Throughout history, people have come together in communities. In these places, we enjoy a sense of belonging and find support and identity. A community might give us purpose or motivate our growth.
People can find their communities in many places, and many brands have devoted time and effort to developing ecosystems that offer people these same benefits. This article explains how businesses can power their customer engagement strategy by creating community.
What is a community-driven customer engagement strategy?
McKinsey labeled community as the “big idea in 2020s marketing”, observing that businesses were “reaching consumers in the communities they are a part of and helping them express community membership by participating in [their] brand.”
Traditional customer engagement focuses primarily on the brand delivering value to the customer through products, services, promotions, or content. The engagement is typically direct from brand to customer and tends to be transaction-oriented (e.g., driving sales, resolving issues, or sharing product updates).
Today, technology and data have empowered marketers to take a community-driven engagement approach. As consumers embrace online communities, they are also demonstrating a willingness to participate in brand communities. In Tint’s 2023 Big Online Brand Community Study, 73 percent of the more than 4,900 consumers surveyed said they had a positive opinion of brand online communities.
Some 84 percent of survey respondents agreed the community surrounding the brand impacted how they felt about it. Plus, four in five consumers deemed community important to brand engagement.
What makes a community-driven customer engagement strategy distinct from a traditional approach? There are several factors, including:
- The two- or multi-way interaction where a brand facilitates conversations and interactions, but customers play an active role in creating and sharing content, offering support, and fostering connections.
- The shift to a customer-centric strategy where the focus is on customers and their collective experiences. The brand is still crucial, but the community is somewhere customers can learn from each other, share feedback, and feel a sense of belonging.
- The importance of long-term relationship building. More than driving transactions, community-driven engagement creates customer loyalty and advocacy with a vibrant, engaged community.
Understanding the value of community-driven customer engagement strategies
A strong customer community is invaluable for any brand. When customers feel connected not just to the brand but to a broader group of like-minded individuals, their sense of attachment deepens significantly.
In Tint’s Brand Community Survey, eight in 10 consumers said they were more likely to purchase new products/services from a brand if they were part of that brand’s community. They were also more likely (73 percent) to recommend the brand’s products or services to others.
This loyalty translates into benefits such as:
- Increased customer lifetime value (CLV): Loyal community members are more likely to explore and purchase new products, stay subscribed to services longer, and participate in upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
- Reduced customer acquisition costs (CAC): When customers share their positive experiences within the community or externally on social media, it can attract new customers organically, reducing the need for costly marketing campaigns.
- Enhanced brand resilience: Whether it’s a PR crisis or a market downturn, loyal customers are more likely to stand by the brand, defend it publicly, and continue their support.
- Improved social proof: Loyal communities can generate a wealth of content—reviews, testimonials, social media posts, and more. This user-generated content can boost brand credibility and attract new customers.
Not convinced? Perhaps you’ve never met an Apple evangelist. The global tech company’s loyal customer base is critical to its commercial success. Their brand community not only purchases new products, but passionately promotes them.
Fostering emotional connection with community brand engagement
A well-engaged community fosters a deeper emotional connection with the brand. When customers feel that sense of belonging and form relationships within the community, they are less likely to switch to competitors because doing so would mean losing these connections.
Take Harley-Davidson’s HOG (Harley Owners Group). The strong bonds formed within this community make it less likely for members to switch to other motorcycle brands, even if they encounter issues with their Harley-Davidson bikes.
In a strong community, members can turn to one another to resolve issues or to get their questions answered. This peer support builds valuable connections and trust, while also reducing customer frustration and churn.
Salesforce’s Trailblazer Community is a great example. The groups connect people from throughout the Salesforce customer population to get product support and grow their professional networks. According to the sales enablement platform, “80 percent of Trailblazers report that engaging in the Community helps extend their Salesforce capabilities, increase efficiency, and reduce costs.*
A “community” caution
Consumers are increasingly skeptical of what they perceive as marketing. In Tint’’s survey, 78 percent of respondents agreed brands were overusing the word “community.” Simply saying the word, but not providing a real community experience can have a negative impact. In fact, 68 percent of Tint’s consumers said they would feel somewhat more negatively about a brand that did this.
With that said, our discussion turns to a step-by-step guide on how to build a customer-driven engagement strategy.
Identify target community
A brand community is an extension of your marketing strategy. Any effort to build your community will start from a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, interests, and values, as well as your customers’ journey.
This comes from analysis of customer data such as demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic information. You can get this customer data from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, customer journey mapping, web analytics, and surveys about customer experience.
You’re probably already using these to develop personas and segment customers for personalization and other customization efforts. Now you’re looking to assess which segments are most likely to engage actively in the community. By prioritizing segments that show a strong inclination towards community participation, you can encourage customer engagement with an emphasis on these segments’ common interests and challenges.
Choosing the right platform for customer engagement
Many brands currently emphasize online brand communities via social media groups, forums, dedicated community platforms (e.g., Discord or Slack), or proprietary platforms. Still, you can expand the community’s relevance and reach by integrating your customer engagement efforts across other touchpoints as well.
For example, as an experiential marketing agency, A Little Bird often combines live, immersive experiences with other cross-channel efforts to support brand engagement. We treat every on-the-ground, in-person event as an opportunity to build and nurture a brand community.
In our customer engagement work for SoBe, we wanted to nourish a community of younger fans for the soft drink label. The brand was entering its second decade, and its existing customers were aging out of its demographic. So, we threw a #SoBeNotSorry pool party in a Vegas hotel. Attendees sipped SoBe poolside at the SLS Hotel, kicking back with celebrities and playing SoBe games to score premium brand merchandise. Charli XCX’s headlining set established SoBe as a current brand, while the entire day’s events built SoBe’s community.
Nurturing a sense of community
Whether you’re building your brand community online or in-person, it’s important to foster a positive atmosphere. Online this could mean setting up community guidelines and enlisting business representatives or loyal customers to serve as moderators or leaders.
When hosting an experiential activity to engage prospects or existing customers, think long and hard about how you can create a welcoming environment. Here’s how:
- Send personalized invites to VIP attendees, making them feel valued and special
- Engage with your audience on social media and email prior to the event to build anticipation and create a sense of community before they arrive
- Have staff or brand ambassadors welcome guests and answer questions
- Ensure the event area is easy to navigate and visually appealing.
- Use signage, branding, and décor that align with the theme
- Provide ample seating, well-spaced areas for mingling, and quiet corners for those who prefer a more relaxed vibe
- Offer a variety of activities that cater to different interests and personality types
- Look for opportunities to personalize the experiences (e.g., allowing participants to customize a product, participate in a personalized demo, or receive a gift that aligns with their preferences)
- Encourage participation and make the experience memorable with photo booths, live polls, gamification elements, or hands-on product trials.
Encourage user-generated content
All of A Little Bird’s experiential marketing activities are developed with social media integration in mind. We always create opportunities for attendees to share their experiences on social media. We use customer engagement marketing that provides selfie spots and encourages people to use branded hashtags.
Depending on the scope of the event, some brands include a social wall to drive customer engagement and participation in real-time by having a live social media feed on display where people can see their posts and others’ in the moment. This is just the tip of the iceberg for user-generated content to drive an effective customer engagement strategy.
User-generated content can also support community-building efforts. Consider compiling attendee’s content into an article that can be posted on a blog or through media. Your business might move beyond traditional segmentation by focusing an article on one particular segment of your target audience and their specific needs or perspectives. This helps create a community of, as McKinsey puts it, “shared relevance.”
Taking someone’s review and, with permission, turning it into a testimonial or case study is another great way to show customers in your community that you not only are paying attention but also value their feedback.
In McKinsey’s analysis of brand community marketing and customer engagement, it found high achievers had more than 75 percent of its content about the brand come from users.
Encouraging participants in exclusive community-only events is also a good way to amplify awareness while driving deeper engagement and loyalty. Yes, people want to join a community. But they also want to feel like a special member of that community. So, inviting a segment of your audience to participate in an exclusive webinar or offer their opinions in a focus group can increase their loyalty to your brand community.
Next, let’s turn our attention to metrics that help you determine whether or not you can claim a successful customer engagement strategy.
Measuring customer engagement
To measure how well brands are engaging customers, marketers typically look at several customer engagement metrics. These include:
- Customer retention rate (CRR), the percentage of customers who continue to do business with a company over a specific period as high retention typically indicates effective engagement.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV), the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer throughout their relationship with the company, as customer interactions are influenced by how well they are engaged.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures customer satisfaction and loyalty by asking customers how likely they are to recommend the brand to others.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), measuring customer satisfaction with a product, service, or interaction helps gauge how well customer needs are being met, directly impacting engagement.
- Churn rate, the percentage of customers who stop doing business with a company during a given time frame as high churn suggests disengagement and potential issues with the customer experience.
- Social media engagement as likes, shares, comments, and mentions on social media platforms can indicate active interest in the brand and its content.
However, when looking at customer engagement metrics through a community-driven lens, you could add a few new metrics. These include:
- Community growth rate, which focuses specifically on the expansion of community by tracking the number of community members over time.
- Community engagement rate as measuring posts, comments, likes, shares, and participation in events or discussions helps brands assess community vibrancy by seeing how engaged customers participate and interact with each other and the brand.
- Active members ratio, the percentage of community members who are regularly active (e.g., logging in, posting, commenting) within a specific time period provides insight into how engaged the community members are, beyond just being members,
- Member retention rate, the percentage of community members who remain active in the community over time can indicate the stickiness of the community experience.
- User-Generated Content (UGC) volume, given the value of UGC, the amount of content (posts, reviews, videos, etc.) created and shared by community members is a measure of deep engagement and community ownership.
- Sentiment analysis often uses AI tools to measure the tone and emotion expressed in community interactions to gauge the emotional climate within the community, which can help you to foster customer relationships.
- Peer-to-peer interaction rate tracks how well the community is fostering connections between members, an essential aspect of a thriving community.
The two-way street of customer engagement
The final step in community-driven customer engagement strategies is gathering customer feedback. Regularly soliciting feedback from the brand community keeps conversations going both ways. Plus, when you demonstrate that you are listening to customer feedback by refining and improving the community strategy based on the members’ input, you boost brand credibility and consumer trust in your community.
Join A Little Bird’s community
Building a strong customer community provides significant long-term benefits, including higher brand advocacy, reduced churn, and increased customer lifetime value. By investing in community-driven engagement strategies, brands can create a loyal, engaged customer base that drives ongoing success.
A Little Bird is known for building brand communities. Contact us today to learn how we can help you meet your customer engagement objectives and exceed expectations.