Building A Community Online
Whilst community management is just one cog in the marketing machine, nobody can deny that we’d all be out of the job without a community of loyal followers. If you work in B2C marketing, then you know the key to digital marketing success lies massively within the community you build. It’s one thing to market to a generic audience, but to build a devoted community of followers is quite an achievement, and one that pays off in the long term.
Think of Burning Man, Gymshark, and Culture Amp - people who gather in the middle of the desert, athletic apparel made for die hard gym heads, and a platform that enables businesses to manage their people data appear to have little to nothing in common. But that’s false, they all are their brand exponentially with the came customer-centric growth plan: community marketing. Whilst the word community sometimes feels overused in the marketing realm, but people will always have a fundamental need for connection, thus the value of it can’t be ignored.
In a world where large companies aim to own small brands' identity and customer data, connecting deeply with customers is fundamental to the survival of direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. Building a thriving community around your brand and giving customers value, whether they've made a purchase or not, is one of the best ways to cut to the front.
What is community marketing?
Community marketing is a brand growth strategy centred around brining customers together over a specific topic, or brands engaging with their customers first.
The key components of a community
Whether you realise it or not, thriving online communities have three key components. When beginning your community building journey, it’s incredibly helpful to understand what these three components are and the precursors needed to achieve them:
People
Having a common interest is the catalyst to the group of people
Who care for eachother
Coming together over their shared interest is a precursor to the group of people feeling like they care about each other.
A feeling of belonging
Working together to achieve goals related to their common interest, is the start to a group feeling like they belong together or have similar interest.
The psychology behind it
Think back to a time when you experienced feelings of rejection or loneliness. Perhaps you didn't get that job you prepped like crazy for, or maybe you've been ghosted by someone you were steadily dating for months… if you're a human (which I sure hope you are), you likely felt terrible.
Humans have an innate need for connection, and there’s a growing body of psychological research that digs into how deep that need lies. According to Dr. Matthew D. Lieberman, Ph.D. and Neuroscience Lab Director at UCLA, more than power and other intrinsic incentives — like money and fame — people’s brains are rewarded most when connecting meaningfully with others.
So much so, that our brains literally start to deteriorate when we endure ongoing isolation. Chronic social isolation can even lead to a decrease in the size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain that’s responsible for learning and memory. From our family and friends to our neighborhood and our team at work, social ties are critical to our happiness and success.
For marketers, this means that there is so much more to driving brand growth and customer engagement than clicks and conversions.
How community marketing fuels brand growth
Now that we have a better understanding of human behaviour, personal growth, success, and how they are driven by our innate human need for connection, we can start to understand how building a thriving community can fuel brand growth.
1. Outdoor Voices: Building a Community of People Who are #doingthings
We’ve talked about Outdoor Voices’ community marketing strategy on the blog before, and yes, it’s so good that it’s worth highlighting again. In just a few short weeks, their hashtag, #doingthings, has climbed roughly 20% on Instagram from being used over 130,000 times to over 160,000 times.
In running this customer-centric community program that spans everything from their social media strategy and their website copy, to the events they host in stores and the apparel itself, OV effectively gets their customers (and people who they’d like to be customers) excited about doing the things they love while encouraging others to do the same.
2. Kitty and Vibe: Building a Community That’s Part of Everything They Design and Do
The bikini (and now one-piece, too) trailblazer Kitty and Vibe makes more than cute reversible swimsuits with hot prints and cool solids. After launching just over a year ago by Cameron Armstrong, Kitty and Vibe’s patent-pending innovative sizing model has been touted by Teen Vogue and Forbes as the future of swimwear.
The secret behind Kitty and Vibe’s success? You guessed it — community marketing. The community Cameron has built (and is growing) around Kitty is dynamic, meaningful, and fun. It drives brand growth by tying online and offline engagement programs into a cohesive and unique customer-centric experience. Here’s how:
Online:
Spotify Playlists: Customers can follow Kitty and Vibe on Spotify and get access to highly-curated playlists for “vibes” that go with their “Kitty” swimwear.
Instagram Product Feedback: Cameron sources all new designs for Kitty swimwear directly from Kitty and Vibe’s Instagram community. Customers vote on everything from style to patterns and colors — making the products all the more personal.
Instagram Shop and Website: Bringing community members from Instagram to their website, Kitty and Vibe puts user-generated content on their website’s homepage and makes the images shoppable.
Offline:
Community Model Program: Inclusivity is at Kitty’s core. In walking the talk, the brand takes it a step further than just a touch-up-free model policy to additionally having a community-sourced modeling program. Qualifications needed to model? To be “comfortable in front of a camera and be any age, style, and size. “No experience necessary, just kindness and your beautiful self.”
Pool Parties: Yup, you read that right the first time. Customers can put on their Kitty swimsuit and meet fellow community members face-to-face at body-positivity pool parties. Kitty calls the events “Parties for EveryBOOTY.” These branded events are where the “Vibes” come to life, and community members can get together. One attendee noted, “I came here alone, and I was a little nervous, but I have made about six friends since being here.”
Bringing the community into everything it does and creating amazing and engaging experiences, Kitty and Vibe fuels its growth by keeping customers at the heart of every one of their community-marketing initiatives.
Building a community around your brand
Even if you don’t know the names above, you’ll know plenty of brands both in and out that have developed a cult following. Personally, gymshark is my favourite example, thinking back to the launch of their first store in london a week or two ago - there was a massive line down regent street. Their low cost stunt Were they sold gym shark apparel for £5 and under in a Birmingham market made it to national papers. There’s a crowd of fans who believe in the founders story and are willing to pay above the odds for generic clothes with the gymshark logo.
Communities are vital to growth in B2C marketing. Build and audience that believe in your brand and the rest will take care of itself.