Building an online community is now a vital element of initial brand building and continuing marketing strategy. With audiences constantly online-connected, and an endless array of entertainment platforms, services, and social options vying for their attention, building a personal, sustained connection with your customers isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s an incredibly important means of cutting through the noise.

Build and nurture a real community around your brand and online social presence, and you cease to be simply another product or service trying to make a sale. You become a part of your customers’ (and potential customers’) lives, and - if you get things really right - one that they actively reach out to, and want to have a relationship with. Achieving this from scratch can appear a daunting process, and indeed there’s a lot to be aware of and understand. So here are the top nine first ideas and approaches to have in mind.

Learn who your potential audience are, and work out how to serve them 

This is the first and most important foundation of building an online community. To maintain any sort of meaningful, authentic connection with a loyal audience, you need to build the right community in the first place. You need to make sure that you’re first talking to people who are going to be genuinely receptive to your products and messaging. 

Without that genuine, organic level of interest and lifestyle alignment, you’re simply going to be advertising, rather than having a conversation. As for how you discover who your community is, how to reach them, and how to talk to them, there are a few different ways to research, discover, and optimise. 

Learn what existing communities’ pain points are, and cater to them 

Whatever your brand, it’s likely that relevant interest groups and cross-over audiences already exist online. But researching ways to engage existing, adjacent communities isn’t just about finding out what they like. After all, if all you do is emulate what they’re already enjoying, then you’re adding nothing of real value to their lives. 

No, as well as working with the positives, just as important is finding out what your potential customers are currently missing out on, and working out how you can fix or better serve those issues for them. Really dig into their culture, read and understand the conversations being had in their online social interactions, the content being made around their subject matter, and the overall sentiment and key points of discussion permeating their overall ‘scene’.

Do that well, and you’ll be able to build a tangible picture of the passions, pains and pitfalls of the products currently serving their lifestyle, and come to understand how you can place - and communicate - yourself as the solution. 

Take the time to understand and establish your voice and identity 

In terms of producing your own content, remember that humanity and connection are key. While influencer marketing can be a powerful route to early momentum and long-term connection with an audience, you should recognise the value in developing your own voice as well. It’s absolutely wise to partner with trusted community voices, but you also need to make sure your official brand channels become the very same thing.

To do that, you need to ask some questions. You need to look past your products, and dig into your values. Find out what you find personally important, think about the causes, subjects, and outlooks that matters to you, and decide how best to express that in your externally-facing messaging and communications. Establishing that relatable - and genuine - identity is one of the most powerful moves you can make in connecting with your community on a meaningful, human level. And doing that is what will keep them coming back.

Create content that delivers value 

We’re long past the days of using social platforms as a glorified RSS feed or mailing list. And there’s a good reason for that. It didn’t work. People are already exposed to enough blunt-force placement advertising in their day-to-day lives. They’re savvy to it. They’re increasingly immunised to it, and they’re regularly taking action to filter it out. When you’re building a community, that’s you’re asking people to actively invite you into their lives. You need to earn that, by providing something they’re glad of. 

The exact shape and format of that content will (hopefully) be defined by what you’ve learned about your community so far, but whether you’re providing tips, recipes, comedy, entertainment, editorial, or subcultural discussion, the important point is to be a friend that your community wants to hear from every day, not an advertiser trying to broadcast to them. 

Find your own star voices 

Once you’ve established the above, look at your staff to find who you already employ who might exemplify that personality, and find ways to get them out there. They may become community managers, presenters, and regular faces of content, or they may simply appear from time-to-time as distinctive, recurring faces.

The point is simply to find the best, more personable cast of ‘characters’ and community touch-points, and let them tell your story and culture simply through relating who they are. 

Find your way to the right influencers and community leaders

So once you have all the right pieces in place, how do you go about actually building momentum? Well the good news is that you don’t have to build from a cold start. Because any community that you want to engage with will already have a multitude of prominent online voices and independent thought-leaders. These content creators will act as beacons and conduits for the important community conversations, concerns, and cultural touchstones that are going to be important to you. So look into partnering with them. 

It’s important to find content creators and influencers who truly align with your brand, values, and voice. Influencer partnerships, like any other element of community-building, have to be natural and authentic. Anything that feels false or forced will misfire very quickly indeed. But by carefully aligning yourself with content creators and community leaders who share the right audiences, philosophies, and messaging, you can build huge early momentum, community goodwill, and potentially very successful, long-term partnerships that will serve all parties well. 

Launch your outreach from the top down and the grass-roots up  

As for the strategy of influencer content partnerships, there are endless approaches that may be suitable, depending on your individual needs, circumstances, and budget. But a wise strategy when laying the foundations for long-term community growth is to establish your presence on both a macro and micro level. 

The logic is that while large-scale, established content creators with large audiences can be great for mass awareness, their sheer size can mean that although numerous, their followers aren’t always the most engaged. Smaller content creators however, may enjoy a closer relationship with their audiences and a more trusting dynamic, making them more powerful in terms of enacting actual influence and action.

A combined plan, therefor - one that seeds topline brand messaging and awareness with the big channels, before collaborating on more granular, personal, grass-roots work with smaller content creators and communities - can be a powerful way of harnessing the best of all worlds. 

Celebrate and elevate your community stars 

As your audience builds, and engagement grows, and activity and conversation builds the pace of its orbit around your brand and messaging, you should take all opportunities to draw those voices in toward you. Don’t be satisfied to simply talk at your audience. Make it clear how much you value them by making them a part of what you do. 

Again, there’s a multitude of possibilities here, from social competitions, to content designed to cultivate creative engagement and response around your brand (that you can then promote on your own channels), right through to special community events, previews, and activities. As things escalate, you can even design content that invites key, trusted community members into your inner sanctum to collaborate, advise, and become semi-official faces of the brand by association. 

Use advocacy to maintain long-term visibility and reward your community 

And moving on to a more formal treatment of the above, do not overlook the power of an official advocacy programme. Sitting somewhere between paid influencer content partnerships and organic community activity, a well-planned, sourced, and run advocacy programme can be instrumental in maintaining visibility of, and investment in, your brand over the long term. 

By recruiting an army of passionate Ambassadors, and rewarding them with special access, merch, products, insider info, and exclusive insights and tip-offs on upcoming products and events, you can instigate something more than promotion and conversation, building a bona fide movement. 

Operated and managed as a persistent arrangement rather than an isolated, stand-out campaign, Ambassador work can deftly walk the line between branded content activations and organic community management, giving you great reach, a constant presence, ongoing loyalty, and a comfortable degree of messaging control without the intensive outlay that a more formal campaign can involve.