What good is having a great idea, attractive branding, and a well-built platform if no one knows about it? The truth is that a brand doesn’t make sense if it doesn’t reach anyone. To succeed, you need to have someone to communicate with and someone to sell to, meaning an audience, a target market, or potential customers. This is something we've already discussed on several occasions on our blog, which is why today we take another step to discover what a community around your brand is.
What is a brand community?
Having an audience is not the same as building a community around your brand. This is a very effective way of connecting with more public, promoting your brand recognition, improving loyalty and increasing sales.
But, what exactly is it and how is it different from the audience? A community is a group of people with the same interest who are connected to each other. Unlike the audience, in the community, as they are connected to each other, they relate to each other, while in the audience they are simply people who follow your brand, that is, you are the sender and your followers only interact with you.
With the community, the connections are much stronger. There is multidirectional communication where you interact with your followers, but they also interact with each other. In this way, as social beings that we are, feeling that we are part of a community makes us develop a sense of belonging to a group. This is why marketing leverages this human need to be part of something to share values, feelings and opinions with the audience to end up building a community. And the advantages of this are many:
- It builds trust with your brand and improves your brand’s reputation. A good community will enhance the image of your business. If your followers feel part of a group, they will develop an emotional connection with your brand. This will result in having a supportive and trusting group, leading to a better reputation. Additionally, it will generate more word-of-mouth, making your brand more well-known.
- Loyalty. Loyalty is one of the key elements for a company's success. By making your customers feel part of a community, they will develop a stronger attachment to your brand, which translates into higher revenues.
- Building brand advocates. Your loyal customers will also become brand advocates, acting as ambassadors who recommend your products and services to those around them.
- Lower costs. The previous point is directly related to this benefit: word-of-mouth advertising is very effective and economical since you don't have to spend anything because your customers are recommending you. By creating a strong community, you can reduce advertising expenses, as the members themselves will promote your brand indirectly.
- You will be a reference. If you manage to create a strong brand community, you position yourself as a reference within your sector, consolidating your market position and attracting more customers.
How to create a brand community
It is clear that the benefits of building a brand community are numerous, so now we will briefly outline the main steps to start bringing yours to life:
- Analysis. Be clear about what your brand values are, upon which your community will be built, as well as other important data such as the image you want to portray, the mission you follow, and where you want to go.
- Set objectives. To establish your objectives, you should first ask yourself what you want to achieve by building a brand community. Then, define the goals you want to achieve, which will later make it easier for you to measure whether your strategy is working or not.
- Know your audience. Obviously, if you don't know who your audience is, you'll hardly be able to address them correctly. To ultimately build a community around your brand, it's necessary to know what messages to convey, in what tone, and what content interests your audience. Therefore, find out what your target audience talks about, what motivates them, what their preferences are... This way, you can address them better.
- Create a content strategy:
- Use different channels. This way, you can reach more people and facilitate contact between them.
- Engage your followers. Make them feel part of the community; be active on social media by conducting surveys, contests, giveaways, live videos to interact with them, etc.
- Interact. Don't just let them interact with each other; your brand should be a part of this community relationship, so interact with the members, respond to their questions and comments to create a more familiar and, therefore, more lasting relationship.
- Monitoring. Finally, it's important to periodically analyze the results obtained to consider possible changes that allow you to improve.
At La Lonja de la Innovación, our team of mentors helps startups understand their target audience, create effective content and communication strategies, and build a brand community, among many other things. Remember that you too can be part of La Lonja through our acceleration program, open all year round.