Community Marketing 101: Basics, Strategies, and Examples

Community marketing focuses on creating and nurturing customer relationships to build trust and brand loyalty. It attempts to redefine marketing campaigns that may sometimes be one-way communication, using the power of community to foster customer engagement.

Brands are pressured to reengage their audiences as standard marketing practices are no longer enough to build consumer trust. A 2024 PwC survey found that while 90% of executives believe consumers trust their business, only 30% of consumers say they do. That’s a 57-point gap between assumption and reality.

This trust deficit is part of a wider trend of changing customer expectations concerning favorite brands. Customers aren’t satisfied with just buying a product or service anymore. Instead, they’re looking for authentic interactions with the brand and its family of loyal customers. This is why community building is paramount.

Community marketing is one strategy for building stronger and deeper relationships with your target audience. This article dives into the important aspects of community marketing to give you an actionable understanding of the topic.

What is community marketing?

Community marketing stands out from other practices by allowing two-way, personalized interactions with and among customers. Its effectiveness comes from connecting a brand to a group of people with shared interests, opinions, and values, creating an active community.

Although it’s making new waves in business circles, community marketing is quite an old invention—much older than digital marketing or social media marketing. Marketing professor Philip Kotler first coined the term in the 1970s.

What has changed in the years since is the concept of community. Rather than a group of people living in the same geographical area, today’s communities represent any group that thrives online in forums, social media platforms, and other digital platforms without the need for in-person interaction.

Benefits of community marketing

Dedicated community platforms bring several unparalleled benefits to businesses.

• Better customer experience. Customers are free to share their experiences with a brand on community platforms. Sharing experiences empowers customers to exercise their passions by freely expressing their concerns, likes, and dislikes. Both offline and online communities enrich customer experiences because businesses can no longer shrug off bad customer support, shady pricing practices, or other issues.
• Ability to sell directly to the community. A community provides a captive audience for introducing new products and services. With a large community, companies can expect significant sales from members without spending on other marketing channels. Besides driving sales, direct selling is likely to foster better community engagement by making customers feel valued.
• Loyalty and long-term sustainability. Because communities are built around shared values and interests, businesses can leverage communities to foster customer loyalty and long-term relationships. Customers who believe in their brands and feel inspired by their community become self-motivated brand advocates. This organic engagement can help businesses increase brand awareness and attract new customers through word of mouth.

Types of community marketing

As you develop your community marketing strategy, it’s important to understand the various approaches you can take. Each type of community marketing has its strengths and can be particularly effective for different business goals or target audiences.

• Social media communities. Use social media platforms like Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, and X Communities to create spaces where your audience can interact, share experiences, and engage with your brand. These platforms offer powerful tools for community engagement and can help foster an active community around your products or services.
• User-generated content (UGC) campaigns. Encourage your community members to create and share content related to your brand. This could include product reviews, tutorials, or creative uses of your products. UGC provides authentic content, increases engagement, and builds a sense of ownership among your community members.
• Brand advocacy programs. Develop initiatives that turn your most loyal customers into brand ambassadors. These programs often involve rewards or recognition for customers who actively promote your brand through word-of-mouth marketing or on social media.
• Online forums and discussion boards. Create dedicated spaces where customers can ask questions, share tips, and discuss your products or industry topics. These platforms can be excellent for building a knowledge base and fostering peer-to-peer support.
• Customer feedback and co-creation initiatives. Actively involve your community in product development or improvement processes. This could involve beta testing programs, idea submission platforms, or collaborative design projects.
• Exclusive membership programs. Offer loyal customers or community members special benefits, content, or experiences. This approach can enhance retention among existing customers and attract new ones seeking these exclusive perks.
• Community events and meetups. Organize both online and offline events that bring your community together. These could range from webinars and virtual conferences to local meetups and user conferences.

5 tips for successful community marketing

Just as personal relationships take time to mature, community-based marketing is a long-term process that takes involvement and consistency—but the returns justify the time and effort.

This marketing strategy can give businesses rare insights into customer behavior, preferences, and expectations. You can use these insights to test new ideas, adjust product designs, share information, and improve customer support and feedback initiatives.

Striking the right tone with customers is often the first challenge marketers face when building a community. You don’t want to come off as too insistent and pushy or too detached and distant. Finding a middle ground between the two and keeping things conversational can help you strike the right balance.

With that in mind, we offer five actions to help you implement your community marketing strategy.

Find your niche

The first step in creating a successful community is identifying and learning more about your target audience.

Explore what motivates your past, present, and potential customers. What excites them? What drives them to action? Most importantly, do market research to find out what sets them apart from other target audiences in your industry and in general.

The second step is finding common ground between your brand and its audience. This can help you zero in on a niche idea for a unique community for your business.

One of the best examples of a niche community is LEGO Ideas. The Danish toymaker launched a website where customers can upload their LEGO creations and share them with the community. Members are encouraged to comment on creations, suggest changes, and share them with their own social networks. The best part of this community is that LEGO produces some of the most popular creations and offers them for sale.

Whether you run a bakery, gym, home services company, or tech startup, finding a niche idea unique to your brand and its customers is key. Building an online or local community around that niche idea can help create satisfying customer experiences and give your business more exposure and long-term engagement.

Build relationships with community influencers

Influencers have a lot of marketing clout that you can use to impact your community marketing efforts. The challenge is identifying influencers who align with your brand’s core values and interests. Research their track record to ensure no conflicts or negative connotations to associating your brand with them.

First, define the specific audience you intend to reach through your influencers. Work out whether you want to reach more of your current audience or go after an entirely new target group. One of the best ways of doing this is by developing audience personas—nature lovers under 35 or bike riders over 50, for instance. Once you have a precise idea of the audience you want to target, you can start roping in influencers.

Start by identifying five influencers you want to work with on your brand. Ideally, start with micro-influencers—those with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. Once you have a list, initiate and establish strong relationships based on a long-term perspective. They’ll be your de facto brand ambassadors who promote your brand and vouch for its values within and outside your community. Collaborating with multiple influencers can help you get more traction and validity for your brand.

Brainstorm to generate campaign ideas for each influencer based on their unique personalities and styles. Once you’ve run the campaigns, analyze their results to decide which you want to continue working with. Remember, influencer marketing aims to increase brand awareness and reach new audiences, not necessarily to make a sale right away.

For example, if your brand were to start working with an influencer in January 2025, you shouldn’t bank on the influencer to drive sales for all of Q1 2025. Instead, consider them as a way to ensure people know about your brand. Some people might organically convert to becoming customers over the coming months.

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Host your own community event

How do you make new friends? Throw a party and invite everyone!

That’s pretty much the logic behind hosting a community event. Physical or virtual events like webinars are a great way to boost existing relationships while making new ones. The opportunity to meet members of your community face to face (offline or on a virtual platform) can help create meaningful experiences that drive affinity for the brand and extend its outreach. Such events can continue to spark relevant discussions and idea exchanges long after the event ends.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when planning your community event:

• Brand conformity. The event should align with your brand’s mission and values. It must be curated to add value to your brand. Even the slightest miscalculation on this front can lead to an erosion of loyalty or negative connotations for the brand. One way to hit on the right idea is to let your community share their thoughts or vote on a list of proposals.
• Watch the cost. Events can be expensive and resource-intensive. They take budgeting, planning, working with vendors and caterers, and so on. Ensure your business is at a stage where it can afford these costs without putting a dent in your operations. The long-term returns from an event can be very high as long as you’re prepared to meet the immediate expenses.

You can also consider sponsorships at popular events or co-hosting events with allied brands.

Community events aren’t necessarily about mega venues, strobe lights, and celebrity guests. A lecture series might be the perfect event for a mentoring company, while a cookout could work great for a neighborhood family restaurant. Select whatever works best for your business.

Create an exclusive experience

In a Salesforce survey, 88% of customers said the experiences a brand provides are as important as its products or services. Exclusive experiences tell customers that your brand understands their unique needs and expectations. And that’s not all—62% of customers expect companies to anticipate their needs.

Creating customized experiences for your brand community is another way to reaffirm the sense of belonging among its members. Experiences like early access to new products, members-only discounts, limited-edition memorabilia, or subsidized tickets to a game are just some ideas.

Exclusive experiences are perfect for keeping your customer base happy and engaged. However, they can also be a great draw for potential customers tempted by the special benefits available to community members.

Like your community events, build exclusive experiences around your brand’s core competencies and values and the interests of your target audience.

Create customized content for your audience

Consumers have changing needs and desires, and it’s not always easy to get their attention. That’s why marketing managers increasingly rely on hyper-personalized content to reach their audiences.

Consider four metrics on which you can deliver customized content to your community:

• Demographics. This is information about your customer’s geographic location, age, sex, level of education, marital status, nature and type of employment, health status, and so on.
• Psychographics. This involves personality traits, interests, hobbies, likes and dislikes, lifestyle choices, opinions, values, and more.
• Technology. This will cover aspects like customers’ favorite or preferred devices, internet browsers, applications, and similar information.
• User behavior. This relates to a user’s behavior concerning your brand—how much time they spend on your website, purchased items, return history, and related data points.

Use this data to create personalized messages for your community across blogs, posts, videos, podcasts, and more. Dynamic content tailored to your community’s interests can help you generate more interest in your products and services, drive referrals and sales, and improve customer retention. This approach to content creation can be a key component of your overall growth strategy.

Engage with your audience with the help of Upwork’s Talent Marketplace

Are you looking to boost your brand visibility with a community marketing campaign, but not sure if you can do it on your own? Let an expert handle it for you.

Upwork hosts thousands of community managers with deep expertise in community marketing. Browse through our extensive talent pool of resources, ask for references and examples of past work, and hire an expert within hours. You can have your campaign going in no time.

If you have community marketing skills and would love to help others, offer your services. Sign up, submit proposals, wait for someone to select you, complete the job, and receive a secure payment.