3 Rules of Engagement: How to Build and Market Your Brand With An Online Community

By Nicole Coons
Marketing Vanguard/Principal Consultant
Integrated Marketing Solutions
Frost & Sullivan

If your company is interested in growing your brand by building an online community, it’s important to plan your approach and then follow some essential rules to ensure your brand’s voice comes through and your community becomes a place your audience wants to be a part of.

Here are some best practice rules of engagement for setting up and building your business through online communities:

1) Identify the Why of the Community. 

You might be inclined to say your group is for Vice Presidents of some particular function at some particular kind of company. The problem with that approach is a person’s title or company is a weak indication of their interest in a certain topic. In the flattening and collaboration happening within organizations, where marketers are wearing customer service hats, or IT leaders are working daily with HR teams, limiting your community to one group of titles could dampen the rich exchanges possible with a more diverse group.

In order to attract the right mix of people to your community, a better approach is to stake a claim on a compelling vision or cause that’s meaningful to your brand. State your Why and cast your net wide—invite everyone you know and everyone you meet from here on out, and let them decide if they’re on board with your belief, mission or cause. Let the members of your community declare their support, and you’re starting from a place of high engagement.

Savvy Marketer’s Tip: When a new member joins your community, ask them to introduce themselves with a statement about their personal Why and what they’re hoping to learn from being a part of your community. Be sure to reply back with “Welcome…!” yourself, and others will likely follow suit.

2) Be a Welcoming Host.

Everything you need to know about hosting an online community you learned when you threw your first party. You probably organized some activities, you provided food, you provided cheerful decor, and if people didn’t know each other, you helped get them acquainted. You made sure everyone was having fun. Most likely that did not involve standing on a platform in the middle of the room spouting everything you know. Instead, you probably spent a lot of time asking questions and prompting your guests with new ideas or stories. Then, you let the conversations and exchanges unfold from there. 

In similar fashion, the key to having an engaged online business community is to spend exponentially more time as the leader asking questions, taking polls, starting conversations, making introductions, and throwing out challenges like “set up a getting-to-know-you call with one person in the community today, and share with us one amazing thing about that person back on the forum.” You can even offer incentives for people who participate. So leave your articles, white papers, event promotions and sales pitches out of the picture. Make it your goal to be of service, and try to meet 100% of the people who are in your community because that kind of knowledge is power. Bonus points if the people in your community also have met one-on-one with at least a handful of the people in the community.

Savvy Marketer’s Tip: When you want to target your community for your brand’s offerings, consider them now an “insiders club”. They are a sample set of the millions more you want to reach with your message. As you do your work, poll them with questions you may have. Let them in on your process of working on your vision. Let them know this is not a promotion, but that you value their opinion for whatever it is you’re working on. 

3) Take it offline, early and often.

The surest way to send everyone running out of your community is to allow people to promote their latest wares, or worse, to do so yourself. Instead, keep the focus of your group on your shared cause or belief—and especially on the people—and a great way to do this is to offer frequent invitations to take the dialog off-line to brainstorm, talk about solutions or make new connections. You will rarely sell someone with a single pitch online. If you really want to generate some sales leads from your group, try sharing a celebratory story about what your business just helped another business do (because it’s in line with your amazing cause or mission—and because results are far more inspiring than benefit-laden sales pitches), and invite anyone who wants the back story to a private conversation. 

Savvy Marketer’s Tip: Set some ground rules for participation. Here are two areas to consider:

 1) Promotions. Either allow no promotions, designate one Promotional day a month, or set up a reserved tab for people to upload their promotional information like a “marketplace” where other members can browse freely without pushy messages filling their inbox.

2) Conversations. Encourage lots of invitations for 1:1 dialogs or mini-teleconferences offline, and invite your community to share back what they learn from each other on your forum. Recordings of group calls could be posted back on the group for others to listen to.

By taking these three simple steps, your online community has the chance to be a thriving place full of diverse and interesting people that will not only enjoy the opportunity to be a part of your community, but they very well might become your biggest influencers in growing your brand.