Every digital audience is flowing with revenue-generating power. Whether that power remains untapped or is harnessed to grow your company depends on how well you can transform your audience into a thriving digital community.
Future plc, for example, grew its online audience by 56% in one year by nurturing its digital communities with worthwhile content and experiences.
But building and sustaining a profitable community online isn’t a simple walk in the park — it requires attention, effort and a carefully-crafted engagement strategy.
If you’re interested in securing loyal brand supporters and additional revenue-generation opportunities, we’ve created a checklist below that outlines everything you need to build a thriving digital community.
1. Social Tools for Your Owned and Operated Properties
2. Re-Engagement and Retention Techniques
3. A Process for Understanding Your Audience
4. Personalized User Experiences Based on First-Party Data
5. Comment Moderation
1. Social Tools for Your Owned and Operated Properties
You can’t form an active digital community if people don’t feel connected to your brand. For this reason, media companies must encourage their audience members to forge strong relationships with one another right on their websites or apps.
Adopting conversation-based engagement tools — like commenting widgets, live chat tools, and live blogs — will allow your company to establish meaningful social connections between your audience members and brand.
A recent analysis of Viafoura data even revealed that people who interact with social tools online have a 20-40% higher retention rate after six months of visiting a site compared to those who do not.
2. Re-Engagement and Retention Techniques
With an abundance of media companies and services competing for your subscriber’s dollar, preventing churn is a constant struggle.
Take video streamers, for example.
According to a survey conducted by Deloitte, consumers paid for around five streaming services in 2020. And yet, nearly half of the consumers surveyed canceled at least one of them that same year.
It’s important to have a strategy in place to re-engage your community members when their engagement levels begin to drop. That way, you can keep people away from your competitors by gently nudging their focus back toward your brand.
Consider working with your engagement tool provider to find out when a user becomes unengaged. Once you identify your inactive subscribers or registrants, you can send out targeted offers and content to re-engage them.
3. A Process for Understanding Your Audience
As is true with any connection in the physical world, the relationship between your company and its community members shouldn’t be one-sided. After all, you can’t expect your audience to give you their loyalty, data or money without getting something valuable in return.
And how could you possibly know what your audience wants if you don’t collect their first-party data, monitor their comments and speak with them to discover their interests?
To fully understand your community members and meet their needs, you’ll also need to turn anonymous visitors into known, registered visitors.
In fact, Piano, a subscription service provider, reports that, on average, registered users are 10x more likely to convert than an anonymous visitor.
Organizations that use a proper identity management system will have a clear, 360-degree view of audience members and their interests.
4. Personalized User Experiences Based on First-Party Data
Once you have a steady stream of first-party audience data coming in, you can draw actionable insights to personalize the on-site experience for your community members.
“This way, audience fragments become super-served niches and loyal viewers become VIP members — who will stick around and pay off in the long term,” explains Rande Price, research director at the Digital Context Next trade organization.
It’s also worth noting that people are hungry for personalized experiences.
According to a research expert on Statista, 90% of U.S. consumers perceive content personalization in marketing to be appealing.
Producing customized experiences around your audience’s behavior will, therefore, keep them coming back to your digital properties for relevant content time and time again.
5. Comment Moderation
Your social tools are critical for forming strong connections between your community members; however, not every internet user will leave positive and productive comments. And unfortunately, toxic comments can damage your digital community.
The Pew Research Center states that one in every ten people will abandon an online service if they see nearby offensive behavior.
Safeguard your brand’s integrity and keep your social spaces inviting by enforcing your community guidelines through an effective moderation system.
We would recommend selecting a moderation system that can immediately detect all 6.5 million variations of each word. It should also be able to evolve alongside your community and understand sentence context for maximum protection.
Whether your end goal is to achieve sustainable revenue growth or simply to serve your audience members better, your success depends on the state of your digital community. The more engaged and connected your community members are, the more valuable they’ll find your membership program or subscription package to be.
The truth is that anyone can create a thriving digital community. All it takes is connecting our business to the right engagement, data-collection and personalization strategies.