“If you build it, they will come.” That’s great business advice if “it” is a baseball diamond in a cornfield and “they” are the ghosts of 1920s baseball players (yes, I am referencing a movie that hasn’t been culturally relevant for a good thirty years). If “it” is a community and “they” are your loyal customers, it’s going to take a little more work than just providing a place to play. They’ll need a reason to show up and stick around.

Building a community online used to be a lot easier back when community seemed to be the whole purpose of the internet and social media. That wasn’t the case because the owners of these platforms saw value in community; it was because communities of people posting, commenting, making friends, and carrying on conversations were their best bet for keeping users within a particular social media ecosystem. Now, the slot machine of an endless scroll of content is what keeps us online. The internet has changed, but the value of a community built around your brand hasn’t. So how do we build a community in an environment that suddenly seems hostile to it?

The Benefits of Community

Community provides people with a shared identity, and identity provides purpose. When a community coalesces around your brand or your products, it means that these products have added so much value to their lives that they’ll become advocates for it. The brand becomes part of who they are. For a business, that translates to greater interest in your products and increased customer loyalty. Given these benefits, it’s no wonder so many businesses are interested in turning their disparate customers into a cohesive community.

A brand community is also a way to occupy the middle space between personalized marketing and a more broad, untargeted type of marketing. For the past few years, “personalization” has been the name of the game in marketing: segmenting customers and serving up groups of them the kind of marketing content they need, no matter where they are in the customer journey. Marketing strategies also often include less specifically targeted advertising to larger groups. Communities aren’t quite personalized, as they bring many people together, but they are more personal than generic advertising.

What’s in It for Them?

A community can’t be all about promoting your brand. It has to create real value for your customers. Why would you join something or identify with something that you don’t get anything out of? Before attempting to build any kind of community, think about the value you can offer its members. This will vary by industry. Depending on your business, you might have something to offer collectors or connoisseurs, like a place to show off collections and rate pieces, or a secondary market to buy, sell, and trade things they’ve purchased from you. A community might be a place to engage with media related to your products. It might be a place for emotional support, or it might be built around an important cause. A jewelry business, for example, might build a community of advocacy around responsible mining or local environmental issues.