Community Management for Fintech and Crypto

As social media emerged, it became a lot harder for enterprises to keep track of what people think of their brand and products. Rumours, just like reviews, are shared at lightning speed. A few negative opinions may snowball into something one could barely stop. Amidst the global pandemic, the number of people who came back to social media and demonstrated a higher activity there grew by 40% compared to the pre-crisis times.

After a brainstorm over this problem, businesses came up with a decision to build and manage a healthy community around their brand. This is how community management appeared. Today, most brands invest in creating customer communities. This is why we would like to tell you about all the aspects of community management.

What a community is

In terms of business, there are three types of people’s associations:

1. Audience. A company doesn’t have any client’s contact info. It can’t get in touch with any of them, and clients can’t communicate with each other.
2. Base. A company has contact info of its clients and can get in touch with them to offer or tell them something. Clients still can’t communicate with each other.
3. Community. For a company, it is pretty the same thing as a base. But in a community, clients can communicate with each other. And this is what creates an extra value.

A community is a group of people sharing an idea or goal and interacting with each other. It can help you build a reputation, ensure customer loyalty, and get people engaged in your fintech project.

What a community gives its members

A community allows people to feel connected to other people with whom they have common interests or topics to discuss. Community members can easily get answers to exciting questions not just from company representatives (admins, managers, or tech support agents) but also from other people who can be experts in your product. This increases the credibility of such a source of information compared to others.

Instead of surfing other dubious websites, people will be more eager to come to your official community to find answers they need, or to discuss your fintech project with veteran members. Meanwhile, third-party sources may mislead your customers and leave them with a negative experience.

What community management is

Community management is a process of building, growing, and managing a community of people sharing common interests and goals. For a business, running a community is a way to interact with its customers through a network where all members can communicate and feel connected to the company.

Community management is gaining traction as a marketing strategy used in lots of companies promoting their brands. However, one may be puzzled with what problems community management actually addresses, what benefits it offers, and what results it contributes to.

The key point here is that a business builds a community on social channels that is focused on their fintech project, product, or idea. It will attract new members (potential clients), define the driving values, and look into what the target audience wants.

In 2023, a business might want to manage a community on the following social networking services:

• Discord
• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Telegram
• Twitter

Thematic web forums are also worth mentioning. Yes, they are safe and sound. They have survived the Web 2.0 era and feel good in Web3. Be sure to stay active there.

How community management is useful for business

Business owners are often too concentrated on growing their audience and customer base. But drowning in the routine, one shouldn’t forget about the existing clients. They need to be retained, united, and engaged.

And this is what community management is aimed at: connecting people and building communities where they aren’t formed yet. Such an approach can increase customer loyalty, brand awareness, and a company’s image. Along with that, this marketing strategy helps you collect reviews and ideas from your real clients to gain insight into their needs.

You can direct the discussions and reviews in a way that you see fit. You can even shape what your audience thinks of your company, keeping customer trust in your brand. Ensuring real-time personalized support, good community management enhances customer service.

Social channels allow you to communicate with your audience directly. Meanwhile, interaction between your business and customers makes your company more human-like. When a business engages in lively discussions and uses emotions, it usually wins more trust than if it used cliches or chatbots. As a result of this interaction, you can build stronger relations, both on a personal and an audience-wide level.

How community management benefits fintech projects

Community management in fintech is a relatively young but promising field. If your company manages to introduce a relevant strategy, you will have a safe place for your clients and advocates. This will be a place where they will cooperate with each other and you, quickly provide and get feedback, discuss and learn more about your fintech product.

An effective community management strategy gives many advantages to a fintech project. In particular, it:

• Expands reach
• Builds a group of loyal customers
• Boosts customer engagement
• Fuels word-of-mouth promotion
• Improves customer trust
• Enhances your reputation
• Prevents unreasonably bad reviews
• Upscales interaction with your product
• Makes it easier to identify and shape growth opportunities
• Attracts partners and investors

Who handles community management

Once you decide community management can minister to your fintech company, you will need to choose who will handle the process and how they will do it. You have two options here. One, you can do everything on your own or assign an employee of yours. Two, you can outsource the tasks to a company that renders such services.

Community management can be daunting and very labour-intensive, especially if you run something big. Small businesses often delegate these tasks to SMM managers. But these specialists are usually overwhelmed with current work, while community management often goes beyond social media.

It makes sense to hire a community manager, a specialist who will be responsible for creating, managing, and growing a community, and interacting with community members. They will work shoulder to shoulder with the SMM manager, PR and marketing teams — all to ensure the integrity in all activities on behalf of your company.

These are some of the tasks a community manager tackles every day:

• Building a community
• Communicating with members and activists
• Monitoring and analysing sentiments
• Supporting members and advocates
• Handling objections and neutralising negative response
• Improving brand identity on the Web
• Spreading the company’s ideology
• Monitoring industry trends and keywords
• Inviting members to the company’s events

A community manager also has to monitor the company’s mentions on the Web and participate in discussions. For example, they can come to help, explain something, share some advice related to the brand or its product. Monitoring and timely responding to mentions is necessary to expand a community. You should go further than just the website and social channels.

If your fintech business is just starting to grow and isn’t yet widely present on the Web, it may be more effective for you to hire a team of professionals who will render a turn-key community management service. Go this way to save time and energy — both yours and your employees’.

Consider choosing Polygant, a dependable community management partner. We serve both emerging and long-standing fintech companies. Contact us on Telegram or use the feedback form to learn more.

How to make community management effective

To receive substantial benefits from community management and make sure it contributes to other fintech marketing efforts, you should build an effective strategy. It usually includes 7 steps:

1. Define the goals. First, answer these questions: why are you creating this community? How will it grow? Who are your rivals and what do they have? Then find and analyse the industry’s best practices.

2. Identify the target audience. Understand the demographics of your customers to find out who your community will be targeting. By doing this, you will also figure out what type of content and format will work best for your followers on a particular social channel.

3. Pick the platforms. Based on the target audience, choose the most relevant platforms where you will nurture your community.

4. Create and add info to your community. Choose a good name, compose a catchy description, and publish some content for a start. Add some fine visual content that will contribute to your further efforts.

5. Maintain the climate. Monitor the negative, handle objections, start discussions, and fuel activity. This way, you will establish healthy and positive communication between your customers. In return, they will show loyalty to your product and company.

6. Conduct analytics and reporting. Make activity recaps every week. For that, define some indicators you will monitor:

• Audience growth
• Number of active commenters
• Overall engagement
• Level of brand awareness

These numbers will help you do more accurate analytics and find out whether your strategy proves right.

7. Make data-driven improvements. Analyse your work, identify what you did wrong, and fix your errors. All this will have a positive effect on the future growth of your community.

Already took your first steps? We are ready to build and stick to a powerful community management strategy for you. Call or write to us, and we will tell you how running a community can help with fintech marketing of your products.