When your brand builds a community, the shared experiences and collective impact can enable customers to feel seen and heard by your brand in a distinctive way. Better yet, it makes them feel a part of something.

We’ve covered all of the hows and whys of building your community here on the Six Circles blog before. But with your community established, it’s all too easy to slip into a false sense of security, kicking back in the belief their work is done.

But that isn’t the case.

Without consistency, strategy and the right amount of know-how, your community can quickly become old news and engagement can swiftly begin to dwindle.

With your community established, the next step is to strengthen it. 

That’s why, in today’s post, we’re exploring six ways you can strengthen an existing community to keep your members active and engaged in the long term.

Start with your team

Your brand identity is the foundation of your community – it’s the core of who you are and what you do. After all, without a clear and established brand identity, how will you relate or appeal to customers?

With this in mind, you’ve likely ticked some of the right boxes when creating your brand identity, from brand voice and tone to design and style.

However, with the emphasis often being placed on the customer-facing elements of this identity, internal factors can often be overlooked. In particular, your company ethos.

Your company ethos should encompass your brand’s traits, goals, mission, vision and community. This entails creating a company culture where employees are not only aware of your identity, but also actively embrace and champion it in their day to day.

The benefits here at twofold. Firstly, you can ensure consistency across the board – every engagement and interaction will be driven by the same values and attitudes to create a cohesive brand experience.

Secondly, and just as importantly, you can ensure these experiences are authentic. Today’s marketing-fatigued consumers have become increasingly insensitive to old-school marketing approaches in the vein of ‘who can shout the loudest?’. Capitalise on this by ensuring an authentic and distinctly ‘real’ brand experience at every opportunity.

Embrace a social cause

One effective means of strengthening your brand community is to make your community go further. As we’ve already touched on, community members want to feel part of something bigger, and one particularly effective way of achieving this is through embracing social causes. 

This isn’t merely a case of jumping on the latest bandwagon, though. Again, customers are seeking authentic experiences within your community, so choose to champion a cause that aligns with the core values of your brand.

How exactly you embrace this cause is up to you. Whether it’s through donations of a profit percentage or simply an awareness campaign, the trick is to ensure your chosen cause is one your community will engage with.

Provided you’ve built your community on the right foundations, you’ll find this is easily done. Your values should already resonate with your community members, meaning any cause that aligns with the values of your brand likely aligns with the values of your customers, too.

Incentivise participation 

Sometimes, all it takes is a little nudge in the right direction.  

Incentivising participation is an effective way of strengthening your brand community in little to no time. The logic here is simple: the more reasons a member has to engage, the more likely they are to do it.

Of course, it’s key that any incentive is sustainable over time. Building a community is all about retention, so consider how you’ll incentivise not just one-off engagement, but long-term engagement. 

From competitions to loyalty schemes, take the time to survey, poll and research your audience to better understand what incentivises them.

Respond and nurture 

Engagement is all very well and good but, if this is a one-way street, your community will soon lose interest.

While organic, customer-driven community engagement is the dream of any brand, this doesn’t mean you should step away and leave your members to it. On the contrary, actively participating in your community ensures customers view your brand as central to their community experience. 

To do this, ensure you remain responsive to queries, problems and concerns, nurturing each and every customer interaction towards your desired goal.

Of course, this requires your community members to know both how and where to reach you. So, strive to be as accessible as possible to your community members, whether that’s a dedicated customer service number, a responsive social media team or private chat functionality on your community platform.

Champion versatile content 

The best way to keep an audience engaged? Keep them interested.

The easiest way to strengthen your brand community is to give customers a reason to keep coming back for more. If you’re posting repetitive, outdated or uninspiring content, community members will quickly switch off – the novelty unfortunately doesn’t last long.

This makes it vital to pay close attention to what you’re offering your members – in particular, what’s incentivising them to return. We’ve already touched on how to incentivise participation when it comes to engagement and conversions, but the easiest way to incentivise over a longer period is to, quite simply, give your customers what they want.

Keep creating fresh, varied and valuable community content that offers genuine benefit to the reader – you can learn all about how to do that right here. 

Give it time 

Community building doesn’t happen overnight. 

To ensure the longevity of your community, build it organically – and give it time. Strengthening your community isn’t about finding short-term gains; it’s about building long-term relationships through authentic growth.

Strengthening your community requires you to understand your brand and audience on a deeper level. Take the time to conduct thorough audience research, map out realistic business goals and develop a strategic approach to achieving them.

Only then will you be able to begin strengthening your community in a natural, sustainable way. Sure, you’ll likely pick up some quick wins along the way, but never mistake these for a job done. Strengthening your brand community is, in fact, a never-ending task – it requires ongoing maintenance in order for you to truly reap the rewards.

The importance of strengthening your brand community shouldn’t be ignored – ultimately, it means more loyal customers for your brand. The trick to getting it right? Keep authenticity, strategy and organic growth at the forefront of your community goals.

Need a helping hand establishing, strengthening or growing your brand community? Here at Six Circles, that’s our speciality. Get in touch now to request a demo of our state-of-the-art community engagement platform.