Tips for Turning an Audience into a Community

Usually, communities built on common interests continue to thrive, and the common interest is the relationship between individuals, which keeps them bonded. However, before building a community that serves as your brand advocates, you need to work on the audience you have gained because a well-maintained audience is likely to become a strong community.

If you want to turn your audience into a community, make sure to follow the tips mentioned below.

Table of Contents

1. Discover your Audience
2. Engage your Audience by Starting a Conversation
3. Offer Content that is Informative and Solves Problems
4. Pay more Attention to Personalization
5. Offer Rewards to Contributors
6. Final Thoughts

Discover your Audience

The first step toward turning an audience into a community is to know your audience. This is essential, especially when you are trying to build a community from scratch. During this phase, you need to individually interact with your visitors or customers.

At first, this might appear to be a daunting and time-consuming task. However, this effort is worth making. You can expect a huge outcome in terms of gaining better engagement and loyalty. In most cases, your earliest fans/subscribers become your loyal customers.

Once you have discovered the things that your audience is interested in, it’s time to find a common bond. In other words, you need to find the segment where most of your audience has identical interests. Talking about things they love helps to keep them engaged for longer.

This allows you to share content that attracts the attention of your audience. Referencing a shared interest can serve as a perfect icebreaker. Hence, you can add a sense of depth and personalization to your interactions.

Engage your Audience by Starting a Conversation

It’s the simplest way to engage your audience. You just need to start a two-way dialogue. In fact, it serves as the foundation of a community that is about to emerge. You can create interesting content or try to grab the attention of your audience through a quick Facebook post.

For this purpose, you need to create conversational content. Meaning thereby, your audience must feel that you are actually speaking to them. The next step is to listen and respond to the queries of your audience which requires patience when going through the individual responses

Make sure to offer your audience viable solutions to their problems. This way, you can expect the required level of engagement from your audience.

Offer Content that is Informative and Solves Problems

Popular online platforms like Hubspot and Salesforce have taken the advantage of this method to enhance engagements. Each of these platforms has emerged as a go-to source for authoritative and problem-solving content.

If you have successfully built up a reasonable audience, it’s time to nurture it. In order to turn your audience into a community, make sure to conduct webinars, summits, or conferences. To add more value to these events, invite professionals and industry leaders.

These people will share their expertise and experience, making it easy for the audience to choose their respective paths. In addition, you can also conduct training sessions for your audience. This would help to build a community that is knowledgeable and skilled.

You can use platforms like Meetup.com and Eventbrite for facilitating your audience to attend relevant real-life events organized by you.

Pay more Attention to Personalization

Usually, an audience is a group of consumers who prefer a particular brand, business, or online platform. Here, individuals don’t have any representation. On the contrary, a community gives every individual a platform where he/she can express his/her thoughts.

When turning an audience into a community, you need to maximize the level of individual personalization. Individual consumers can engage with each other when developed as a community. One of the most effective ways to turn your audience into a community is to give them a platform for sharing their experiences or expertise.

You need to answer even the least important queries. Moreover, you also need to promote user-generated content. The audience would stick around with each other and experience a strong social bonding. This would serve as a fundamental step toward transitioning an audience into a thriving community.

Offer Rewards to Contributors

To develop a sustainable community, it is imperative to introduce a reward system. This helps to drive excitement and generate enthusiasm among the community members. You can offer rewards to those members who have helped you while turning an audience into a community.

People feel appreciated when rewarded for their efforts. Hence, you need to consider offering a variety of rewards for community participation. For instance, you can host contests and offer giveaways or cash prizes.

Final Thoughts

The preferences of your audience might differ depending on a variety of aspects. Hence, you have to work in different ways when it comes to turning an audience into a community. However, the methods discussed above are suitable for almost all types of audiences, you just need to work on implementing them depending on the requirements of your audience.