If you are wanting to strengthen your brand, and enhance your awareness within your industry, you need to think about building your community.
But before this begins, you need to know what it is, why you should be building one and how you go about doing it.
What is a brand community?
A brand community is where all of your loyal followers are. These are the people who regularly see what you post, as well as share and talk about your products and services.
Why should you build a brand community?
Building a brand community is always a powerful thing. You will gain customer knowledge from your brand community, which will help you make decisions based on feedback.
You can then reward them directly, with discount codes, free products, or other services.
How do you build a brand community?
The first thing that needs to be thought about is what you want to achieve. This should include your goals, brand voice and unique personality.
Define your brand & goals
Getting others to ask you questions about your brand is always a good thing, and once you are able to answer these, it will help further define your tone of voice in the eyes of the consumer.
Now that you can define your brand and goals, it is time to think about what you should be used as your platform.
Choosing your platform
Social media
The most obvious one is social media. Whether it is engaging with users through creating a group, posting Q&As on stories, including a poll in reels, any of these are a good way to gain further knowledge about what your customers think or want.
You could also create specific hashtags, which will help users target and engage with your brand.
Forums
Forums can also be utilised, as they will generally target a larger and broader community online. Even though it may not be specifically about your brand, the community on forums generally talk about shared interests, which could be linked with your brand.
Reward Scheme
Giving back to your community is vital to keep people interested in you and what you offer. Creating some sort of reward scheme is a good way to do this, such as giving something away for free once they achieve X.
Referral scheme
A referral scheme is an additional marketing strategy, where existing customers benefit by getting other people to sign up.
Now that you have your brand community, you need to ensure that you are engaging with them. You need to give your community a reason to stay involved and connected.
Responding to questions they have, as well as creating new conversations with your community is another thing that should be done.
To summarise, building a brand community takes time and effort. However, every brand out there should be doing it, as it can be a hugely effective way to create loyalty within your brand, and increase sales.