The 6 Key Steps to Create an Engaged Community

Today, savvy consumers no longer trust traditional brand marketing messages! There are numerous competitors in the market, all offering more or less similar products. Simply being present on the web to sell products and services is no longer enough. To truly stand out, attract, and retain consumers, it’s essential to succeed in creating a strong connection with your community members. Implementing an effective community strategy will ensure the sustainable development of your business in the consumer landscape. Here’s how to go about it.

What is an Engaged Community?

First, let’s revisit the concept of community and engagement. It’s a group of people who come together around a common interest, a project, or an important cause supported by a brand.

Having a large number of likes and fans on social media doesn’t mean your community is engaged. It’s crucial that the individuals who make up your community get involved, interact with each other, and develop a strong sense of belonging to your group.

What Are the Steps to Follow to Build an Engaged Community?

1- Lay the Foundation and Define Your Strategic Objectives

Building a community and creating engagement is a complex and long-term endeavor! To avoid getting sidetracked and to be as effective as possible, it’s important to do some preliminary thinking. The following elements will allow all your company’s collaborators to move in the same direction and thus maintain consistency in all your strategic decisions.

Creating Your Brand Identity

Your goal is to successfully unite as many individuals as possible around your brand. To succeed in creating engagement, it’s necessary for your followers to “identify with and completely adhere to who you are and what you offer. So, take the time to clearly define all the elements that make up your” brand identity: How do you define yourself? How do you want to present yourself to your audience members? What are the values and principles you believe in and want to convey to your community? What sets you apart from your competitors? What is your company’s approach and vision? Etc.

The Marketing Objectives of Your Community Strategy

Building an engaged community, yes, but for what reasons? What do you want to achieve by implementing this marketing strategy? The targeted objectives can be more or less priority and complementary depending on the contexts:

• Develop your brand awareness and make your brand known;
• Improve your image;
• Recruit prospects and/or customers;
• Increase the conversion rate of your e-shop;
• Build customer loyalty;
• Develop your visibility on a particular social network like Instagram;
• Introduce a new product or service to your followers;
• Obtain feedback from your customers after using your products and services;
• Conduct a survey among your users;
• Implement co-creation actions;
• Gather ambassador customers to your side, to develop word-of-mouth;
• Etc.

Define the Target Community to Conquer and/or Retain

Now that you know who you are, and what objectives you want to achieve, it remains to determine who will be the members of your community… What are the targets that interest you?

We can never say it enough, knowing each of your personas inside out is an absolute necessity!

As a reminder, personas are your ideal typical customers. They are semi-fictional people who each symbolize a consumer profile. To address them with the right messages, at the right time, via the right communication platforms, you must know perfectly: their habits, their expectations, their values and commitments, their needs, their codes, their deep motivations…

All of this analytical work is essential and will save you valuable time for the future!

2- Commit to the Right Cause

According to a study Earned Brand 2018 conducted by Edelman Intelligence: 65% of French consumers choose to buy or boycott a brand based on its positions. Moreover, this study reveals that messages focused on values (34%) are more likely to encourage consumers to make a purchase than communication solely focused on the product (28%).

As we can see on social networks, the new generations are particularly sensitive to responsible consumption issues and do not hesitate to express it. They are interested in the origin of the product, the manufacturing conditions, the brand’s environmental footprint, etc.

Also, more than just a high-performing product or service, today’s consumers expect brands to commit to important issues such as societal, environmental, economic, or ideological ones.

That’s why, to unite and engage community members around your brand, you must identify the right cause and adopt a strong stance!

Commit to a project or an important cause that inspires and makes internet users want to follow you.

Once you’ve identified your cause, publicly unveil your action plan to officially commit to your community. This is how you will build a solid relationship of trust with your audience.

3- Focus on the Human Aspect to Better Engage Your Community

Consumers constantly flooded with advertisements and messages from all sides are now seeking authenticity, transparency, and empathy… They expect brands to sincerely care about their needs, to be attentive, responsive to exchanges, and available to answer their questions. Just like a friend or family member would!

To spark interest and create engagement among your community members, you must therefore show a much more human and sincere face. By adopting a warmer and more accessible attitude, you will more naturally bring people together around you.

This concept of humanizing your brand doesn’t stop at customer service; it goes further. Audiences demand that brands help them in their daily lives, provide good advice, challenge them, and push them to surpass themselves to become the best version of themselves!

4- Create a Sense of Belonging to Your Community

Everyone will agree, a story told with sincerity and emotion leaves a greater impression. Consumers need authenticity, dreams, and immersion to adhere to a brand’s universe.

Tell the story of your brand’s creation to your subscribers, simply and unfiltered. It’s the best way for all members of your community to absorb your brand’s DNA and understand what your values are.

Don’t hesitate to regularly share all the life moments of your company with your targets. Social networks are, in fact, fantastic tools for this! They allow you to disseminate creative content, publish videos, easily conduct live sessions, and share your brand’s daily life with your community at every moment.

For example, you can tell about:

• The stages of creating a new product or service up to the moment of its launch;
• The behind-the-scenes of your company, your manufacturing workshops…
• The arrival of your new collaborators and their role in the company;
• Events and significant moments;
• Etc.

Storytelling is a formidable means of communication that allows messages to be transmitted in a less intrusive way than traditional methods.

These stories, shared with complete transparency, allow your online followers to identify with you, but also to create a climate of trust, to encourage exchange and to build a special relationship with your community. In return, invite your customers to share their own experiences and always show that you are attentive to their expectations, needs, and feedback.

5- Transform Your Customers into Ambassadors

The whole challenge of building a community is to successfully win over enough members of your audience to create in them a spontaneous and selfless attachment.

It’s a fact, if your customers are won over, they will talk about your brand to those around them whenever the opportunity arises. True fans of your brand won’t hesitate to defend you against your detractors and respond for you to a negative comment on social media if needed.

This is why it’s important to pamper and value these customer ambassadors, as they represent a valuable source of visibility and credibility for your targets.

To show them your appreciation and reinforce their choice to belong to your community, you can set up a reward system such as gifts, specific benefits, promotions and/or invitations to private events.

You can also send them free products in advance for them to test. In return, they will give you their detailed opinions on their use.

Also offer the members of your community the opportunity to participate in the creation of your products or in communication around a subject that is especially close to their hearts. Consumers want to be actors in the life of brands!

This win-win relationship will strengthen their sense of belonging to your community and allow you to develop a product or service offering that corresponds to consumers’ real expectations.

Finally, when members of your community create and share content about your brand on their own initiative, always remember to thank them and highlight them, whether through posts on social networks, on your website, or in your marketing communications and materials.

Your ambassadors should feel like they are part of a VIP club.

Trustt is a SaaS (Software as a Service) that aims to help brands develop their proprietary community through the implementation of an ambassador program. Trustt’s mission is to guarantee the commercial success of consumer goods brands by bringing them closer to their consumers and enabling them to unite and retain proprietary communities behind each of their products.

6. Provide Real Added Value to Your Community Members

Obviously, for individuals to want to support the development of a brand, they must first find a personal interest, a particular value, a real usefulness, and meaning.

Think about the reasons why individuals might join your community and what you can offer them to make them want to follow you.

For example:

• Publish content on topics that interest them and that meet their needs and expectations on a regular basis;
• Give them a voice and create a space for exchanges! Let them express themselves on subjects they are passionate about and put them in contact with each other;
• Ensure that their experience with your brand is memorable at every stage of their journey and on every channel used;
• Offer them the opportunity to participate in the realization of a good cause;
• Set up a co-creation system for your products or services that allows them to fully express all their creativity;
• Etc.

As you have understood, if you wish to engage the members of your community and retain them in the long term, you must not only bring them together around a common interest, but ensure that joining your group brings them something personally. Also understand that building a community is a long-term process and requires daily involvement from brands! Additionally, it is strongly recommended to form a dedicated team with people whose job it is. A social media manager and/or a community manager will be responsible for animating, creating and publishing content regularly, responding to comments and interactions quickly, which will significantly increase your chances of success in building an engaged community for the long term.