How to Boost Your Content Marketing Strategy By Using Online Communities

Online communities with user-generated content such as Reddit and Quora can be a gold mine when you need to refer traffic to your website, reach a niche audience, boost brand authority, and pick up some ideas for excellent content.

Using Online Communities (Reddit, Quora, YouTube and beyond) for your content marketing can yield great ideas as well as helping you reach your target customer.

The three types of communities you should know about

Different types of online communities require different approaches when researching topics, spotting trends, and evaluating the audience.

There are three types of communities which can be helpful for increasing your visibility and doing market research:

  1. Major communities and forums are there to spot large trends and evaluating a diverse audience.
  2. Niche forums are basically customer surveys on a larger scale.
  3. Company forums are internal customer bases which provide you with the tools and knowledge to explore your existing audience and clients.

Utilising all of them together will yield in the most effective data for improving the content marketing strategy and attracting new customers.

Know the rules of the community

Each online community endorses specific behaviours which are worth knowing about.

  • Quora is a Q&A forum with a major emphasis on valuable content. The forum covers over 400,000 topics and has more than 80 million unique visitors per month. You can use it to find out what your audience is confused or insecure about and to provide them with answers which will lead to your site.
  • Reddit has highly-informed users and can be a fruitful source of influencers with a vast knowledge of diverse topics. Also, it allows you to position yourself as an influencer in your niche.
  • Yahoo has the advantage of being present for decades, so you have a pool of information and questions to look into.
  • LinkedIn is the go-to network for the B2B sector, so look at it as a valuable insight into different industries, and a place to look for influencers, as well.
  • YouTube is the place to be if you are looking for popular and viral content. The comment section will give you a hint of the users’ opinions.

Know what and how to look for

The starting point for your search is the site’s search bar. If the site doesn’t have the bar, you can use Google’s search bar. All you need to do is to type in “site:”, the forum’s URL, and the keyword.

For instance, “site:reddit.com content marketing”.

You can also look for tabs like top stories and trending now to find industry novelties and potential topics.

The things to pay attention to

To find valuable information in the online realm, keep your eyes open for common audience questions and misunderstandings, recurring words and phrases associated with your industry and brand, opinions about your company and your competitors, and the things (and people) that influence the purchase decisions.

Reach out

After the phase of preparation and research is done, you are ready to reach out to your target audience and to relevant industry influencers.

The number of reviews and mentions on forums can be particularly relevant for your offline community as well. To boost it, encourage local influencers to become your patrons who will write positive things about you on Quora, Yelp, Reddit, and other communities.

Also, you can, without being too “salesy”, get involved in discussions, provide relevant insights, and thus become an industry authority the audience trusts.

Create content

A wisely devised content marketing strategy revolves around answering the users’ questions. If you are new to the business or don’t have a strong community of your own, you will find those questions within the major and niche online communities. These will be the inspirations for your articles, videos, and other posts. Depending on your industry and the audience you are searching for, you should choose one or more forums to draw your inspiration from.

Finally, you should build and nurture your own community and encourage them to create content associated with your business. How? Inspire discussions on your social media and websites. Communicate with the customers on a daily basis, and you’ll get there. As for the user-generated content, just look at the successful campaigns such as Burberry’s Art of the Trench in which customers were asked to post pictures of themselves wearing the legendary trenchcoat.

Too many businesses struggle to create relevant and fresh content and to appeal to a bigger audience. Too many of them are starting with this huge work from scratch, without valuable insights. They often forget or fail to see that there is a large pool of data right at their fingertips. Don’t be one of them. Use and infiltrate the online communities we mentioned above (and those beyond), and start building a new and more effective content marketing strategy today.

Over to you now. Have you used any of these online communities within your content marketing strategy? Tell us in the comments below.

Source: business-achievers.com