How To Build A Brand Community
If you want to strengthen your brand and form better relationships with your customers, you need to build a brand community. Brand communities rally your most loyal customers in one place, which is important for any brand. These communities are fun for your audience too.
If you want to strengthen your brand and form better relationships with your customers, you need to build a brand community. Brand communities rally your most loyal customers in one place, which is important for any brand. These communities are fun for your audience too.
What Is A Brand Community?
A brand community showcases brand loyalty at its best. People in your brand community are emotionally invested. They will buy from you, engage with your content, and tell people about your company. A brand community, however, is not the same, as brand awareness.
Just because someone knows about you or has bought from your before doesn’t mean that they are part of an engaged or engageable community.
Your brand community is people who follow your content on social media, who share your products, services, and content with others, and who enjoy seeing everything that your brand does.
A brand community is a place where people who have some kind of emotional connection to your brand can connect with each other and with your brand.
Why Should You Build A Brand Community?
It is important that you understand that your brand community already exists on social media. What you need to do is find this community, connect with it directly, and build a strategy for those within your community to interact with each other. You should want to do this because your brand community is a powerful business tool.
Picture having a group of people who often use your products or services that you can reach out to on a regular basis. You can use this group to test new product mockups, ask about future releases, share blog content, and collect some feedback to use for improvement.
This community can be used to help your band to make customer-driven decisions and spread the word about your business, make sure you’re building a strong community that thrives and rewards your community members.
How To Build A Successful Brand Community
There are already people out there who really love your brand. It’s time to bring these people together and build a space for them, through something like a group or an app from Disciple Media.
Building a successful brand community can take a lot of different forms, there’s no one-size-fits-all option that works for everybody. Whichever you choose, there are a few essential steps that can help you to decide the best brand community for you.
Define Your Brand
If you want a build a community around your brand, you need to know what your brand is first. This goes well beyond what your business sells or offers.
Your brand also involves your mission, company vision, brand voice, and personality. Think about what your brand is trying to do. Who is it trying to help? What do you want to be known for?
All of these things are important for you to know before you build your community. The more you showcase what your brand is all about, the more you will attract the target audience that you want.
Define Your Brand Goal And Metrics
Brand communities are a way for you to make customer-driven decisions and spread the word about your business. You should ask yourself a lot of questions before you start creating your brand community.
These are just a few sample questions that you should ask to guide you in the right direction when you develop a strategy for your brand community.
- What is the purpose behind your community?
- Are you helping people to get answers to the questions they have about your product or about something else?
- What are you doing for your community members to keep them engaged?
- How are you measuring the success of your brand community?
- What metrics do you want to track?
- How will your brand community goals help with your company goals? How will a brand community help marketing, support, or sales?
Once you have set these goals and metrics, the next steps will be easier to handle.
Choose A Community Platform
There are several different options when it comes to creating your brand community’s home base. There are a few popular options that you can consider to decide what might work best for your brand and audience.
A Forum
A forum is a great way for a much larger community to be able to talk about shared interests, whether they’re directly about your brand or not. If you have a wide audience, a forum works well for them.
For example, Spotify uses a forum for its audience, where people can discuss the music they like or share new artists or playlists on the platform. Forums work well for Spotify’s brand to encourage conversations about their industry, with their streaming platform at the center of it.
Social Media
There are different ways that you can manage your community on social media, by engaging through the platform or by creating a social media group.
For example, if you have someone who is good with Instagram, you can use social to be hands-on and transparent with your audience. Use your brand’s Instagram stories to communicate on a regular basis, hold Q&As for your audience, and have your followers vote on potential new products.
The last way that you can use social media for the community is to create an actual group that your customers and community members can join and use to interact with you. The most popular options for this are groups on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Since brands can create and manage Facebook Groups, it makes it a lot easier to use this option as a way to create a successful brand community platform.
Rewards Or Affiliate Programs
Another way to hone in on your band community is by creating a program that gives back to your most loyal customers or referrals. A rewards program often gives regular customers perks, such as freebies. Some of the best-known examples of this are coffee shops, which give you a free drink after so many coffees bought.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully the above tips will help you build a fantastic community around your brand that will bring your customers and employees together. Do you have any tips for building a brand community? Drop them in the comments below.