What is Community-based Marketing? Key Benefits & Examples

Looking for a marketing strategy that creates deep connections with your target audience? You might consider community-based marketing (CBM), a strategy that centers around building genuine connections with your community.

Author and marketing expert Mark Schaefer calls community “the last great marketing strategy”, and according to community marketing platform Tint, 74% of consumers say being a part of a community increases their trust in a brand. This goes for online education too.

In this article, you’ll see how to make community-based marketing work for your online course by understanding what it is, learning the benefits of community-based marketing, and taking a close look at some effective community-based marketing strategies.

What is Community-based Marketing?

Community-based marketing centers around a community of like-minded, similarly-driven customers. For online education, this could be a group of people interested in learning, for example, a new language, fitness and lifestyle tips, or coding.

A community-based marketing strategy focuses on authentic communication and engagement with that group of people to create trust and a sense of belonging for its members.

To be clear: the purpose of CBM isn’t to curate a community so you have an easy customer base to sell to—that’s a great way to lose their trust. The focus should be to create a place where members feel safe, seen, heard, and supported.

At its core, community-based marketing has genuine, authentic connections between its members and the brand or product the community is centered around.

This connection is supported by three key principles:

Authenticity

People want authentic interactions; they want to feel like a person and not just a number. For a brand, this means being transparent, consistent, and true to your brand values.

Being authentic builds trust and credibility, making it more likely that community members will advocate for and engage with your brand.

Two-way communication

Hand-in-hand with authenticity is two-way communication. Your audience doesn’t want generic messaging (“That’s great!”, “Love it!”) when they reach out or comment on social media.

They want thoughtful responses that add value. As a brand, this means actively listening, addressing concerns, and facilitating discussions. By showing you care for the input and ideas of community members, you encourage deeper engagement.

Community building

And of course, for community-based marketing to work, you need to build a community. This could look like organizing events or creating exclusive online spaces where your community members can meet and interact.

A community transforms your audience from simply buyers to a supportive network and may result in members advocating for your brand via word of mouth.

These three principles come together to create a powerful collective where members of a brand community support and interact with each other and the brand it’s centered around.

Traditional Marketing vs. Community-based Marketing

Community-based marketing differs from traditional marketing by hyper-focusing on connecting authentically with and creating space for a community of people rather than a broad audience.

And that’s a good thing — according to Forbes, 82% of Gen-Z skip or block traditional ads when they can, preferring instead to learn about products from real people (like influencers) or those who are part of a like-minded group.

Check out this example to see how community-based marketing can compare to traditional marketing for an online course:

Traditional marketing:

A coding course provider, we’ll call them Blake, uses a banner ad campaign on social media and education platforms to promote a 50% discount on their entire catalog of coding courses.

Community-based marketing:

A different coding course provider, we’ll call them Sam, partners with a well-known TikToker who specializes in Python. They create a series of exclusive, free, Python workshops and interactive coding challenges.

Together, Sam and the TikToker promote the workshops and challenges through the TikTok channel to target and engage aspiring Python coders.

Some key differences in the strategies above are that the community-based marketing plan focuses on collaboration, engagement, and a bit of exclusivity to provide meaningful, informative (and yes, free) content to followers.

This type of community-based focus has real benefits, let’s take a look.

Benefits of Community-based Marketing

To help you understand how community-based marketing can work for you, you might want to look at how it can positively impact the success of your brand.

Community-based marketing offers:

• Enhanced customer loyalty: Creating genuine connections increases trust in your brand and creates more engaged, loyal customers – or better yet, brand ambassadors who bring new customers and referrals. The focus also shifts from one-time or repeat purchases to long-term relationships between your brand and your audience.
• Word-of-mouth marketing: Community members believe in and trust your brand, making them more likely to tell others about your offerings or feature your brand in their user-generated content (like Instagram Reels, TikToks, or YouTube videos).
• Cost-efficiency: Community-based marketing focuses on organic reach, which means that you can grow your brand awareness without relying solely on expensive marketing campaigns.
• Valuable feedback: From community member’s discussions and feedback, you can learn their likes and dislikes and tweak your offerings to align with what they are looking for.
• Improved customer experience: With CBM, customers feel less like a number, or a sales target, and more like an individual. Community-based marketing humanizes the brand and the customer and offers both a space to communicate and connect.

Other benefits can include:

• Boosted engagement
• Increased customer retention
• Better brand reputation
• Local relevance
• Targeted marketing opportunities
• Sustainable for the long-term (as opposed to short, generalized campaigns)

When it comes to benefits for your online education brand, using community-based marketing can give your learners the chance to connect and collaborate through a shared course. This can lead to:

→ Increased learner engagement: Through your community, learners can enjoy a sense of fellowship or camaraderie, which can make the learning process more enjoyable. They also have better access to you, the course creator, making them feel connected and seen.

→ Improved learning outcomes: Learners in your community can bounce ideas off of each other, ask questions, debate, and actively participate in discussions that can lead to better overall learning.

→ Enhanced course value: A community gives learners more to work with. Not only are they guided through your course content, but they also have opportunities to enhance what they learn by talking with other community members.

→ Better visibility and reach for your course: Happy learners talk to other people. If you give them a place where they feel supported and encouraged, they may share that with others through testimonials and reviews or on their social media accounts.

Using a community-based marketing strategy for your course doesn’t have to be complicated.

Having a strong understanding of how community marketing strategies work can help you use CBM effectively. Let’s look at the basics.

Successful Examples of Community-based Marketing

Below are some examples of big brands and how they effectively (and successfully!) use community-based marketing to boost their marketing efforts.

Patagonia’s Action Works

Patagonia is a renowned outdoor recreation retailer. The company is famous not only for its products but also for its efforts to improve communities worldwide through its Patagonia Action Works program.

Action Works connects Patagonia customers with environmental organizations to help them find opportunities for volunteering and activism that align with their values. In doing so, it creates a sense of community and shared purpose.

Patagonia encourages Action Works community members to share their experiences on social media and through their community platform. This works to create a collective of individuals inspired to get involved in environmental activism.

Action Works is a powerful example of connecting like-minded customers with a united purpose, which reinforces Patagonia’s mission and values and encourages brand loyalty.

Red Bull’s Athlete Community, Clubs, and More

Energy drink company Red Bull’s community-based marketing efforts are vast and varied.

For starters, it has its Athlete Community, which works as an exclusive hub for athletes to connect with sponsors, receive support, and collaborate with other athletes. It also has clubs such as the Red Bull Music Academy or Red Bull Air Race that serve as centers for individuals to form tight-knit communities around a shared interest.

Red Bull’s communities aren’t just for athletes and enthusiasts either. Red Bull hosts the Red Bull Basement, a global successful community program that empowers students to work toward positive change through innovation and technology.

To spread the word and strengthen these communities, Red Bull uses social media, sporting events, festivals, and more to advertise either commercially or through user-generated content. All in all, Red Bull’s community-based marketing efforts are massively successful and contribute in a big way to the success of the brand.

How Community-based Marketing Works

Here’s how community-based marketing works—and how you can make it work for you—in 10 simple steps. To help you visualize it in practice, we’ll use our fictional course provider, Sam, as an example.

Step 1: Identify and Refine Your Target Community

Remember that you want to build a community of people who share and identify with your brand values. So make sure you have defined your brand’s greater purpose and have clearly outlined its values before you start.

Check out already existing groups and community platforms online to get a sense of your target demographics and what they may be looking for. Discover what your audience values and ask yourself what may be missing from these groups that you can offer through your community.

Example: Sam checks out online communities for professional coders on Reddit and LinkedIn to see what questions people are asking. Sam uses this information to create pillars for their own coding community.

Step 2: Choose a Space and Create Your Community

There are many places you can choose to host and manage your community, like Discord, Slack, Facebook, or even your brand’s official website (if you have one). Invite people to join your community using social media, email lists, blogs, or any other way you connect with your audience.

Example: Sam chooses an online course platform like LearnWorlds to host their community using its powerful built-in community features.

Step 3: Create Engaging Content and Resources

To help your community feel valued and engaged, create freebie content they can use and discuss. The key here is to make the content valuable and exclusive to your community. Advertise the content using your social media channels and email marketing.

Example: For their coding course, Sam creates and shares checklists with common coding terms that can be easily referenced by their community members. These resources are only available for download through Sam’s community platform.

Step 4: Encourage Community Engagement

This can be done by hosting online live events or even local meetups. Encourage your community members to attend and make them part of the planning process by asking them what they would like to discuss or learn at these events.

Example: Sam hosts a live webinar using LearnWorld’s Live Sessions to encourage student interaction with polls, chats, and breakout sessions.

Use LearnWorlds’ live community features to actively engage your learners.

Step 5: Gather and Implement Feedback

Conduct polls, use surveys, or read chats and threads to better understand what your members are looking for. Use this information to update your offerings and communicate to your members that you heard what they want and are adjusting to match.

Example: Using LearnWorld’s survey builder, Sam creates a survey to see what learners thought about a recent course offering.

LearnWorlds’ survey builder can be used to check the satisfaction of your learners.

Step 6: Reward Brand Loyalty and Advocacy

Take time to reach out and acknowledge top contributors to your community. This could look like allowing them to organize or co-host an event or simply awarding a “Top Member” badge to highly active members and brand advocates.

Example: Sam enables LearnWorld’s gamification features to help members stand out for their contributions by awarding badges like, “Golden Community Member” or “Mentor.”

LearnWorlds has many gamification features, such as badges, to motivate learners.

Step 7: Measure and Analyze

Tracking metrics is an important part of any marketing strategy. Assess your participation rates, content interaction, conversion rates, new sign-ups, and more to get an idea of where your community-based marketing efforts have been successful and where they need work.

You can do this directly through your community hosting platform and by looking at metrics available on your social media channels or website.

Example: Sam uses LearnWorld’s in-depth analytics reports to analyze user progress and engagement and assess their financial metrics.

With LearnWorlds’ analytics, you can test and assess numerous aspects of your community and course offerings.

Step 8: Adapt, Evolve, and Be Transparent

After reviewing your analytics, you will likely have a clear idea of what can be improved. Couple this with the feedback you gained in Step 5 to clearly outline the steps you can take to level up your community.

Be transparent with your members and let them know how you plan to make improvements based on their feedback.

Example: Sam sees that learners often quit a particular lesson module without finishing, and they understand from community interactions that the course material is too difficult. So, Sam revises the content and announces in a community forum when the new updated course material is available. To field any questions before re-launch, Sam hosts a live webinar.

Community-based Marketing Challenges and Solutions

Although often successful, a community-based marketing strategy is not immune to challenges. You may find it difficult to maintain engagement or struggle with moderating diverse opinions and potential conflicts within community forums.

Here are two common community-based marketing challenges and how to tackle them:

Maintaining engagement

Long-term engagement is a pillar of community-based marketing. And while members may be excited and active when they initially join, what do you do when their engagement flags?

• Make it easier to engage: Host events frequently, create helpful resources, and start discussions and threads that match the community’s goals and interests. Consider making the community easy to access by offering a community app.
• Create a welcoming environment: Ask yourself how you would feel after joining your community. Was it easy to navigate and participate in from the start? Do the members encourage inclusivity and engage in positive interactions? Consider what you can do to help members feel welcome not just on day one, but also in the days that follow.
• Encourage user-generated content: Make it easy for members to share their own content and ideas. Encourage them to share about the community on their social media platforms by offering incentives or rewards for sharing.

Moderating conflicts

It makes sense that community members may occasionally clash over differing opinions and ideas. When this happens, it is your responsibility to resolve conflicts respectfully.

• Establish and share clear guidelines: Determine what is and isn’t acceptable behavior for your community. Put these guidelines in writing and make them easily accessible and understandable for community members. Consider having members read and agree to the guidelines before they can participate in community events or forums.
• Have a plan for moderation and discipline: Although not ideal, there may come a time when you need to moderate a conflict and/or remove members from your community. Make sure community members understand the repercussions of not following the community guidelines and have a clear, step-by-step procedure in place for reprimanding or removing a member if necessary.
• Delegate to community members: Assign roles within your school community like “community manager” or “space manager” to motivated and highly active community members. This can be a great way to reward them for their loyalty and engagement and to delegate some of the community management responsibilities.

Strengthen Your Brand with Community-based Marketing

In our fast-paced, post-pandemic world, the growth of both online and in-person local communities signals the rising importance of community-based marketing as a key strategy.
Using this type of marketing as part of your marketing initiatives can transform how you connect with your potential customers and deepen trust between you and your learning community.

For a more hands-on approach to building a thriving community, check out how a platform like LearnWorlds can give you the tools and resources you need for success.

Get your free trial with LearnWorlds today!

Further reading you might find interesting:

• 100+ Elearning Statistics, Facts and Trends
• 10 Best Online Coaching Platforms for 2024
• How to Create and Sell Profitable Online Courses: Step-by-Step Guide
• SCORM 101: The Definitive Guide to Choose a SCORM Compliant LMS
• Personal Branding Guide: How to Build Your Brand Strategy
• The Benefits of Mobile Learning: Unveiling Its Power and How It Works
• What is an LMS (Learning Management System)?

Ciera Lamb

Ciera is a freelance content writer and editor connecting companies with their ideal audiences through blog articles and other online content. She approaches her writing with curiosity and research and enjoys the ever-present learning that comes with being a content writer. She is also an avid scuba diver, an aspiring Dutch speaker, and lover of all things nature.