Community is central to the human experience. Whether it’s a football stadium, a mosque, a neighbourhood or a Facebook group, community is a powerful tool for creating a sense of belonging through trust, loyalty, and shared experiences and values.
This is why smart B2B brands are increasingly building communities to forge meaningful relationships with their audience. Research supports this shift, with one report showing that a whopping 86% of customers say they are more likely to remain loyal to a company with a strong community.
Community doesn’t build itself, though. So, how do brands get started? The best place to begin is where people gather. And where do people gather?
Events.
Let's take a look at how your brand can use events to create an engaged and authentic community that builds trust and customer loyalty.
Create a vibrant community
By bringing people together around shared interests or values, events foster engagement and strengthen authentic connections. Done well, they can enhance the all-important sense of belonging and, ultimately, cultivate a dedicated community of brand advocates.
Events should, therefore, be designed with community-building in mind. Here are some starters:
Make it personal
The personal touch can help attendees feel part of a community. Consider offering thank-you notes, goodie bags, and tailored follow-up emails that provide bonus goodies such as behind-the-scenes content. If you’re looking to foster a smaller community of high-value customers and major prospects, VIP events such as product launches, milestone celebrations, and exclusive previews are an attractive way to deliver personalised experiences for a select group.
Keep it engaging
The more you engage attendees, the more they’ll feel a sense of belonging. In-person events offer the chance to give attendees a multi-sensory experience with visual displays, live demonstrations, and audio-visual presentations. Take advantage of augmented reality and virtual reality for a unique experience.
Get interactive
The more your attendees are involved, the longer they’ll stick around, and the more they’ll feel a part of your community. Workshops, training, and networking opportunities enable group interactions and knowledge sharing and create a sense of shared values and participation.
Keep your community engaged
You don’t create a sense of community and belonging from just one event. In fact, the event should be only one part of the attendee’s journey. To forge trust and loyalty, community building should start before the event and continue after.
To facilitate ongoing conversation and participation, you can:
Use an event app
One of the best ways to continually engage with the community pre- and post-event is through a bespoke event app. Pre-event, the app can bring attendees together digitally with regular updates and notifications. Attendees can create profiles of themselves and exchange messages, while you can also introduce forums so that your community creates an ecosystem of its own. The app can also empower attendees to connect with the community once an event is done and dusted.
Engage attendees post-event
There are plenty of ways to encourage your attendees to remain involved and invested after the event.
Online networking opportunities are now an expectation rather than a nice-to-have so use your event app or follow-up emails to send out polls and surveys to collect feedback and make attendees feel valued.
Social media is also a powerful post-event tool: publish event highlights, engage with attendees, reply to comments and questions, and even host weekly chats with attendees.
Finally, create a content hub that houses on-demand videos, speaker sessions, and exclusive content that can only be accessed by your community. The purpose? Maintaining momentum and driving engagement until the next event.
Host community-building activities
Whether it’s food, drinks, a bonding activity or all three, getting attendees together again is an opportunity to nurture relationships. If costs are prohibitive, consider an online activity: invite attendees for quizzes or remote product launches.
Drive brand loyalty and awareness
There’s another critical reason to build a strong community: awareness. The bigger your community gets, the more people want to be a part of it. So, while you want your event attendees to feel part of something special, you also don’t want it to feel like your community has pulled the shutters down on new members.
To ensure your event’s reach is as wide as possible, you can:
Use community-generated content for ongoing brand promotion
Share footage from your event taken by attendees across your social media channels, use positive attendee feedback in outreach, and highlight the networking value of the event ecosystem to prospects.
Collaborate with community influencers and thought leaders
Community is also about partnership. So leverage the network your brand has built from the event by partnering with brands that can help your business raise awareness with new audiences.
Align all messaging
The awareness you raise must be authentic to your brand. So, it’s crucial that the messaging and tone of the event must be consistent with the messaging and tone of all brand positioning.
It’s clear that community is pivotal to establishing trust and loyalty for B2B brands and events are pivotal to building that community.
If you want to heighten customer loyalty, increase brand awareness and, ultimately, drive revenue, then a well-crafted community-building strategy - based on personalised, interactive events and sustained post-event engagement - must sit at the very centre of a brand’s marketing mix.
Cvent’s eBook, The Marketer’s Guide to In-Person Events, provides tips and best practices for increasing the impact of your in-person events to deliver on key objectives like revenue, pipeline, and brand awareness. Download it here.