Whether a business is just starting out or they’ve been around for a while, creating a community is key. A business needs to establish a community to truly thrive and be sure that customers will return. The idea of “build it and they will come” is one of the past. Competition between businesses is higher than ever before This means adapting to new ways of creating meaningful and lasting relationships with consumers. The process of marketing a product or service to a target audience isn’t as simple as many people think. Although making a few sales may seem easy, keeping an audience happy and engaged is very complex.
What is Community?
Community essentially means a loyal group of customers that feels a connection with a brand. This loyalty can drive sales and help a business achieve consistent growth. A community can take years to build, but once it is large enough, it can generate substantial revenue for a brand. Therefore, it is essential that businesses of all ages focus on building one.
Consumers that become part of a brand community are more likely to make purchases, engage with online content shared by the brand and recommend the business to others.
What a Community Isn’t
Although a business may have a substantial number of sales under its belt, this doesn’t mean it has a community. Community isn’t defined by sales, but instead by the number of people that follow a brand, engage consistently and make repeat purchases.
Finding Your Community
Often, a brand’s community will already exist, the challenge comes in finding it. Social media pages are paramount to building an online brand community. A business should first start with creating these if they have not done so already.
For businesses that already have social media pages with some followers, the goal should be to nourish these followers. This means creating engaging content and encouraging them to interact with it. For businesses that are new to social media, the initial goal should be making their target audience aware of their new pages. This may mean reaching out to existing customers are asking them to follow, share, or like a page.
Building a community can rely strongly on a brand’s identity or voice. This means this should be defined before focusing efforts on community building. A business should create a “personality” that followers can relate to and want to engage with. Asking questions such as, “how can the brand help people?”, “what is the brand’s vision or mission?” and “what are the brand’s principles?”, can be a good starting point.
Once a brand establishes its identity, it can begin building a community that will benefit its members. A community must be useful to its members, which means that content posted should be relevant and informative. Using analytics, a brand can analyze engagement surrounding the content it posts and discover the type of content that works best for them.
Benefits of Building a Community
Aside from having a loyal group of customers that will increase sales and engagements, there are other benefits. These include:
Collecting feedback to improve services and operations.
Testing new products on an audience that they will appeal to.
The ability to conduct very useful market research.
A platform that allows a company to learn about its target customer in greater detail.
What’s Next?
Creating a brand community can be useful in many ways. It can be an invaluable asset to businesses in all industries. Businesses should build a community and nourish it by creating engaging content and ensuring it interacts with its followers regularly.
Building a community can take time. Many businesses can find branding and community building difficult. Contact Fifth & Cor today for information on how we can help.