User to consumer: How online communities can prove to be a gold mine for marketers
It’s 2022, the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. A year where the term ‘new normal’ doesn’t seem to be so ‘new’ anymore. In fact, it seems familiar. As familiar as a passé advertisement by a brand that solely focuses on the sale of a product. It sells but barely connects with the consumers’ needs.
Talking about consumers; digitally savvy, well-informed, and dynamic are just some of the attributes that can be associated with the consumer of today. And as you read this, millions of consumers across the world have perhaps made up their minds to switch to a different, new-age brand than their usual preference. More often than not, the reason behind the shift is the content that they consume online. And while there could be a plethora of other reasons, better communication and targeting by new brands in the market cannot be sidelined. But how do these new-age brands efficiently target just the right user? They go where the consumers go!
A simple search on the internet sends an average internet user down a rabbit hole. With thousands of articles popping up on a single query, the decision-making process becomes more complicated for a user. While a regular user might not simply abide by what a brand might say about its offering, what they would trust upon is another user like themselves. And that’s where the power of online communities comes in!
Think of any area of interest, and you’ll find an online community for it, thriving with passionate users. Whether it’s business or technology, education or healthcare- the users in these online communities are united by their passion, and hence, the trust amongst them increases manifold.
They ask questions, seek recommendations, gather reviews- all of which significantly impact the decisions they make, including the products and services they consume. Thus, making these communities the perfect space for brands to insert themselves into and understand what the consumer exactly wants.
Online communities are in no way a new concept. They have been around for more than a decade and have witnessed an increase in engagement, owing to the growing number of internet users across the globe. However, the unprecedented changes that the pandemic brought along, further increased the importance of gathering information through peers and users who have gone through the same buying process for any given product.
The insights that can be gathered from these communities are no less than a gold mine for marketers to effectively target their prospective consumers. The online communities provide a safe space for brands to engage in meaningful conversations with the users, understand their mindsets, their queries, and offer them solutions that add value to their lives. A data-driven approach to understand the sentiments of consumers can enable marketers to identify trends and consumer behavioral patterns in order to tweak their marketing strategies.
Without bombarding them with ineffective advertisements, the journey from user to consumer can be simplified if brands go directly to the source and align themselves with the needs and wants of the consumers. And one such community-based platform, Quora, has been facilitating this process since its inception.
Quora, with its 100M+ users in India, has become the go-to source for information on any and every topic under the sun. The diversity of the questions asked on Quora has turned the platform into a valuable resource for marketers to go beyond demographics and get inside the consumers’ minds. In line with this, Quora in India recently launched an insights ebook dissecting the conversations that their users engaged in 2021 across six major sectors- Education, Entertainment, Technology, Business, Health, and Commerce.
The e-book dived deep into what information consumers are scrounging across these sectors and how brands can effectively utilize this data to fill in the gaps and reach their target audience.
Neha Chimbulkar – Head, Business Marketing – Quora APAC shares the objective behind launching the e-book, “New-age customers prefer engaging with brands that do not consider the end user as passive audiences, but rather engage with them consistently and align with their values. Quora as a platform can enable marketers in India to identify trends and dissect audience perspectives. This e-book offers snippets of insightful information about user behavior across major categories for brands and advertisers, which we hope marketers find useful.”
The report provides valuable and never-seen-before insights to marketers who want to understand how they can publish relevant content and cater to the needs of their prospective customers. Simply follow the link below to get an insider view of what your prospective consumers are talking about!