By Siobhan McDade, Managing Director of Media at Jungle Creations
Communities are having their moment – and for good reason. Long gone are the days of battling it out to be the most popular on social media. It’s now about building authentic connections with the right audiences to resonate with the most relevant people to your brand – all while navigating brand safety. Whether through publishers establishing their own community platforms, or brands looking to reach specific groups of people, the attraction of tapping into passionate and highly engaged groups via communities is clear.
Brands now have the ability to tap into existing interest-based communities through creators rather than start from scratch. For instance, to celebrate its 200th anniversary and reach younger audiences, the National Gallery has recently been working with influencers – including artists, comedians and historians – enabling it to tap into arts and culture communities. As part of Samsung’s recent Olympic sponsorship, and to increase awareness of its Flip 5 phone, the brand’s ‘First Flips’ campaign partnered with Skateboard GB to reach a Gen Z audience with similar passions and interests. The potential to reach a diverse range of communities is endless, but brands must first know how to do this so it feels genuine and connected.
How brands can find their community
A community is a space for individuals who share an interest or passion to come together in a safe, open and positive way, on and offline. Brands can both tap into and build communities. They have the option of identifying and targeting an existing community by collaborating with influencers – which is a quicker way to quickly reach new, already engaged audiences – or investing and building their own engaged community. Owning an audience vs simply influencing one offers huge potential and can be a powerful marketing strategy – as this group can become advocates for the brand and convert to long-term sales.
There has been a stark shift in recent years from large anonymous online audiences to pockets of niche, engaged communities across social and beyond. This is partly down to the proliferation of TikTok and the rise of creators on that platform increasing communities across every passion point imaginable (think Booktok, Historytok, Cottage Core and more). On a broad level, this mimics a wider societal need to build connections in a time when the world feels as if it’s more divided than ever.
People look for like-minded people and it has become easier to grow smaller communities across social media platforms thanks to interest-led algorithms favouring depth of engagement – prioritising interactions such as the completion rate of videos. This has created a rabbit hole effect so people can easily find their people no matter how niche their passions are.
The benefit of tapping into – or even better, building – a niche community is that it allows a brand to not just reach but to open a two-way dialogue with an audience who shares an existing affiliation or association with the brand. By reacting to trends, brands can appear culturally relevant and stay at the front of people’s minds. Those that can respond by involving their community in product creation add value to their audience’s day beyond just the product. Targeting a niche means there is already an engaged audience who will likely move along the funnel beyond a one-off purchase.
The three C’s – Consumer, content and commercial
For any brand looking at communities, the key principle is to consider the 3Cs – consumer, content and commercial. This can form the framework of the brand’s activity.
Consumer – Is there an existing passion point or audience that a brand can build a community around? For instance, we noticed a sub-community on our entertainment brand, VT, who were obsessed with food and trying new cuisines. Out of this Twisted was born, which has become one of the biggest food and drink publishers on social media in the UK. Brands can learn from their audiences and go with the flow. Communities can often be found in unexpected places.
Content – Next, consider how a brand’s content strategy can reach and nurture this community, creating engaging, always-on content – for brands this must go far beyond packshots and ads. Can the brand react to platform trends? And which creators are already touching this passion point that the community is built around?
Commercial – Brands should think about what the commercial opportunity is within a community. For our publisher brands, it is a question of whether there are like-minded brands we can work with. For brands it would be how can they use the community to improve sales. For example, by creating a group of dedicated fans from the community who can test products and feedback on content to improve conversion or events with the community offline.
In communities, brands have entire audiences ready and waiting to become customers – or, even better, lifelong fans. But they must first find these communities, and spend time understanding their audiences so they can build 3C frameworks to tap into the power of like minded groups collected in one place.
