According to 80 percent of consumers, the positive experiences a brand offers are just as important as its products and services. So, if you’re not offering value to consumers beyond mere transactions, you’ll have a hard time fostering long-term brand loyalty and attracting new customers.
Community marketing is a great way to create experiences that emotionally resonate with consumers. The strategic emphasis is on cultivating strong relationships between the brand and individual consumers through interactive engagement.
Whether via social media or an in-person event, community marketing drives authentic conversations and connections that quickly build consumer trust, making them more likely to share positive feedback which can help generate new business.
What Does Community Marketing Mean?
Community marketing strategies engage your existing customers to build long-term relationships. This type of marketing typically takes place online (on discussion forums or social media) and connects customers from various locations so they can exchange tips and opinions.
There are two ways community marketing happens:
- Organically: In organic community marketing, consumers create a community without brand involvement. A good example is the PlayStation community on Reddit, which isn’t affiliated with PlayStation or Sony.
- Via a brand sponsorship: Sponsored community marketing means a brand creates and moderates the community. Employees may also participate in brand discussions and answer questions. An example would be retailer AllSaints starting their own Discord community.
6 Community Marketing Examples and Tips
To strengthen customer relationships, check out these six community marketing examples and tips.
1. Put the “Custom” in “Customer”
Building a strong brand community means building strong relationships with individual consumers. You can do this by engaging with them on a personal level, taking the time to ensure they feel seen and heard by your brand. As Salesforce notes, when interacting with your company, consumers want to be treated “like a person, not a number.”
On your brand’s social media accounts, you can provide customized feedback and assistance that shows individual appreciation. Publicly liking, loving, and responding to comments, questions, and brand tags provides validation and shows potential consumers the kind of positive experience they can expect to have with your brand.
DTC eyewear company Warby Parker is well known for using social media to strengthen emotional ties with consumers. In addition to helping with traditional customer service needs, Warby Parker uses its accounts to give input to consumers choosing between different glasses and to offer compliments to users on their product selections.
Source: Warby Parker
Similarly, skincare company Paula’s Choice uses Instagram to engage with its community, answering questions about the exact product formulation and reassuring customers when they have concerns.
Source: Paula’s Choice
And remember: how you choose to communicate with consumers is just as important as what you say to them. Do your best to avoid robotic, one-size-fits-all responses, especially when encountering negative consumer input. Your consumers are human, and they expect you to speak to them as another human — with friendliness, attention, and transparency.
2. Showcase Real Users in Your Content
Brand communities will include some of your most passionate consumers. Take advantage of that by celebrating them in your social media community content.
Community marketing content that celebrates your top customers doesn’t just show you appreciate individual members — it also strengthens the community as a whole by letting customers get to know each other.
Consumers have a significantly higher level of trust in product and service recommendations that come from fellow consumers, so featuring real users also helps establish your brand’s credibility.
User-generated content (UGC) is a virtual goldmine for community marketing. It allows brands to showcase and celebrate active consumers of their products and services without the content reading like a traditional sales-focused advertisement.
Sharing UGC on your accounts helps consumers view your brand as more credible and relatable, giving members a chance to identify and interact with others like them. UGC is exciting for consumers because it provides an opportunity to be put in the spotlight of a company they support, making them feel valued by the brand and the community.
Popular skincare and beauty company Glossier uses UGC as its community marketing keystone, prevalently showcasing consumers on their Instagram feed and amassing over 3 million followers.
The brand invites the most active users who post Glossier content to become official brand ambassadors. They receive a percentage of a sale whenever someone uses the ambassador’s promo code.
Source: Glossier
Publicly acknowledging and rewarding these ambassadors is also a great way to drive participation in your brand’s formal referral program. At one point, word-of-mouth made up 70 percent of Glossier’s online sales and traffic.
Real users can also inspire unique long-form content. For example, you can share stories of noteworthy consumers others can relate to and learn from. Spotify’s podcast tool Anchor has used its blog, Word of Mouth, for this purpose. The blog profiles a variety of diverse podcast hosts who use Anchor’s services to improve their podcasts.
Learn more about building a winning referral program with Extole’s guide to referral marketing best practices.
3. Offer Opportunities to Shape Brand Decisions
Community marketing can help your bottom line by gathering direct consumer feedback on existing products and services. And it allows community members to influence future decisions.
By using your brand community as a focus group, you can reduce the time and effort you spend determining the needs and wants of your consumer base — they’re giving you the answers themselves!
Giving consumers a voice in your brand’s direction helps them feel a sense of partnership with the brand and other community members. Brands are increasingly embracing social media to do so, creating interactive polls that are user-friendly and visually compelling.
When you ask for customer feedback and then show how you incorporated it, you encourage further participation in brand-related activities because you’ve provided tangible evidence of how feedback makes a difference in your company.
Salesforce’s IdeaExchange is an excellent example of this community marketing approach. It allows customers to share their ideas with Salesforce product managers and the rest of the community. Then, they can vote on product ideas. Product managers add ideas with the most votes to a prioritization list and decide which ones will become a part of the Salesforce platform.
Source: Salesforce IdeaExchange
4. Demonstrate Social Responsibility
Consumer brand preferences are increasingly being shaped by a feeling of alignment with a company’s values and its effect on change in the world. In fact, 71 percent of consumers surveyed in Edelman’s Brands and Politics report said brands must take a stand on societal issues.
Your brand community members can offer valuable insight into how you should continue to shape your corporate mission and activism.
If you pay attention to community trends and causes that matter to members, you can adjust your community marketing strategy to incorporate content and activities that directly address those causes.
This creates a sense of unity between your brand and your consumers. And it makes the community feel that by supporting your brand, they also support something they care about.
One of the most important things to remember in community marketing is that consumers don’t just want lip service; they want action. You need to back up the public stances you take, or you risk facing public backlash and losing the support of your community members.
Italy-based vegan bag manufacturer Miomojo puts sustainability and animal welfare at the center of its business. The company publishes yearly impact reports that outline how it specifically supports these causes. In its most recent report, Miomojo announced that it donates 10 percent of its profits to support animal welfare causes.
Cosmetics retailer Lush is also well known for its Charity Pot program which donates 100 percent of the purchase price of its Charity Pot lotions to grassroots projects connected to human rights, environmental justice, and animal protection.
Source: Lush
Since the Charity Pot launch in 2007, Lush has donated over $95 million to over 15,500 international groups.
5. Create Exclusive Experiences
Your community marketing strategy should include unique perks and experiences only available to community members. This will also entice new customers to join your community based on the promise of extra benefits they normally wouldn’t be able to access.
Some popular exclusive experiences include:
- Early access to new products or features
- Ability to participate in contests
- Members-only virtual or in-person events
For example, tech newspaper TechCrunch launched Extra Crunch Live during the COVID-19 pandemic. Available only to subscribers, this exclusive webinar series kept existing subscribers engaged while attracting new ones. Two months after the series launched, TechCrunch reported a staggering 600 percent year-on-year subscription increase.
Another great example is REI. The outdoor gear retailer offers a membership program that includes discounts and rewards, such as free shipping. Members are also invited to special in-person and virtual events and get a discount on REI classes and events.
Source: REI
Fun, unique activities and opportunities for further social engagement greatly enhance the appeal of becoming a member, and they should serve as the true backbone of your community marketing. Discounts are great, but they simply don’t generate the same kind of emotional tie to your brand as new experiences do.
6. Build communities on digital platforms
Depending on your industry and audience interests, starting a branded community on a digital platform is a straightforward way to build a community. For example, consider starting a subreddit if you know that a large portion of your customer base uses this platform.
Dbrand, a manufacturer of device customization products, runs an active Reddit community with over 48,000 members.
Source: Dbrand subreddit
If you take this route, be clear about the purpose of the online community. For example, Dbrand clearly states that subreddit members should contact their customer support team directly if they encounter an issue. This saves customers time and prevents frustration.
Community Marketing FAQs
How to start community marketing?
To start with community marketing, consider your objectives first. It could be optimizing customer lifetime value or promoting the launch of a new product. Then, analyze your audience and where they spend their time — both online and in person. This will help you craft a rough framework for your community marketing strategy and come up with ideas for the best ways to engage your audience.
What are the pros and cons of a community marketing strategy?
The table below breaks down the most common benefits and disadvantages of implementing community marketing.
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Community Marketing Is Necessary for a Strong Referral Program
Implementing thoughtful community marketing strategies helps boost consumers’ emotional investment in your brand, making them much more likely to participate in your referral program. Once customers start becoming brand advocates and referring their friends, it’s important they encounter a frictionless process.
With Extole’s customer engagement platform, you can build personalized and user-friendly programs including refer-a-friend, friends & family, ambassador programs, and more. Robust analytics allow you to measure and optimize these experiences. And support for multiple languages enables customers from all over the world to participate.
Take a platform tour to dig further into all the different features.
