Scale your ecommerce business by building a community-led brand

Recession. Rising ad costs. Economic uncertainty. Consumers tightening their belts. Online shopping habits dipping from the boom days of lockdown. It doesn’t make for great reading for an ecommerce business, does it?

Yet one hugely important and often-overlooked approach tackles all of these problems. It doesn’t solve them, but it does put you on a much better footing to deal with them. And once you’re on a better footing, you’ll be in a stronger position to scale your ecommerce business in the face of recession.

We’re talking about building a community-led brand for your business. This has the power to strengthen the majority of ecommerce businesses even in a difficult economic climate. That’s why we made it the subject of our new whitepaper.

If you’re able to channel the ideas covered into your business, you’ll be on track to:

• Elevate your brand above the pay-per-click scrum
• Boost your customer lifetime value (CLTV)
• Reduce customer acquisition costs
• Increase sales through the downturn
• Scale your business via a culture of connection

But, if you want to scale, you first need to understand the size of the challenge.

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Overcoming the problems you’re facing

Clearly, the impending recession is the big one. People will have less disposable income available, so you’ll be competing for a slice of a pie that’s shrinking. But problems impacting the ecommerce industry go beyond the headline factor of recession. Issues troubling your business right now might include:

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Rising advertising costs

Cost-per-click is increasing steadily across all major advertising platforms and marketplaces, including Facebook, Instagram, Google, Amazon, and TikTok. With new privacy policies impacting Apple devices, it’s also becoming harder to target and reach audiences cost effectively.

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Supply chain worries

Supply chains have still not fully recovered from the effects of the pandemic. A scarcity of raw materials, longer lead times, and price increases are all creating an environment where selling online costs more and takes longer than it did pre-pandemic. Supply chain uncertainty has a financial impact but also exposes you to disappointing customers with out-of-stock items or delayed deliveries.

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Privacy concerns

The new privacy policies we mentioned reflect wider concerns about personal data. Consumers are gravitating towards brands they trust, increasingly wary of sharing personal data with advertisers, and tired of social media ads in general. That makes it very difficult for new and growing ecommerce brands to make their mark if they’re only going down ecommerce’s well-worn paid media route.

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A return to brick-and-mortar

Consumers have returned to offline shopping in greater numbers than some expected after the pandemic. During lockdown, nearly all retail was online. This trend was expected to have a long-term effect on accelerating ecommerce growth. Instead, the breakdown between offline and online shopping has now reverted to roughly where it would be if Covid-19 had never happened.

Against this backdrop, a loyal group of advocates who value and support your brand is more important than ever.

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Starting to build your community-led brand

Building your community is about creating an emotional bond with consumers. But heading into the process with that fuzzy feeling front and centre might cloud your judgement. It's important to fully recognise the business value of your brand's community. This is a business decision that will have measurable outcomes.

Develop a clear sense of why you’re building a community, then do so with that purpose in mind. You’ll first need to rely heavily on existing advocates around your brand, but long-term success will depend on bringing new customers along for the ride.

We take a more detailed look at how to lay the foundations on which to build your brand community in the whitepaper.

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Dig deeper into how to scale your brand community

With the right foundations in place, there are several ways to instantly start scaling your community. You can do this by:

• Creating a referral scheme that grows community as well as sales
• Turbocharging content creation within your community
• Improving community engagement
• Being spontaneous in a way that’s authentic to your brand

In our white paper, you’ll find actionable insights to help you bring these and other community-building tactics to your brand. You’ll also see examples of how other brands have already adopted each approach and the results they’ve achieved.

Download now to start building your community-led brand.

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