Community Marketing: What It Is and Why Your Brand Needs It

In a continuously evolving digital world, customers are increasingly proving their power and influence over brands and businesses. Gone are the days when the relationship between companies and customers is done and gone after paying for products and services.

Today, successful brands and businesses build and nurture relationships with their existing customer base. Why? Because customers no longer want to be seen as only buyers, numbers, and sales by brands they do business with. They’re much more informed than that now.

As a response, various brands and companies have launched new and innovative marketing campaigns and strategies to keep their customers satisfied and driven to stay loyal to their brand.

One of these marketing efforts is through community marketing.

Here, we will take you through a detailed guide on what exactly community marketing is, how you can go about implementing it in your business, and why your business needs it in today’s industry standards.

First, What is Community?

In the business world, a community is a space and shared environment where customers, clients, and other audiences share opinions, interests, and values. When people share something in common, they build meaningful relationships and human connections. Communities allow people to feel like they belong to something.

Communities can be online or offline communities. They can exist on the internet, on social media platforms, or in physical and offline events.

Brand communities are where customers, audiences, supporters, and the brand itself come together to share their interests and opinions. Brand communities help foster connections and relationships between the brand and its audience.

What Is Community Marketing?

Community marketing has become an integral part of many successful brands and businesses. So what exactly is it?

Community marketing is a marketing strategy whose main goal is to build a connection between the brand and a specific community of your customers and target audience. This community shares values and beliefs with the brand, creating a common base to bridge gaps and build relationships.

Community marketing campaigns aim to create and maintain two-way relationships between a business and its customers and audience. Remember, you are creating a sort of bond with your customers, instead of only pushing products to sell.

Relationship-building is at the center of all community marketing campaigns. Selling the products and services your business offers only comes second.

How Does Community Marketing Work?

Community marketing, at its core, is relationship building.

With community marketing campaigns, you build relationships with your customers and audiences by finding common values, beliefs, and traditions. This creates connection and communication.

This also gives your audience a sense of belonging with like-minded people who value what they value.

Community marketing works because customers are more likely to buy into the products and services a brand offers when they feel there is a sense of connection and that the brand doesn’t just see them as numbers of sales.

The Importance of Community Marketing

With so many marketing efforts and strategies available in so many business industries, why do brands have to pay close attention to community marketing?

Here are all the benefits your business can enjoy if you strategize and implement an effective community marketing campaign:

Better Customer Experience

Building meaningful relationships and building gaps between your brand and your customer base will provide a better customer experience. As we’ve established above, your customers and what they have to say about your brand now have more power and influence than ever over businesses.

Customers can freely give feedback on their experience with the service and product in brand communities. This means businesses cannot simply ignore these reviews. Instead, they have to respond and do what’s necessary to address concerns.

Brand and Customer Humanization

Community marketing humanizes brands which in turn makes them authentic in the eyes of customers. Building relationships with your audience requires human connection; and when audiences feel this connection, they see your brand as human and one with personality.

At the same time, community marketing will give customers a voice and platform within the brand. This will encourage businesses to see their customers for what they are: humans, instead of just sales and numbers.

Increased Brand Awareness

When there is an established relationship and communication between the brand and its customers, there is also an increase in brand awareness and in the overall brand identity.

Existing customers who have experienced good things with a brand are more likely to recommend the same brand to friends and family. Here, word-of-mouth marketing comes into play. This will help your community grow organically.

Increased Customer Retention, Trust, and Loyalty

Customers with satisfying experiences with a brand are more likely to trust and stay loyal to the brand. This is how customers transform from simple buyers to brand advocates. Where there is trust and loyalty, there is also an increase in customer retention.

Reduced Marketing and Advertising Costs

As we’ve listed above, community marketing can increase brand awareness and customer retention. Loyal customers are also more likely to recommend brands they trust to friends and family.

This will help get your business’s name out there and even increase sales while lessening dependence on paid marketing and advertising efforts. This reduced dependency on paid advertising can result in reduced costs as well.

Sell Directly to Your Community

By building a close-knit community of your customers, you are also building a targeted audience where you can directly sell products and services without shelling out on new advertising campaigns.

Long-Term Sustainability

All the benefits of community marketing can lead to one big advantage for many brands and businesses: sustainability in the long run. A successful community marketing campaign will help your business stay at the top of its game.

Are There Downsides to Community Marketing?

It’s important to remember that while community marketing is an effective strategy for businesses, it might take time to reap the benefits. An effective community marketing strategy is long-term. Don’t expect immediate results once you implement your plan.

And because it will usually take a long time to see results, community marketing requires high commitment and patience. Brands would need to invest in building positive communication and relationships with their audience to see results.

Effective Community Marketing Strategies and Tactics

Now that we’ve got the basics of what community marketing is and how exactly it can benefit businesses, let’s dive deep into how you can strategize and implement an effective campaign for your brand:

1. Find Your Audience

First things first, identify your target audience and find where they hang out. This will be your niche. Dive into your past, present, and future target audience and find out what interests them and where they are.

Go into social media platforms, forums, and even physical events to know more about your audience. Listen to what they have to say because this will help you lay out the rest of your plan. From there, you will have a clearer picture of what they care about and where you should swoop in with the target relationship building.

2. Build Relationships and Engage With Your Community

Next, plan strategies and tactics on how you can bridge the gap between your brand and your customers. Reach out to existing and potential customers and engage in conversation and discussions. This is the start of a fruitful relationship that will benefit all parties involved.

Tap into partnering with influencers as well. Influencers relevant to your brand and those with big followings have the power to influence their audience. That’s one way to get your brand in front of their audience.

3. Sponsor And/or Host Events

Sponsoring or hosting events is a great way to show an audience that your brand has similar values, beliefs, and interests. Moreover, physical events allow brands to communicate with an audience face-to-face, instead of on the small screens of our phones.

Events will also increase your brand’s visibility in your local community if that’s something your business values.

4. Create Content

Part of engaging with your community is to consistently create and publish content. But it shouldn’t be just any content for the sake of publishing content.

Content should be meaningful, worthwhile, and personalized for your audience. This further increases the sense of connection and belonging between your brand and your audience.

Measuring the Success of Community Marketing Campaigns

Unlike other marketing efforts, measuring the success or failure of community marketing efforts has proven to be more difficult. Why? Because unlike sales and transactions, there really is no quantitative approach to measuring the success of community marketing campaigns.

But like most marketing efforts, marketers and businesses must establish the key metrics that will tell them whether their efforts have been worth their time and effort or not.

It might vary from one brand to another brand and from one community marketing campaign to another but here are a few factors you might want to consider:

Community Growth

The true focus of community marketing campaigns is not sales and numbers. It’s about fostering connection and building long-term relationships with your customers, audience, and community members.

With that said, look into your community and whether or not it has grown in numbers. Are your customers converting to brand advocates? Are they referring other people and bringing in new customers to your brand?

Engagement

One surefire way to get your community marketing efforts up and running is to engage with your community. Along with that line, keep an eye out for key engagement metrics in community posts and content.

Look at the likes, interactions, comments, and shares of community and brand posts. Are community members engaging with your content? Does your content start meaningful conversations and discussions surrounding your brand?

Sales and Conversions

Although we’ve mentioned again and again that relationship-building should be at the center of all community marketing efforts, marketers and businesses still shouldn’t ignore the sales and conversion metrics in measuring the success of a campaign.

Is your audience fully converting to customers and adding sales to your business?

An increase or decrease in sales can very well tell you how well your community marketing campaign (and other marketing efforts) are doing.

Get Inspired: Some Real-Life Examples of the Community Marketing Best Practices

Now that we’ve got the what, why, and how of community marketing, let’s examine a few real-life examples of effective community marketing and why they work.

Lego

Lego launched its community platform, called Lego Ideas, in 2014. In this online platform, community members can share ideas on new products and even share pictures of their own creations onto the platform. Other community members are free to comment and vote on creations and ideas.

The page features member-submitted Lego ideas and creations and challenges that keep community members engaged and in conversation not only with the brand but with other community members as well.

TOMS

TOMS

TOMS has centered its community on the premise that when you buy a pair of shoes from the brand, you are helping make a social impact on three focus areas: mental health, access to opportunity, and ending gun violence. They also include social efforts on sustainability, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism.

The brand makes it a point to tell customers that a third of its profits go to cash grants and partnerships with community organizations that spearhead sustainable change.

This kind of community marketing effort makes your customers feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves, that they’re doing more than buying a new pair of shoes – which they are. It also creates relationships between entities (brands and customers) that share and honor the same values.

Adidas

Adidas Creator’s Club

Adidas launched its exclusive and member-only community called the Adidas Creator’s Club. This community focuses on exclusivity, with rewards and programs exclusive to customers who signed up to become members.

Adidas exclusives include member-only product launches, vouchers, discounts, priority services, exclusive events, and limited-edition shoes and apparel.

This reward system community program fosters customer loyalty by giving member-only and exclusive rewards. Members can also share photos and stories which other community members can interact with, creating a sense of community and belongingness.

Conclusion: Start Your Brand’s Community Marketing Campaign

It has been proven time and again the importance of customers to many brands and businesses in various industries. Not only do they make up sales and conversions to keep businesses going but they also prove themselves to be essential factors in the success of a business.

Customers value brands that value them instead of only seeing them as sales, transactions, and numbers on sheets. Customers and audiences want to be seen as what they are – as persons.

Because of this, brands and businesses have taken up special interest in what is called community marketing. Unlike other marketing efforts whose main goal is to sell products and services, community marketing focuses on building connections, bonds, and relationships between the brand and its customers.

It emphasizes the importance of building a community of people who share the same values, creating a sense of belonging with like-minded people.