Building A Community Around Your Brand; Marlee Briscoe, Peak
Whether it’s through in-person or virtual events, brand communities are key to brand loyalty, awareness and overall success. A strong and engaged community will lead to improved service, learning and innovation, as well as company growth. However, to be impactful, brands need to build communities that go beyond selling a product or service and instead provide value and support for their members.
A brand that connects, engages and has built a strong community around it is Peak. This week, we take a closer look at the Decision Intelligence company with Marlee Briscoe, Events Manager. She discusses the community around Peak and how events have helped to create and bond their community.
What do you find your community relates to most with Peak?
I believe there are two key parts to how our community relates, engages and responds to Peak. The first being how we are a data-first business but still have a personal touch. We understand how AI can be a ‘black box’ word and that there can be uncertainty around what AI really means and how it can work for businesses. To support our customers, we provide a dedicated customer success manager to not only guide them through the integration process but to help their business grow with Peak; they’re never left alone at any stage with just a step-by-step guide on how to install our platform. We really care how Peak can support individual businesses and are here to ensure that they get the most out of their partnership with Peak.
The second is our culture. Yes, we are a data-heavy company and we like to hire smart and intelligent people, but we also like to hire people that are personable and can bring that caring and understanding approach to work. When we’re hiring, we like to ensure that we’re not only hiring the best people but also like to make sure that Peak is the right fit for the employee. Culture is a large part of who we are at Peak, and employees are such an important part of who we are as a brand. We bring that personable culture to all the events that we host and whenever we engage with our community – we have even gone as far as having our own branded beer!
How do you regularly engage with your community?
We have found that our community thrives on regular engagement, through both events and other forms of communication. We kicked off our events strategy in 2019 when we realised how much more engaged people were with our content, how we were able to generate qualified leads easier and how we could create a space where people could be further educated by our experts.
We run a range of different events, from Devbase – a community-based series designed to support digital innovation – through to our Masters of AI series that focuses on real-world applications of AI for business leaders.
We also engage through other methods such as our monthly newsletter, publish around three blogs per week and are very active across social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. Our blogs cover a range of topics, from industry updates and thought leadership articles to pieces that highlight our culture, team members and life at Peak. We’ve found that a balance of topics allows our community to get to know us as a brand and rely on the information that we provide. Two contrasting blogs that have both performed well in their own way are our Meet Peak: Pet Special and our What Is Explainable AI? article. This gives you an insight into the variety of content that we’re regularly producing!
What have been your key learnings in creating a strong community around Peak?
A big key learning for us was recognising that, even though we have one community, we have different audience types (such as different industries) and within that community they each interact differently with our brand. For example, our audience includes people working in sectors such as retail, CPG, manufacturing and construction. We have customised each event style based on what works best for each industry audience type. When it comes to construction, we have found that informative webinars work best. However, for our retail customers, they prefer a more 1:1 ‘speed dating’ networking-style event, where they can communicate with a bit more ease and ask questions directly.
What benefits do you gain from building a community around a brand?
There are so many! The main benefit that I would say is how you get to know the people in the community and understand what else you can do to help them. This not only ensures that you’re providing a service that they need, but also helps you as a brand improve your offering and your value. Building a community around your brand enables you to develop brand loyalty, brand awareness, develop an educational platform and, ultimately, drive customer success.
How have you connected with your community throughout COVID?
Throughout the pandemic, we have continued to connect and interact with our community. This wasn’t an easy process at the start, as in-person events had become an integral part of the Peak community, and we wanted to ensure that this continued even though we couldn’t be face-to-face. As a result, we have been running informative webinars for our data scientists and technical audiences, and more of a networking-style wine tasting virtual event for our customers and commercial audience. The virtual wine tasting has been such a success that we’re looking to continue this for the foreseeable future. We are, however, extremely excited to return face-to-face this November when we bring together 500 of our community members in Manchester for AltitudeX. The summit will bring together the greatest people, technologies and data to help us reassess how we think about decision making, and win in this new era, in the right way
#SpeaktoSleek
Events are a great way to build your brands community, speak to Sleek’s event experts about community building strategies here.