Yesterday QuestionPro hosted the last webinar of the year, and we definitely ended the year on a high note! Thank you, everyone, who attended and registered! We loved your engagement and questions, and below you can read a recap on what you might have missed from the Community Engagement During and After Holiday Season webinar.
Our experts, this time, were Casey Shultz, Community Manager at CITRIX Startup Accelerator and Flavia Lemes, Head of QuestionPro Communities. Casey has 8 years of experience in community management, marketing, and events. Currently, she is mentoring entrepreneurs through the Citrix Startup Accelerator programs and managing a community of about 3,000 stakeholders in person and online. Flavia is a Product Marketing Manager at QuestionPro Communities. She has over 6 years of experience in marketing and product management. Currently, she is heading the marketing efforts for QuestionPro Communities.
Here are the slides that were shared during the webinar.
What is a community and why it is of such great importance?
Community is a group of people who share a strong identity or interest. A well-established community is of significant importance; because it can go a long way to influence companies, to keep people attached to their brands, make people identify themselves with the product as well as with other product users. It is proved that engaged community can lead to increased sales, higher product adoption, new customer acquisition through recommendations and increased customer retention rate, which in the longer term will lead to higher profits.
When setting marketing goals or business objectives, a better outcome is guaranteed if we know who are we trying to engage with, who we are interacting with and what motivates these members to do an activity, for example, write a blog post, tweet or write a product review.
There are two types of motivation – extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is a drive to engage in an activity because of a reward to engage in the activity or a punishment for not engaging. An example for that is a community member writing a blog post and receiving some points to spend in your store. Direct compensation for their activity in moderation can be a great way to get members plugged in and interested in the community. In the longer run, they can, however, get bored from not getting personal satisfaction, or if the reward is not considered worth the effort. Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is an inner drive to engage in an activity for its own sake because it is interesting and satisfying in itself. In this case, the community members find joy in this activity and come across as experts. Often these activities are not encouraged or discouraged, but once you notice them, you can create a brand ambassador program for these members to teach other community members how to emulate.
While it might be a difficult task to measure how well you are doing with keeping your community engaged, it is extremely important that you find metrics that work and put them in place. Metrics will give you a sense of the overall health of your community, let you know if you are being successful in your efforts, demonstrates the importance of community within your organization and inform future campaigns and content. Therefore, a strong recommendation for your holiday campaigns is to measure all your baseline metrics before you start anything else. Here at the possible metrics you could look at:
1. Number of community members
2. Monthly active users
3. User retention rate
4.. Content posted per user
5. Social media impressions
6. Customer acquisition cost
Casey was giving some inspiration and suggested 3 tactics that you could employ for this Holiday season:
1. Online Holiday Scavenger Hunt – Sounds fun right? Get your creative juices flowing and set out some cool tasks for your community members.
2. Questions, Surveys and Ideation – Of course, using QuestionPro Communities here! Seed answers and activity, call out individuals for discussion and then share results with community members.
3. Events – This is the perfect time of the year to adopt the holiday theme and throw a wonderful event for your community. While your community is engaged online – events are a great way to get to know them in person. It can lead to increased loyalty and connection with your brand. It is also a good place to share your future plans and activities with the biggest influencers. In addition, the event will generate some great content to share afterwards – blog posts, photos from the event, newsletter etc.
You can watch the entire webinar here:
