Tips for Building a Community Content Strategy

A well-thought-out content strategy can be the light switch that turns your empty community into a thriving and engaged crowd. Communities offer significant benefits to companies, providing ways to enhance customer service, marketing, sales, and even product development. Though your strategy for creating and delivering content may differ according to your community, the goal of providing an amazing experience should remain the same.

1. Determine your Community Goals

Look at the current community you have and ask yourself whether you’re the kind of business that thrives off one-off transactional interactions, or meaningful relationships with customers. Does your community offer support to individuals who have problems, or are you trying to develop a community that convenes around a particular interest? Determining the purpose of your community will help to direct your content, as a big part of the content is understanding what your members want.

2. Tell Compelling Stories

Storytelling is one of the best ways for individuals online today to stand out amongst the crowd. Community managers are often good at this aspect of marketing because they have a great deal of visibility when it comes to customers. Community managers should have a wide range of potential topics to draw from in relation to their role. Remember, telling a good story doesn’t have to mean that it lasts forever.

3. Understand what Your Community Members Want

If you decide to build a community, there is no better foundation than the passions and interests of your customers. If you’re not sure which parts of your business or industry your community would be most interested in, you might start off by doing surveys to learn what they care about the most. On the other hand, you might simply want to make a phone call to your customer relations team and find out more about what your customers seem to be interested in.

4. Re-imagine Your Content

Crafting brand-new content is important for any business, but some content will perform well regardless of what’s happening at the time. Community managers should focus largely on developing evergreen content, but they should also be aware of what they have already covered so that older pieces of content can be incorporated into new ideas. There are numerous ways that you can go about repackaging your content with slides, info graphs, photos, and videos. It's essential to effectively incorporate older pieces into fresh ones to avoid duplication. To accomplish this, performing plagiarism checks is necessary.

5. Remember Support Community Content is Different to Marketing Community Content

The chances are that as we progress into the future of digital, we will witness marketing aspects taking direction from support. Marketing is likely to focus on creating more content that is informative, instead of trying to get by with traditional advertising alone. Some of the best content emerges from the use of support communities, but this content doesn’t get the presentation it would get through marketing. Because of this, both aspects may work together to incorporate the best of both worlds into a singular marketing success.