Building Community With Content: The Who, What, Why, and How
When it comes to creating community, marketers aren’t practicing what they preach. According to a survey conducted by Lithium and Marketing Profs, 74% of marketers report that “creating a community around their brand is a social media business objective;” however, only 18% of marketers say their company has one.
What’s preventing marketers from achieving their goal of galvanized online communities? To dig into this disconnect, we’ve broken down the who, what, why, and how of brand communities, and the underlying content marketing objectives that drive them.
What Is A Brand Community?
UM, a division of IPG Mediabrands, defines participation in an online brand community as joining “a community or group centered around a product or brand, e.g., a fan page on a social networking site, following a brand on a microblogging service (e.g. Twitter) or signing up to a dedicated website or forum.”
To put it more simply, brand community is built upon the same foundations found in interpersonal relationships, namely conversation around shared passions and common interests.
Consider, for example, Etsy, which has built its online craft empire around a passion for all things unique, handmade, and homegrown.
One of the driving factors behind Etsy’s success is the brand’s ability to foster both communication and commerce among people, all centered around the common purpose of “[reimagining] commerce in ways that build a more fulfilling and lasting world.” “Community Tastemakers” are even featured on their homepage.
How Do You Create Brand Communities?
Social networks have created an opportunity to integrate branded and interpersonal communication. Again, just as in your personal community, online brand communities are built upon principles of creating and fostering communication.
According to July 2012 survey results from Incyte, customers are drawn to brands by content, and the more relevant the content is to the consumer, the better.
Consuming content (27.3%) was the most appealing activity consumers reported engaging in with a brand, followed by following (18.8%), sharing (18.2%), and liking (8.9%) content on social networks.
While these activities are all natural social network-oriented behaviors, keep in mind that approaching digital marketing as a broadcast mechanism does not a community make.
You cannot create community around your brand by simply showing up on social networks, nor will any sparse smattering of content across channels build communal momentum.
Who Participates In Brand Communities?
As taxonomical mechanisms, groups and communities can be defined by demographics. When it comes to online brand communities — be it a forum, blog, or social channel — it probably comes as no surprise that digital interactions with brands are more frequent among younger online Americans.
According to the Wave 7 study from UM, 54.6% of 16-24-year-olds participate in brand communities, compared with just 33.4% among 45-54-year-olds. On gender lines, brand community participants are marginally more female, with 47.2% women and 38.6% of men reporting participation in brand communities.
Across the board, however, there has been an upward trend in participation in online communities in the past year. UM’s longitudinal survey data shows a year-over-year uptick of over 10% in online brand participation.
Why Invest In Brand Community?
For brands, the list of incentives and use-cases for galvanizing and sustaining a socially active online brand community is a long one: real-time market research; crowd-sourcing problems and opportunities for innovation; ability to spot customer complaints and deliver high-quality customer service; strengthen brand ties; and and broadcast customer interactions and brand affinity.
Still not convinced your marketing department should prioritize community through content? Then consider the link between online brand engagement and revenue.
According to surveys conducted by Google and Advertising Age, consumers that regularly engage with brands online correlate with those who purchase more.
According to the surveys, marketers have the greatest opportunity to influence purchasing behavior among the 62.8% of consumer respondents who identified as “Hyper-Engagers,” or consumers who engage with brands online at least once per week.
Hyper-Engagers displayed both higher cross-channel engagement than “Engagers,” or consumers who engage with brands online less than once per week, and are “more than four times as likely to purchase a product online every day or multiple times per week.”
J.Crew also noted in their annual S.E.C. filing that by driving meaningful engagement across a variety of social media channels, they have cultivated an online audience that spends twice as much as the average customer.
Conclusion: Focus On Value Exchange Via Content
For best-in-class brands, creating community around products and services is more than a marketing objective. It requires a cross-departmental commitment to customer satisfaction, retention, and responsiveness.
However, brand-consumer communication across digital channels offers a highly-visible, real-time opportunity to build brand affinity around common interests.
As the Wave 7 UM study concluded, “only when communication is successful with both the brand and the consumer will we go beyond campaign based activity and build a lasting relationship.”
If you liked this post, you might like Content As A Sales Conversation Starter or 3 Forgotten Parts of Marketing ROI.
Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
