How to Build a Community around Your Brand

 Most digital marketers always like to put their products/services where buyers can be found. Bringing people with similar interests to regularly interact with one another in a community is very smart digital business strategy.  Creating a community around your brand by deliberate efforts somehow helps such businesses to easily get traffic, leads and eventual sales. Since customers are more likely to be emotionally attached to a community rather than just a single product/service, building a community around a brand becomes a smart business marketing move. That is one sure way to have a stable and reliable sales-funnel at all times. Driving steady sales no doubt is good for any business that expects to thrive and thrive well no matter the competition. 


 
To create a community around your brand, you need to do these here 4 things.

#1. Create Online Meeting Space

Online, people rarely meet regularly unless there is a suitable meeting space. To create a community around your brand, you must carefully decide on this space where fans can meet and get together. In fact, you’ve got to provide things of value to encourage people to visit this space and very regularly too. If at first you are only able to start with a few select individuals of like minds, you can grow from there. Creating a centralized location for persons with similar interests and enthusiasm is a very smart thing to do. Online, with its gift of unlimited virtual space you have ample room to choose from such as forums, chatrooms, social media groups, and the like. What really counts is making the online space a worthwhile location for people to spend their time without feeling as if they are wasting it. With that, they get to build bonds and do business without much ado.

#2. Create a Takeway Benefit

Getting something for something is a natural human craving. The reason many people always ask what’s in it for me. You can explore a great way to bond a sense of identity that is so crucial to the community around your product/service by selling or giving away something of value for free.  As an alternative, you can offer them for sale on your site as well, something that provides interacting fans with the opportunity to show their affiliation to the community. You may decide to brand such items with your logo and other details and give them away as gift items to your best customers or giveaway winners.

#3. Build Superfans

Superfans are usually created organically, but it's also wise to take some action to help nurture them as well. When created, superfans become the most significant assets you can have when you create a community around your brand. Reason being that they are not only a near-guaranteed revenue stream, but they also act as good ambassadors who convince others to buy your products as well. You may choose to create a VIP mailing list with sneak peeks and special offers that only go to your most high volume customers. What you really need is any tactics that can help give some community members that feeling of importance and special treatment. One great way to garner very positive emotions around your brand! That alone quickly helps to turn people into superfans and very valuable business assets to boot. 

#4. Link to a Wider Community

You can link to a wider community even if offline when you get involved in social and humanitarian projects which may not necessarily be online. Deliberately do such things that are highly beneficial in promoting a sense of community particularly if they are very useful in humanizing your brand. There are many of such world-wide charitable and good causes such as Rotary International, the Red Cross, animal conservation, climate change, renewable energy or environmentalism. Be careful to select any one that is more local and really jells with the area in which your business is based.  Creating a community around these causes helps to create a very positive regard for your business, thus confirming to those that buy your products that you align with their views on the world. You must however choose these causes very carefully to be sure they align with and match well with your products/services and the working practices of your business too to avoid unwittingly hurting the community by way of reckless insensitivity.