Community to a Brand, Soul to a Body

“You can never go wrong by investing in communities and the human beings within them.”

— Pam Moore, CEO / Founder Marketing Nutz

A branded community is a perfect way to channel and rally your most loyal customers. In fact, it is an ecosystem where you can have personalized communication with your audience and make an instant 101 connection.

In fact, building a community is an incredible marketing strategy that lets you fetch some valuable customer insights while you’re capturing the hearts and minds of your target audience.

According to an article by Potion Social Software:

1. 86% of Fortune 500 companies report communities to provide insight into customer needs.
2. 96% of companies see branded communities as the perfect way to collaborate with their customers with their marketing departments.
3. 64% of companies say that branded communities have helped them in improving their decision-making abilities.

Community marketing has been listed as one of the content marketing trends of 2021 in a survey conducted by DataBox. It stated:

“With so much competition in the digital world, one needs a way to be noticed and building communities can achieve this.”

Today I want to share with you how various businesses have used branded communities to upscale their marketing efforts, how you can create a branded community for your business, and finally, we’ll learn what various experts have to say on the same.

Let’s get started.

What Is A Branded Community?

In the simplest terms, a branded community is a place where your customers and target audience are emotionally invested in your brand beyond what you sell. In brief, it is a habitat for your customers that want to become a part of your brand itself.

Often a branded community is confused with brand awareness but both are completely different. In a community, people of all sorts communicate and engage with each other independent of the fact that they are your customers.

In fact, these are people that follow your content online whether it is on social media or on your website. They love and appreciate what you post and share it with others. Briefly, a branded community is made of the audience that enjoys and cherishes what your brand does.

For example, Sleepy Owl Coffee’s Facebook page has 14,483 followers. Now all of these followers aren’t buying coffees from Sleepy Owl (at least not me), some may be coffee connoisseurs and some just want to learn about coffee (like me and I recently discovered I love filter coffees).

@sleepyowlcoffee is a community of people who in general like coffee independent of the fact that their morning cup of caffeine is sourced from Sleepy Owl.

Communities add soul to a brand, they make them look lively and catch the attention of an audience that loves connecting with a brand. Apart from engagement and marketing strategy, building branded communities has a lot more to do with and has a huge impact on a brand’s online presence.

Let see how.

How Communities Are Souls To Brands?

A branded community is a powerful tool that lets you connect with your already existing audience and build a strategy to interact with them.

Imagine it as a group of people where you can run polls to know what your audience likes the most about your brand, ask questions and learn where and what you are lacking, and take decisions that originate from the conversations done within a community.

You can ask customers to share their stories and their relationships with your brand and be the soul of your business.

Anyways let’s understand the importance of building a community with the help of some numbers collected by Vanilla in their eBook, Online Communities: The Benefits and Impacts on Organizations:

• Online communities have improved engagement by up to 21%.
• 66% of brands said that communities helped them in retaining their customers.
• 68% of brands were able to source new leads with the help of branded communities.
• Online communities are a valuable tool for increasing the number of visitors for 72% of those with a branded community.

With the help of these stats, we can see how brands used communities for keeping their audience engaged and retain customers. Also, it was the communities that played a crucial role in the survival of businesses during the pandemic outbreak by humanizing the brands.

How Brands Survived Covid-19 By Building Communities?

Let me ask you, what was the one thing that you craved the most during the lockdown?

Most of you would answer: meeting with friends for lunch, going out on Sunday brunch with family, or going out to movies with friends and family.

Well, most of these activities can be performed at home, you can cook a luscious meal and have it for brunch or check out your favorite movies on various entertainment platforms. What you or even I actually missed was a social connection with an actual human being.

The same happened with brands and businesses too. Customers started to miss and were wanting to know what their brands would do to build the connection in the era of social distancing.

This is when businesses turned to social media, forums, and other platforms to build a community of their loyal customers. Even the CEOs of various companies actively participated in sharing content with their customers and followers that would engage them in conversations.

For example, Soko Glam founder Charlotte Cho tells her Instagram followers about her favorite Korean dramas to start a conversation with her target audience. Charlotte used this new normal as an opportunity to humanize the voice of her brand and return home with a strong bond.

Another example that I can think of is Gymshark. To survive their business in 2020 and keep their loyal customer base intact, they decided to start a new trend known as Workout From Home (#WOFH). The brand did consumer research and tried to anticipate behaviors that will prevail as long-term trends.

In their research, they got to know that gym closures have compelled people to find new ways to exercise, and this is the change they people were looking for from their favorite brands too.

And since this method is quite rewarding for store owners, merchants consider it quite seriously.

Hence, to engage their fitness community, they started hiring trainers for sharing virtual fitness classes through their application. This helped the audience from the fitness world to explore new ways of keeping fit in the time of coronavirus.

Brands have approached community building not only as a successful marketing technique to gain valuable insights but also used it to survive their businesses from the worst times. Brands spend the bulk of their time building strong relationships with their customers and brand communities can be of great help.

Community building is like building a channel that allows you to humanize your brand and connect with people that include not only customers but also people who love what you do.

Okay now that you know how communities play an important role in giving life to your brand, let’s see how some of the brands are doing it and what can you learn from them.

Examples Of Successful Communities And Takeaways

Various brands have used communities for building an unbreakable bond with their audience. They have used it for resolving shoppers’ issues and keeping them engaged in conversations. Here are some examples that have used branded communities perfectly and we’ll see what we can learn from them.

1. Apple

Apple is one of the biggest sellers of electronic gadgets in the world and there’s a lot we can learn from the marketing success of Apple.

Apart from serving the best quality to its customers, what we can learn from them is providing innovation and support. The Apple community is known for giving peer-to-peer support and providing a platform where customers can hang out and share their experiences.

Maybe this is the reason that Apple’s customers carry their Macbooks and iPhones as a part of their identities today.

Takeaway

Apple uses its community for boosting customers’ success stories by giving them a space for sharing their feedback, self-service support, and spreading knowledge with other apple fans.

The Apple community runs on the fuel of engagement and boosts the platform using user-generated content. They also reward and gamification to encourage constructive participation from the members.

2. Lego

Feeling nostalgic already?

Lego, the Danish toy manufacturing giant has been very helpful to parents when they had a hard time getting their children away from the screen. It is a household name that is known all over the world for movies, video games, and Lego amusement parks.

Now the brand is also known for its community known as Lego Ideas. The forum was originally started in 2008 in collaboration with a Japanese website and since then it has grown as a platform for the ideation of the brand’s product.

Takeaway

Understand the ideology behind the Lego Ideas community. It is to give the customers and the fans of the brand a platform to contribute to the product development process.

The Lego Ideas community gives the customer where they can speak their ideas and share with the brand what they actually want to buy.

As a business, you can also use communities for getting valuable information from your target audience and cater to their needs.

3. Airbnb

Airbnb was started by two roommates back in 2007 and now it has grown into a multi-billion-dollar company. Since then, it has emerged as the leader of the global accommodation market.

One of the prominent reasons behind its growth is its online community platform. Airbnb’s Community Center is a platform where the hosts share tips and tricks, and connect with each other to organize local gatherings.

Takeaway

Travel is a topic that everyone loves to talk about and the world has become more accessible with businesses like Airbnb that provide affordable stays.

The Airbnb Community Center uses the love of travel and through their platform, they allow people to build relationships, learn about each other’s culture, and become better hosts.

4. HubSpot

For those who don’t know, HubSpot is a CRM platform that is powerful and easy to use. It lets you create an exclusive and delightful experience for your customers for lead generation.

HubSpot has a community that is made up of individuals who are interested in learning marketing, HubSpot users, and even agency partners. In fact, it is a platform where the participants can connect with each other and share best practices, ask questions, or simply share their love for inbound marketing.

Connect with me on the HubSpot community and let's talk inbound marketing together-

Takeaway

The one thing that I love about the HubSpot Community is that it has different boards where participants discuss various topics. For example, it has a Developers board where coders and software developers across the world can share ideas, ask questions, and post their problems.

This is great that helps participants and even me sharpen their knowledge on the concepts of CRM development. The second thing that I love about the community is the active participation of the moderators, community managers, and HubSpot staff in the community.

5. MakeWebBetter

MakeWebBetter is an eCommerce development agency that helps business owners in getting their business online. They help businesses in starting their online journey with WordPress and WooCommerce.

Apart from this their experts develop solutions that help businesses with marketing automation, boost sales, customer retention, and generate leads.

MakeWebBetter has recently launched its community where people can discuss topics like:

• WooCommerce
• WordPress
• WordPress/WooCommerce plugins. Example- Events Ticket Manager for WooCommerce
• Digital marketing
• Marketing automation and integration
• Dropshipping

The community is an exclusive forum for people to intercommunicate their idea of online selling and tell tips and tricks to boost profits.

Takeaway

The MakeWebBetter forum is a platform where participants are allowed to share all their queries and knowledge related to WordPress and WooCommerce. Even the customers can share the problems to get instant solutions from the support team.

Not only this, the community has an exclusive forum called Self-Promote where the people can promote their services and products. The community is actively managed and moderated by the Keymasters and Moderators.

6. Harley Davidson

For centuries, Harley Davidson has been the first choice for motorcycle lovers and has been ruling as the world’s best motorcycle company. Harley Davidson spawners come from both formal and informal backgrounds in hundreds of countries and territories.

The brand soon realized its popularity and immense love of the motorcycle among its customers and launched the Harley Owners Club popularly known as the HOG.

Harley Davidson used the HOG community for bringing the motorcycle fans together and organizing events and meetups to share the love of riding a Harley Davidson motorcycle.

Takeaway

Harley Owners Group has emerged as one of the most recognized and cherished motoring communities on the internet. The reason behind the success of the community is they reinforce the identity of their fans across the globe.

The Harley Davidson community provides exclusive benefits to each of its members such as access to exclusive events and additional services such as roadside assistance. The combined efforts of the brand help Harley owners to get more out of their motorcycles and in return, the business gets a huge loyal customer base.

So these were only some of the brands that use branded communities as an integral part of their marketing efforts to increase the reach of their brand among their target market.

Communities have given businesses the ability to use and channelize the power of user-generated content to draw people’s attention. In fact, I see it as a perfect medium to consolidate the various aspects of a brand into a single space.

Moving on let’s see what it takes to build a community of your beloved brand followers. I’ll be sharing some tips and steps that you can follow to build a space to interact with the customers of your brand.

Tips For Building A Successful Community

As I said earlier, there are already people that love your brand and cherish your products and services, what you have to do is rally them into a single space.

Before I begin, let me tell you creating a branded community can be done in many different ways and there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy. Therefore, I’ll be taking you through all the necessary steps to help you determine the best approach to building a community.

1. Establish A Brand Definition

For building a community around your brand, you first need to know what your brand is. Who is your target audience and what do you sell? In short, you first have to establish the appropriate definition of your brand.

For defining your brand just answer the following questions:

• What does your brand do?
• Who you are going to help with your products and services?
• What is that one thing that your brand should be known for?

For example, MakeWebBetter is an eCommerce development company that builds solutions for businesses and entrepreneurs who are on the journey of making their own way on the internet. Our goal is to help them and make online selling a softball for these businesses.

2. Choosing The Right Platform

Interaction with your customers can be done on many platforms therefore, you have to carefully choose the right platform.

I’ll be covering some of the popular platforms that various brands use for building their communities.

Forums

A forum is an exclusive space where people of similar interests connect with each other and share their knowledge on specific topics.

For example, the music streaming giant Spotify has a forum called the Spotify’s community that works perfectly for them.

Participants of the Spotify community talk about the music they love hearing and share new artists. If you have a massive audience like Spotify, you can use forums for building a branded community. It will help you cultivate conversations around your industry and build a habitat exclusively for your brand.

Social Media

You can create and manage your community from social media platforms as well. This can be done in two ways:

• Engaging your audience through your official social media pages
• Forming separate groups.

Pro Tip- Use a good design resource like BestDesign2Hub to get your hands on a compelling logo and campaign assets.

For social media, we’ll be taking the example of Ring Concierge. The brand uses a Business Instagram account for managing the community which is run by a woman who’s the founder of the brand.

The specialty of this Instagram page is that the manager is very transparent and very hands-on in what she posts through the account.

Nicole uses the page appropriately for communicating with her audience via Q&As and engaging the followers by asking them to vote on potential products. She also regularly shares the latest product launches to keep the followers updated with what going on in Ring Concierge.

The second method is as I mentioned before is creating Facebook or LinkedIn groups which are much easier to manage and can be successful avenues for managing the participants. For example, WooCommerce Help & Share is a place where you can share anything related to WooCommerce products and offerings.

Reward Programs

So this is one of my personnel favorites. Reward programs help you not only build a community of loyal customers but bring sales to your business.

You can build a reward program that revolves around your most loyal customers and give them exclusive perks. Starbucks is the best example that uses this approach for managing and building a branded community.

Each time a member places an order through the Starbucks app, her or she is provided a reward point that adds to the perks. This means you can enjoy your coffee with an extra shot of espresso or get a drink absolutely free.

Third-Party Platforms

You can also use third-party platforms for building your community and connecting like-minded people on these platforms. Examples can include platforms like Slack and Mobilize.

You can create channels or topics for your community where they can conduct conversations on specific subjects.

3. Perform Regular Engagement

The last and most important thing for a successful community is engagement. Just increasing the number of members is of no good if the participants are spontaneous for doing interactions.

This spontaneity can only be achieved if you as a community manager take the initiative. You’ve to give your audience a reason to interact with. You can begin by responding to any or all questions, creating posts for discussions, or encouraging conversation by posting a new thread.

Start Engaging With Your Customers Now

With this, we come to the end of our post. I hope I was able to help you understand how communities add soul to a brand and humanize a business for the customers.

Communities are great if you want to foster brand loyalty or build the most valuable and honest source of feedback for your business. A branded community lets you make your customers engage with your business and make them feel that their opinions matter the most in the success of your business.

So are you ready to build a community of your own brand?