How can you boost a followers-base while increasing engagement rate in 12 months, in the middle of a pandemic, for a brand usually famous in summer for its sun-care products? The answer is both simple & complex: community building.
Discover our key learnings from developing an engaged and loyal community for Lancaster Beauty
Community Building Vs Community Management
In 2019, Havas Group found that the people they asked wouldn’t care if 77% of brands disappeared. This was a stark reminder that without creating a true connection with your audience, they might not notice if you stop appearing on their feeds. Community Building, along with fuelling sales, ensures your brand is one of the 23% people want to see remain.
This process is a step further than simply managing a community, which includes answering DMs, liking comments and tagged images, essentially, daily activities to keep up to date with notifications. Community Building is focussed on acquisition and retention of followers, gaining insights, providing extra value to customers, and using social listening learnings to feed product development. It should be considered as part of the sales funnel, like a virtual sales assistant answering questions, offering free samples and inviting you to visit again.
3 key activities to build your community
In the Lancaster situation, the goal was to feed, expand and develop the existing community. After refining the identification of their desired key audience, we focussed our attention to building relationships with them, infiltrating new communities to expand brand awareness, and creating a following that trusted the brand.
Our solution became 3 key activities;
- Community Management, to create best-in-class customer service
- Active Listening, to reach outside of our community
- Digital flirting, to reward and develop one-to-one relationships with our community members
Initiating these processes and making them happen seamlessly meant that, in a time where offline events that were previously the key calendar moments for the community were not available, we could consistently touch base with our followers. The end result was a dedicated community, with which we had one-to-one bonds with, that were fully-educated on Lancaster products and loyal to them.
3 Reasons Why
Building this community for Lancaster allowed us to identify 3 main reasons why people want to join a brand’s community;
- Rewards: They hope to receive gifts and surprises. We received hundreds of requests to collaborate with Lancaster and test out products. Often, these came from people who we had reached out to during Active Listening and didn’t follow the page. This helped us to invite people into the community, but we also needed to give this group a reason to stay.
- Alignment: They want to have their personal brands associated with the brand. We had a growing trend of followers with smaller followings who regularly tagged us in their pictures, even with no product present. Perhaps they were hoping for a like or comment from the brand, to show their followers that they have a relationship with the brand. This alignment was therefore beneficial to them, as it raised their status as an influencer.
- Loyalty: They are true product lovers. This is a group of people who have perhaps been using the products for years, whose mothers even used the products before them. This is the gold standard of community members, who will regularly engage with the brand simply because they love it. The more followers who fall into this category, the closer the brand is to being in the 23% of brands that people would care about if they disappeared.
The Desired Results
Building a community really means building trust. Through Community Management, rewards and surprises you build loyalty, and that is how sales can be unlocked. A successful Community Building approach lets you learn from your community, give them what they want, and create a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship. Which ultimately leads to more brand loyalty and, in effect, more sales over a longer period of time.
To successfully build your community, you need a consistent, aggressive and structured approach, as this is the only way to reach enough people and make sure every engagement is maximised. This is even more vital in a time when hosting events and meeting people in person is more and more difficult.
The benefits of an active community who are informed about your products is having a team of people ready to be ambassadors for you as influencers or even as brand fans.
A group of people who truly care to see you on their feeds.
