Not knowing the best actions to take when marketing to consumers can be a gamble. An important insight is buried deep inside oceans of data. Often, customer data may seem either out of reach or too complicated to be useful.
Coordinating numerous third parties and internal departments along with finding the right personnel to analyze and execute refined campaigns are complicated tasks for most marketing groups. Add in cross-channel consumer preferences and the result is a complex knot that cannot be undone by most organizations.
Is there an easier way to deliver relevant cross-channel messages to prospects and customers? To meet these challenges, many companies are turning to affordable cross-channel marketing solutions.
Designed to bring the power of high-end database marketing tools to mid-sized organizations, these solutions enable marketing groups to execute automated cross-channel campaigns based on intelligent insight rather than intuition.
This article will examine the challenges faced by marketing and reveal the many advantages of affordable cross-channel marketing solutions.
Trends Influencing Marketing
A growing number of channels and the pressure to do more with less are two key drivers motivating marketing to change. These trends also create conflicts for marketing.
“Proliferation of choice offers marketers new opportunities such as social networks, mobile, and branded entertainment. Each of these has its own success metric and dynamic, making comparison and the calculation of ROI impossible,” stated a Forrester Research report.
“New channels mean more work for marketing. As marketing departments face pressure to cut budgets whilst expanding capabilities, technology will play an important role in enabling success,” stated a Gartner study.
Have a look at Community-Based Marketing
You’ll probably be familiar with account-based marketing
(ABM), an approach that sees sales and marketing teams work together to engage with highly targeted accounts.
Are you also familiar with the term community-based marketing (CBM)?
Let’s go over what community marketing is, why it works, and how to get started with building a community around your brand in the investment industry.
What Exactly is Community Marketing?
Community-based marketing is a brand growth strategy centered around bringing customers together over a topic that is aligned with, or directly related to, a brand in an engaging and non-intrusive way that puts customers first. Meaning it’s about them, not you.
To really understand what community marketing is and how it fuels brand growth, we need to define what a community is and learn a bit about the psychology behind the human need for connection.
The 3 Key Components of a Community
Whether they realize this or not, all thriving communities have three key components. When beginning your community-building journey, it’s incredibly helpful to understand what these three components are and the precursors needed to get to them:
- Key Community Component: A group of people…
Precursor: Having a common interest is a precursor to having a group of people. - Key Community Component: Who cares about each other…
Precursor: Coming together over their shared interest is a precursor to the group of people feeling like they care about each other. - Key Community Component: And feel they belong together.
Precursor: Working together to achieve goals related to their common interest, is a precursor to a group of people feeling like they belong together.
When you’re starting the process of building a community around your brand, start by identifying who your customers are and what they care about that is related to your brand. Then come up with regularly cadenced ongoing ways to bring them together and meaningfully connect.
The Psychology Behind the Human Need for Community
Without a community – as a side effect e.g. of the social distancing and lockdowns – we encounter detrimental effects. Chronic social isolation can even lead to a decrease in the size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain that’s responsible for learning and memory. From our family and friends to our neighborhood and our team at work, social ties are critical to our happiness and success.
For marketers, this means that there is so much more to driving brand growth and customer engagement than clicks and conversions.
How Community Marketing Fuels Brand Growth
Now that we know a bit about how much of human behavior, personal growth, and success is driven by our innate human need for connection, we can start to understand how building a thriving community around a brand fuels its growth.
Key Takeaway: Build a Community Around Your Brand
Building a community around a brand fires up growth and builds long-term relationships with customers. B2B businesses that invest time and resources into community marketing efforts see real growth. According to a recent report, community marketing tactics generate an average of 6,469% ROI.
Building a community around your brand is one of the best ways to give customers value at every stage of their journey.
Adopted correctly, it is a very helpful tool for B2B marketing in the investment industry. In a B2B context, a ‘community’ is a group of professionals drawn together by a shared interest and held together over time by mutual support or benefit.
Community-based marketing brings professionals together around a shared practice or area of expertise to create closer, and more valuable, relationships with prospects and customers.
By building connections in a professional environment, you can create more valuable relationships with prospects and customers. The focus lies on building deeper relationships and facilitating meaningful engagements through conversations and networking.
With SmartMoneyMatch you have exactly this opportunity for the investment industry: you can browse and list investments, find investors and indicate your investment interests and create a request for proposal, search service providers or offer your services, connect with and message other users, search for and announce relevant events including a fully-fledged event platform, find jobs, post vacancies or publish articles.
In addition, all users have a profile page where their activities—as an investor, asset manager, or service provider—can be described and can be listed in the searchable business directory.
And best of all: It’s free of charge!
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