An intro to community building

I was recently asked by the lovely Lorna Scully to join her as a guest on her fab podcast Digital Discussions; Unfiltered to chat about all things community building.

I jumped at the chance and nerves aside, it was a really great experience and I loved chatting to Lorna about community building and how it can help build brands and businesses of any size as it’s something I am really passionate about.

Sometimes community building can be portrayed as “marketing fluff” or something only large scale brands and businesses can do because it costs mega bucks and involves trying to get a past contestant for Love Island to work with you. It’s actually an incredibly powerful marketing tool that can help increase loyalty and position you as an expert in your field.

Want to find out more? Click the button below to listen to the podcast (we talk about some great examples that you can see out in the wild) or read on for a bit more info about what community building is and how it can help your biz.

What is it?

Community building is essentially a brand growth tactic, but saying it like that makes it sound a bit icky right? But don’t worry it’s not - it’s all about the more human side of marketing and getting to know your ideal customer.

Consumers no longer want to just purchase a product or service, they want to make sure the brands they are buying from have similar values and ethics to them and they want to feel like they are part of something more than just a transaction.

When it’s done right community building can give your marketing a boost in terms of followship, customer satisfaction and repeat business.

How can this help me grow my business?

In life we tend to gravitate to people who have the same sense of humour, likes, dislikes, values and beliefs - when it comes to choosing a brand to buy from or work with it’s no different.

When done well community building helps to set you apart from your competition by showing your existing and potential customers more of your brand personality and the values you have as a company. Connecting with them on a deeper level than just “buy this product / service because you’re hungry / need an outfit / looking for an accountant etc”.

Your customers and clients will also resonate more powerfully to content that is tailored to their needs. This means more reach thanks to all the lovely shares and comments your content will get. This juicy content, whilst it may not be super sales-ey, helps to build trust and show your audience that you are an expert in your field which in turn will help with further conversions and lead generation.

I’m in, what tips have you got for me?

Create an ideal customer profile so you can get a really good feel for who you are talking to with the content you create. To keep it simple think about splitting the characteristics in to these three groups

• Demographics - location, age range, gender, income / spend (not all of this may be relevant for your offering so feel free to leave out anything that doesn’t resonate). If you have a B2B offering you may wish to add job titles / management levels in this section to.

• Personality / Interests - Are they technophobes? Do they LIVE for Friday nights out? Is Brunch their fave activity? Are box sets their thing or do they prefer reading a good book instead?

• Pain Points - What is going on in their life that your product / service can fix? For example do you offer a healthy food delivery service? Do you offer career advice and tips?

Review your previous content - what has worked well? are there any trends you notice? For example it could be that “top tip Tuesday” post is helping to convert the most purchases even though it’s not an overtly sales type post.

Research - People love to share their thought on products / services so think about asking your audience want to see. You could do this via email with a small group of customers that match your ideal customer profile or open it up to a wider audience. Not only will this give you a better feel for what people want to see but is could also give you some ideas for other products / services you might not have thought about.

So … what sort of content do I need to create?

This really depends on what your business is and who your ideal client / customer is however I’ve listed some ideas below as a starter for ten.

• Blogs - think about how your product / service can solve a certain issue or pain point

• Videos - demo videos are always great

• Advice / top tips - maybe turn this in to a discussion thread and ask people to share their tips to

• Social media groups - gives your customers / clients a place to hang out, connect and share knowledge with each other

• Memes / gifs - don’t be afraid to show your humour

• Newsletters - share good news, knowledge and thought leadership pieces as well as shouting about what you do and the value you and your products / services provide to your clients / customers.

But it’s not all on you, think about getting your community involved to, share the pics your products have been tagged in (also known as user generated content) and other peoples content (just double check they are credible sources) to share further knowledge on topics that you may be passionate about but not an expert in.

Hope you have found this useful, community building is a huge topic so this is very much a brief overview but I have more content coming over the next few months that will build on this.

Want to stay in the know? Join my mailing list or if you would like a bit more support, get in touch and we can have a Zoom chat over a cuppa.