Marketing is a multifaceted field filled with strategies, creative executions and everything in between. While all of this is important to the success of a brand, it’s also crucial that every brand maintains strong relationships with consumers – especially during uncertain times such as these.
One of the best ways to help your brand’s audience feel heard and understood is by developing effective community management. Here are three ways you can leverage community management practices to successfully respond to consumers in today’s landscape.
- Above all, have empathy
Marketing is a multifaceted field filled with strategies, creative executions and everything in between. While all of this is important to the success of a brand, it’s also crucial that every brand maintains strong relationships and communication with consumers – especially during uncertain times such as these.
One of the best ways to help your brand’s audience feel heard and understood is by developing and maintaining effective community management. Here are three ways you can leverage community management practices to successfully respond to consumers in today’s landscape.
- Establish approved FAQ guidelines to respond to common questions and comments
Many people are grappling with the same questions right now as we navigate unprecedented times. To properly address them in an informative and understanding manner, it’s important for your brand to work with internal stakeholders to create FAQ guardrails your internal team can use when answering common questions. This will help ensure consistency in your brand’s position and enables you to meet your customer’s needs more quickly by providing them with an answer.
Once these answers are in place, it’s important to continually reevaluate and adjust them when necessary. As news develops and situations change, your responses should, too. This will help ensure that your customers are receiving the latest and most accurate responses.
Take a look at Apple & Eve, a brand who prepares and approves responses to common questions they receive. By crafting well-thought-out, clear answers to questions such as these, Apple & Eve is able to give consumers the information they seek with honesty and accuracy.
Along with developing FAQ guidelines, establishing an escalation process is a helpful tool for managing consumer comments effectively and appropriately. Unfortunately, threatening or worrisome comments from consumers happen every day. Now that we’re living in uncertain times, heightened confusion and stress could add to these types of responses. Having an escalation process in place can enable brands to flag moments where consumer comments are a cause for concern and find ways to respond effectively and appropriately. - Proactively find ways to connect with your audience
As long as brands exist, consumers are certain to have questions for them. While engaging with your direct consumer base is important, it’s also beneficial to seek out opportunities that enable your brand to connect with people outside of your community. By finding ways to have positive interactions with new audiences, your brand can raise awareness in an organic way.
For example, coffee brand Lavazza followed relevant coffee hashtags to find new people on social to engage with and influence their at-home coffee routines.
This approach allows brands to remain true to their purpose and current audience, while finding natural places on social to join in conversations with new consumers and add value.
All in all, by remaining empathetic, creating guidelines to respond to consumers appropriately and seeking out new ways to start conversations outside of your typical consumer base, your brand can build and maintain strong connections with consumers.
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