Everything You Need to Know About Community-Based Marketing

A new brand or an already established brand that wants to increase its reach in the industry will, at one point, decide to invest in community-based marketing by creating or expanding its community first. Is your brand building the right community marketing strategies?

In today's rapidly evolving environment, customer expectation has become one of the most significant trends when it comes to interactions between businesses and brands. The new-age customers are not only looking for a great product but also expecting an authentic human connection with the brand as well as their community of customers. Their buying decisions are depending more and more on their identities and the communities they live in and belong to.

This relationship between customers and brands is growing by the day, making community-based marketing a crucial aspect of new-age marketing strategies. With customers losing trust in regular and standard marketing practices, community-based marketing is gaining more and more prominence. So, let's deep dive into what exactly it is, what are its benefits, and how can it impact your marketing strategies?

Community-based Marketing - What is it?

Community-based marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on building relationships and engaging with local communities. It is a way to connect with potential customers and create a connection between the business and the community. This type of marketing can be used to promote products, services, or events. It can also be used to build brand awareness and create loyalty among customers.

 Community-based marketing requires businesses to have an understanding of the community they are targeting. They need to research the demographics, interests, and needs of the community. They also need to identify key influencers in the community who can help spread the word about their business. Once a business has this information, it can develop a marketing strategy that will engage the community and build relationships.

Community-based Marketing - What are the Benefits?

1. Enhanced Customer Experience

When executed correctly, community marketing provides marketing professionals with a deeper understanding of their audience and generates an extremely authentic touchpoint for various tasks and processes like gathering product feedback, handling customer complaints, nurturing brand advocates, and much more. An insight into the community members can provide a plethora of information that helps marketers and brands to deliver a well-thought-out and unique experience.

 2. Increased Relevance and Loyalty

Customers often get inspired by effective loyalty programs, pushing them to re-purchase and build consistent relationships with brands. For marketers, this is a remarkable system to maintain acquisition costs and build brand equity. However, building loyalty programs is not an easy task. Providing customers with incentives is not enough anymore, and brands need to provide more relevant and varied loyalty programs for customers to build a relationship with the brand.

For brands, this means maintaining an uninterrupted and timely relationship. A strong community helps build and maintain this consistency as members of the community interact and rely on each other for purchasing decisions. Brands with online communities can add another layer of responsiveness by addressing customer queries and questions promptly, pushing potential customers in the right direction, at the right time.

3. Brand and Customer Humanisation

One of the key aspects of this article has been the importance of brand authenticity. Marketing often feels inauthentic or hollow than trying to make customers feel like their needs are considered.

A good community marketing strategy will resolve this issue by putting the power in the hands of the community. Members will express their honest opinions (for better or worse), post genuine user-generated content, and develop their own unique relationships, that brands cannot replicate. The outcome is a more human and authentic experience.

Community-based Marketing - The Drawbacks

1. Unique skillset required

Community-based marketing looks exciting from the top but is considerably harder to do. Community-building is often in direct opposition to traditional performance marketing. It's tough to create highly targeted messaging and track its impact. Negative reviews are a part of community-based marketing and brands must be willing to take it with honesty and work closely with the members to improve their needs.

Marketers should also walk in parallel with the constantly evolving needs and fine-tune their approach based on community response. Brands can lose the trust of members if they don't sound authentic across any single touchpoint.

2. Impact in the Long Run

Not exactly a drawback, but marketers need to understand that a community strategy is long-term. Trying to work with a community to boost sales immediately or launching an ad campaign can backfire quickly. Marketers will need to be prepared to focus on long-term brand building and customer experience, which can often mean overlooking and foregoing short-term campaigns or targets.

3. Dedication and Commitment

Similar to the need for long-term, community marketing requires marketers to invest time into building or supporting community infrastructure, listening to members, taking in information, and communicating regularly. Speed, authenticity, and personalisation are key benefits in community marketing, but they require a team's attention. 

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