If you’re interested in getting more visibility and more customers for your online brand, one of the best steps you can take is building an entire community for your brand. Community building goes beyond simply marketing or advertising your products, and has far more long-lasting benefits.
So how can you build a community for your business, and what are the long-term benefits?
How to Build a Community
Building a community around your brand is a process that takes time. You’ll need to employ many different strategies simultaneously, though there’s significant room for experimentation.
Ultimately, your goal is to create a (mostly) self-sustaining group of users who either engage with each other in ways related to your brand or have found each other because of your brand. The interactions are mostly between other users, but your brand will be at the center of them.
These community-building strategies can help you get started:
- Get active on social media. You’re probably active on social media already, in pursuit of standard social media marketing strategies. However, you’ll want to be active in slightly different ways if you want to succeed in building a community. For example, you’ll want to spend lots of time engaging with individual users and getting involved in online discussions. You may also want to join specific groups or subforums related to your industry.
- Showcase interactions. Social interactions are a gateway to further support from your customers, so it’s important to utilize social proof, demonstrating that people are already interacting with and supporting your brand. One of the easiest ways to do this is to provide onsite visitors with notifications when other people are taking action related to your brand. For example, you can show that someone has recently completed a purchase or downloaded your latest eBook.
- Create a platform for interaction. For a community to develop, you need some platform where people can engage with each other. Social media already serves this purpose, so you can start a discussion page or group for them; however, it’s often better to create a platform of your own, so you have more control. For many brands, this is a unique onsite discussion forum.
- Develop content and cultivate discussions. Content is the heart of your brand community, so you’ll need to develop new content often. Write detailed posts that your fans will find valuable, and make sure fans can interact with them. Add comment functionality and get involved in discussions that stem from your work.
- Promote the community. Make sure your customers and followers know that your community exists. You can circulate a newsletter, pay for advertising, or just ask users to join after they make a purchase.
- Nurture your community with touchpoints and events. Your community will grow further if you regularly support them; the more often they visit and engage in discussions, the more benefits you’ll see, so it’s important for your community to remain top of mind. Use regular touchpoints, like email newsletters or community events, to get more attention.
- Support your best contributors. Inevitably, some users will contribute more than others; they’ll write more content, support your brand more, and make more comments. These users are incredibly valuable, so make sure you support them in some way, such as with free products or other non-monetary rewards.
The Benefits
So why would you spend the time and effort to build a community like this?
Community building shares many benefits with other marketing strategies, including raising brand visibility, but there are also some unique benefits you won’t get elsewhere:
- Profound customer loyalty. Users who engage with your brand community will be far more likely to buy from your brand in the future. They’ll also be less willing to switch to a competitor. Communities can grant you levels of customer loyalty that are hard to get with good products alone.
- Detailed feedback (and other data). Customers interacting with each other is also a great platform to gather data related to your business. You’ll learn more about your target demographics, and you’ll get firsthand feedback from people who have used your products. This is invaluable for research and development.
- User generated content. Once thriving, members of your community will generate content on your behalf, to an extent. It’s a hands-off way to develop your content marketing strategy.
Building a brand community could be the most important step you take to promote your company, but it’s not as simple to start as some other advertising strategies. It takes time, and you’ll need to remain flexible if you want to succeed. Make sure you prioritize the wants and needs of your users, and with enough investment, you can eventually establish a thriving community around your brand.
