Building and nurturing an engaged community in today's digital world is no easy thing. Between members spread across various social platforms and channels, keeping your community connected and actively participating can be a challenge and a half!
The goal here is empowering your communities by meeting them where they already are online. That's where having the right digital engagement platforms in your toolbox makes all the difference.
That's why we put together this piece with the top 7 digital engagement platform types that can maximize your community's success.
Sit tight! You're about to discover some invaluable tools to go beyond transactions, nurture genuine connections, and build a thriving space where every member feels seen, heard, and supported. Let's unlock the secrets to a community that truly thrives, not just survives.
What are Digital Engagement Platforms?
In simple terms, digital engagement platforms are software solutions or tools designed to foster communication, build online communities, and drive participation through various digital channels. These platforms give community managers and program managers the tools to deliver engaging experiences, gather meaningful insights, and strengthen relationships across their entire member base.
From social media to surveys to virtual events, digital engagement platforms enable organizations to meet their audiences where they already spend their time online to deliver a personalize better customer experience. Those that leverage these solutions stand to benefit from increased member engagement, reduced churn, offer customer support and get valuable insight from customer data.
Digital Engagement Platforms Explored
With engagement goals varying across every organization, there is no one-size-fits-all digital solution. Instead, community builders have an expansive landscape to consider, with various platform types offering unique capabilities to boost customer interaction.
1. Social Media Management Platforms
Managing an active presence across every social network is no easy feat. Thankfully, social media management platforms give community managers a centralized dashboard to easily schedule and publish content, engage with audiences, and analyze performance data.
Why are Social Media Management Platforms important?
Instead of jumping between multiple networks, you can plan, execute and optimize your entire social strategy from a single unified platform. This allows you to deliver consistent messaging and experiences to customers across social channels.
Tools to keep an eye on:
Popular platforms like Hootsuite and Sprout Social make it easy to publish content across networks, engage followers, monitor mentions and hashtag discussions. The built-in analytics help you determine when your audience is most active, which posts resonate best, and how users interact with your brand across social platforms.
In other words, social media management platforms can help understand interests and behaviors.
Applying those insights, you can then tweak social content and engagement strategies to improve customer loyalty over time and offer a personalized customer experience.
2. Email Marketing Platforms
Yes, Email continues to drive higher engagement than most digital channels.
This means that having dedicated email marketing platforms is essential for community growth. These tools allow you to segment contacts, create targeted email campaigns, automate messages, and track critical performance metrics to nurture relationships over time.
Why are Email Marketing Platforms important?
Email marketing platforms offer user-friendly tools to design email templates, capture contacts, segment your lists based on behaviors and demographics, schedule and send campaigns, and of course, track all performance data.
Tools to keep an eye on:
Unlike general email providers, platforms like Mailchimp are purpose-built to help businesses nurture meaningful relationships with customers over longer time horizons by delivering personalized value at scale. They make complex segmentation, dynamic content, and integrated analytics accessible through drag-and-drop simplicity.
3. Webinar and Event Platforms
In-person events rapidly shifted to digital and hybrid models once remote work became popular. With video meetings, conferences, summits, workshops and more, organizations can now deliver immersive online experiences to complement in-person events and engage global audiences.
Why are Webinar and Event Platforms important?
These platforms allow you to offer informative, insightful or entertaining content to connect and engage your community through digital experiences. Whether hosting a trade fair, speaker series, product demo, skills training, or even team events, interactive webinars drive user engagement across in-person, virtual or hybrid event formats.
Tools to keep an eye on:
Especially after the pandemic, video engagement tools like Zoom have dominated the market by offering streamlined video meeting capabilities, screen sharing tools, and engagement features like polls, Q&As and breakout rooms.
As events grew popular for community building, dedicated solutions like LoftOS emerged specifically to host memorable virtual, hybrid or in-person events with ease.
Whether you want to host a single workshop, webinars, or a large conference with over 25,000 visitors like our customer E-world, our no-code tool comes equipped with networking features like integrated video conferencing and live chats, matchmaking capabilities and more to help you exceed your event goals.
4. Online Survey Tools
Asking the right questions is crucial to pretty much every thing in life. Specially when it comes to customer satisfaction.
Whether looking to improve event experiences, website usability, product features or member benefits, online surveys help you gather data directly from your audience for shaping decisions and build customer profiles better.
Why are Online Survey Tools important?
Understanding your audience is step one to boosting customer success. That's where simple yet powerful online survey tools play an invaluable role. Online survey tools provide an easy way to create questionnaires and feedback forms to gather first-party data directly from your audience.
Tools to keep an eye on:
User-friendly survey builders from vendors like SurveyMonkey, Typeform and Google Forms make it easy to create polls, questionnaires and requests for feedback that uncover member preferences, frustrations and suggestions across the entire customer journey.
In a similar vein, our very own platform LoftOS also offers the Forms module to create custome r surveys, quizzes for your community, used as part of event registrations and other data collection opportunities to provide better community experiences and collect data for improvements that deliver higher lifetime value.
5. Content Management Systems (CMS):
Content management systems (CMS) are software tools that help create, manage, modify and publish content through a user-friendly interface without needing coding expertise. These systems essentially act as a central repository for content creators and editors to collaboratively produce, edit and maintain content.
Why are CMSs important?
For community managers, CMS allows you to provide always up-to-date and branded content experiences across your digital touchpoints like websites, apps and emails. In short, a CMS is empowering, it enables the layman with no prior coding knowledge to share custom content that educates, informs and supports your audiences as well as keeping your business relevant in the digital world.
Tools to keep an eye on:
Leading CMS platforms like WordPress and Shopify make building content-rich websites intuitive through drag-and-drop site builders and SEO optimization.
Whereas community-centric CMS solutions like LoftOS combine traditional centralized content management with tools to manage user-generated community content. This consolidated approach helps community managers distribute branded assets while also stimulating organic participation through groups, news, events and more.
For example, our customer TexSpace uses LoftOS to power their innovation platform for the textile industry - enabling startups and companies to connect through profiles, discussions and news updates on the latest in materials, manufacturing, sustainability and other industry topics.
6. Customer Relationship Management system (CRM):
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms consolidate data on entire customer profiles including contact details, interactions, preferences, and engagement metrics for a 360-degree view of your audiences.
Essentially, CRMs help store all customer data, track interactions over time, reveal insights through reporting, and inform communication personalization for deeper engagement.
Why are CRMs Important?:
There are many benefits of using a customer relationship management system (CRM). For community builders, CRM empowers personalized experiences, predictive analytics, customer journey mapping, and tailored programming based on intelligence gathered across touchpoints.
Tools to keep an eye on:
While often associated with sales teams, versatile CRM platforms like Salesforce, Pipedrive and HubSpot are invaluable assets for anyone managing customer or member relationships – whether driving conversions, understanding customer behavior or boosting community loyalty.
7. Community Engagement Platform:
Community engagement platforms provide specialized tools for building branded online hubs to engage defined groups of users through discussions, content, profiles and interactive features that stimulate organic participation.
Why are Community Engagement Platforms Important?:
These tailored solutions centralize community data and interactions for driving member engagement, tracking participation, informing personalized experiences, and strengthening relationships between organizations and their audience communities.
At the same time, you can easily monetize community engagement platforms by tapping into new revenue streams. Think of offering tiered memberships with premium content, and exclusive access to events or resources.
This approach not only enhances user engagement but also fosters a sustainable ecosystem where both users and platform admins derive mutual value, ensuring the long-term growth and sustainability of the community.
Tools to keep an eye on:
Innoloft's no-code community builder LoftOS makes it really easy for anyone to launch custom community apps around any member base or use case that you monetize - from member community platform templates to incubator platform software, we have a template ready for you to launch your application 10x faster.
See it for yourself, our customer StAfrica created an online startup community using LoftOS to interactively connect startups, investors and other stakeholders - bridging the gap between Germany and Africa. With LoftOS, they’ve managed to significantly enhance community engagement. Specifically, the 'programs' feature now accounts for 60% of their platform activities, attracting more than 150 daily users.
Our all-in-one tool consolidates the must-have features for stimulating organic community growth and achieve the best customer engagement.
Why Not Take Your Community Engagement to New Heights with the Right Tool?
As we've explored, a variety of capable digital engagement platforms exist to activate multifaceted participation across channels - from discussions to surveys to events and beyond.
Choosing solutions tailored to your community strategy and goals promises more meaningful engagement and lasting connections.
But here's the thing - meaningful community engagement isn't about any quick hack or singular tactic. It's a continuous process of understanding your people, bringing value into their lives, and innovating experiences that bridge connections.
When evaluating platforms, be sure to consider factors like:
- Features and functionality
- Customizability
- Ease of use
- Scalability & Monetization
- Pricing and total cost
Of course, managing multiple vendors to cover each engagement capability can mean high costs, disjointed experiences and integration headaches.
That's where our no-code community building solution LoftOS shines as an all-in-one solution combining various must-have tools like forums, events, surveys and profiles for simplified, high-impact community engagement.
And because LoftOS remains flexible to build completely custom community platforms without coding, you retain the agility to adapt your solutions whenever business needs evolve - no development resources required!
That’s why industry leaders like Deutsche Telekom, Fraunhofer, RWTH Aachen University trust LoftOS to create dynamic communities that drive their growth and success.
So if you're looking to consolidate community management and take member experiences to the next level, why not get started with LoftOS for free today?
