Personalize Your Community with Content Curation and Creation

Digital marketing is not getting any easier these days, we’ll be the first to admit.

With so much marketing content being produced and new trends emerging every day — how does one keep up with it all?

Personalization. Personalization. Personalization. This can’t be stressed enough. If the member experience is not personalized, you will lose your customers and your community will fail.

Before a member even starts a conversation in a forum, they want to see an experience that reflects the conversations they want to have. For example,  if you have a community of dog owners, you want to ensure that the experience reflects their love of puppies, not kittens.

When you're on a community team, you're selling multiple brands. You're selling one story that gets interpreted through multiple lenses.

We all know that community is going to be the most scalable way to send messages about what we as a brand value.

If your company has a CRM or has ever collected data on your customers, you need to leverage that data to deliver a personalized experience with curated content based on customer preferences. Customers want to see what they care about, not a generic community.

There is a dearth of information on how operators should approach building and scaling a community. Do we need more community content? Absolutely.

It's like asking in 1900 if we need more books.

Enterprise is going to have to follow community marketing. Enterprise buyers are humans, too, with emotions just like anyone else. The most successful community content programs are not necessarily pushing the idea of a brand or product, but figuring out the problems their audience has, and even if that wasn't the problem that the product was solving, they created content that solved the problem.

Community storytelling when it's done well, taps into humanity. You have to motivate somebody. Content only succeeds when it is helpful or resonates emotionally.

So, how do we do this? Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Content Creation

Once you have your audience targeted, create personalized content connected to your existing CMS or created from your lightweight CMS.  Connect your CMS and import your existing content and settings right into the community. If you need to create new content, use a lightweight CMS  and create content within the community.

1. Headline (short and intriguing, usually mentioning the benefit)

2. Sub headline (a bit more detail about the benefit)

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3. Problem (common problem people have when not using the community)

4. Video (add it in if you have one to increase credibility)

5. Pictures (demonstration of how to use the community)

6. Internal validation (mention how you are using it, or showcase how another community members use it)

7. Examples/Guide (of how you can use the community)

8. Original price (show it and validate it by mentioning how you or someone else pay that price)

9. Community Leaderboard (promote participation and some healthy competition, giving credit and visibility to the people who contribute the most in the community)

10. Benefits (all the cool things members are about to get)

11. Offer (final call to action to join the community)

12. Social proof (reviews and questions automatically sorted by most upvotes to kill spammers)

PRO Tip (Performance and Resource Optimization tip): Don’t write your sales page in Google Docs, Word, or your email editor. Write it inside Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/LinkedIn messenger. It will help you write like you’re writing to a friend (then copy it across to your website).

You don’t need a long sales page to sell a lot of product, but it’s critical that you have every element I covered above if you want your sales page to convert people.

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