Why marketers fail at building online communities

In today’s world every brand wants to engage with its audiences and use the power of digital to deepen engagement and increase loyalty. Yet there’s a balancing act – consumers are choosier about who they engage with and are increasingly likely to use social media to complain about brands and their actions. Witness this week’s furore after Sainsbury’s changed the range of items eligible for its lunchtime Meal Deal.

Many brands have tried to create communities to get closer to customers, but often these have failed to deliver any results. Why is that, and how can marketers ensure they are building effective communities for the long term? At this week’s Cambridge Marketing Meetup Chris Massey of Mind The Product explored some of the reasons why, and gave some tips to maximise the chances of success.

Building a community relies on three factors:

• Your audience has to be reachable
• Your community needs to be relevant
• Members have actually got to care about your product/company

The third factor alone explains why so many communities fail. You may be the one toilet bleach manufacturer with huge sales, but how many people actually care or feel an affinity with your brand? The only way to get their interest would essentially be by buying it – offering free stuff for their time, which will result in low engagement and not deliver lasting results.

As with any marketing initiative, you need to follow a process when creating a community. Start with building a business case – what problem are you trying to solve? For companies with technical products it could be reducing support calls as the community shares its knowledge to provide answers to basic queries, or it could be to help co-create new products and services. Identify your goal, and then create aims and metrics around it, ensuring you get the right level of buy-in internally.

Secondly, do you need to create a community at all? Is there an existing community that you can become involved in? There’s no point reinventing the wheel, particularly if members are unlikely to move across to your community from an open alternative.

Why do people join communities? It is normally for a combination of four reasons, which increase in engagement and commitment as they move up the hierarchy of needs:

1. To get things (mugs, discounts, general free stuff)
2. For access – to receive privileged information, such as pre-launch news before everyone else
3. To feel powerful – members see that their feedback is taken on board and really makes a difference
4. For increased status – they are respected within the community and essentially can become brand ambassadors/fan boys for your company

Once you have connected with people you need to keep it going. As Chris pointed out, in many ways this is the difficult thing – technically it is easy to create a community, but it takes a lot of work to ensure it thrives over the long term. Think about how you set membership criteria, what it is going to be called, and remember that it is going to take a lot of human management from your end to drive it forward. You aren’t going to always be in control, so bear that in mind, but any community needs to fit your own brand values or it will undermine the rest of your marketing.

Creating a community is not easy, and isn’t a short term project – but done well it can drive real engagement and create a multiplier effect that boosts your brand through third party endorsement. Just start with the business case, rather than building it and hoping that they will come…………