Grow Your Fans! Branded Community Strategy with Antsomi CDP 365, Vol. 2

Introduction

Vol. 1 of this series explained the growing importance of Branded Communities in today's changing consumer landscape. We defined what they are and why they are crucial for long-term growth, focusing on turning customers into "enthusiastic fans" and "Key Opinion Consumers (KOCs)."

Now, in Vol. 2, we will explore how to build these powerful brand communities. This document outlines a strategy centered on the collaboration between Innity's Branded Community platform and Antsomi CDP 365. We will demonstrate how this partnership uses advanced technology and expert knowledge to attract users, deepen their engagement with gamification and personalized experiences, and analyze their loyalty to effectively nurture your most valuable fans.

Chapter 1: Hakuhodo DY ONE's Branded Community Building Strategy

Building a powerful brand community is achievable with the right strategy and tools. Hakuhodo DY ONE leverages strong partnerships and cutting-edge technology, with two key partners at the core: Innity and Antsomi.

Innity, a leading digital marketing company in Asia since 1999, has a deep understanding of the region's unique market conditions. They specialize in creating "Branded Community websites" that gather premium content, social media feeds, blogs, and publisher content. Innity also utilizes its proprietary KOL/KOC network to select influencers who can effectively attract and activate community members.

This service is made even more powerful by Antsomi CDP 365, a customer data platform designed to unify customer data and automate marketing. It integrates all customer-related data to create a single, unified view. This enables multidimensional analysis of customer behavior, allowing for highly personalized marketing initiatives.

Here is how the collaboration works in three main steps:

Step 1: Driving Users to the Community and Encouraging Participation

• Online Ads and Influencer Guidance: Users are guided to the "Branded Community" website through targeted ads or posts from influencers selected from Innity’s network.
• Targeting Existing Customers: Using Antsomi CDP 365’s omnichannel campaign features, you can send personalized messages to your existing customer lists, inviting them to join the community for exclusive content or special missions.
• Seamless Registration: As users register, Antsomi CDP 365 integrates their data to build a single customer view, enabling smooth personalization from the very beginning.

Step 2: Deepening Engagement within the Community

• Member-Only Rewards and Missions: Community members can participate in exclusive "reward programs" and "missions," such as answering surveys, posting product photos on social media, or accessing special content.
• Gamification and Point Exchange: By completing missions, users earn points that can be exchanged for discount coupons or special products. Antsomi CDP 365’s Marketing Automation & Engagements features deliver personalized content and gamification, encouraging users to interact with the brand in a fun and continuous way.
• Personalization Based on Activity: Antsomi CDP 365 collects and analyzes community activity data in real-time. This allows the system to suggest content and missions tailored to each customer's interests, enhancing the overall customer experience.

Step 3: Analyzing Loyalty and Nurturing "Enthusiastic Fans"

• In-depth Data Analysis: Antsomi CDP 365 deeply analyzes community data, including site visit frequency, browsing history, mission participation, and survey answers. This analysis makes it possible to measure a fan's "enthusiasm level (high loyalty)."
• Customer Segmentation: With Antsomi CDP 365's Data Analytics & Insights features, you can integrate multiple data sources (purchase data, membership data, etc.) to analyze customer behavior from many angles. Using RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) analysis, customers can be categorized into segments like "Champion," "Loyal," or "About to Sleep."
• Automated Special Offers: Based on the analysis, Antsomi CDP 365 automatically delivers "special experiences or offers" to your most enthusiastic fans, such as invitations to exclusive events or early access to new products. This feeling of being "treated as someone special" deepens their attachment to the brand.

This entire process, from data collection to personalized engagement, powerfully supports the cycle of fan cultivation. The unique advantage of Antsomi CDP 365 is its ability to link detailed community activity to loyalty measurement and automatically deliver special experiences.

Chapter 2: Operating Mechanisms and Consulting Expertise for a Successful Community

A successful strategy requires more than just creating a space; it demands continuous activation through proven operating mechanisms and specialized expertise. Innity provides years of experience in this area, understanding that successful communities require companies to "take a backseat and provide a stage where customers can be the stars" and facilitate "continuous dialogue between the company and customers."

Key features of Innity’s community operating mechanisms include:

• Rich Content Aggregation: Innity builds community sites that consolidate all brand-owned content (premium articles, social media, blogs, etc.) in one place. This makes it easy for customers to find information, increasing their time spent in the community.
• Promotion of KOCs (Key Opinion Consumers): Through social login features and reward programs, Innity helps visitors evolve into "KOCs" who actively recommend the brand, leading to more credible and authentic information sharing.
• Diverse Engagement Functions: The platform includes features like gamification, social login, bulletin boards, chat, and surveys to promote two-way communication and foster a sense of unity.
• Strategy Optimization Through Data: By analyzing site access, customer activity, and social data, Innity helps optimize marketing strategies, manage the PDCA cycle for audience expansion, and improve content marketing.
• Online-Offline Integrated Marketing: QR codes can be used to guide customers from offline events or in-store promotions to online campaigns, creating a seamless, integrated marketing experience that maximizes customer touchpoints.

Innity also provides extensive consulting expertise:

• Influencer Marketing: In collaboration with its unique influencer network, Innity selects influencers who are highly compatible with the brand to invite fans and promote community activation.
• Content Planning and Production: Innity supports the planning of content that resonates with target users, often in collaboration with KOLs/KOCs, to strengthen the sense of community belonging.
• Community Activation: They foster a sense of unity through active communication and support the creation of mechanisms that encourage customers to proactively engage with the brand.

By combining Innity's operational expertise with Antsomi CDP 365's data integration and automation capabilities, your brand can operate a powerful Branded Community. This approach helps avoid common mistakes and transforms traditional "Owned Media 1.0" (one-way communication) into a "Branded Community (Owned Media 2.0)," which enables co-creation of brand experiences.

Chapter 3: Expected Results of a Branded Community

By building and operating a Branded Community with Antsomi CDP 365, your business can expect several key outcomes that drive sustainable growth.

• Increase in Community Members: Effective acquisition strategies, appealing content, and gamification will steadily increase community membership and expand the brand's natural reach.
• Growth of "Enthusiastic Brand Fans": Continuous engagement and personalized experiences deepen customers' affection for the brand, nurturing them into "enthusiastic fans" who genuinely advocate for it.
• Increase and Retention of Loyal Customers: The community is a powerful tool for preventing customer churn. Continuous interaction and reward programs enhance loyalty, evolving customers into "loyal customers" who make repeat purchases.
• Improvement in Engagement Rate: User-participatory campaigns and interactive content dramatically improve the engagement rate. When customers actively interact with the brand, the power of its messaging is strengthened.
• Deepening Customer Insights: A community is a treasure trove of raw customer voices and behavioral data. Analyzing this data with Antsomi CDP 365 provides a deep understanding of customer interests, needs, and purchasing behavior, which can directly inform new product development and marketing strategies.
• Increase in LTV (Customer Lifetime Value): Higher purchase frequency and average transaction value from loyal customers contribute directly to an increase in LTV. This maximizes sales while reducing new customer acquisition costs.
• Cost-Efficient New Customer Acquisition: When enthusiastic fans (KOCs) actively promote the brand, word-of-mouth and social media diffusion accelerate. This becomes a highly efficient way to acquire new customers through credible information while reducing advertising costs.
• Enhancement of Brand Image and Trust: Two-way communication and sincere responses to customer voices enhance brand credibility and foster a positive image.

These concrete benefits enable sustained, high-quality business growth that is difficult to achieve with one-off campaigns. A Branded Community strategy will lead your brand to a new stage of growth by fostering deep bonds with customers.

Conclusion: Deepening Bonds with Fans to Forge the Future with a Branded Community Strategy

In today's digital world, customers are no longer just "consumers"; they are transforming into "partners" who want to engage deeply with brands and share in their growth. For brands to achieve sustainable growth, it is crucial to move beyond one-way communication and cultivate "bonds" with each customer based on empathy and dialogue. The Branded Community is the most effective "stage" for nurturing these bonds.

Antsomi CDP 365 provides a powerful foundation for this stage. It seamlessly optimizes the customer experience and the fan cultivation cycle—from data collection and integration to deep insight extraction and personalized marketing automation. Furthermore, with the specialized expertise of Innity in the Asian market, your brand can deploy a community strategy tailored to regional characteristics and customer needs.

The Branded Community strategy is the key to unlocking a future where your brand is not just selling products but is genuinely cherished and proactively "championed" by its customers. We look forward to helping your brand build these deep customer bonds and achieve sustained success.