The shifting technological landscape has brought about a major change in how, not just major businesses, but also small businesses, try to connect with their customers.
Thrown out is be the belief that the company or brand needs to be a faceless being, and in with the humanizing of companies and brands. It is this humanizing that helps make the brand/company and their product popular with the masses.
This type of marketing builds a community around the product or service and if you are a business owner, here is how you do it.
Be mission-driven
As a brand, your first aim is, of course, to attract customers who enjoy and want your product. However, if you want to build a core community around your product or service, you need to attract like-minded people.
So, have a grand mission or purpose for your company. This grand mission, which should be in line with the company values, will attract people who share a similar value and who see your product/service as a way for them also fulfilling their mission.
So embrace a social cause beyond business and see how this will help build a community around your brand
Connecting on the right platform
Communities right now are emerging online and then shifting offline and as a brand, you want to build a community on the social media where you are strongest.
So, to build a community, consider what medium your audience prefers and how they like it. If you get more engagements on Twitter than anywhere else, focus on starting the community building from there before shifting to other platforms.
Get the community engaging beyond you
You might have created the community but to ensure that the community grows, create opportunities for the people in these communities to initiate conversations on their own.
For example, if you run a Facebook Business Page group, encourage the people in the community to keep conversing by providing endless value for them. As a business, you want the community to feel heard and thus, continue being loyal customers. This engagement could also help improve the feedback you get.
Host events
Once you have built a substantial online community, you can then take the community to the outdoors by hosting events. You could choose to host events aligned to your mission, like volunteer work, or have events where people come to interact and have a good time.
However, you should only do this if most of your online community is in agreement with it. don’t plan an event before you know how your online community will respond to it.
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