By making your audience feel part of your community, you increase their engagement.
The desire to belong is a powerful human motivation that can transform your audience’s relationship with your brand. To create this sense of belonging, it must be supported by the actual existence of such a group, so nothing better than to start by building an authentic and accessible community.
This is relatively easy to achieve today if you wisely use the possibilities offered by social media platforms to interact directly with your followers, responding to their comments and messages, or creating groups that have as a nexus a certain interest related to your product or service.
Personalized interaction also creates a personal and group experience. On the personal side, it makes customers feel valued and listened to, and on the group side you are really making your audience feel part of a community, which increases their engagement with your brand, content, product or marketing message.
The experience of belonging can not only be a group experience, but also an emotional one. It is not necessary for the potential customer to be specifically within a group, but rather to feel part of something. This type of strategy can be done quite effectively by sharing customer stories and testimonials.
This happens because by publishing real experiences of people who use your products or services you are creating a feeling of connection and empathy, or even envy among those who have already purchased and those who have not yet done so.
As part of the perceived belonging to a community, you can always also encourage active participation by asking your customers to share their own stories and experiences, which in addition to having that belonging effect we are looking for, makes these contributions make your communication channels stand out.
This not only increases engagement, but also strengthens the community around your brand.
As we want to increase engagement and strengthen the community created around your brand, you can also offer exclusive benefits only accessible to members of your community, and communicate this to those who are not yet members. Among the possible benefits, we can highlight the creation of advantageous loyalty programs, early access to new products, and exclusive discounts that do not apply to non-members of the community, as well as other advantages such as free shipping, or participation in sweepstakes. In short, these are ways to reward your customers and make them feel part of a special group, and they really work.
Therefore, by implementing these tactics, you will make your audience feel an integral part of your brand, increasing their engagement and loyalty, and you extend your authority or awareness of your product, service or brand as such, reaching not only the members of your community, but also those followers or contacts of those members, with whom they can share your offer at any given time.
