How to Build a Strong Brand Community

Building a strong brand community is now a primary goal for most companies. A brand community doesn’t just foster loyalty, it builds strong relationships and creates meaningful connections that increase engagement and shared experiences.

In many cases, brand communities already exist and are just waiting for companies to engage with them. Take LEGO, for example.

Customers have been avidly building with the brand’s products for years, but the company engaged with its community by creating a platform where they can submit design ideas for new LEGO sets. Popular submissions are turned into products, with the creators receiving royalties, and the initiative has led to vast amounts of user-generated content, deep engagement, and loyalty.

Apple, Sephora, and Nike have also done great jobs fostering brand communities.

But how can your brand build a strong community? Let’s dig in.

What Is a Brand Community?

Building a brand community can and should be a part of a company’s brand strategy, as it brings together the people most excited about and engaged with your brand. In practical terms, once they are part of your brand community, consumers are much easier to reach and don’t require advertising to communicate with.

A brand community brings together people who form relationships and connections around their engagement with your brand. Whether it’s emotional ties to your products and services, a sense of identity, or shared values, the community fosters engagement both among customers and with your brand. They might interact on social media, in message groups, or even out in the world outside of the online space.

What Is a Brand Strategy?

A brand strategy is vital in today’s marketing landscape. It can be a key component of differentiating a brand from its competitors, establishing and strengthening its identity, and connecting with its audience.

Consistent messaging is key to any brand strategy and helps a business achieve its goals of raising awareness, fostering customer loyalty, and differentiation from competitors. 

There are a few components that generally make up a brand strategy:

• Defining a brand’s purpose and values: This establishes what a brand stands for, why it exists, and its core values.
• Defining a brand’s target audience: What specific demographics is a brand aiming to connect with, and what resonates with them?
• Voice, messaging, and visual identity: Consistent with language, tone, color palettes, and design guidelines.
• Positioning in the market: Establishing a brand’s value proposition and its competitive advantages in the market.

Why Is a Brand Community Important?

Building a brand community fosters loyalty among devoted customers, allowing them to interact meaningfully with products and services. 

That can lead to advocacy for your brand among the community, as well as a rise in user-generated content. Sometimes, members of a brand community can feel as much like ambassadors as customers when they share their love for a company and its products with friends, family and followers.

Here are a few key benefits to building a strong brand community:

• Enhanced customer loyalty: The emotional connections that form in a brand community make consumers more inclined to make repeat purchases. Remember that around 60% of a company’s revenue comes from 8% of its most loyal customers.
• Word-of-mouth marketing: A Statista survey found that 52% of customers show loyalty by recommending a brand to family and friends. People who are part of a brand community aren’t just engaging with products themselves; they often feel compelled to share their love with others, and that word-of-mouth can be invaluable for brands.
• Strengthened brand identity: A brand community can reinforce a brand's values. When a brand's identity resonates with people who identify as members of its community, it can create lasting emotional connections.
• Gaining insight: Brands that engage with the communities they help foster can gain valuable feedback to improve their products and marketing strategies.

How to Build a Strong Brand Community

Creating a brand community isn’t just about interactions between the brand and its customers. It’s also about fostering an environment where everyone involved can connect and share their passions and experiences.

1. Define Your Brand

By defining your brand, you create a shared purpose that will attract new people and help create a community that feels like an organic extension of your brand. It’s important for a number of key reasons:

• Define your brand’s mission and purpose: Brand communities don’t just form because customers like a company’s products; they form around the company's core values. Defining your brand’s mission and what it stands for gives your community something to connect with and share.
• Establish a clear brand identity: This is what people will connect with and is often the foundation around which a brand community is formed. Your brand identity communicates your values and can attract those whose principles align with yours.
• Differentiate your community: Your brand's identity separates it from its competition. Highlighting what makes your brand and its values unique will resonate with your brand community.‍

2. Define Your Brand Goals & Metrics

Setting clear objectives for increasing member engagement or growing your membership is an important step in building a brand community for several reasons:

• Clear purpose and directions: Having clear goals helps align efforts within a brand community with broader business objectives. That, in turn, can resonate with community members who are actively rooting for a brand’s success because they align with its mission.
• Measure success: Metrics allow brands to determine whether their efforts are working. Are the efforts being put into the brand community leading to customer retention and brand advocacy? Having the right metrics in place provides the answers.
• Drive member engagement: Tracking engagement through online discussions and user-generated content, as examples, helps brands understand what is working in their community. 

3. Choose a Community Platform

The right platform must be chosen to build your brand community. It’s where members are going to connect and form meaningful relationships with both your brand and each other. Here are a few key ways that choosing the right platform can enhance your efforts to build a brand community:

• Facilitates content sharing: Whether it’s a Reddit community or a hashtag on a specific social media site, the right platform allows members to contribute their thoughts, engage with content, and share their own.
• Centralizes engagement: The platform you choose will act as a central hub for members to access brand updates and conversations and share their own content.
• Better accessibility: The demographics of your brand community are an important factor in determining the best platform. It is vital to choose a platform that aligns with both the preferences and tech-savviness of your community’s demographics.

4. Engage with Your Brand Community Regularly

Brands that engage with their community strengthen loyalty and drive advocacy while strengthening relationships. There are a few key reasons that this is so important:

• Building emotional connections: When brands engage with members of their community, they feel valued and connected. That drives customer loyalty.
• Encouraging advocacy: The more connected members of a brand community feel, the more they’ll share their positive experiences and even create content of their own that highlights the good work a brand is doing. 
• Provides valuable feedback: Interacting with a brand community can be insightful for brands, as it provides a real-time look into how customers feel about products, services, and the needs of those who engage with them.

Examples of Community Building Done Right

There are many brands out there doing community building the right way and adding their own unique twists. We mentioned LEGO at the beginning of this blog, but here are a few others.

• CAY Skin’s City Walks in NYC: Cay Skin is a suncare brand by Winnie Harlow. Their website prominently features videos from real people who use their products, with links back to their social media accounts. The brand also hosts regular City Girls Who Walk events, where members of their community meet up with representatives from the company and walk the streets of New York City together.
• Nami Matcha’s NYC Pop-Up: Nami Matcha’s products are mostly sold online, but earlier this fall, they hosted a pop-up in New York City that featured exclusive products and a meet-up with company founder Ashley Alexander.
• Harley Davidson Owners Group: The world-famous motorcycle company’s global community gets together for exclusive events and group rides and has access to exclusive branded merchandise, which creates a shared sense of lifestyle and loyalty.
• Park Distillery: When Park Distillery launched two new gins, it partnered with MODERNSPEAK to bring in nine content creators from Calgary and Edmonton, including sommeliers and liquor enthusiasts. The campaign saw followers eager to try out the new gins on their own and generated high-quality user-generated content from the community.

Find Your Brand Community with MODERNSPEAK

Working with an influencer management company like MODERNSPEAK is a great way of building a brand community. We work with influencers in many different niches who can connect your brand with the right followers ready to engage with your products, services, and content.

To find out how we can help you build your brand community, email us at hello@modernspeak.co or call us at 403-991-4988.