A woman in a dressmaker's workshop leans over a desk to look at the screen of an open laptop. The woman has black hair pulled back and she is wearing dark jeans, a denim jacket, and a yellow T-shirt. She has a measuring tape hanging around her shoulders. Behind her are a rack of hanging shirts and dresses in various colors and a dressmaker's mannequin holding a pastel blue sundress. The far wall of the room is covered in sketches of clothing designs.
There are several online platforms that act as tools for building online community, using features like discussion boards and social learning courses. — Getty Images/benixs

A brand community, or connected group of fans of your brand, can boost customer loyalty, improve word-of-mouth marketing, and help your brand uncover key insights that improve your business performance. However, developing that group of deeply devoted fans takes time—and the right tools. The options on this list can help you manage, moderate, and encourage a brand community to coalesce around your small business.

Substack

Substack has emerged as one of the most powerful channels for building an active community. With more than 35 million active subscribers, Substack empowers writers and creators to build a direct relationship with their audience through newsletters and paid content. The platform is built to host conversations with features like comment sections, discussion threads, and direct messaging. One of Substack's core components is facilitating conversations between writers and readers and among readers themselves, creating a sense of belonging and community.

[Read more: 6 Ways to Create a Sense of Community at Your Small Business]

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Forj

Forj is a platform designed for associations and professional networks to build online communities, offer learning experiences, and increase member engagement. Its goal is to help organizations grow their membership, revenue, and impact. While the product is geared toward professional networks, brands can also use Forj’s tools to create channels and topics for community members to unite and start conversations.

Circle

Circle is geared toward content creators, with features for hosting discussions, creating courses, hosting virtual events, and chatting with members. Circle has more than 3000 integrations, widgets, and reporting tools to help you grow your community with care. It can host video, audio, and images as well as gamification options to keep members engaged with your content. For instance, you can reward members for interacting with one another or posting a high-quality conversation starter. This type of feature gives you a way to identify future brand ambassadors, too.

There are dozens of loyalty and rewards apps and platforms your brand can use to start building a more active brand community.

The community flywheel

The community flywheel isn’t a service or platform but rather a model for building a strong community around a brand or product to drive growth and customer loyalty. The community flywheel has five elements:

  1. Knowing your consumers and the communities to which they already belong.
  2. Choosing a few “hero products” to champion in the market.
  3. Using authentic brand and customer stories to bring these hero products to life.
  4. Feeding content into the community for members to engage with.
  5. Making it easy for customers to transact with your brand online and offline.

McKinsey Consulting reported that brands that use the community flywheel approach are able to convert more than 4% of online traffic to sales. Moreover, more than 75% of content about the brand is user generated. Companies like Drunk Elephant and Gymshark have used the community flywheel to successfully grow.

Loyalty and rewards apps

Loyalty programs are a great way to encourage community around your small business. Sephora’s Beauty Insider program, for instance, drives 80% of the company’s overall sales. It’s also one reason Sephora is rated one of the most valuable brands in the world. Beyond sales, loyalty programs can incentivize user-generated content, increase referrals, and lower customer acquisition costs.

There are dozens of loyalty and rewards apps and platforms your brand can use to start building a more active brand community. Belly and Fivestars are just two options for small businesses. Clover POS includes an add-on loyalty program, as does Square.

[Read more: Setting Up a Customer Loyalty Program for Your Business]

Social media engagement tools

Once you have a thriving, vibrant community, you need a way to maintain and moderate it. Tools like Sprout Social Engagement, Sprinklr, or Hootsuite make it easy to respond to comments, tags, and posts on your social channels. These platforms bring together your social channels in one unified dashboard so you can monitor comments across your social media profiles and respond to direct messages in one place. Some include AI functions that can generate automatic responses while your team does deeper troubleshooting.

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