At Convosight, we have helped 150+ brands like Nestle, Dettol, Dyson, Maybelline, Plum, Godrej, Veet, Motorola, and J & J, to name a few, successfully create a solid community marketing strategy and execute over 1000 community marketing campaigns.
That’s precisely where we have crystallized our learnings from, on formulating a sought-after community marketing strategy that gets you the desired results. Hence, you know we speak with experience on this topic.🙂
If you’re a brand marketer looking to create a foolproof community marketing strategy for your brand that you can apply right now and would like to take inspiration from some of the top brands, this blog is for you.⚡
However, if you’re someone who’s still trying to gauge if community marketing should be a part of your marketing mix, I’d highly recommend you go through this blog first.👇🏻
Why Community Marketing should be a part of every brand’s marketing mix
After you’re fully convinced and have finally decided to explore communities at scale and wish to understand how you can go about preparing a community marketing strategy, scroll down to read more.
Before I start, let me shed some light on the two ways you can approach community marketing:
- By building your brand community
- By partnering with the most relevant communities that exist on different community platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, or Telegram
Here’s the difference between the two:
| Building your Brand Community | Community Marketing in existing communities |
| Reaching scale takes time and requires immense hard work, effort and consistency. | Reaching scale does not take time and you can achieve that immediately by identifying relevant communities across platforms. |
| Impact across one community i.e. users in your community. | Impact a across multiple communities, i.e. relevant target audience across multiple communities |
| Complete control over content that goes in your community | You will need to work together with community leaders to create content that their members would love to engage with |
| Easily track metrics and report impact across one community | You will need third party tools to track and report impact across multiple communities |
No matter your approach, a rock-solid community marketing strategy is a primitive requirement.
Let me explain why:
There are three different players that exist in the community marketing ecosystem and each of them has its own set of expectations:
a. Community members
Looking to seek solutions to their problems/ pain points and participate in exciting games and contests, if any.
b. Brands
Looking to meet their desired objectives and hit target KPIs
c. Community admins, aka community leaders
Looking to share high-quality content their members love to engage with, get acknowledged for their effort by community members, and simultaneously earn.
An ideal community marketing campaign is the one that provides value to each of these players and finds the right balance between their expectations.
That’s where the need for a legit community marketing strategy comes in.
Let’s look at how Urban Company used community marketing to drive consideration for its home disinfection service amongst its target audience.
They started by analyzing community conversations and the need for disinfection, given that the Covid 19 virus had begun to slow down in severity.
They then identified the most relevant women communities across parenting and lifestyle categories to drive the key USPs of their disinfection services, making sure that the entire campaign tonality was positive and supportive rather than causing any fear.
In their posts, community admins established the need for disinfecting homes, talking about the things they do every day to keep their homes clean and disinfected during the pandemic.
Admins who availed Urban Company’s disinfection services shared their reviews of the same and advocated for it by providing images.
Consequently, members also started sharing their thoughts about the service and stressed the importance of a clean and disinfected home.
How did the UC campaign benefit members, brands and admins?
- It generated awareness about the importance of disinfection among customers and encouraged them to keep their homes clean and safe during the pandemic
- It helped brands achieve their objective as their category conversations went up from 10K to 16K in just three weeks, and brand SOV was 84%
- It made admins the real superheroes as they partnered with relevant brand and disseminated the most beneficial information for their members
To know more about the campaign, you can check out this 👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻
Without further ado, let’s dive right into how you can go about creating a foolproof community marketing plan for your brand and the different components that are a part of it.
How to create a successful Community Marketing Strategy?
1. Identify your objective and category
The first step to creating an effective community marketing strategy is to understand what you wish to achieve with it. You can have different objectives for your brand, from increasing conversations around your products and services to driving engagement and advocacy.
The next step is to figure out your brand’s niche – whether you’re into food, lifestyle, nutrition, health, electronics, skincare, or any other.
These two factors together play a crucial role in determining your community marketing plan.
Let’s look at the different objectives some top brands have achieved with community marketing campaigns. At the same time, we will also focus on each of these brands’ categories and the approach or campaign idea that helped them accomplish it.
a. Generate high-quality organic leads
Generating high-quality leads is the topmost priority for any new or existing brand because that’s the key to a thriving business.
Pediasure, the number one toddler nutrition brand, launched their new product packed with growth nutrients like Arginine and Vitamin K2 in mid-2021.
The brand leveraged community marketing to achieve these objectives:
- Create awareness around it
- Help parents understand how these two ingredients support a child’s bone growth and strength
- Generate leads for their free nutritional counselling session
Campaign Idea: Content partnership
Approach: They co-created content that helped community members understand about 60% bone growth in the early years of a child, the role of nutrition in the overall growth of toddlers, and highlighted how new Pediasure contributes to a toddler’s development.
Result: Pediasure was able to generate 3700 relevant leads along with 32K user-generated posts and an increased positive sentiment, among other things.
Why they could achieve it: The brand selected the right campaign idea and communication style as members understood the benefits of those particular nutrients and how they’d help their child’s bones grow taller and stronger.
To know all about Pediaure’s community marketing campaign, you can check out this
👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻
b. Build brand RTBs or Reasons to Believe
Today every brand strives to be on top of the minds of its customers when it comes to brand recall.
To achieve that, you need to communicate the value you can add to your customers’ lives and how you differentiate from your competitors.
Berger Paints, the second largest paint company in India, tapped into communities to achieve these objectives:
- Help parents set aside their worries when it comes to wall stains and let kids channelise their creativity with art on walls
- Position itself as the brand that ensures perfect and stain-free walls
Campaign Idea: Content partnership
Approach: On the heels of Mother’s Day, Berger Paints, along with community admins, focused on creating conversations where mothers (admins of the groups) shared their personal stories of how they encourage and participate with their children to channel their creativity with their art on the wall without any stress of the wall paint getting spoiled. They introduced Berger Paints as their partner in their kids’ creative journey while ensuring that their walls look neat and clean. They further encouraged group members to share similar stories.
Result: Within a span of 10 days, the brand received 4995 mentions and 5207 user-generated posts. Positive feedback on the conversations include parents being happy (33%) and loving (25%) Berger Easy Clean.
Why they could achieve it: The brand selected the right campaign idea, occasion, and communication style as members could easily convey their message to the members. They could relate to the admins’ stories, and that’s what led to increased participation.
To know all about Berger Paint’s community marketing campaign, you can check out this
👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻
c. Drive word-of-mouth advocacy
Nothing better than consumers talking about and advocating for your brand or products in front of their friends and family.
That happens only when your brand delivers results as promised and there’s visual evidence for it.
Wella, the renowned German hair care brand, specializing in hair care, styling, and colorants, used the power of communities to achieve these objectives:
- Get consumers back to salons (post the pandemic) after losing them to a host of at-home colorants that promise salon-like results at home
- Understand the perceptions, biases, and fears of women towards adopting salon hair color solutions
- Create widespread acceptance of salon coloring and create word of mouth advocacy for Wella
Campaign Idea: Content partnership
Approach: The brand co-created content around the superiority of salon hair colour and built the superiority narrative with Wella as the preferred brand by showcasing the impact with before and after photos. Further, they addressed the fears and perceptions around hair colouring through expert-led live sessions.
Result: Mentions for Wella increased from merely 3 to 2700 on an average along with 58% share of voice (increase from 2.7%). The campaign attracted 8962 UGC posts. 18% of all brand conversations were about purchase and recommendations, indicative of a very strong advocacy leg.
Why they could achieve it: The brand selected the right campaign idea and communication style, i.e. before and after pictures by admins, and expert sessions to educate members about the benefits of salon hair color as these work best for skincare, haircare, and makeup brands.
To know all about Wella’s community marketing campaign, you can check out this
👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻
d. Product Sampling
Product sampling is a fantastic way to increase brand awareness and allow consumers to get to know your product well, leaving them wanting more.
In the process, you can also tap into some great insights and use them to your benefit.
Pediasure, the number one toddler nutrition brand, launched its new product packed with growth nutrients like Arginine and Vitamin K2 in mid – 2021.
The brand leveraged community marketing to achieve these objectives:
- Create awareness around it
- Help parents understand how these two ingredients support a child’s bone growth and strength
- Generate leads for their free nutritional counseling session
Campaign Idea: Content Partnership
Approach: They co-created content that helped community members understand that 60% of bone growth happens in the early years of a child. They also talked about the role of nutrition in the overall growth of toddlers, and highlighted how new Pediasure contributes to a toddler’s development.
Result: Pediasure was able to generate 3700 relevant leads along with 32K user-generated posts, among other things.
Why they could achieve it: The brand selected the right campaign idea, i.e. creating content to help members understand the importance of those nutrients and how they’d help their child’s bones grow taller and stronger.
Their communication style was also on point as members actually took the 90 day challenge and shared visible results.
To know all about Pediasure’s community marketing campaign, you can check out this
👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻
e. Expand into a new market
As you would know, user-generated content is the original, brand-specific content done by customers and potential customers in the form of new posts, comments, stories, or anything similar.
High-quality UGCs are not only a testimonial to how good your brand products are, but they are also responsible for driving advocacy simultaneously.
ITC’s leading atta brand Aashirvaad, explored communities to achieve these objectives:
- Increase conversations for wheat in South India, where rice is the staple food
- Increase brand conversations and mentions by highlighting key brand benefits and USPs
- Facilitate adoption amongst potential customers
Campaign Idea: Community contests
Approach: They partnered with 53 communities with over 2.7 million members and successfully ran their flagship contest, ‘Try my recipes’. Both Phase 1 and Phase 2, held around Diwali and Christmas respectively, saw admins sharing their festive special cooking recipes using Aashirvaad MP Atta along with photo of dish and Aashirvaad pack shot. To ensure maximum amplification, they tagged 3 other members to share their recipes and encouraged them to do the same.
Result: The campaign was highly successful and attracted 1936 organic entries for the contest – the highest across any channel.
Why they could achieve it: The brand selected the right campaign idea and communication style, as recipe based contests work like a charm for food brands.
To know all about Aashirvaad’s community marketing campaign, you can check out this
👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻
2. Select the most relevant communities
After you’ve defined your objective, the next step is to select the list of communities that are relevant to you. Here’s how you can do it:
a. Identify keywords associated with your category and brand
Understand the keywords your target audience uses to express their pain points, the category, or your brand.
Let’s say you’re a toddler nutrition brand; hence your target audience would be parents. The relevant keywords for you would be immunity, child, baby, toddler, growth, development, parenting, moms, dads, parents, etc.
Similarly, if you’re a makeup brand, your target audience would be women, and the relevant keywords for you would be: makeup, makeup tips, skincare, and so on.
b. Figure out the category of community your TG resides in
Your target audience could be present in either a single community category or across multiple community categories.
If you are looking to target women aged 25 – 45, they’re highly likely to be found in cooking, parenting, beauty, and lifestyle communities.
Similarly, if you’re looking to target parents, they would exist primarily in parenting communities, followed by cooking and lifestyle communities.
c. Look for communities on the right platform
That is, where your target audience, aka customers, are most active.
Facebook groups are one of the largest community platforms, with over 1.8 billion active people.
They are the place to look because everyone is here!
This is followed by:
- Reddit (where technology, gaming, and crypto enthusiasts are most active)
- Slack (where working professionals are most active)
- Quora (where people are talking about everything be it business, travel, entertainment, marketing, or learning)
- WhatsApp (where people are talking about everything)
- Discord (where coding, gaming, and crypto enthusiasts are most active)
- Telegram (where news and movie buffs are most active)
- LinkedIn (where business professionals, mainly from the supply chain, marketing, sales, and PR, are active)
d. Look for your category and brand keywords inside those communities
To understand whether or not a particular community is relevant for you.
Also, make sure to see if there are any ongoing or previously concluded community marketing campaigns in that community for your category or other relevant categories.
If yes, then that community is highly relevant to you.
3. Observe community conversations & identify strong and meaningful consumer insights
Go through member conversations across all the communities you’ve identified and understand people’s top of mind, their pain points, the kind of problems they are discussing, and the solutions they are getting from other members of the community.
This will give you an insight into how much awareness currently exists around your brand or product and the biggest consideration factors for people when they recommend anything.
These insights will help you gauge how to start building consideration around your brand, products, or services.
Look at this post done by a member of a parenting community on Facebook. She is enquiring about anti-aging skin care products for her mom who is over 43 years.
Sharing a few comments of this post below.
Consumer insight identified from these comments:
“People who use anti-aging skin care products are well aware of the active ingredients and the impact it has on their skin.”
Skincare brands can double down on this insight by creating a community marketing campaign that advocates the ingredients of their products, telling how beneficial they are for your skin.
4. Create your community marketing plan
You must formulate your community marketing plan based on the insights you gathered by digging into community conversations.
Map them against the existing needs, pain points, or interests of consumers.
Have a look at this post from a lifestyle community on Facebook where a member is inquiring about pink aloe vera and its benefits for skin.
Sharing a few comments this post got.
Consumer insight identified from these comments:
“Only a few people are aware of pink aloe vera and the fact that it protects the skin from sun damage and keeps it hydrated and moisturized.”
We can see that members are interested to know about pink aloe vera and those who use it vouch for it.
How can you formulate a community marketing strategy from this insight?
Skincare brands can work on a campaign wherein they co-create content that creates awareness about pink aloe vera and its benefits on the skin. They can host expert-led live sessions because it would matter when experts share their take on pink aloe vera, and discuss how one can use it.
Alongside, the brand can talk about their product (if any) with pink aloe vera as an active ingredient and how it tackles their skin concerns.
REMEMBER:
Unlike influencer marketing, a community marketing campaign does not involve a single post. Your community marketing plan will mostly be multi-phased, each aimed at achieving different objectives.
Let’s have a look at the number of phases the aforementioned brand campaigns had.
- To generate high-quality organic leads from their community marketing campaign, Pediasure created a three-segment strategy (Pre-launch, launch, and post-launch).
- To strengthen its brand positioning,
- To drive word-of-mouth advocacy, Wella ran a three-phased campaign.
- To generate high-quality UGCs, Aashirvaad ran a two-phased campaign – one around Diwali and the other around Christmas.
- To increase brand conversations and mentions, Plum ran a campaign for four months that was divided into four phases.
5. Run your community marketing campaigns via community leaders
Every community out there has a community leader/ creator / key opinion leader (KOL) who’s the most trusted voice of the community. The KOL has built, nurtured and scaled this community to where it is, and members look up to them to share valuable information.
Hence, it’s best to approach the community leader to discuss potential collaborations. Tell them about your brand, marketing objective, why you think your brand will add value to their community, and why their community is the right fit for your brand.
After they’ve agreed and are aligned with your brand and objective, you can decide on a date and ask them to start executing campaigns in their respective communities.
6. Measure the impact of your community marketing campaigns
Lastly, you must measure the impact of your community marketing campaigns to track whether you could meet the desired objectives.
Giving you a sneak peek into the different metrics some of the top brands tracked:
- For its organic lead generation campaign, Pediasure tracked – increase in category conversations, brand mentions, user-generated posts, and brand sentiment and leads generated.
- Berger Paints tracked total engagement (likes + reactions) on campaign posts, increase in brand mentions, user-generated content along with positive feedback for its campaign around strengthening brand positioning.
- Wella tracked increase in brand mentions, increase in brand share of voice and total user generated posts for its word-of-mouth advocacy campaign.
- For its UGC led campaign, Aashirvaad tracked increase in brand conversations and mentions along with increase in category conversations and of course, total number of user-generated posts.
- Plum tracked increase in brand mentions, increase in brand share of voice along with user generated posts to understand its impact.
Success is measured by understanding the change in conversations in the community vs the pre-campaign period. Track the:
- Increase in category conversations vs pre-campaign
- Increase in brand mentions vs pre-campaign
- Increase in brand share of voice vs pre-campaign
- Increase in the brand’s positive sentiment
To understand in detail about these and all the other metrics that you must track, check out this blog 👇🏻
Top metrics to measure the success of community marketing campaigns in 2022
How do you market in communities?
Either you do it all by yourself (i.e. finding relevant communities, tracking member conversations and deriving insights, creating a community marketing plan, executing the campaign and measuring its impact) OR you partner with third-party platforms like Convosight.
Convosight is the world’s first community marketing platform that has helped 150+ brands get the maximum ROI for their community marketing campaigns by:
✅Helping them find the right communities through our automated campaign selection dashboard and extract user insights from raw conversations
FYI: 50,000+ Facebook groups with over 570 million members across the globe are using Convosight today!
✅Using those insights to conceptualize campaigns and, with the help of technology, execute them simultaneously across multiple communities
✅Measuring the impact of these campaigns across different business KPIs
To know everything about how we do it, check out this 👉🏻 VIDEO👈🏻
In addition to this, we even help brands start their communities and work with them to build, manage, and scale a thriving brand community.
If you’d like to kickstart community marketing for your brand too, please feel free to REACH OUT. Our community marketing expert will get in touch with you!
Creating value in the lives of others with my content, little by little.✨
Working at Convosight, I do more than just wrangle commas. I’m passionate about innovating new ways to create super valuable and actionable content about Communities and Community Marketing at large, and sharing it with the right audience.
I also happen to manage a global community of power admins on Facebook, and that’s where most of my learnings come from.
Do check out my latest blogs and feel free to share them! 💛
