Brands that grow through community have one thing in common: great content.
Content brings your brand's values, mission, and culture directly to your audience—wherever they are.
According to House of Wise, Doe Lashes, and Tortuga Backpacks, here are the best tips for building community through content.
1️⃣ Your audience comes first, always
The most important part of your community is your customers. By knowing who your audience is, how they speak, and their interests, you can create content that resonates with them.
Here’s a step-by-step what you should do:
- Figure out where your target audience spends time. If they’re listening to podcasts but not reading blogs, then creating a podcast or guest appearing on a podcast makes more sense.
- Let your audience inform your content strategy. Create a survey that asks customers about what type of content they’re interested in, and share it on social media or via email. This will give you tons of topic ideas.
- Focus on giving value. Trying to create for too many channels or forgetting what your audience wants will result in you wasting time creating content that falls flat. Remember who your audience is and ask yourself if what you’re creating actually has value for readers.
Maria West, the Head of Content at House of Wise, says, “content should be used to educate readers about your products and your customers’ problems.”
“Know what you want to be known for and start with the basics—with your own take. For example, “[Topic] 101” posts are great and allow room for the ‘what’ with the ‘why.’”
Here’s an example of how she did this to educate House of Wiser customers on CBD with a “CBD 101” link in the nav menu:
2️⃣ Build your own unique personality
Brands should find their unique voice that resonates with their audience. If every creator followed the same template or checklist, there wouldn’t be any individuality.
We recommend checking out Duolingo on TikTok, which narrowed in on a Gen-Z demographic and created a community around their TikTok personality.
Take note of how Duolingo gets involved with various trends and trending sounds with their videos.
By building off what’s already popular, they’ve developed a unique voice with the Duolingo mascot as the main character.
3️⃣ Focus on solving customer pain points and answering questions
According to Jason Wong, founder of Doe Lashes, two successful channels have been Doe’s blog and TikTok account.
“They're both digestible forms that educate our readers. Tiktok allows us to be discovered by users that weren't looking for us, and educate them on our brand and product in a way that is easy to understand.”
4️⃣ Understand what your community values
The things your community prioritizes may be different than what you expected. This is why audience research is so important.
Once you understand what type of content interests customers most and where they could use help, you’ll see better results from the content you’re putting time into.
A great example is Tortuga Backpacks, a lightweight travel backpack brand.
Fred Perotta, co-founder and CEO of Tortuga Backpacks, says, “We write to solve the same types of problems for customers that our products solve—almost exclusively how and what to pack.”
Tortuga’s air travel, packing tips, and packing lists categories are designed just for this reason.
5️⃣ Hire creators who specialize in a specific channel
One general best practice Jason shared with us is the importance of hiring people who specialize in one channel—people you can trust to do the job better than you could.
“Find people who can do it better than you and give them the platform to perform. This applies to writing blogs, making Tiktok videos, or designing Instagram posts,” said Jason. “Our growth came from finding content creators that are successful on Tiktok and giving them the freedom to create what they think will work for us as a brand.”
🚨 For more community and brand building tips, look out for Part 2 on Monday!
