Brand community is a powerful business strategy brands can leverage to enhance their presence and revenue. However, businesses still don’t know how to yield maximum benefit from these communities.
This is major because they forget that these communities exist to serve the consumers in it and not the business. A community drives brand loyalty and visibility not by driving sales but by helping the people in these communities meet their needs.
In order to engineer a strong brand community, businesses should have a complete understanding of their members’ lives – their desires, pain points, and responsibilities. These communities also allow businesses to form deeper and more meaningful customer relationships. Be that as it may, there are some basic things that a business should keep in mind if it wants to build an authentic and effective brand community:
- Bringing out the brand’s mission: Always remember that the core of your community will be what your brand represents. And hence, before creating a community, ensure that you clearly understand your brand’s mission, vision, and values and that your community effectively communicates all of these.
- Understanding the purpose of the community: Have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve through this community. Do you want to help people find solutions to their problems, or do you want to facilitate an exchange of ideas through it!? To know what your focus is going to be, do thorough market research of your target audience, understand what your customers are looking for and take action accordingly.
- Creating enriching content: You can also leverage this market research to create high-quality content for your customers that they will truly connect with. You can take the help of a community engagement application to create effective content for your customers. It can be quick tutorial videos or interesting blogs and vlogs etc. Encourage the members to engage with your content and share their ideas and opinions.
- Cross-channel promotions: Cross-channel promotions can help businesses reach an increasing number of people. In order to grow your community, try to reach as many people as possible on various platforms and touchpoints. This includes everything from social media to search ads to in-person demos, all of which are trying to broaden your community’s reach.
- Nurture participation: You can accelerate people’s participation in the community by incentivizing them. For instance, you can organize giveaways and contests or a customer loyalty program that encourages people to share their ideas and experiences and answer as many questions as possible.
- Be responsive: While a community is a space for the customers to interact amongst themselves, it is important for businesses to consistently monitor the progress of the community, proactively answer people’s queries, and help customers with all kinds of support. Furthermore, it is equally important for brand managers to reduce conflict in these spaces and accept people’s varying feedback and reviews.
- Don’t let it get boring: Finally, make sure that the community doesn’t die out. Keep things interesting to ensure that there is constant engagement in the community. You can spice things up by putting out contests, new topics of discussion, interesting videos, gifs, and much more. If the community becomes inactive, members are going to leave. Last but not least, businesses can also organize events for these communities to encourage people to participate and engage with the brand by leveraging the power of virtual event management softwares.
