drive trafficWhat if, your customers started selling and up-selling your products and services, managing customer support issues and identify issues within your services or products before a crisis takes place? This is not just a pipe dream – online communities have put such achievements within our grasp. According to a study conducted by RightNow on the Australian population, over half the respondents i.e. 58 percent said that they deemed customer feedbacks and reviews on online communities and forums to be the most important factor when making a decision. Also, Australians look at online communities as a major channel for carrying out social media discussions.

According to another study conducted by Society for New Communications Research and Beeline Labs, Deloitte, online communities can boost your social media marketing and internet marketing initiatives as they help to increase word of mouth publicity by 35 percent, bring new innovative ideas into the organization about 24 percent faster, increase brand awareness by 28 percent and improve customer loyalty by 24 percent. An online community has tremendous potential for your social media marketing and internet marketing efforts. Here in this article we will look at some of the most important reasons why you should have an online community in place to boost your social media marketing and internet marketing efforts.

Internet Marketing: Benefits of Online CommunitiesOnline communities provide you with the opportunity to convert your relationship with other members into revenues as well as drive traffic to your website. Let us look at some of the most important ways online communities can help your internet marketing efforts.

  • Worldwide Exposure: Online communities give worldwide exposure to your business. You can reach out to prospective clients and customers from all over the world. They provide you with an opportunity to educate people about your product or service. By just educating and not hard selling your offering you poke the prospect’s interest. Moreover, this approach also enables word of mouth publicity as community members further educate others about your products and services.
  • Establish Reputation: Online communities can boost your internet marketing efforts by establishing you as a credible and reputable source. This can be achieved through posting unique content which helps you get noticed by community members. This is a great and effective way of marketing your offering in a subtle manner.
  • Search Engine Optimization Benefits and Increased Visibility: Initiating dialogues with other members through blog posts and adding great and unique content will help generate more user responses in the form of comments and user generated content (UGC). Now you might wonder what SEO value these comments and user generated content might have. First of all, Google takes user generated content into consideration when ranking a website. More importantly the back links generated through these online communities also help to boost your search engine page ranking. Overall, online communities can help boost your internet marketing initiatives by improving your visibility on the internet and thus driving traffic to your website.
  • Build Relationships: Online communities can be used quite effectively as a subtle internet marketing tool by providing you with a chance to build strong relationships with other members. The more comfortable your existing customers and prospects are, the better it is for your internet marketing efforts as it makes conversion a lot easier.

Thinking of setting up your own online community to reinforce your internet marketing and brand management efforts? Visit www.GreenfieldsToolbox.com.au. The Greenfields Toolbox is basically an e marketing toolbox which incorporates low cost high performance strategically relevant services necessary for the smooth running of any online business.

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