The Power of Community-Based Marketing

Before I dwell deep into this topic, I would like to cite two examples from my personal life where I have benefitted from being part of two communities.

I am a pandemic mom and delivered a baby girl in February 2021. Life after a kid is full of doubts and queries while you and your body are recovering from a lot of physical and mental transformations. Along comes a whole book of what to do and what not to do from your families, relatives, and friends. It was a similar experience for me. But thanks to the hospital where I delivered, they have created a WhatsApp group of all new moms – sharing their experiences, uplifting each other, giving tips and tricks about what worked for them during sleep regression or solid strikes, etc. Trust me, I never asked anyone anything regarding raising my kid apart from new moms in the group. They gave me the most trusted advisor and became like a Mom Community. They never judged me for my choices and my rants about sleepless nights and at times, prioritizing my career over a kid. Because the sole purpose of this group is to ensure every mom is supported and every mom is praised.

A second community where I am part of is a platform that helps people transform their lives using Quantified Nutrition and Exercises. I wanted to shed off my post-pregnancy weight and resorted to this community. On days when I feel like giving up on my healthy journey, I resort to this group, read transformation stories of other members, post my queries and silliest doubts and I find myself back on track. There would be someone who would help me realize that it’s okay to progress slowly and have days when you don’t feel like exercising or going for walks.

Both these communities have been my go-to persons now!

Last few years, I have been seeing a rise in the roles of Community Managers/Community Marketing/Community Builders, and no doubt, firms that are doing this are building a huge fan following leading to more sales, revenues, but above all lifelong customer loyalty.

What is a Community?

Here is what Wikipedia says,

“A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with a commonality such as norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighborhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms. Durable relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community, important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions such as family, home, work, government, society, or humanity at large. Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties, "community" may also refer to large group affiliations such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.”

But I would tweak this definition to make it more relevant to Product or Brand Communities

“A community is a group of users, customers, buyers, or influencers with a commonality such as same problems, similar aspirations, and lifestyle, identical purchasing patterns or budgets. Brand Communities may share a sense of place in terms of online forums, communities, groups on social media, or any virtual space through communication platforms. The brand or product communities work to ensure each of the community members can find quick solutions to their problems and they behave above any kind of prejudices. These are durable relations that extend beyond family, colleagues, government, society, or humanity at large.”

Now, these communities are used by brands or products to further deepen their relations with the customers and build solid word-of-mouth marketing.

Not all communities are aimed to provide solutions related to a product or brand, few communities are built to help someone quit an addiction, or sail through a phase of depression in life. These communities serve more humane purposes or bring a group of like-minded individuals who believe in similar values.

What is Community Marketing?

Community Marketing provides online or offline modes of engagement to customers that are associated with a similar brand. Unlike PR, Paid Campaigns, Content Marketing, and Brand Promotions, Community Marketing is non-intrusive, solely focused on the customer and their needs. Hence Community Marketing, when done right generates an enormous amount of brand loyalty.

Community Marketing focuses a lot on customer-generated content and gives customers the right platform to present their experiences, thoughts, and suggestions to the brands and fellow customers. A very good example of Community Building and Community Marketing is WordPress. Despite so many CMS platforms being available in the market, WordPress has maintained its place as the leader.

What makes Community Marketing so successful?

There can be multiple reasons for this question. But there’s one anchor to all these answers – Community Marketing makes your audience powerful, they provide them the special place of being experts where they can help others to solve the same problems they might have faced when they started their association with the brand.

Here are a few other reasons why Community Marketing is so successful –

• Budget-Friendly – Community Marketing is a non-paid form of promotion where customers take the charge of creating content and providing answers to the solutions. Brands act as facilitators in the whole game and provide customers the platform to interact with each other. Few brands provide generous rewards and recognitions to their users for being active contributors to the community and helping other users. These rewards and recognitions can be both monetary and non-monetary.
• Brand Loyalists –Community Marketing aims at building a community of extreme brand loyalists’ and takes their help to convert their normal customers to brand loyalists. This gives brands repeat purchases as well as new customers. Just to give an example, Jenny, a B2B Sales Executive has used a Demand Generation Platform in his early career. This platform has a huge community and Jenny has been part of this community since the beginning. She moved on in her career and now establishing a sales function for a new start-up. Without a second thought, Jenny recommended the same Demand Generation platform to the new management and they all trusted Jenny’s advice. Since the brand has invested genuine time and efforts to establish the community, it paid off in terms of building an extreme brand loyalist customer and repeat purchases.
• Human to human connection – Given the sophistication of AI, ML, NLP, Robotics, customer care services are improving dramatically and chatbots are replacing the first line of customer service. But nothing can replace a human advisor or counterpart that has been in the same situation and shared the exact solution. That is what community marketing does, it helps in creating a virtual or physical environment where customers help each other and provide solutions that have worked for them.

The Future of Marketing is Community Marketing

The age of pushing or persuading people to buy products or services is certainly over. With social media, transparent reviews platform, word-of-mouth, and influencer marketing, every customer is empowered to make an informed choice. Any company that is trying to continue the old and traditional ways of marketing is surely going to hit a wall. Organizations need to work with their marketing teams very closely, make them in charge of the customer-centric projects, and chalk out a plan to start marketing programs to build a community – a community that focuses on the solving problem, helping each other in making decisions and acts as a valid and live proof of the products and services offered by the brands.