Just What is a “Community” and Why is it Important in Marketing?
It’s the old philosophy of birds of a feather flock together. Or in 2008 terms, birds of a feather usually have a common interest that you can isolate and market your product to. That is, communities are people with like interests or beliefs, a common goal or a common need who form an informal group or “community”. Some communities are organized such as a women’s book club or entrepreneur group, but most are not. Most communities are just groups sharing a common interest such as a yoga class, women who try to help each other with after school sports practice juggling or breast cancer survivors who meet for coffee once a month. They may not seem like a group at all. The community can be made up of something as simple as people in the same stage of a life group like mothers’ with elementary school age children or women who are just starting a business.
But in fact, they are a community of people that all have a common interest and a common need. Thus they make a great marketing target group.
Community building is becoming so important in marketing that many universities are now offering classes and even degrees in community building. Online social networking sites need effective managers and consumer products needs marketers who can really get under the skin of their targeted consumers. Thus community marketing has exploded. Marketing to the mass audience is becoming less and less effective. The marketing gurus of tomorrow are graduating with an understanding of how to reach many, small groups with a personalized message crafted just for that group. They are using less broadcast and more social networking sites, less outdoor and more WOM, less print and more viral email. The message becomes more targeted, more relevant and thus more effective.
A recent study by the Society for New Communications Research showed the greatest values of participating in communities:
Increasing word of mouth about your product 35%
Increasing brand awareness 28%
Bringing new ideas into an organization faster 24%
Increasing customer loyalty 24%
This is an area of marketing that radio seems to be made for. Radio offers many ways to bring community members together and can benefit from the good that involvement and loyalty from community members can bring. But, because of the newness or the “out of the box” thinking required to get the process started, radio is lagging far behind other industries in using communities and word of mouth marketing to create long-term, tangible results.
If you’d like more information on how your radio station can identify communities within your listener base, build new communities that can help build long term loyalty and how using word of mouth can not only create listening, but revenue too… call MStique Marketing at 888-707-4414. Make your marketing sticky, make it WOM worthy.
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