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This week’s topic is all about building a community. We’re going to walk you through these three chapters:
Let’s get right into it.
What is community building and marketing?
Birds of a feather flock together.
We’ve talked about humanising your brand last week, and if you humanise your brand well, you are gearing your brand up to building a strong online community.
Community marketing means selling and portraying your brand in a way that attracts the same group of people together. People who stand for what you do, what you believe in, your mission and vision.
A strong community is a result of a consistent brand mission and vision that people can support you for, mastering the art of giving without taking (delayed gratification), understanding what your target customers not just physically need, but emotionally need, and constantly finding ways to help your community solve problems and fill emotional gaps.
How powerful can a community be?
Just think about the Harry Potter fan base for a second.
The final book was published in 2007, and the final movie was released in 2011.
Since then, no new books or movies have been released, but the Harry Potter community is still one of the strongest fan bases of all time. Some fans are so die-hard that any negative thing you say about Harry Potter can boil their blood, but of course, those are extreme cases and you don't really have to aim for that result.
Building a community is like building, well... a building I guess. It takes effort and time to achieve because the interaction with your customers should not stop after the sale, and should begin way before they even consider making a purchase from you.
How can community marketing benefit your brand?
Point 1: Think long term
The best business decisions are always the most sustainable ones, and community marketing is exactly that. A strong growing community is fuel for long term growth.
As your customer base and community grows, your brand authority and opportunities grows along with it.
Your chances of surviving in the market is higher as your fan base is stronger, and it opens the doors to ways that you can bring your community together like events, workshops, meet and greets, etc. whether it is online or offline. These also often lead to fun collaborations with other brands that share a similar audience like you.
This is future-proofing your brand.
Point 2: Loyalty
It’s hard to convince someone to jump from Apple to an Android device. This is an example of customer loyalty and the result of a strong community.
The thing about loyalty in your customer base is you can already reap its benefits even with a small following.
You’ve probably heard this analogy before:
If you have 100 followers on Instagram, you probably think that is not really impressive, but what if 100 people were to willingly attend and listen to you speak in a room right now?
That would be pretty darn incredible.
Point 3: Your community will do the work for you
No, I do not mean taking advantage of your customers.
The market is not as passive as it used to be. Communication spreads fast and with a strong community, they will organically do the advertising for you, sometimes without you or them even realising.
If they genuinely like your product or service, they will spread the word to people they know who share the same interest as them. This is an example of word of mouth (WOM) advertising.
A strong brand community will, in the long run, sell itself.
Take care of your community, and your community will take care of you.
Point 4: Market research
There are two ways to look at this.
1. Testing new ideas
2. Receiving feedback
If you have a loyal fan base and you plan to launch a new product or service, you can easily ask them questions about what they think about it to test their interest.
An example of this would be how Canva or Adobe launches new features to a smaller group of Beta customers first to get their feedback. As a customer, who wouldn't want to be a part of this? Your customers will feel special, and included, as they are genuinely part of your company's journey. As a business, this will allow you to make any final changes after receiving feedback before officially launching the new feature or product to the public. Plus, you get to make your community happy too.
Alternatively, if there is something wrong about your product or service, you can bet that the first ones to voice out, are the people from your community, because they care about your brand as much as you do.
Point 5: Your community members can help each other
Community members can help each other solve problems.
The best example for this would be tech products.
Imagine you are a Fuji customer who just purchased the latest Fujifilm X100VI.
If you have trouble navigating around the menu or using certain features, the first thing you would do is either ask a friend or anyone you know who is an avid Fuji user. The second thing is to go online to do a quick Google or YouTube search.
Pages like Reddit or Quora are brilliant places to get answers to customer problems like this.
Namely, the Fujifilm Reddit page has over 128k members, where they not only actively help each other with problems, but also share photos or videos they have taken using Fuji cameras. Most brand Reddit pages are not in any ties with the actual company, but created by fans themselves who genuinely want to help the community.
Imagine all the buzz online that your community can create for you just by helping each other.
Case studies and WHY they are successful
1. Motherchukers
Motherchukers is a Malaysian born clothing brand founded in 2020 by content creators, Jane Chuck and Mandy Gioh.
What started off initially as a merchandise launch for CNY that year eventually grew to become not just a successful clothing line, but a powerful brand.
They currently have an Instagram page @heymotherchukers that has over 41.2k followers, as of writing this in March 2024.
Their marketing strategy has always been people-first while also being consistent with their branding.
The two fiery founders constantly share the behind the scenes of their business to their followers online and are always open and down to earth when they are invited to podcasts and interviews.
Over the four years in the market, Motherchuckers also has done collaborations with local brands and companies. Here are a couple of brands they have collaborated with:
103 Coffee
Good Vibes Festival 2023
Heineken Malaysia's 150th anniversary campaign
We don't have the time to go through Motherchucker's entire list of marketing efforts, but these here are great examples of incredible community marketing which builds a strong emotional connection with their customers overtime.
2. Gymshark
Gymshark’s customer-first approach for their marketing campaigns helped them build the unbreakable Gymshark online community. Here are a few examples:
The ‘safe space’ barbershop (2022)
Gymshark opened a pop-up barbershop in East London called Deload for 5 days, aimed to give men a safe space to open up about their mental health and in return give them a free haircut.
United We Sweat (2022)
They tried to target a broader audience here, featuring people from different walks of life in the main campaign video above. The main message of this campaign is finding your strength, overcoming hurdles in life to reach a common goal, especially when the world tries to set us apart. “Alone you get far. Together we go further.”
They also actively do live events with a recent one being Lift Miami.
A two-day fitness event where Gymshark fans can meet athletes, fitness influencers, participate in sports challenges like the Turf Games, and more. This works well because it brings their customers or fans together in one space to connect with one another.
It was also a great opportunity for Gymshark to invite fitness influencers to the event with PR packages and a lot of them (or all of them, we can't really confirm) have posted their vlogs on YouTube. Genius community marketing.
Influencer marketing
Gymshark has a panel of influencer ambassadors like Nikki Blackketter, David Laid and Whitney Simmons. These ambassadors are always carefully selected to make sure they align with the brand's vision and have a similar audience base.
An example of a great way how Gymshark uses influencer marketing getting them to do content during a pre-launch of a product or event to create hype. Most Gymshark events also have meet and greets where the influencers can meet their fans and interact with them. This creates a genuine emotional connection between Gymshark, the influencers and their customers and is one reason why Gymshark is killing the influencer marketing scene.
Gymshark also creates a variety of in-house marketing content on their YouTube channel.
3. GoPro
One way GoPro brings value to their community is with online contests.
Earth Day 2024 Contest
The GoPro team is aware that their customers are active individuals who like to take pictures and record videos outdoors. Hence, they created a photo challenge in alignment with Earth Day 2024. Users can submit a landscape image taken on their GoPro with a theme of removing plastics from our oceans. The top five winners will receive a GoPro Hero Black 12, and get featured on GoPro’s channels. The contest has ended, so if you want to take a look at the top five winners, click the image below to head to GoPro's Instagram post.
In short, a contest is an effective way to bring your customers together and generate buzz, regardless if it's physical or virtual. If you choose to do a social media contest, come up with a unique branded hashtag (Like #GoProAwards) so users can use that hashtag whenever they submit an entry. It's free community-driven marketing too!
GoPro YouTube channel
On the GoPro YouTube channel, you will find videos of people using their cameras in a real sports setting. These videos are often uploaded with minimal editing.
The content works because
It's genuine. Real footages taken by real people. The footage is minimally edited so the viewers know what to expect if they are thinking of getting a GoPro for themselves. The production quality is not too high so it relates with a wider audience.
It's kind of immersive. Viewers get to experience what it's like to go on these sporty adventures from the creators' POV.
It's not hard selling. They sell the experience and result of the product. Not the product itself.
It's fun. Even if you're not thinking of getting a GoPro, these videos are fun to just play on your TV.
The result of GoPro's community marketing efforts? The GoPro Reddit community has over 164k members and it is the top 1% of all Reddit communities.
As a GoPro user, you can also rely on the community to create content whenever
a new product launches.
there's a common issue.
there are updates.
Or just evergreen fun content that anyone can appreciate.
4. Adobe
Adobe is a creative application suite, and they understood that the people who use their products are creative people.
They have a free blog on their website where they can post updates, tips and news to their community, and they are also known for doing an event called Adobe Summit annually.
Adobe Summit
A yearly event hosted by Adobe for creative people and marketing leaders to attend to hear about latest Adobe product releases and updates. You get to experience live demos, participate in Q&As and most importantly, network with other people in the field. They just wrapped up this year's Adobe Summit in March and Adobe's Generative AI features were a big topic.
Content
Adobe's efforts to serve their community also reflects in their social media content.
Adobe often posts videos on Instagram collaborating with influencers who use Adobe software.
Meshna is a professional photographer and creator who has an audience base of 242k followers on Instagram. Recently, Adobe collaborated with him to promote their latest AI features.
By collaborating with people in the creative industry who has a similar audience like Adobe, they are able to reach out to more people in an organic way. Of course, this isn’t the first time Adobe has done this. They have also collaborated with creators like Kane Sutter (@Kallaway, 190k followers on IG), Kim Alban (@kimalban, 76k followers on IG) and Dani Dazey (@danidazey, 166k followers on IG) to promote new adobe app features.
This not only provides value to Adobe’s online audience, but also the creators’ audience too, creating a symbiotic relationship that just works really well.
5. Lego
Lego is more than just (really expensive) plastic building bricks. They are an exemplary result of successful community-driven marketing and they appeal not only to kids, but adults too.
Age gap is not the sole criteria that Lego is targeting, it is actually an emotion - creativity, and creativity is something that share no age boundaries.
The Lego Ideas page for instance, lets customers submit their Lego builds and potentially become an official Lego Ideas Designer (which is exactly as cool as it sounds like).
Members can achieve that title once their submission gets at least 10000 supporters and passes an expert review stage.
Why would anyone want to become a Lego Ideas Designer? Not only do you get a chance to be featured on the page, but your build has the opportunity to be turned into a real product that is sold on shelves and you get to attend official Lego Ideas signing events and meet your fans.
Lego understood that their customers are creative people, and they satisfied these needs:
Creative people want their work to get noticed.
Creative people want inspiration for new ideas.
Creative people love to collaborate.
Therefore, the Lego community is one of the most unbreakable creative communities out there. They even have a Reddit page that has over 1.4 million members.
In a nutshell:
Even though building a community for your brand can take a lot of time and effort, its benefits can pay off in the long run, if executed well. The Creative Pistachio was founded with a mission to help people like you share your ideas online by creating valuable content for your audience. We are constantly finding ways to help you get creating.
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