Founded in 2003, LinkedIn is one of the most used social networks for all businesses. Unlike other social media networks in which you try to find “friends,” LinkedIn is all about building business relationships. So, LinkedIn is the best business tool for maintaining your business relationships.
Do you know more than 722 million business professionals use LinkedIn around the world? Hence you can imagine how fruitful it can be for you and your business.
Through LinkedIn, businesses can grow rapidly and build the brand to generate new and healthy leads. The platform mainly focuses on B2B connections and includes everything you need for your social media marketing strategy.
LinkedIn is regarded as the most effective among all social media networks, especially when it’s about generating B2B leads and for the right reasons. LinkedIn is a reliable catalyst for brand community growth as it has plenty of room for each and every one. But you should know how to engage your connections and how to develop a brand community on LinkedIn.
This guide answers all these questions, and by the end, you will exactly know how you can build a brand community on LinkedIn.
What is a brand community?
In simple words, a brand community represents your brand’s loyalty in the best way. People in your group or brand community are emotionally devoted. Hence most of them will buy from your brand, digest and share your content, and more.
But a brand community is a bit different from brand awareness and in many ways.
If someone knows about your products or purchases, it doesn’t mean they’re part of your brand community. Instead, your brand community is users who actively follow your posts, share your products or services with others. In short, they love everything that your brand does for users.
In other words, a brand community is a place where users have an emotional connection with your brand.
Why is it necessary to build an online community?
Your brand community is already present on social media. You need to find this brand community, connect with it, and then form a strategy for people within the community so that they can interact efficiently with each other.
And this is extremely valuable for your business if you know how to utilize it and get the maximum benefit.
Imagine you have a group of people or community who love to use your product or service. Via this group, you can test your brand’s new products, seek their recommendations, talk about feature releases, share your content, and collect reviews for improvement.
Furthermore, the brand community can significantly help your brand make timely customer-driven decisions and spread the word about your products or business. Hence you need to build a strong brand community that thrives you and other community members.
The benefits of brand communities
Creating a strong brand community is a time-consuming process but pays off extremely well and much more than your imagination. Brands that do follow the correct approach will get these significant benefits:
The best source of authentic, meaningful content
One of the benefits of creating brand communities is that they provide you authentic, user-generated content for free and as per your brand’s products and services. Online communities can give you comprehensive reviews, comments, and FAQs that work as social proof and lure new customers.
This is especially true for customer reviews, in particular, and as per stats, 93% of online buyers like to read reviews before buying any product.
Nurtures brand loyalty
Brand communities significantly nurture your brand’s loyalty and make customers more devoted to your brand. This results in increased revenue and more loyal customers.
Reduced overhead costs
Online brand communities on any social media platform are more like a customer service department. This is because it allows your customers to ask questions, discuss various issues, and get solutions from other community members.
This curtails the burden from your customer service department and allows you to save a handsome amount in the longer run. You can save up to 25% annually by developing online communities.
Improves brand exposure and credibility
Brand communities contribute a lot to your marketing and advertising efforts by sharing and mentioning your brand to other social networks similar to collaborative marketing. This enhances your brand exposure and credibility. Customers will trust your brand more when there is social proof, along with an active community.
A valuable data source and feedback
According to a survey, two-thirds of companies and businesses utilize their brand communities to get various insights about their offerings. And this whole thing makes sense. Your brand communities are neutral and offer you honest stats and accurate feedback. Brand community members don’t have any pressure, neither are they influenced by someone; hence they provide you authentic feedback.
Best customer retention
Brand communities are an ideal way to retain your existing consumers. Plus, they give you an excellent channel for post-purchase conversations. It also allows your current customers to continue interacting with your brand after they have made their purchase.
Effective pre-release channel
You can also use the brand community as a pre-release channel, and it works flawlessly in that case. You can seamlessly share or present new offerings among your community members before launching them in public. In this way, you can get honest feedback from your brand’s loyal customers and use it to polish your product before launching.
Hope now you understand how brand communities are valuable for your business. Now let’s talk about how you can build a strong brand community on LinkedIn that works for your brand and community members.
LinkedIn Outreach Strategies to Build Strong Brand Community
There are various marketing channels and strategies that you can use to build a successful online community. Let’s take a look at some effective ones.
Let’s get started.
Cold LinkedIn outreach:
For LinkedIn email outreach, you need to know two things in the first place:
- Your existing customers.
- Your target audience and market who are not in your group at the moment.
These two things are essential for LinkedIn email outreach. Another thing that is exclusive in LinkedIn and you will not find on other platforms is that you can effortlessly reach out to anyone on LinkedIn regardless of the location, job title, or country. That’s why most businesses prefer LinkedIn for email outreach.
Moreover, to make things more fruitful and to ensure that your messages are visible to all your prospects, infuse email in your outreaching campaigns.
Follow these outreaching steps to enhance your brand community:
- Create an engaging LinkedIn post.
- Boost your LinkedIn post.
- Design an outreach campaign.
- Create an outreach campaign via Closely to send connection requests and personalized messages.
But what to write in the personalized email? Learn more about this topic in our article here. Also make sure to stop by our Simple Tips and Hacks for Linkedin Outreach.
Scrap competitor’s audience
Before going for outreach on LinkedIn, you need to know your competitors and their strategies.
You can easily find an untapped audience that might be interested in your brand’s product and services. Just target them and provide a valid reason to care.
In this regard, you can try the following:
- Explore LinkedIn search results.
- Relevant LinkedIn groups.
- Analyzing Google search results.
- And monitor your competitor’s activity on LinkedIn.
Besides, you can also scrape your competitor’s community on other platforms like Facebook or Twitter and reach out to those prospects on LinkedIn!
When sending LinkedIn’s connection message, you can state that you also follow the same brand community, and people will be glad to connect with you. The process can be a great conversation starter, and you will surely found something in common with your prospects and lead, and then you can go in for your CTA!
Use personalized outreach to gain user’s interest.
The biggest reason that most LinkedIn outreach campaigns are not successful is that people use dull message templates.
This is the wrong way to do outreach on any platform. Whether you are outreaching to get business leads or growing your brand’s online community, you need to be creative in your outreach.
And the quickest way to get more responses is to use hyper-personalized, vibrant images and other media files like tailor-made infographics or GIFs.
With this approach, your prospects will reply to your emails, and your messages will stay in their minds. In this way, you can get their attention and invite them to your brand online community.
Vital things to improve your LinkedIn business strategy:
Here are some eye-opening stats that will help you in improving your overall business strategy:
- Around 3 million people share content weekly on LinkedIn.
- 40-49 characters in the title work best on LinkedIn.
- Articles with video are not that good than those without video.
- Posts divided into sub-headings perform more than the others.
- Experts recommend posting 2 to 5 times per week on LinkedIn.
So, keep your business strategy on point, and always post useful content regularly to develop a successful brand community.
In the End
Building a brand community only includes creative and proactive thinking. If you see someone posting a problem in your community and you can help them, don’t hesitate to approach them. Provide a practical and valid solution to them, and they will be more than happy to return the favor.
However, most users get aggressive sometimes. Don’t do that, and never rush. Building a strong community demands your efforts, time, and patience. So, play wisely and be consistent.
