Why your brand should have a virtual community

Organizations and businesses create a virtual community to foster engagement and build relationships among their audience or customers. These communities are typically led by a host or community manager who guides the communal experience, whether that’s working toward learning a new skill or simply setting the rules for community engagement. These communities serve as a space where customers, users, and fans of the brand come together to share common interests to share experiences, ask questions, troubleshoot issues, and build relationships with each other.

Virtual communities are important because they cultivate a sense of belonging and loyalty between the members of the group and the brand they’re supporting. This is valuable for brands because virtual communities not only serve as a place to generate excitement and brand loyalty, but they also serve as a helpful space for customers to get their questions answered without the back-and-forth of traditional customer service. Brands also get direct communication with their customers through virtual communities, which can help them learn more about their audience and further develop their offerings based on member feedback.

Great online communities provide a host of benefits for brands, from increased brand loyalty to expanding their reach to new audiences around the globe. We’ll explore these advantages of online communities below.

Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Because virtual communities provide an attractive venue for social connection and brand engagement, they’re a great way for brands to increase the customer lifetime value (CLV) of their base. Customer lifetime value refers to the amount of money a customer will spend throughout their relationship with your brand. This is an important metric to understand because it can reflect the profitability of your brand, help you boost retention, target your ideal customer demographic, and reduce customer acquisition costs. By fostering brand loyalty, brands can retain customers for longer and thus, increase CLV.

Better understanding of customer needs

Another important benefit of establishing a virtual community is the direct feedback your brand receives from engaging with its customers online, and the indirect feedback you can gain from monitoring engagements between members. Rather than sending out surveys, brands can use the wealth of feedback that’s naturally gathered from community interactions. This information will help brands better understand their audience, and they can implement changes to align with customer preferences and needs.

Lower customer acquisition costs

Virtual communities can also help brands reduce their customer acquisition costs because engaged, happy customers tend to share their positive experiences with others, which naturally converts new customers through word-of-mouth referrals. This means your brand has to spend less money to get your products or services in front of new customers. Additionally, a virtual community can serve as a knowledge base for people in the research phase of the buyer’s journey, and seeing opinions from other users may entice them to convert.

Expand reach and diversity

Because virtual communities exist online, their reach is practically unlimited. With this incredible influence, your brand can facilitate meaningful conversations with people from all walks of life, all around the world. These diverse perspectives and experiences can enrich your virtual community, inspire new products, and increase brand recognition globally.

Virtual communities are becoming more favorable for brands as opposed to social networks for several reasons. For one, social media platforms have been heavily affected by hate speech and misinformation. Combine that with privacy concerns and ad fatigue, and you see customers and brands leaving these venues to form their own virtual communities.

This gradual shift away from traditional social media sites presents an opportunity for brands to move into this space and create safer virtual environments for their users to connect and engage with each other and the brand itself. More and more well-established brands have observed this trend and have launched successful virtual communities such as Dropbox and Adobe, ultimately strengthening their brand and increasing loyalty among their customers.

Graphisoft, an architecture software company, sought to create a virtual community for its users after realizing the disjointed online knowledge landscape for architecture professionals. Archicad, Graphisoft's flagship product, is available in localized versions by country, so Graphisoft launched two local, virtual communities in Brazil and Japan to help unite users in a common platform to collaborate, share resources, and grow their professional networks.

Since their launches in 2022, the Brazilian and Japanese communities have tripled Graphisoft’s overall user base, inspired new sub-groups and events within their communities, and helped Graphisoft reach its goal of connecting fragmented communities in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry.

HubSpot, a marketing software company, seeks to unite software, education, and community to help businesses grow — and they have done just that with the establishment of the HubSpot Community. From conversations around marketing and networking to job listings, the HubSpot Community provides self-service support, study groups, and even an advocacy program for users to connect, engage, and learn from each other while adding value to the community. Since the HubSpot Community began, the company has attracted 3,000 active advocates, 27,000 gamified members, and more than 80,000 posts.

Local Guides is an official Google program on Google Maps where contributors share their experiences through reviews, photos, and business information. Local Guides Connect was established in 2016 as a virtual community to unite these guides over shared topics, questions, and experiences. In 2018, Google completely revamped the community and made around 100 improvements a year to Local Guides Connect based on community feedback.

As a result, more than 120 million people around the world participate in Local Guides Connect, and they’ve shared 350,000 topics, posted 1.1 million comments, and proposed and accepted 22,000 solutions to community members’ problems.

Now that you’ve learned why your brand should have a virtual community and seen branded community examples, we’ll explain steps on how you can get started with creating a virtual community.

The first step in creating your own successful virtual community is aligning the community with your business needs. The executive team won’t buy into your vision if your brand community isn’t part of an overall strategy to support your company’s goals. If, for example, your company wants to improve customer support systems, or increase customer retention through engagement, then virtual communities are a great way to meet these objectives.

Just like businesses need a purpose to survive and thrive, so too does your virtual community. Establishing a community mission statement gives your members a clear understanding of why the community exists and what objectives it looks to achieve. This statement is pivotal in shaping the group’s trajectory as it establishes a sturdy foundation. Without a precise understanding of its purpose, members may struggle to align with the community's direction and ultimately disengage.

Using an online community management platform can help you get your brand community started on the right foot. It allows for brands to easily establish and customize their virtual community space to meet their needs, whether a brand wants to operate like a forum, host events, or include gamified widgets to increase user participation. Brands can also utilize community management software to easily oversee their community with hassle-free tools and analytics to get instant insight.

Khoros Communities provides everything you need to build an enterprise-class community. From custom community design to community listening for spotting opportunities, automation for seamless monitoring, and analytics to track what’s important — our community management software helps you scale with fewer resources, complexity, and cost.

More Fortune 100 brands choose Khoros to build their brand-owned community than any other provider. With Khoros Communities, brands can expose customers to new, peer-validated products and resources and drive 70-90% of community traffic through organic search. Our virtual community software can also help save brands thousands of dollars in crisis mitigation thanks to the collaborative nature of these channels. 

To learn more about how Khoros Communities can help your brand build a successful virtual community, request a demo today.