Building Brand Community – a key business strategy

1. Define your brand

If you want to build a community around your brand, you need to know what your brand is. This goes beyond what your business sells or offers.

This involves your mission, company vision, brand voice, and personality. What is your brand trying to do? Who is it trying to help? What does it want to be known for?

All of these are important to define before building a community. Because the more you showcase what your brand is all about, the more you’ll attract the target audience you’re looking for.

2. Define your brand goal and metrics

As I mentioned earlier, brand communities are a way for you to make customer-driven decisions and spread the word about your business. But you should ask yourself a lot of questions before creating a brand community.

These are just a few sample questions you should ask to guide you in the right direction when developing a strategy for your brand community.

• Ultimately, what’s the purpose behind the community?
• Are you helping people get answers to questions about your product? Or about their profession?
• What are you doing for your community members to stay engaged?
• How are you measuring the success of your brand community?
• What metrics do you want to track? Lead generations? Conversions?
• How will your brand community goals help with your company goals? For example, how will a brand community help marketing, support, sales?

Once you set these goals and metrics, the next two steps will be easier to handle.

3. Choose your online platform.

While some brand communities come in the form of Facebook groups, yours doesn’t have to be. First and foremost, consider where your audience is already spending their time so you can meet them there.

Popular brand community examples include:

Loyalty programs

Loyalty programs are built for the purpose of encouraging customers to keep on doing business with you.

Starbucks, for example, has a rewards program with nearly 20 million members. This coffeehouse chain rewards its loyal customers by giving away stars at every purchase. As these stars add up, they can then be used to redeem free food and drinks! With this brand community, customers are able to enjoy their favorite coffee brand while also saving money down the road.

Forums

Your brand community could also be in the form of a forum or a discussion board. In addition, forums are beneficial for brands with a massive audience. Here’s an idea: If your business is in a broader niche, like fitness in general, for example, you can categorize your forum into more specific topics.

Spotify has created Spotify Community, a place where its audience can discuss music and podcasts, as well as get customer service support. Spotify takes also keeps its users in the loop by mentioning how many conversations took place, questions were answered, and new ideas were generated in the previous week. 

Social media

There are two different ways you can manage your community on social media – by engaging through your platform or by creating a social media group.

A lot of brands today have their social media handles and most times keep commoning up with post ideas that are either not in sync with their brand or too commercial. The idea is to build association and fans to interact and engage. You don’t want appreciation you need engagement. Using social media you can build a community where fans can share their ideas, their feelings, and associations with your brand.

For example,

Use groups to build your community on Facebook

Hashtags

Branded or campaign hashtags can form communities, aside from amplifying the reach of your content. Specific hashtags are great for building private communities (exclusive to your business) and making sure that all content shared using a specific hashtag is relevant.

A popular example of effective brand community building using hashtags is,

#justdoit (Nike) 

Nike has always been a visionary brand when it comes to creating a brand-associated lifestyle and a sense of community among fans. They approach the community hashtag as the most important of their hashtags. They almost always use the hashtag #justdoit or #nikewomen, as opposed to brand or product focussed hashtags.

► Pro Tip:

• • Be original. It should not look like a rip-off of your competitor’s campaign.
  • It should be precise and easy to understand
  • Don’t combine more than 3-4 words together
  • Try to write it in the title case to make it easy to understand
  • Don’t make your hashtag entirely about your brand. It should be about the user’s experience with your brand.
  • Don’t come up with a hashtag that your audience would resist using
  • Don’t sound demeaning, offensive, or self-promotional
  • Use trending topics, but don’t solely rely on them

Third-party platforms

Many times, brands choose to use third-party platforms to help them facilitate a community.

Options for this include sites like Slack and Mobilize, where you can create various channels/topics for your community members to check out and start conversations in.

► Pro Tip: 

After you’ve built your brand community, make sure that it’s easily accessible. Mention it from your other channels like your blog (write a blog post), your podcast, emails, and social media posts. In fact, link to it from your website footer to boost its visibility.

4. Create community guidelines.

Guidelines are imperative for any community. They let members know how they’re expected to behave in a way that maintains respect and peace within the group. Your guidelines can include things like:

• The goals of your brand community
• Tips on how to treat and respond to other community members
• Which actions will result in a ban (such as violent comments or discrimination)
• The kind of posts that will be removed or unapproved because they go against your guidelines
• Your review and approval process

Establishing guidelines in place helps you build a strong community where members feel a true sense of belongingness.

5. Keep the engagement going.

Last but not least, the best way to maintain a community is to engage with it. Luckily, there are many ways to maintain engagement, such as:

• Posting photo quotes that inspire and motivate
• Telling personal and brand stories that connect
• Showcase your process
• Let your employees at all levels take pride in being a part of your community by posting ideas
• Posting surveys or polls
• Responding to your members’ questions

It’s nearly impossible to serve your group well without getting outside help, especially if your group is growing fast. In that case, consider hiring someone who has the skill and experience to interact with people, is flexible, and unbiased.