Brand Community Defined: How to Build a Brand Community

A brand community is a group of people who regularly interact with a brand’s content, services, and products. Online brand communities often transition into the offline world, with customers sharing why they love the brand by word-of-mouth to friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances. Fostering a brand community means rewarding customer loyalty with increased access to all a brand can offer.

Brand communities serve as the most loyal customer base for a given company. Here are three benefits to building your own brand community:

1. 1. Built-in advertising: The better you treat your brand community, the more likely they are to share information, promotional material, and positive reviews about your products and services for free. Plenty of companies already do their best to treat loyal customers well out of a sense of moral responsibility but doing so also serves as an effective business strategy. Happy customers become zealous brand advocates, meaning they can bring new customers to your company.
2. 2. Customer retention: Organize your marketing strategy to bring in new customers and reward those most loyal to your brand. Engage with your brand community often through social media, set up a brand loyalty program to treat them to perks, and seek out their feedback directly. This will lead to long-term customer loyalty and customer retention.
3. 3. Firmer brand identity: Your brand community will help you expand upon and solidify your brand identity. In a company’s early phases, defining your brand and increasing brand awareness serve as core initiatives. After a period of social media marketing and similar strategies to bring in customers, you can turn to your new brand followers to see what works for them and what doesn’t about your company’s overall ethos.

Building a brand community takes a lot of hard work, but it will be rewarding for both you and your customer base. Keep these seven tips in mind as you engage with your followers:

1. 1. Allow for direct feedback. Your brand community also serves as your target audience in most cases, so it’s important to solicit as much direct feedback you can from them about their brand experience with your company. Ask them how you can optimize your content to appeal to them and other people like them. After gaining this feedback, recalibrate internal metrics about what constitutes brand success.
2. 2. Define your brand identity. A strong brand community platform will help you further define your brand identity, but your company needs a strong sense of self-awareness to attract a loyal brand community in the first place. A brand tailored to gamers will require different messaging and marketing strategies than one tailored to motorcycle enthusiasts. By defining your brand identity, you help pull in a brand community that will further shape and flesh out that identity once they’ve become loyal customers.
3. 3. Encourage sharing. Incentivize both old and new customers to share information about your brand on social media. Encourage them to make user-generated content as amateur brand ambassadors. Look at other examples of brand communities across the internet to see how they work hand in hand with their customers to increase referrals to other people in their social networks.
4. 4. Engage on social media. Successful brand community engagement means knowing your way around all relevant social media platforms. Hashtags, influencer marketing, and online social interactions facilitate emotional connections between your brand community and what you have to offer, whether you’re an e-commerce company or a brick-and-mortar business.
5. 5. Release regular content. Brand community members should receive a steady stream of content from your company. This is one of the main ways you take a disparate customer base and transform the individual members into a community. Once a wide swath of loyal consumers begins regularly interacting with your digital marketing efforts, they become the foundation of what will soon become a growing brand community.
6. 6. Set up a rewards program. Building a rewarding affiliate program helps pave the way for a great brand community. Rewards programs provide a concrete incentive for customers to continually purchase your brand’s products and services. It also helps turn potential customers into loyal brand ambassadors—once they see how well your brand treats them for their interest and support, they’ll likely want to share that with plenty of their own distinct social connections.
7. 7. Treat your customers to perks. Your most loyal customers should feel they have a relationship with your company that goes far beyond the transactional. Treat community members to readily accessible customer support, early exposure to new products, pricing discounts, and other perks to reward their devotion to your brand. Offer perks for new customers, too—for example, a SaaS (software as a service) company could offer one month free to both a current customer and a new customer whom they help to subscribe.

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