It’s an exciting time for your brand.
You’ve launched your online brand community. A fully branded and welcoming digital destination, with engaging activities to entertain and connect with your audience. Your audience is gathered and is ready and eager to engage with your brand and each other.
To really be a hero of your organization, you want to make sure you’re tapping all of the ways that your community can support your brand.
There is so much value your community can drive across your company. With over 30+ engagement activities, Vesta’s Community Platform can power countless highly personalized and engaging experiences to activate your audience.
Vesta’s team is here to help you strategize and work with your teams – from Innovation to Social Media, Shopper Marketing, Rewards and more – to identify all the ways your community can streamline and support your consumer acquisition, retention, and brand loyalty efforts.
With all that said, the question remains: What should you make sure you are doing with your online brand community?
Our community optimization checklist can help.
Task 1: Drive Ratings and Reviews
Customers trust their digital neighbors, not brands.
Luckily, Vesta can deliver authentic and amplified ratings and reviews that power e-commerce and retail success.
Sampling missions and advocacy campaigns have been honed over the years to quickly and efficiently drive authentic and impactful ratings and reviews. Vesta’s Single-Click SharingTM technology can automatically syndicate reviews to retailer network partners like Bazaarvoice.
And Vesta’s insights and segmentation tools have the ability to identify past purchasers to drive immediate reviews and encourage Amazon reviews as well.
Mission accomplished: hello products – Vesta was able to help hello products produce over 86,000 reviews, recommendations, and pieces of UGC.
Task 2: Capture Data and Insights
It’s critical to have a pulse on the ever-changing shopping and behavioral patterns of your consumers.
Vesta’s platform allows you to build progressive profiles for your consumers that continually gather first-party data and zero-party data to identify and personalize the experience for each community member. Everyone wants to feel special and valued by your brand, and these personalized experiences go a long way towards this goal.
Vesta can help you gather this valuable data in a number of ways, including surveys, polls, discussions, and more.
Diving deeper, Vesta’s built-in survey tool will allow you to perform quantitative research on concepts, such as brand sentiment and audience segmentation, and supports innovation efforts such as concept, messaging, and packaging testing.
Looking to take your consumer research to the next level? Check out our state-of-the-art applied consumer neuroscience research – such as facial coding and eye-tracking – to study your consumers’ non-conscious decision-making.
With Vesta, the opportunities to capture valuable data and insights are nearly endless.
Mission accomplished: Leading Healthcare Brand – This leading healthcare brand needed a name for its new iron supplement. First, Vesta’s robust segmentation capabilities identified respondents within the brand’s key target market. Our insights team then helped the brand deliver a customized survey to help them understand consumer affinity and preferences toward possible names. The healthcare brand ended up meeting its demanding timeline, saved $10,000 in research fees, and validated its chosen name with Vesta’s help.
Task 3: Spark Advocacy and UGC
Brand authenticity and credibility are essential for consumer trust.
The best way to establish this authenticity and credibility is through promoting user-generated content.
UGC helps drive word-of-mouth promotion, which is a powerful tool. After all, 92% of consumers trust online content from friends and family above all else. These consumers are looking for an organic endorsement from their peers instead of a fabricated story from the brand themselves.
Vesta’s Single-Click SharingTM technology powers more social advocacy from community members and allows them to share more authentic and organic content with their peers. You can then identify your most socially connected consumers and focus on promoting their content to help spark brand advocacy and generate additional consumer interest.
Mission accomplished: ARM & HAMMER Baking Soda – ARM & HAMMER Baking Soda’s objective was to encourage engagement and advocacy through UGC centered around unique use cases for their products. Using Vesta’s platform and with the help of the Vesta client success team, the brand has successfully generated over 52,000 pieces of UGC and counting.
Task 4: Power DTC and E-commerce
With Vesta, it’s easier than ever to drive consumers to online and retail locations using geo-targeted campaigns and shopping behavior insights. These tools help you get a read on where consumers shop, automatically identifying those who can find your product in-store and spreading the word to them.
Vesta’s Quick Offers functionality enables you to help activate sell-through for specific target retailers with special offers and discounts. We can also help brands drive velocity at key retailers by promoting and amplifying shopper campaigns.
Mission accomplished: Veggies Made Great – Veggies Made Great used the Vesta platform to create a campaign where members planted discount coupons in select stores nationwide. Members were more than happy to participate and share their experience with their friends, with over 4,460 coupons planted, 20% higher coupon redemption rates, and 90k+ social impressions generated.
Task 5: Personalize Engagement and Build Loyalty
In today’s market, customers have never been less loyal. But what does this mean for you?
It means that you have an opportunity to grab customer loyalty for yourself.
Building loyalty is about making consumers feel connected and valued by your brand. In the end, these consumers who are emotionally connected to your brand are more likely to remain loyal in the long term.
Community activities are a great place to start. These activities are designed to drive action and impact by delivering personalized experiences that spark engagement and loyalty.
Vesta’s platform gives you access to various channels to help you achieve this goal, such as discussion boards, promotional quick offers, and targeted content.
Mission accomplished: GrubHub – GrubHub understood that too many brands create a space that rewards consumers, only to have these consumers join for a quick perk and leave. With Vesta’s help, GrubHub is able to create a space where they can make their consumers feel heard and cultivate genuine loyalty.
Task 6: Activate Rewards and Loyalty
Too many brands struggle to build loyalty with programs that are fueled solely by purchase-based activity.
Your Vesta community allows you to enhance your loyalty efforts by offering fun and interactive opportunities for members to advocate, engage, and share with your brand to earn non-transactional rewards.
Members can earn points and badges through their participation in all community activities, which can then be used for points redemption or tiered rewards programs within the community. Points earned in Vesta can be pushed to your existing rewards program on platforms such as Yotpo, our latest Martech partner.
Rewarding your community outside of transactional rewards is a crucial part of an effective community marketing strategy. Vesta’s platform makes it all possible.
Mission Accomplished: BuzzBallz – Originally, the BuzzBallz rewards program was focused on rewarding customers for purchases and reviews. Now that they’ve connected their rewards program to their Vesta community, we’ve been able to help them reward members for other non-transactional behavior, such as social sharing, participation in insights activities, and more. Points are pushed from their community to the rewards program, creating a seamless and connected experience that rewards their most loyal consumers.
Vesta Communities Can Support Brands In Many Different Ways
Your Vesta online brand community is a deep well of insights, engaging activities, and chances for strengthening your brand.
The best part?
Vesta makes it easier than ever to tap into all of these valuable resources. Our client success team has a wealth of experience in managing and moderating communities for clients and making sure that they’re reaping all the rewards of their Vesta communities.
Use this checklist to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your Vesta community and take your brand to the next level. Your audience is waiting.
Do You Have Questions About Online Communities? Vesta Can Help
Reach out to the Vesta team with any questions you have. We would love to help.
