make sure you foster meaningful relationships with your customers by responding to them whenever necessary.

If you want your community to thrive, avoid treating it like a marketing channel. Instead, pay attention to what your members talk about and provide help authentically. It will help build trust and will bring organic traffic and leads. And, nothing beats engagement built on trust.

Wish to create a strong business presence with dynamic online communities? Talk to us!