How to create a community around your brand | 5 strategies to generate excitement and cultivate a “following”

When we talk about creating a community for a brand, there are a couple of things we could mean. We could talk about community in the employees-team building sense, or community in the sense of a hyper-engaged, super-fan level customer-base. This article will talk about the latter definition.

If you’re able to build a community around your products, services, or brand over building “just a customer base,” you’ll benefit in multiple ways:

• You’ll have a closer connection to members of your community
• You’ll be able to get feedback and develop products with them
• Community members will essentially ambassador your brand
• You’ll benefit from increased loyalty

Here are 5 strategies you can use to generate excitement around your brand and cultivate a community.

1. Ask your community how to build and optimise your product or service

This should start from day 1 for best results. Literally ask your target demographic what they want that doesn’t exist, or what their problem is that hasn’t been solved by the open market so far. Obviously, these questions need to be more focused, and more targeted to be effective, but soliciting feedback to develop a product, service, or business, or soliciting feedback from one version to the next not only helps you build what your customers want, but gets customers and target customers to buy in.

For a simple example, consider someone opening a coffee shop in a specific area, and asking for feedback on a social media site for local residents. In asking what local residents think is missing from the local coffee scene, they might discover there’s an appetite for a coffee shop that is open later in the evenings. While there’s more to creating community than just this act, early customers may well feel a sense of ownership as their feedback directly led to them getting what hadn’t been provided for them previously.

Pro tip: You can easily create professional Surveys on the Drimify platform and include video and audio files as well as text and images in your questions. You can customise the question formats to give you both quantitative and qualitative feedback, depending on what you need. These can be distributed by direct link or through a QR code, and you could include a contact form at the beginning or end of the experience to encourage participants to stay in touch and follow the development of your offering.

2. Host online workshops and seminars

Arranging virtual workshops and seminars tailored to the interests and needs of your customers is an act of community building. Hosting these interactive sessions provides an opportunity for members to learn from industry experts, share insights with one another, and connect with like-minded individuals.

By positioning your business as a valuable source of knowledge and facilitator of meaningful interactions, you’re actively strengthening the bonds within your community.

3. Use gamification to engage, reward, and communicate with your community

If you want more from your customers, and want them to form a community around your brand, it follows that you need to do more to earn it, and this goes beyond just developing an amazing product or service. Gamification – applying game mechanics to real life to get the most out of users – is one of the most effective techniques you can use to help in this aim

You can customise a range of tried and tested game engines on the Drimify platform to reward members, to educate members, to ignite healthy competition between members, and to encourage ongoing communication. Create challenges, competitions, or loyalty programs that will further immerse members in your brand’s community. This approach not only enhances the overall experience for your community, but can also develop a sense of fun and camaraderie among its members.

4. Create specialised, value-added content

Brands that successfully build communities always provide expert content and position themselves as an industry resource.

Make a point of producing and sharing high-quality content that caters specifically to the interests and needs of your community. This can take the form of blog posts, articles, videos, or podcasts. By providing valuable and tailored information, you position yourself as an authority in your niche, and nurture a loyal following within your community.

5. Shout out success stories

What better way to create buy-in throughout your community than highlighting success stories? Recognising the achievements of community members in your chosen area is a way to highlight to other community members what’s possible with your brand, product, or service. Maybe they could be a guest on your podcast, or maybe you could dedicate a blog post to their accomplishment and their journey with your brand.

You only need a couple of TikToks or Reels to get mixed up in your feed to learn how lucrative an industry inspiration has become, and the power of inspiration has never been easier to utilise for businesses through the affordability of modern multimedia equipment.

For example, if you own a language learning app and a customer has managed to become fluent, shout it out. If you’re in the fitness wearables game and a customer has used your hardware and software to achieve something, shout it out.

By keeping your community close, and following the 4 other strategies listed here, identifying your early adopters and high achievers will be far easier, as will approaching them to showcase their story.

Key takeaway

A customer base is united by their preference for a particular product, brand or business, but they can be swayed to competitors by a number of factors. A brand’s community is empowered by their dedication to a particular product, brand, or business, and will each be as loyal as it’s possible to be, and an ambassador capable of collecting more members.

Committing to turning your customer-base into a community is one of the most effective ways to supercharge loyalty, facilitate innovations developed in-line with real customer demands, and promote long-term business growth.

By implementing the strategies mentioned above, you’ll be taking the first steps to creating your own brand community.