Cultivating a vibrant community takes your content to the next level. It makes information you provide significantly more valuable and creates an essential strategy for driving community participation. 

So how do you create community hubs around compelling content? 

Here are five best practices that go beyond producing compelling content. They can help you build brand affinity through proactive community-building and authentic interactions that enhance your content.

1. Drive engagement with the content

Make your content interactive. Encourage your best content authors to be active members of your community. Ask them to engage in forums and discussions and respond regularly to feedback. 

Leveraging their unique expertise to do more than just publish will build authentic relationships with your audience in ways no one-way stream of information can match. You can even incorporate gamification to recognise and reward desired activities and top contributors. For example, you can incentivise readers to share your content with their social networks or to participate by commenting, voting-up stories or inviting other people to join your community.

2. Elevate the voice of your customers

Show that you listen by bringing your customers’ commentary and ideas back into your content marketing efforts. 

By collating and recapping information from external discussion threads, polls and customer comments or ideas, and sharing how suggestions have been implemented, you can celebrate valuable insight from your customers and prove that you hear — and care about — their voices.

Read more about using content to grow your marketing efforts:

• The power of video content discussed by British marketing agencies
• For growing businesses, 2015 will be all about content
• What businesses can learn from the new Kings of content

3. Get to know your customers better

Offer content that addresses the needs and challenges of your customers. For example, you can create an interesting test or survey for your community, and based on the outcome, develop content with applicable tips and tricks. 

Ask for feedback, and allow your readers to respond and share their own information regarding those tips and tricks. Then use the insight you gather for your subsequent content.

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