What do Burning Man, Outdoor Voices, and Culture Amp have in common besides their exponential growth and popularity? If you don't think much of anything, I can see why. People who gather in the middle of the desert, athletic apparel made for #doingthings, and a platform that enables businesses to manage their people data appear to have little to nothing in common. Yet, they all grew their brand exponentially with one common customer-centric growth strategy: community marketing. While the word 'community' sounds a bit overused in the marketing realm, people have — and always will have — a fundamental need for connection.
In a world where large companies aim to own small brands' identity and customer data, connecting deeply with customers is fundamental to the survival of direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. Building a thriving community around your brand and giving customers value, whether they've made a purchase or not, is one of the best ways to cut to the front.
Let's go over what community marketing is, why it works, and how to get started with building a community around your brand.
Community marketing is a brand growth strategy centered around bringing customers together over a topic that is aligned with, or directly related to, a brand in an engaging and non-intrusive way that puts customers first. TL;DR it’s about them, not you.
To really understand what community marketing is and how it fuels brand growth, we need to define what a community is and learn a bit about the psychology behind the human need for connection.
Whether they realize this or not, all thriving communities have three key components. When beginning your community-building journey, it’s incredibly helpful to understand what these three components are and the precursors needed to get to them:
When you’re starting the process of building a community around your brand, start by identifying who your customers are and what they care about that is related to your brand. Then come up with regularly cadenced ongoing ways to bring them together and meaningfully connect.
Think back to a time when you experienced feelings of rejection or loneliness. Perhaps you didn't get that job you prepped like crazy for, or maybe you've been ghosted by someone you were steadily dating for months… if you're a human (which I sure hope you are), you likely felt terrible.
Humans have an innate need for connection, and there’s a growing body of psychological research that digs into how deep that need lies. According to Dr. Matthew D. Lieberman, Ph.D. and Neuroscience Lab Director at UCLA, more than power and other intrinsic incentives — like money and fame — people’s brains are rewarded most when connecting meaningfully with others.
So much so, that our brains literally start to deteriorate when we endure ongoing isolation. Chronic social isolation can even lead to a decrease in the size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain that’s responsible for learning and memory. From our family and friends to our neighborhood and our team at work, social ties are critical to our happiness and success.
For marketers, this means that there is so much more to driving brand growth and customer engagement than clicks and conversions.
Now that we know a bit about how much of human behavior, personal growth, and success are driven by our innate human need for connection, we can start to understand how building a thriving community around a brand fuels its growth.
To see what this looks like in practice and how it works, let's look at two D2C brands who have knocked their customer marketing programs out of the park:
We’ve talked about Outdoor Voices’ community marketing strategy on the blog before, and yes, it’s so good that it’s worth highlighting again. In just a few short weeks, their hashtag, #doingthings, has climbed roughly 20% on Instagram from being used over 130,000 times to over 160,000 times.
In running this customer-centric community program that spans everything from their social media strategy and their website copy, to the events they host in stores and the apparel itself, OV effectively gets their customers (and people who they’d like to be customers) excited about doing the things they love while encouraging others to do the same.
The bikini (and now one-piece, too) trailblazer Kitty and Vibe makes more than cute reversible swimsuits with hot prints and cool solids. After launching just over a year ago by Cameron Armstrong, Kitty and Vibe’s patent-pending innovative sizing model has been touted by Teen Vogue and Forbes as the future of swimwear.
The secret behind Kitty and Vibe’s success? You guessed it — community marketing. The community Cameron has built (and is growing) around Kitty is dynamic, meaningful, and fun. It drives brand growth by tying online and offline engagement programs into a cohesive and unique customer-centric experience. Here’s how:
Bringing the community into everything it does and creating amazing and engaging experiences, Kitty and Vibe fuels its growth by keeping customers at the heart of every one of their community-marketing initiatives.
As Outdoor Voices and Kitty and Vibe have demonstrated, building a community around a brand fires up growth and builds long-term relationships with customers. D2C businesses that invest time and resources into community marketing efforts see real growth. According to a recent report, community marketing tactics generate an average of 6,469% ROI.
Building a community around your brand is one of the best ways to give customers value at every stage of their journey, design better products, and increase overall customer lifetime value (CLV). Marketing strategies that aren't prioritizing community marketing are missing out big on brand growth and customer advocacy opportunities.
Last updated on January 12th, 2024.