Marketing in itself aims to communicate with your customers using inbound and outbound strategies such as advertising, promotion, branding, engaging audiences on various channels as well as providing customer support. All the time, however, your focus is on acquiring more customers and ultimately, selling your product or service.
Community building instead tries to meet the social, unspoken, “interest” needs of your audience as a whole (which includes customers, employees, and the community at large). The purpose is to cultivate frequent bidirectional communication in order to:
- Do away with communication barriers.
- Identify customer needs and wants.
- Acquire more customers through word-of-mouth.
- Increase product usage and satisfaction.
- Channel constructive feedback on product improvement.
- Increase customer loyalty.
- Identify and reward brand advocates.
- Minimize scepticism towards brand messaging.
- Prevent PR crises and minimize the impact of negative sentiment.
