If you’re looking for ways to strengthen your brand and have better conversations with your customers online, you need to be building and maintaining a brand community. Brand communities rally your most loyal customers in one place, usually social media, which is a massive win for any brand. To help you further understand what exactly a brand community is, why they’re so important for your business and how to build a successful one, we’ve put together this quick guide to share with you.
What is a brand community?
In the simplest terms, a brand community showcases brand loyalty at its best. People in your brand community are emotionally invested; they will buy from your company, digest your social media content, tell their friends and family about your company, engage with you online and more.
But a brand community is not the same as brand awareness.
Just because someone knows about or has purchased from your brand doesn’t mean they’re part of an engaged or even an engageable brand community.
Instead, your brand community is people who follow all of your content on social media, who share your products/services and content with others, and who enjoy seeing everything your brand does.
More simply put, a brand community is a place where people who have an emotional connection to your brand can connect with each other and with your brand.
Why should you be building a brand community?
It’s important to understand that your brand community already exists on social media. It’s your job to find this community, connect with it directly, and build a strategy for individuals within the community to interact with each other.
And you want to do this because your brand community is a powerful business tool. Imagine having a group of people who regularly use your product or service that you can regularly reach out to. With this group, you can test new product mockups, ask about feature releases, share blog content, and collect general feedback for improvement.
Because this community can help your brand 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.
Let’s talk about how you can build a successful brand community that is mutually beneficial to both your brand and your audience.
How to build a successful online brand community
There are already people out there who love your brand. Now it’s time to nurture them and rally them all together and build a space for them. Building a successful community can appear in many different forms, and there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy. Here are some key things to consider when building your community:
Define your brand- who are you? What are you values? What's your purpose?
Define your goals and key performance metrics- Do you want to gain brand awareness? Or maybe you're trying to drive sales? Also consider whether you measure things like reach and impressions, or link clicks and conversions as your metrics.
Choose a community platform- is it a blog, forum, social media channel?
Consistently and regularly engage with your community
Ready to start building your own brand community?
Use social media as a valuable asset beyond simple engagements and mentions. Engage with your customers and potential customers in a way that makes them feel valuable to the brand themselves.