Companies wishing to create a community bond between themselves and their consumers should consider branding their businesses online. A branded community is marketing focused on nurturing the attachment a customer can experience towards a product or brand. Below are steps to ensure building a successful branded community.
1. Don’t look at your branded community as a marketing strategy, but as a business strategy.
Recognize it as an opportunity to engage the consumer in what your business wide goals are. Impress them with your brand message. Let them know who you are and what your business stands for.
2. Engage the customer.
Get your community involved in your business. Let them be creative and express themselves too. Lego, for instance, has asked their community why they love Legos and got an enthusiastic response. So far, consumers have been sharing their love by building Lego monuments, making fan commercials, and blogging articles about Legos.
3. Do not try to mold your brand around a specific consumer.
It will serve you and your company better if you remain diverse. You’ll be able to expand the marketability of your business if you broaden your market. Alienating any consumer will limit opportunities to expand the approachability of your brand and others joining your community.
4. Let the visitors on your brand site interact.
Communities cannot grow if people cannot approach one another to talk, forge friendships, and strengthen bonds. Establish message boards and other areas where followers can joke around with each other and discuss their love for your brand. Let them chat in real time, create their own forums, and encourage offline social events to meet up. This will increase loyalty for your brand and popularity.
5. Don’t run away from conflicts in your community.
Sometimes a healthy rivalry can make your brand not only more interesting but also more versatile to the consumer. The popular “Campaign for Real Beauty” by Dove campaign is a great example of this. It brought real women together to speak out about idealized beauty goals. Dove not only unified women, but they bolstered their community brand by welcoming an “out” group in marketing to their community.
As you can see, creating a branded community isn’t a difficult process. By embracing the steps listed above companies have widened their marketing opportunities, increased their reputations and boosted the demand of their products. To connect to a branded community is to ensure the longevity of any business. Embrace success today. Embrace the branded community.
