Here at Six Circles, helping brands build communities online is our bread and butter. 

But we also know that successful community building doesn’t just take place digitally. 

After all, your customers are living breathing people who embrace your brand not just online, but in their real day-to-day.

This is why our online community platform boasts a dedicated event area where brands can promote their upcoming in-person events and exhibitions.

It’s also why we’re exploring 6 ways hosting events can help you grow your tribe and strengthen your brand’s community building strategy in today’s post. Let’s explore.

Your brand can be experienced first-hand

Community building is all about reducing the distance between brand and customer. Enabling the customer to experience your brand first-hand is one of the most effective ways to do this.

Why? Because it establishes authenticity.

Anyone can say anything online. Brands can claim to be driven by certain values or to operate in a certain way – but to actually prove this to an audience online takes time, effort and consistency.

At events, on the other hand, you can quickly establish trust by demonstrating authenticity to your audience.

Allowing customers to experience how you interact and engage with your audience first-hand (as well as overcoming conversion hurdles by previewing your products, services and offerings ‘in the flesh’) will make it far easier for your brand to resonate in a real way. 

This turns potential customers into budding community members willing to align themselves with your brand.

You become more memorable 

You’ve probably noticed, but there’s quite a lot of information online, which means standing out from the crowd and sticking in consumers’ minds is easier said than done.

In-person events and exhibitions, on the other hand, allow brands to appeal to the senses of their potential customers – they can be seen, heard and experienced.

As a result, it becomes an awful lot easier to build brand recognition through this marketing method. Consumers are far more likely to, at the very least, recognise your brand name and, ideally, know exactly who you are and what you do.

Plus, in-person events are an ideal opportunity to offer up some free branded merch that spreads the word about your brand that little bit further.

Greater opportunities to experiment and engage

Hosting events and exhibitions opens up plenty of possibilities to explore more experimental marketing campaigns.

Experimenting with fresh and innovative ways to engage your audience can start to become a real challenge online. In person, though, the world is your oyster.

As this post proves, there are endless ways to engage, entertain and capture the attention of in-person audiences to the benefit of your brand recognition and your customers’ enthusiasm for your brand.

Best of all, you can even document these experimental events and experiences to create engaging online campaigns, too – expanding your audience even further!

Community members connect with each other

Community building isn’t about building a following – it’s about growing a tribe. 

As a result, your engagement and growth strategy should place your brand at the heart of the community, not the head.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to encourage conversation and interaction among your community members.

This is significantly easier to promote organically in person, where opportunities for interaction are more natural and your audience feels more incentivised to connect.

Of course, this has a natural positive impact on your community building efforts. Members who are connecting with one another feel a greater sense of belonging, meaning they’ll form a greater connection – not only with their fellow community members, but also with your brand.

You gain a deeper understanding of your audience

In today’s digital world, data reigns supreme. 

Data enables brands to form a better understanding of who exactly their customers are – it gives welcome insight into their habits, behaviours, interests, pain points and more.

Off the back of these insights, brands often build buyer personas and audience profiles to better visualise and get to grips with who their average customers are.

The key word here is ‘insight’. Data is simply a snapshot into a customer’s background – a sneak peek behind the curtain to see what makes them tick.

While there’s undeniable value in these insights, the personas and profiles they inspire are estimations – there’s still an element of assumption around the audience.

When hosting events, on the other hand, you get to meet your real customers. You see faces and learn personalities, and can judge sentiment and observe expectations and reactions.

In short? You gain a deeper understanding of who exactly makes up your brand’s audience, helping you to refine your community engagement strategy in the long term. 

Generate a greater buzz 

Providing you pull it off, your brand event is likely to generate buzz – this is great news for your community engagement efforts.

What exactly this buzz looks like will ultimately depend on the type of event you host – it might be going viral online, bolstering your brand recognition through word of mouth, or recruiting an enthusiastic army of brand ambassadors.

Whatever buzz your event generates, the hope is that it captures attention and ramps up the FOMO (fear of missing out) to attract a wider audience of people who can be nurtured into dedicated community members.

Event marketing is a powerful way of ensuring a robust community engagement strategy. That’s why, at Six Circles, we make it easy for you to promote your events on our first-class community building platform. And better yet, our event area will be undergoing further developments in the coming weeks!

Want to find out more? Get in touch with us today to learn how Six Circles can help your brand community grow.