Do you own a business or startup? Do you intend to start a business or startup at some point? Maybe you are even planning to invest in some business or startup. If you are in business or entrepreneurship there are things that should interest you. In fact, there are things that you cannot afford to ignore. One of those areas is marketing. It does not matter the size of the business or startup, marketing is integral. You must know all there is regarding marketing. Today our focus is community-based marketing.

An Age-Old Principle

The principle of communities has been around for ages. Generally, a community is a group of people sharing a common understanding, and often the same language, law, manners, and or tradition. From an internet perspective, a community is a group of people interacting by electronic means for educational, professional, social, or other purposes. You could even call it a virtual community. The idea or the principle has always been there.

However, very few businesses over time have managed to harness that in business marketing. Yes, the principle of targeting in marketing has been evolving over the years. Yet consciously getting to build a group of people (a community) around a business has been alien to many. You can check out the article building communities around your business. In that article, I explained it, with some examples, so I urge you to read it.

What Exactly Is Community-Based Marketing?

Community-based marketing is the promotion of products or services by appealing to people as components of a community. For the longest time, marketing has mostly been about appealing to the individual. Even today for many, marketing is still about that. No wonder why buyer personas are a thing. A buyer persona is a detailed description of what you consider your target or ideal customer. Do not get me wrong, that element of targeting the ideal individual is great. It is still relevant in this day and age. However, there is a much better approach – which is community-based marketing. Which community-based marketing still has its roots in individualised or customized marketing.

What Differentiates This So-Called Community?

If you are as analytical as I am you may already have this question: are those individuals put together not a community? Well, not necessarily. For instance, your traditional marketing can appeal to people in different locations. Those people may never actually know or interact with each other. Thus they will not necessarily be a community. The community aspect in our discussion today pertains to a group of engaged, committed, and like-minded people promoting your products or services with you. They have a sense of brand ownership though they are your customers. This means they go beyond just buying your stuff or interacting with your content. They actively propagate your content and even create their own content for your business unsolicited. All of which will push your brand awareness further than it would have without them.

You Already Have The Platforms And Tools

That is the beauty of community-based marketing. You already have tools and platforms at your disposal. What will set you apart is knowing how to use them rightly. Being able to build social media accounts affords you the opportunity to build communities. You have to move away from making it a one-way street. So many businesses on social media are one-way streets. You go to their platforms and it is basically them talking to themselves. They never acknowledge or respond to anything from their audience. That is ironic because it is akin to missing out on treasure that is right in front of you. You have to shift your focus.

Involve, Acknowledge And Reward

That is the simple formula for building communities and rolling out community-based marketing. You may have heard me encouraging the creative use of hashtags in business before. That is one way of leveraging community-based marketing. You can learn more from this article, about the importance of hashtags and how to use them for your business. You can also learn more from another one, about how you can generate online word of mouth. There is also another article I did on competitions businesses can run.

These are examples of areas you must focus on in rolling out community-based marketing. The thrust is to involve, acknowledge, and reward your audience. Once you consistently do that, they will become your marketing foot soldiers. They will have a multiplier effect on your marketing efforts. Whatever you put out they will multiply and expand. Plus they will even be initiative enough to do their own sort of marketing for your business.

Community-based marketing thrives on the general nature of human beings. People are emotional beings and as such you need to appeal to their emotions. You also want to get them emotionally attached to your business. The other aspect is that people tend to attach themselves to some form of purpose. Be it good or bad, people like to have a sense of purpose. Thus in your business, you want people to get interested by virtue of being involved in a good cause. When you craft your community-based strategies always remember this. Build and drive your community or communities centred on emotional attachment and purposefulness. You can learn something from observing social media personalities. They have a substantial understanding of how to leverage communities-based approaches.