Brand Communities …Good?
Probably yes. Products are better when they have a community.
When building a brand, creating exciting new products is only the first step. Cultivating a welcoming and engaged community around your products is something that’s often overlooked but a necessary step in creating lasting brand loyalty, and advocates.
How do brands build communities around their products?
Cultivating a community of loyal brand advocates goes beyond clever one liners in email marketing campaigns, cute social media posts, and funny PPC ads. A Customer never wants to feel like they’re the only person buying the product. Providing an easy, highly visible way for Customers to interact with others who have purchased your products or are simply considering making a purchase is extremely important. This can be a forum or message board hosted on your main website, a public Slack or Discord channel, or other existing social networks can easily be leveraged to the same end - albeit with less control. A brand can easily create a subreddit (or “sub”) on Reddit.com or a Facebook Group, and include links that are easy to find on web and social posts.
Be highly active and interactive. Be it on Slack, Discord, Facebook, reddit, or your own self-hosted forum, you’ll want to be sure to monitor activity 24/7 and comment / reply / post often. Keeping several employees monitoring and able to interact and participate in any discussions is a good idea. These employee accounts should have special badges that make it obvious to visitors that they’re communicating with official brand representatives.
Give users a reason to check the forum - post software update change-logs earlier than they launch on the website, share exclusive beta invites, post polls for Customer feedback. There is an opportunity here to make those that have purposely sought out your brand’s community feel special - seize it!
Keep in mind that you want users coming to the forum for information and not always seeking ‘deals’. You may be able to boost traffic by sharing coupon codes but that boost will only be temporary and in the end detrimental (lots of Customer spam just asking for more coupon codes).
Don’t be too heavy handed on the moderation, you want Customers to feel like this is an authentic safe space where they can share true (sometimes negative) opinions without being censored or punished. Responding to feedback, even (especially?) negative feedback is a great way to dispel concerns from lurkers - potential Customers that are still in research mode but haven’t yet made a purchase, and rarely participate in active discussions. Seeing examples of a brand being responsive and attentive is a great comfort to most.
Of course there are both positive and negative aspects to company managed user forums. Being tuned in to the general sentiment around your offerings is great, but if sentiment turns, the forums can quickly devolve into a cesspool of negativity. Beware!
Disclaimer: No AI was used in the writing of this blog post. Blog art created with the help of MidJourney.
