Advertising your company and its offerings isn’t always enough nowadays. Building community around your brand can be an important part of its success.
Today, brand-building is not primarily through one-way communication via advertising, The new way is co-creation, enabling customers to build your brand with you.
Customers are increasingly making decisions based on alignment with their values.
Customers are increasingly making decisions based on alignment with their values.
“Purchases now represent a customer’s ‘vote,’ and the brand is a symbol, an extension of the consumer, The internet has created a more level playing field that allows people to easily and quickly research what’s out there. Having community allows your brand to break through the noise.”
Benefits of Building Community Around Your Brand
An increasingly digital, modern lifestyle is creating a hunger for authentic and relatable interactions that connect us to others like us. Building community gives your customers a space to feel seen and heard by your brand in a unique way.
Branding is about story and community, and humans are wired for story and community. When brands build community, they invite potential customers to become part of something bigger and to have an impact together. That shared brand experience and collective impact makes people feel good.
Sponsor a Facebook group and make it the most vibrant within its subject matter.
Building a community around our brand has been a key tool in converting our marketing efforts into sales. Customers may be buying our products, but it’s much more than sales. We’ve found that once you have a community people love, they return to experience that community.
Steps to Building Community Around your Brand
Here are steps to building community around your brand and what you can learn to adapt your company to today’s changing marketplace.
1. Give it time.
It’s a long game to build community around your brand, but it creates an authentic, long-lasting connection between your brand and customers.
The best brands fill voids in their customers’ lives and as a result become friends and trusted resources.
Building a community of people takes time and a lot of effort. If you’re in a rush, people can sense that. Growing slowly will help you in the long run.
2. Start with your team.
Build brand community internally first. Rally your team with a clear vision and a well-crafted brand purpose, and give employees the systems they need to deliver on the brand promise. Then they can create great brand experiences for customers every day.
3. Embrace a social cause that extends customer impact.
Brands that have a social impact that helps the larger community are especially effective. If your customers buy a product, and your company donates to people in need with each sale, this is a good way of supporting a larger community while also building community around your brand.
4. Involve your customers via video.
Since we create custom clothing for men and women, we often recruit existing customers to be our models. When we shoot video features, it’s almost exclusively on real-life customers.
Fitness company also features customers via video. Re-share customer submitted videos, and always quote the customers on the videos.
People want to tag us so they can be featured with their comments shared on our page. When we reply to customer reviews, we thank them for the purchases and reviews and ask that they tag us, letting them know we repost.
When you use video, make it authentic, .
Tools like Instagram Stories allow a truly authentic look at what’s going on inside a company. Under-produced, run-and-gun content performs better than highly produced content, because it feels real.
5. Create educational blog and email content.
Giving customers additional information through email and blog posts can be a great way of building community. Throw in some perks and promos along the way to keep your open/click rates high.
This free value is important, because buyers won’t feel like your products are that expensive when they hear from you on a regular basis with useful information.
6. Define what your brand is and what it stands for
Before you can build a community around your brand, you have to know what that brand is. Do you have a mission statement?
Do you know exactly who your target audience and community is? Do you have the content ready and armed to engage this community each and every day?
Here’s a classic example: The colour pink doesn’t try to make itself greener, hoping to appeal to everybody who loves both. Pink is pink, and you either like it or you don’t. There are no apologies and no justifications.
So, what’s your ‘pink’? What do you stand for that nobody else does?
What type of people do you want in your community and, more importantly, who don’t you want to include? Move on to the next step only after you’ve answered these questions.
OFFER VALUE AND EXCLUSIVITY
The best brands offer their communities:
- Boundaries
- Emotional safety
- Belonging
- Personal investment
- Insider status
7. Develop a value-driven presence on social media.
The key when posting to social media is to share content that enhances the lives of customers while also building community around your company.
Once you’ve identified what your brand stands for and who you are wanting to target, the next step is the ‘where’ and the ‘how’.
That means choosing the right platform based on the following:
- Size of your audience
- How your audience prefers to engage
- The features you need
- Your technical skill level
- Your budget.
When you’re first starting out, think small and simple. A basic forum might be enough for your website, or my favourite, utilising Facebook groups if your users access it via mobile devices.
Sponsor a Facebook group and make it the most vibrant within its subject matter. If you’re a food company, start a recipe-sharing group. If you’re a shoe company, start a running group. Periodically have giveaways, including sponsored trips. Be transparent about the sponsorship of the group, but otherwise let it be about the topic, not your brand.
Use these test forums to see how your community members interact. As their numbers and engagement grow, you’ll be better equipped to choose the right platform down the road.
8. Make community membership valuable and exclusive
There are five factors that make joining a community valuable for customers:
- Boundaries
- Emotional safety
- A sense of belonging and identification
- Personal investment
- A common symbol system.
Your community members need to feel safe sharing with others in your group. They need to feel that they’re accepted and that they’ve ‘earned’ their spot in the community. They also need to be able to understand the group’s social norms and how to communicate like an ‘insider’.
How can you build these factors into your community? Possible strategies include:
- Clearly defining and enforcing moderation standards
- Limiting membership to a select group who have achieved certain status (perhaps, by buying a product or opting into a challenge or course from you)
- Encouraging the development of inside jokes and memes
- Giving top users benefits — even if it’s just icons for use in their posts that denote their status, or free products, discounts, invites to secret events and so on. In other words, make it exclusive.
9. Get the community talking to each other
Every community will go through an ‘awkward phase’ where conversations feel a little forced and people aren’t initiating conversations on their own. It will pass. Keep building your community one person at a time, and it will eventually begin to flow naturally.
Don’t be discouraged by lack of engagement or feedback — If you have customers within the community, they are seeing your content and taking it in, they just need a little time to come out of their shell. The key? Keep providing value.
10. Give more than you get
Lastly, why would your users remain part of your community if they aren’t getting any value out of it? Invest whatever resources you have into creating a stellar community experience.
Provide helpful resources. Answer questions. Offer whatever support you have to in order to delight your community members. Your efforts will come back to you in the form of engaged followers, future purchases, and possible referrals.
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