6 Excellent Community Marketing Ideas That Work Like A Charm For Brands

As a brand marketer, you’d agree that ideation and execution are the backbone of any successful marketing campaign.

Screw up either of these, and you’ll have to face the music!

However, coming up with a killer community marketing idea for your next campaign won’t be any trouble, as we’ve got you covered.

At Convosight, we have helped 150+ brands like Veet, Dettol, J&J, Dyson, Maggi, Pediasure, Amazon, Unacademy, Bingo, and Sunfeast, among others, successfully execute over 1000 community marketing campaigns.

That’s where we’ve crystallized our learnings from and have shared the secret sauce with you in this blog.

Two things that we could decipher after curating numerous community marketing campaigns:

• The “one size fits all” approach doesn’t work, and there are two factors we need to consider when choosing a community marketing idea.

• Six different community marketing ideas work effectively for brand community marketing campaigns.

Let’s know all about it below.

How to choose the right community marketing idea for your brand?

1. Identify your brand’s objective

Before you go ahead and start planning your campaign, make sure you have a clear understanding of your brand’s objective.

Like every building needs a strong base, your community marketing campaign needs a solid foundation too, and defining the purpose is the way to begin.

Here are a few objectives that you might want to achieve for your brand:

• Generate high-quality organic leads
• Build brand RTBs (Reasons to Believe)
• Research for a new product or concept
• Create a new product category and expand
• Launch a new product
• Expand into a new market
• Issue / moment / cause marketing
• Crisis Management

You can pick from any of these objectives that are the most aligned with your brand’s end goal or go on to define your own objective.

2. Define your brand category

Once you have your campaign objective in place, the next step is to recognize what category your brand falls in. This is your brand’s niche and can include food, health, lifestyle, beauty, and more.

For instance, if you are a make-up or skincare brand, your niche would be beauty or lifestyle.

Similarly, if you are a toddler nutrition brand, your niche would be the same.

These two factors together will help define your community marketing idea.

For instance, you’re a food brand looking to launch a new product into the market. Your community marketing campaign idea will most likely consist of community contests because that works amazingly well in food communities and would help achieve your KPIs easily.

Similarly, if you’re a skincare brand looking to build brand RTBs, your community marketing campaign must include expert-led live sessions, user testimonials with before and after images/videos, among other things.

If you’d like to learn in depth about how to create a solid community marketing strategy, you can refer to this blog 👇🏻

Community Marketing Strategy – A Complete Guide

Let’s have a look at the different community marketing ideas that you can choose from.

6 Effective Community Marketing Ideas 

1. Content Partnership

A content partnership campaign idea is the one where community leaders and brands collaborate by creating content that interests the community members and adds value to them.

This content can either be in the form of static posts, carousel image posts, or anything alike.

Maggi, India’s leading instant noodles brand, leveraged the content partnership campaign idea in their recent community marketing campaign for their product – hot and sweet ketchup.

Objectives:

• To drive brand conversations and consideration for Maggi hot and sweet ketchup
• To position itself as the favorite ketchup among families and kids

Approach: Maggi partnered with 40 food communities with over 3.4 million members.

They co-created content with community admins who shared food images and posted how adding a dash of Maggi’s hot and sweet ketchup to their evening snacks or food recipes enhances the overall taste and how their family loves it.

Admins further encouraged community members to do the same and share their recipes prepared with the product.

Result: Maggi received over 51K total engagement across campaign posts, which was a 2.2x increase from the set target. The brand further got 3472 mentions and 99%+ positive sentiment around how its product enhances every dish and is the all-time favorite ketchup among kids and family members.

How they could achieve it: The brand selected the most relevant community marketing idea by having members share their stories and experiences by posting images of the tasty treats they prepared with the product. They strengthened the association of snacks and deliciousness with the brand.

To learn more about Maggi’s community marketing campaign, you can check out this

👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻

2. Community Contests

Community contests are an innovative way to gamify marketing campaigns. They involve brands teaming up with community admins to host contests in their communities where members participate in huge numbers and stand a chance to win exciting prizes and gift hampers.

Plum, a leading 100% vegan skincare and beauty brand, hosted a challenge as a part of their recent community marketing campaign.

Objectives:

• To understand the prevalent skin care concerns and position themselves as the best fit
• Highlight Plum’s USPs of no harsh chemicals and safe for skin, and drive word-of-mouth advocacy

Approach: Plum partnered with the most relevant 78 communities around beauty, women & lifestyle with over 3.9M members that had a massive affinity for beauty & skincare.

As part of the campaign, the admins of these communities shared their personal experiences of using Plum products. They posted how Plum’s green tea range is helping them fight acne and oily skin and showcased the efficacy with before and after photos.

They further encouraged community members to try Plum products for their various skin concerns and share their stories.

At the end, the best entries got a gift hamper from the brand.

Result: The campaign helped increase skin care category conversations from 45K to 89K per month, an increase of almost 2x!

20% of the brand mentions were linked to active recommendation and over 4.2K mentions were linked to purchase.

How they could achieve it: The brand selected the most appropriate community marketing idea, i.e. community challenge and encouraged members to participate in it.

This not only helped increase brand consideration but also word-of-mouth advocacy.

To learn more about Plum’s community marketing campaign, check out this case study

👉🏻 CASE STUDY👈🏻

3. Product Sampling

Product sampling is a concept where brands collaborate with community admins and distribute samples of their products to them as well as community members in exchange for feedback.

With this, both community admins and members are able to use the product first-hand and can share their experience and reviews, thus increasing brand conversations and driving consideration.

Amazon, one of the largest e-commerce brands in the world, is simplifying shopping for millions across the world. The platform’s user reviews and ratings are enough to drive conversions through the roof.

However, there was still some ambiguity amongst users about trusting Amazon for online shopping and that’s what Amazon decided to subside with their community marketing campaign.

Objectives:

• To get consumers who still prefer retail shopping to consider online shopping, and especially Amazon as a destination
• Drive preference for Amazon for consumers who shop on other online platforms

Approach: Amazon partnered with 109 communities related to lifestyle and shopping with over 3.3M members.

As a part of the campaign, community admins shared their personal experiences with photos and videos of online shopping for anything and everything including electronics and advocated how Amazon is their go-to destination for it.

They further encouraged community members to share their own experiences of the same.

Result: The campaign succeeded in increasing ‘online shopping’ category conversations from 168K to 220K per month, an increase of 1.3X! It helped Amazon get over 7.3K mentions and 37% of these brand conversations focused on brand RTBs like quality, delivery, availability to name a few.

How they achieved it: The brand selected the perfect community marketing campaign idea. By encouraging users to try out Amazon themselves, they built trust and boosted brand advocacy.

Curious to learn more about Amazon’s community marketing campaign? Check out this

👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻

4. Surveys and Research

Surveys are one of the best ways to tap into users’ top of mind, and you can easily make them a part of your community marketing campaigns.

This idea involves brands sharing survey links in communities to get clarity about their consumers’ preferences.

Veet, a renowned depilatory brand, incorporated surveys as a part of their campaign on teenage depilation. Let’s have a look.

Objectives:

• To reach their TG, i.e. teenagers and suggest the benefits of using Veet hair removal cream
• To highlight the brand USPs and drive word-of-mouth advocacy

Approach: They partnered with the most relevant 107 communities across parenting, beauty, women & lifestyle categories with over 6M members that had a huge affinity for hair depilation.

The brand, along with admins, did a pre and post survey in all these communities to understand how consumers reacted to Veet and measure the campaign’s impact.

After the pre-survey, the admins hosted live sessions with beauty bloggers and dermatologists and addressed myths around skin types and talked about usage of hair removal creams in sensitive areas like underarms.

They further shared their personal experiences with the product and prompted community members to do the same.

Result: The use of Veet hair removal cream in the core segment, i.e. below 20 years, increased from 21% (pre-survey) to 55% (post-survey) and its usage increased from 66% to 75%.

Moreover, the preference for Veet hair removal cream for underarm depilation increased from 50% to 82.5%.

How they could achieve it: Veet chose the right community marketing idea to promote their brand and by understanding the results from their surveys, they effectively established themselves by owning the narrative on teenage depilation.

Want to know more details about Veet’s community marketing campaign ? Check out this 👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻

5. Lead Capture

This campaign idea is the one where brands and community leaders collaborate to showcase the value of their products in communities to generate high-quality leads.

Nangrow, the most preferred kids nutrition brand, that wanted to showcase their product benefits and offerings and simultaneously generate relevant leads, run a community marketing campaign.

Objectives:

• To capture the attention of mothers who regularly look for growth and development solutions for their kids
• To leverage trials and generate high-quality leads which would help drive adoption

Approach: Nangrow selected 131 parenting communities with over 3.5 million members that had a greater affinity for kids nutrition solutions.

As part of the campaign, admins shared their testimonials about Nestle NANGROW along with a sampling form link to influence trials amongst community members aka mothers.

This further encouraged them to use the product and share their reviews, which showed their intent to buy and make a switch from the existing brand.

Result: Conversations for the ‘toddler nutrition’ category went up to 335K, marking an increase of 25%. The brand got 3729 mentions and a sharp increase in share of voice from merely 4.5% to 92%.

Most importantly, the campaign attracted 20,427 sampling leads from the communities.

How they could achieve it: Nangrow selected the most appropriate community marketing campaign idea to showcase the benefits of its milk drink among moms and facilitate purchase intent among them.

To know more about Nangrow’s community marketing campaign, check out this

👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻

6. Link Sharing

This one’s a no-brainer! As the name suggests, the brands, in collaboration with admins, share the link of their products across multiple communities to drive them to their website, thereby boosting traffic.

Unacademy, India’s largest e-learning platform, launched a similar community marketing campaign.

Objectives:

• To establish themselves as the top platform providing assistance for competitive exams like JEE and NEET

• To encourage trials of the platform through subscriptions amongst JEE/NEET aspirants

Approach: The brand selected 42 communities (of JEE/ NEET aspirants) with 2.1 MN+ members across the country to drive this campaign.

In the student communities, students aka community admins shared their personal experiences about how Unacademy is helping them in their exam preparation.

In the parenting communities, parents aka community admins shared their experiences of choosing Unacademy as their child’s guiding platform and how it offers all the necessary resources.

These admins also shared links to the subscription of the platform, encouraging the community members to try it out.

Result: The brand got 1731 mentions of which 72% had high positive emotion attributes and 52% were intent-based. A total of 1525 users visited the website and checked the links.

How they could achieve it: The brand selected the most relevant community marketing idea and using user testimonials to facilitate trials of their platform worked in their favour.

Know all about Unacademy’s community marketing campaign in this

👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻

Parting Words

Every brand is unique and has its own set of objectives to achieve. By choosing and implementing the most relevant community marketing idea, you can fulfill your brand’s goals in no time.

Now that you have a knowledge of community marketing ideas for your business, it’s time to execute them. And, that’s where Convosight can help!

REACH OUT TO US and leverage the power of community marketing today.

Simran Grover

Creating value in the lives of others with my content, little by little.✨

Working at Convosight, I do more than just wrangle commas. I’m passionate about innovating new ways to create super valuable and actionable content about Communities and Community Marketing at large, and sharing it with the right audience.
I also happen to manage a global community of power admins on Facebook, and that’s where most of my learnings come from.

Do check out my latest blogs and feel free to share them! 💛