3 Steps to build a community around your business
By: Midhun Areeckal
Tags: Startup, Digital Marketing, Business Strategy, Business Community, Community

Earlier advertising was the key to popularizing your brand and reaching out to customers. But, customers are always expecting something more from brands so as to create a sense of togetherness. With improved use of technology and outstanding online and offline features, community building around a brand is crucial for its sustainability.

Customers tend to actively engage with their interesting brands, share their user experience, and build a strong customer relationship. It’s important for businesses to have a strong community management team as it’s one of the major marketing strategies that organizations consider.

As an entrepreneur, effectively creating a customer base and gathering them to build a strong community could help your brand become easily recognized by people across the globe.

Consider the case of Hootsuite, three years from their establishment; they have reached a 3 million user base only with the help of building a strong community around their brand.

So, below are three crucial steps that you have to consider in order to build a community around your business.

Define Your Brand

It’s impossible for people to understand what your brand is offering unless you strongly define its purpose and the why factor to your audience!

Every brand has its own reason for existence; it’s not about squeezing in everyone, you have to set the brand image and define the things your brand values, and it doesn’t.

Because the members who are actively joining the community around your business must not be confused about what they should expect from engaging with you.

For example, Uber eats a renowned brand for food delivery, and Uber is the parent company focused on online car taxi services. As when a customer joins an Uber community, he/she must not be confused about whether the community would be engaging more about car trips or would it be discussing food recipes. It has to be well defined and separated.

Make the membership valuable and exclusive.

Everyone who is joining your community expects to have the freedom to share their opinions and, moreover, get an exclusive brand experience from the community managers.

Along with all those benefits, the member must be expecting safety and security in sharing information with others. So, making the community membership value for each of the joining members would be pretty much necessary for building a strong connection with the brand. But, along with that, an exclusive feel could make the members get active in the community engagements and activities.

Providing a special coupon or a random giveaway could build a more exclusive feeling for all the community members.

Value-driven Social Media Presence

It’s not just about your brand; there have to be instances where customers could interact with various other domains but not feeling to be within the boundaries of a brand. Showing a value-driven presence in social media could boost your brand value even without actively engaging your brand for any of the things. For example, if you have a running shoe brand, try to build a social media presence by focusing on running. Create a group and actively engage with the community. As for the brand promotions, bring in special giveaways from your brand and even organize special events sponsored by your brand.

Value-driven presence could elaborate on your community and help you create brand awareness among the community members passively.