Why your brand needs to invest in community building in 2025

In the ever-evolving landscape of business, one key element stands out as a potent catalyst for success: community.

Brands that invest in fostering a sense of community among their customers often find themselves reaping a wide range of benefits that extend far beyond mere sales figures. This is especially crucial if your brand is appealing to Gen Z consumers, for whom community is more important than ever.

Simply put, consumers aren’t interested in brands that only connect with them on a surface level. Instead, they expect in-depth interaction, from social media accounts that respond in pitch-perfect brand TOV, to messaging assistants who speak their language, literally and figuratively.

Community building isn’t a new concept, but its significance in today’s market cannot be overstated. It’s the art of cultivating connections, nurturing relationships, and creating a space where individuals not only interact with a brand but with each other, forming a cohesive and engaged ecosystem.

Let’s look at 5 reasons why your brand needs to invest in community building in 2025.

1. Having a brand community leads to more loyal customers

Community breeds loyalty and trust. When consumers feel like they belong to a community surrounding a brand, they establish deeper emotional connections. These connections transcend transactional interactions, leading to increased loyalty and trust. In a world where choices are abundant, earning this loyalty is invaluable — because it means that consumers will always choose to buy from your brand.

2. It’s a great way to get feedback

Forget paying to work with a polling agency — a brand community is a great place to source inspiration for new product lines, as well as gain feedback on your existing services. Your customers can share their opinions and give suggested improvements, which is invaluable for your brand, and also helps build loyalty even further, because there’s nothing that consumers love more than being listened to.

3. You can build brand advocacy

You don’t just want customers, you want brand advocates who are going to go and tell all their friends to buy from you. Community fosters brand advocacy. Satisfied individuals within a community are more likely to spread positive word-of-mouth recommendations. This organic promotion carries substantial weight in influencing others' perceptions and choices, effectively expanding a brand’s reach and impact with very little effort. These people will hopefully also become brand advocates, and you create a snowball effect of brand fans—which is substantially harder to do with social media, for example. That’s why we’re building Genuin, an app that allows users to truly connect. Genuin’s founder Bhargav Patel says it best: “Genuin is more than just an app; it’s a movement towards a more inclusive, engaging, and community-driven social experience.”

4. It’s a source of UGC content

Want to get more bang for your buck? Communities are a great way for brands to get user-generated content that they can then use in their omni-channel marketing materials (provided they get the right permissions from the original creator, of course). Active communities generate a wealth of user-generated content, which tends to get particularly great results: according to Insense, “brand engagement increases by an average of 28% when online users are exposed to both UGC videos and branded content.”

So there you have it: community is the future of marketing in 2024. Brands should be focusing on community if they want to engage with their (Gen Z and Millennial) customers, build deeper relationships, and gain a wealth of insights for marketing and new product development purposes.

At Genuin, we’re building a new way for brands to create their own community—with embedded video feeds, unique engagement features, and community moderation tools. Want to find out more? Find us here or say hi to Shabbir on LinkedIn to book a call.