Building Your Brand by Creating Community

What are the most important goals when building your brand online? No matter the product, service or industry, those goals likely include:

1. Starting a relationship with your customers that can’t be duplicated by the competition, encouraging loyalty and providing value.
2. Maximizing customer interaction time with your brand, as well as building mindshare and influence.
3. Building an e-mail list for targeted follow-up and communication.

Now, what’s the best way to kill these three birds with one rock-solid project?

One popular and effective method is building an online community for your brand, letting your customers lead the way from a touch point that they control.

Not so fast. Before you slap together a branded forum, note the key to online community success: Good design.

Good community design goes beyond just the visual experience. A complete user experience means fresh visual design, but also includes intuitive navigation, easy registration capturing valuable information, user-generated content and support from the brand.

How you build your community depends on what customer needs you can identify, as well as business goals your organization needs to accomplish. Like most marketing initiatives, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for how to accomplish the three goals.

Here’s a successful example:

Wacom Technologies, a leading manufacturer of digital art tablets, has had success building their brand and achieving these goals through the establishment of several Wacom communities, such as the Pen Collective, as well as their presence on social media channels such as Facebook.

Since one size doesn’t fit every brand, it takes a specific strategy and set of tactics to accomplish the three goals. Here’s the specific strategy eROI and Wacom developed to accomplish them with the Pen Collective:

Enhance brand perception (start the relationship)

1. Use the community to transform the perception of Wacom from simply products to products that are used by real artists to meet goals and live life with creativity.
2. Track and harness brand evangelism around Wacom products.
3. Provide value to customers by putting the focus on them, and letting them control the content being put on the site.

Create a user community (Maximize the interaction)

1. Establish PenCollective.com campaign microsite as the place for customers to share with each other stories about how they use Wacom products.
2. Establish Facebook community.
3. Harness and brand evangelism.
4. Open up Pen Collective and Facebook as avenues to drive traffic sales-ready traffic to the main Wacom e-commerce site.

Don’t forget the e-mail list.

Build list based on community interests

1. Establish an e-mail list of community enthusiasts for targeted, ongoing follow up campaigns and product offerings.

As you provide value through your community, your customers will feel a personal connection with your brand, giving you credit for the ongoing value they receive from it. Remember that every second your target customer spends with your brand is also time not spent with your competitors. But you have to show customers what’s in it for them. If you give it to them, they will love and remember you for it.

What are the most pressing needs of your customers. Is it information? Communication? Entertainment? Productivity? Feedback?

The ‘Pen Collective’ gives consumers a chance to meet some extraordinarily talented artists and see how they take advantage of Wacom’s innovative graphic tablets and pens. The site mixes tutorials, testimonials and a good dose of humor, along with a pinch of social networking.

Also, the site offers the opportunity to meet such people as Mark, an illustrator who prefers his pen to his girlfriend, or Alex, who will show you how she uses her pen to remove the cellulite from her sister’s wedding photos. The site also allows other users to share their own story with the world and become part of the Collective.

The primary customer offering of Pen Collective was providing a place for users to share their stories on the site, giving a 250-word synopsis of their experience, select their favorite products, their industry, and their preferred software they use Wacom products to control. This fostered a natural shift in focus from the product to the user of the product.

Pen Collective users could also join the Pen Collective Facebook group, established and managed by the Wacom internal team, which now boasts over 3000 very active members. The needs of the customer and brand are both met.

As a major touch-point, the constant customer contact lets your company progressively profile visitors over time, targeting their specific needs and wants. This allows you to identify opportunities to offer value add services and knowledge when they need it most.

To ensure your community meets the goals and is productive from both a brand and ROI perspective, it’s important to focus on meeting customer needs and design the community with usability and sociability in mind.

This case is a great example of successful brand building through community. With the Pen Collective, Wacom gave customers the type of community that best meet their needs and while encouraging enthusiastic participation.

Ryan Buchanan is CEO of online marketing and creative firm eROI.