You can get started once you understand why you want to form a community and how many resources you can invest in the project. Let’s see what are the steps to follow to create a brand community from scratch:
Get to know your customers better.
It is important to find out what topics and content your customers are most interested in through online questionnaires. Try to gather as much information as possible about the problems they must solve and their interests and tastes in your company’s products and services. It will help you understand how to provide community content and services.
Choose the platform
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other forums connected to the company website: You must understand which platform to use by evaluating several factors. Consider not only the habits of your customers – if they frequent a particular social network, it may be easier to intercept them there – but also the reference sector and the commercial objectives you have set.
Start creating the community.
With the 90-9-1 rule in mind, start forming a small group of people, choosing them from the most loyal or active customers within the company’s social profiles. This group will create the “hard core” of the community and help you grow it over time. Continue probing their interests and preferences with questionnaires and questions for the next step.
Plan the content
Once you have identified the topics that interest your customers most, the platform to use and the first members of your community, you should create a content calendar. The key word here is relevance – which articles, videos, tutorials and discussions are useful based on your collected data?
Expand the community
The time has come to start publishing the first entries within the community. Don’t worry; at first, it will be normal to get few user interactions or likes. Do not be discouraged by the initial failures and continue experimenting, always asking for opinions on the proposed topics.
As the community fills with content, extend the invitation to others, drawing inspiration from user discussions and questions to enrich the list of topics you’ve created.
Fuel participation
To keep your community active, constantly publish quality posts on different topics, monitoring participants’ reactions. It stimulates the creation of content by users, responds to all comments and publications, and periodically launches new proposals to fuel the group’s interest. You can also think about a reward system for the most active members, such as limited access content (webinars, previews, etc.) or reserved discounts.
Once launched, the community will become an irreplaceable resource for your company and an inexhaustible source of useful materials and ideas to improve the offering of products and services.
What is a brand community?
Fundamentally, it is a group of users, potential customers, or consumers of a certain brand, such as PlayStation, a series of people who feel linked and committed to its corporate culture and values .
Humans are social animals; we must feel we belong to a community. This strategy channelled this need to belong and share values , perceptions, feelings, and opinions in marketing.