If, as the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child, what does it take to create the village or community? This ancient proverb was brought into the context of the modern world by Hilary Clinton, but it originally came from Nigeria and its basic premise is that the responsibility of raising a child lies not only with the parent, but the wider community as well.

 

Going Social

So, what has this proverb got to do with a blog post about online marketing solutions? Glad you asked! Smart businesses are beginning to realise that in order to stay relevant and current they need to be able not only to use traditional online methods to market their business, but also to dip their toes into the murky waters of Social Media. As Online Marketing evolves, its proponents (that’s us) have to evolve with it and increasingly we are incorporating Social Media elements into our clients’ marketing mix.   As part of our integrated Online Marketing strategies for many of our clients, we now also create blogs, and manage Twitter and Facebook communities; but for one client in particular, as part of our online marketing solutions for them, we have taken a rather innovative approach.

Home and Away

We have been providing a successful Paid and Natural search campaign for our client, a large travel company, for several years now. About four months ago we got the go ahead to develop a blog for their website – but it was to be a blog with a difference.

Yes, it would look lovely and interesting and be well-branded and provide SEO benefit; but this was to be more than a blog – we wanted to first create a community offline and then create a “voice-piece” for this community online with the blog.

The concept of creating an offline community and bringing it together in an online platform was an experimental one for us, but for this tour company it was ideal. The sense of community, camaraderie and friendship is something that develops naturally on each tour and all we needed to do was to harness that ‘holiday feeling’ and create a place where past, present and future customers could come together and ‘inspire’ the community with their own contributions and enthusiasm.

Creating the Story

We began by inviting customers heading off on their group holidays to become the ‘storyteller’ for their group. The response at first was sluggish and, in a lot of cases sceptical – in fact the silence was deafening from our first few attempts!  But we persevered by phoning and emailing these customers and nurturing them towards being brave enough to give it a go. By interacting with them offline, they came together online and voila – the community was born. A funny thing began to happen about three months into the project: I suddenly could not keep up with the responses and the enthusiasm, and my “storytellers” began inundating me with blogs, tips, photographs and suggestions on how they wanted their community to develop.

Happy Ever After

In the background, I am off course SEOing the blog posts to ensure they provide valuable online marketing solutions but, more importantly we have, in a very short  time, created a sense of community and customer loyalty which has been nothing short of astounding.

You can’t buy that; but phone call by phone call, email by email, blog post by blog post, we’re building it. 

If any of you have similar stories or experiments on building customer communities (both offline and online), we would love to hear about it.