No one needs to be sold on the value of a strong brand community. It’s why our clients regularly cite community development as one of the key objectives for their brand editorial.
High-quality content can certainly promote engagement and nurture connection, but fostering community is not intrinsic to every content plan. For example, a content strategy designed solely to win in SEO will drive traffic to your website, but those audience numbers you see in Google Analytics won’t represent a true brand community. If you want a deeply engaged and active community, you need to take a different approach with the right strategist at the helm.
What Is a Brand Community?
No matter the type, all brand communities share the same underlying mission: to bring together people with common needs and interests who gain value from having a place to interact.
Investing in these types of active communities unlocks the power to have direct conversations with your audience. It also brings your most loyal customers together in one location. Whether your goal is to…
- improve customer satisfaction
- scale customer support
- create a pipeline for product feedback and fresh ideas
…a thriving brand community can help you achieve many different business objectives.
Brand communities can take on many different forms. Some companies have launched active blog communities they leverage for crowdsourcing and product co-creation, such as Glossier’s Into the Gloss. Others have created online and IRL community-led events to increase their brand’s reach and drive customer engagement, such as Peloton’s All-for-One Musical Festival. Some companies have even reported great success forming deep relationships with customers after building sticky forums or chat communities on online platforms, like Flo’s Secret Chats.
We’re Expanding Our Services to Support Brand Community
As of today, we’re doubling down on cultivating vibrant digital communities for our clients. And for this reason, we’re expanding our team to include community-building expert Michelle Cohen.
A growth marketer and community professional with more than 15 years of experience, Michelle has had a hand in launching new community programs for early- to mid-stage startups, ranging from food-based nutrition supplement company Further Food to The Monroe Institute, the world’s premiere organization for the study of human consciousness. She spent the past year helping dating platform Bumble launch and test new community products and features for its friend-finding app Bumble BFF.
Michelle has also served as Director of Community and Social Marketing at XO Group, Inc, where she evangelized community, social media strategies, and campaigns across the company’s family of brands, including The Knot and The Bump. There, she engineered a community contributor program that curated the most engaging user-generated content on the platform. Michelle also set the strategy to grow the number of volunteer moderators within the community to enhance trust and safety among members.
“Brands are realizing how critical their community is to their mission,” Michelle says. “I’m thrilled to be partnering with the Revel team to help brands design high-quality community content programs that drive value to their business.”
Michelle got her start in community-building running programs for some of the first leading online communities for women, including NBC Universal’s iVillage. During her five-year tenure at iVillage, Michelle partnered with some of the nation’s top health, parenting, and lifestyle experts to design thriving community content programs that drove up to a 400% increase in program member registration and engagement.
How Revel Can Build Your Brand Community
Ready to build a flourishing community for your brand or refine your existing strategy? Revel can help take your community investment to the next level and drive key business objectives by offering the following services:
✔️Community discovery and analysis: Up-front research is a must for community success. Our in-depth analysis will help you learn how to build meaningful foundational relationships with customers (i.e., understanding their needs and pain points).
✔️Community strategy and design: We’ll develop a strategy that includes best-in-class community programs designed around your business goals.
✔️Community content creation: Leverage active members of your community for content through a contributor program, customer testimonials, product videos, or other strategic initiatives. We can create the plan and manage the end-to-end production.
✔️Community campaign build out and implementation: We’ll work with your team to create the best community campaigns—including digital and IRL events, such as expert AMAs, community challenges, and local meetups—to help acquire new customers, deepen existing customer connections (read: increase retention), and identify early ambassadors who want to champion your products.
✔️Super user and ambassador program strategy: We’ll help you build out a super user or ambassador program designed to identify leaders within your thriving community and empower your most loyal customers to contribute and self-organize.
If you’re interested in building your brand community or taking it to the next level, please drop us a line at Hello@thisisrevel.com to set up an intro call.