How Community-Generated Content Fuels Marketing Efforts

Introduction

As you probably know, creating content is a big deal for SEO and getting customers to visit your website more frequently. Creating content for SEO, specifically, blogging effectively for business, are inbound marketing tactics that will keep you busy curating, aggregating, and filtering all of your content. But, there is a more powerful way to harness content - and it focuses on your community. 

Your customers, subscribers, partners, vendors, and employees can extend your content in ways that you’ve never imagined. They’re more equipped to tell people about the experience they’ve had about your company because they know what you’re all about. Plus, these people can influence others to engage, learn, or buy your products. We’ve dedicated this post to helping you find ways to get your community to talk about you (in a positive light) online.

Establish a Knowledge Base

What if you could find a way to get your customers to answer questions and supply best practices to those who are looking to find the answers about your product? It’s not unattainable. There are many products in the marketplace that can help you with this. For example, Zendesk can help you engage with customers by listening, responding, and pleasing those who matter the most. You can create membership programs through your business that helps a specific niche of customers gain support, whether it’s coaching, training, or extending a hand. Members of the group can do a great deal of the work. The forum style approach gives members the ability to help others when they have nobody else to turn to, and it gives you the opportunity to join the conversation, too.

Encourage Customers to Share Stories

Everyone loves a good story. Why not get your customers to share their experiences with your product or service? You can start “following up” with your customers to get this powerful content, or you can use tools that will do the work for you. For example, AudioAcrobat is a tool that assigns you a phone number for your customers to call and record their story. The software then produces an MP3 file and code that you can embed on your site, allowing visitors to hear first-hand the experiences of your customers. 

Create a One-Question Survey

A one-question survey is nor time consuming or difficult to create -- “Would you refer our services to others?” Then, break the answers down into 3 possibilities: Never - Sometimes - Every-Chance-I-Get. 

Here’s how to redirect the answers upon submission:

Never- Sends them to a page that apologizes for any bad experiences they may have encountered and sets up the expectation that they will hear from someone immediately to find out what went wrong.

Sometimes- Sends them to a page that reassures them that you aren’t happy until they are. Ask them to suggest (with a form) how you can improve to help satisfy them better.

Every-Chance-I-Get- Sends them to a form that allows them to submit a testimonial and asks them to check a box if they would agree to be interviewed for a case study.

This is a great way to get feedback from your customers quickly. These pages can be very simple and can easily be employed by your Webmaster.

Host a Hangout

There are many tools to help you acquire video content that you could use as testimonials on your website, social media sites, or blogs. Our favorite tool is Google+ hangouts. This tool gives you the ability to host and facilitate a group or individual conferences where your customers and their peers can answer questions, discuss industry news, or share their experiences. You can record and archive the event to use as testimonials or other valuable content.