There has never been a better time to find your audience.
Google is using AI to uncover customers beyond the keywords marketers already know. LinkedIn can analyze audience signals and campaign history to find professionals likely to convert. A growing category of AI targeting tools promises to identify high-value audiences using signals marketers would struggle to connect on their own.
The technology will only get better.
But finding the right people and giving them a reason to care about your brand are two very different problems.
Marketing has spent years getting better at the first one. We can identify an audience, segment it, reach it and retarget it with extraordinary precision. What we can't automate nearly as easily is the relationship that comes next.
That’s where community enters the picture.
An audience can be assembled through targeting. A community forms when people find enough value in an idea, experience or connection that they choose to participate.
For brands, that kind of participation is invaluable. It creates relationships that are difficult to buy through media alone and difficult for competitors to replicate.
It also changes how brands should think about building relationships.
Community Doesn’t Happen on Its Own
Sparkpr EVP of MarCom Amy Packard Berry recently explored community-building from a leadership perspective in Forbes Agency Council. Her experience spans everything from restarting a sorority to serving on boards and building community within the advertising industry.
The common thread is intentionality. Someone has to bring people together, recognize what they can contribute and create something they want to be part of.
Brands face the same challenge.
Finding People is Only the Beginning
Modern marketing is exceptionally good at finding attention, and AI is making that capability even more precise.
But attention is temporary.
Your brand can buy an impression, optimize for a click, and use increasingly sophisticated models to predict who is most likely to take an action.
Still, participation has to be earned.
People participate when there’s something worth contributing to. They ask questions, share experiences, recommend resources, challenge ideas and help one another. Eventually, some begin creating value for the group themselves.
That changes the relationship.
The brand is no longer responsible for generating every interaction. People begin forming relationships with one another, and those relationships become part of the experience of the brand itself.
You can see this in developer communities where users solve problems together. In enthusiast brands whose customers organize their own gatherings. In industry events where the conversations between attendees become as valuable as anything happening on the main stage.
This is why community can become such a powerful part of a brand building strategy. It creates something media spend alone cannot.
Your Brand Can’t Always Be the Main Character
This is where community gets uncomfortable for marketers.
We’re used to controlling the experience. We want the messaging right, the logo visible and the journey mapped toward a business outcome.
Community requires some restraint.
If every discussion circles back to the product and every event becomes a lead-generation exercise, people notice. Eventually, the “community” starts to feel like just another campaign.
The strongest brand communities leave room for conversations the company doesn't control.
A brand can introduce people who should know one another, open access to useful expertise and create experiences people genuinely want to show up for. Sometimes, the most valuable contribution is simply creating the conditions for other people to connect.
Your brand’s value becomes visible in what it enables.
Start With What You Can Give
Before choosing a platform, launching a program or hiring a community manager, there’s a more important question to answer: Why would anyone want to be part of this?
“We want to engage our customers” isn't a valid answer.
The useful answers usually start with something the company is unusually well-positioned to give.
A quantum computing company might offer access to researchers and technical expertise. A venture capital firm can bring founders together around problems they’re all trying to solve. A consumer tech brand might connect people around an interest or identity that extends well beyond the product.
Once that value is clear, the format becomes easier to figure out.
It might be a subreddit, a private group, an annual event, a dinner series, or even an executive’s social presence.
Start with the value exchange, and the platform can come later.
Small Communities Can Carry Outsized Influence
Marketing has trained us to value scale, but community doesn't always work that way.
A group of 500 people who exchange ideas, attend events and recommend your brand may create considerably more value than 50,000 followers who rarely interact with you.
Influence inside those communities can be equally deceptive. The person everyone listens to may have almost no public following. They’re influential because people trust them.
This makes community harder to evaluate through conventional marketing dashboards.
Some value is visible in participation, retention, referrals and advocacy. Some travels through the business in less predictable ways.
A customer introduces a prospect. A recurring conversation surfaces an issue that becomes a strong media story. An executive notices the same question coming up and realizes the market is shifting. Someone recommends the company in a conversation the brand never sees.
Those moments rarely fit neatly into an attribution model, but they still matter.
Community Makes Brands Smarter
Perhaps the most underappreciated benefit of community is what a company learns from it.
Brands spend heavily on research designed to understand what people think. A healthy community creates an ongoing conversation with many of the people the company most wants to understand.
Listen closely and you hear the language customers actually use. You see which problems keep surfacing. You discover where people disagree with conventional wisdom and which topics create genuine energy.
That intelligence should feed the communications program.
It can surface a media story, inspire original research or sharpen an executive point of view. It can reveal questions worth answering through content and expose the gap between how a company describes itself and how customers experience it.
The community becomes part of how the brand learns.
And that is arguably more valuable than treating it as just another distribution channel.
Build Something Worth Joining
The technology for finding audiences will keep getting better.
Marketers will have more data, stronger predictive models and increasingly autonomous platforms capable of identifying who might buy something before we could have found them ourselves.
None of that answers a much older question: Why would someone want a relationship with this brand in the first place?
Amy’s observation about community-building gets at the answer. Someone has to bring people together. Someone has to recognize what different people can contribute. Someone has to create something they genuinely want to be part of.
Brands have the opportunity to do the same.
The payoff is bigger than engagement. You gain people who know the brand, contribute to it and help shape what it means to others.
AI may get remarkably good at finding those people, but building something they care about is still our job.
Looking to build your brand? Let’s talk.
