This is a guest post by Nigel Twumasi, co-founder and director of Mayamada, a Japanese inspired character brand based in London.

Who doesn’t love the convenience of the internet?

Social media in particular, whether Facebooking, Tweeting, Instagramming or face swapping while Snapchatting, it makes reaching and engaging your audience tantalisingly simple. As a brand business owner, social media promises to make it easier, cheaper and more fun to reach your audience than ever before.

It’s also a great time if you happen to be running an event. Create your ticketing page, add a suitably enticing event description, a few photos of the good times to be had and voila! Over to you internet. I’ve built it, go let them know it’s safe to come.

Well, not quite. There’s a little more to it…

I’m the co-founder of Mayamada, a Japanese inspired character brand based in London. We have created our own universe: a television network inhabited by an all-star animal cast. We create manga-style comics where each story is a show on the network, produce a line of stylised casual clothing featuring our characters, and also organise events.

Bringing our brand experience to the real world is something that has turned the uninitiated into fans, and fans into customers.

When it comes to delivering an experience in the age of smart phones and social media, engaging with your customers isn’t something that should happen exclusively online or exclusively through bricks and mortar. Both are needed to effectively reach out to, and connect with, your audience.

It’s an eternal double act. Like yin and yang, or Ant and Dec. Fusing online and offline experiences is about implementing complimentary aspects of marketing that will contribute to the whole of your brand.

Delivering a consistent brand experience via different channels, offline and online, is an approach that has allowed us to find and build a community of like-minded people that become long-term fans and customers.

Events have been a part of mayamada from the very beginning. We believe the best brands provide their customers with great experiences. Those experiences can be extended and amplified online, but they are certainly stronger when shared together in the real world.

Know your community

We were able to build our community once we honed in on who they are.

This is important for any business, especially small ones like ours. Events are a non-trivial time and financial investment. Getting the most from them means directing that investment where it will get the most return and that happens when you pitch your event at the right people.

Think of the Bat Signal. A message so clear it cuts through the noise. It’s obvious who it’s for, so everyone else can ignore it and continue with their day.

You want something similar. Figure out who your audience is by creating profiles of them. How old are they? Where do they live? What do they value? Once you have a good picture of them, build your equivalent of the Bat Signal. A message so clear that they will come to you right away (prepared to fight some crime if needed).

Bring them together

Once you know who’s in your community, give them something to gather around. As important as digital marketing is, real world events are still a powerful way to deliver a brand experience that is personal and has a lasting impact.

One of our earliest community building events was a Frozen Yogurt Party we held in 2013 at Tutti Frutti, a central London frozen yogurt shop.

We wanted to provide an experience our community would be eager to take part in. But the engagement started before the first cup of froyo was consumed.

In the lead up to event day, we launched a campaign to pick a new flavour of frozen yogurt to feature at the event. Each flavour option was turned into a fearsomely cute character that would battle it out with other the flavours over several round of voting.

We made use of email, Facebook and Twitter to allow people to make their voice heard and over the course of a few weeks, we worked our way down from eight flavours to one winner.

A mix of offline and online

Online engagement leads to offline action. Taking part in the voting gave people an added incentive to turn up at the event. The winning flavour, Honey and Pistachio, sold out within hours…democracy at it tastiest!

This behaviour works the other way too – offline action leading to engagement online.

When we’re not organising our own events, we make use of opportunities to partner with other brands at their events. When it comes to building your community, taking your brand experience on the road can work well for raising awareness with the very people who will want to become part of your community too.

At the urban culture festival StreetFest, we played a selfie game (no Kardashians here, promise). We placed posters of our characters around the Tobacco Dock venue and asked people to take a selfie with each.

The photos had to be shared on Instagram or Twitter to be counted and the first person to share selfies with all eight characters would get a free t-shirt at our stall within the event.

This lead to people engaging with our characters in the real world and interacting with our brand online too.

GamePad: learning and improving

Once an event is done, it’s important to get past the positive feelings of an event well run and attended, and start analysing.

What worked well? What didn’t? How can you improve the experience next time? What did your guests think about the event? Data from past events will allow you make informed decisions on future events.

We took the lessons from our Frozen Yogurt Party to create our next event series, GamePad.

Looking back, we knew people enjoyed the video games from our previous event so we focused on those aspects for GamePad, a social video gaming event which centres around video games and brings in other aspects such as music, prizes and cakes.

Admittedly, we didn’t need to look hard at data to know people enjoyed that last one.

Our offer became this: a social video game event designed for people who want to play games and meet new people in the real world. Gamer guys and girls who enjoy events served with a helping of J-Culture. This is our Bat Signal.

Through GamePad, we have built a community of people who have gathered around our social gaming message. These are people who have a great experience and are more likely to become long terms fans and on-going customers of our brand.

Growing a community can open up partnerships with other companies and individuals for mutual benefit. Companies who have a similar community that can join with yours, or a complimentary community that will add something different to the one you have.

Delivering consistent experiences for our community has put us in a position to partner with major video game publisher Ubisoft for our next GamePad event. Opportunities for your community will become apparent once it has been well defined.

Keep building

We ran several GamePad events in 2015 and are looking towards our first event of 2016 on Saturday, March 26th. We plan to take what we’ve learned so far and build on it to better serve our community and help it continue to grow.

This means event day experiences such as a new game playable at GamePad and special guest appearances.

Taking advantage of services like Twitch, YouTube and Periscope to stream our events will add another dimension to GamePad, allowing people who can’t physically be there on the day to still be a part of the event and the community.

New ideas are part of the process of building your community, continuously analysing and improving the experience for the people who want to be a part of your brand.

Summary

Remember that it does take time, but the combination of online and offline marketing activities gives you a great opportunity to keep your community engaged and excited to connect with you.

The internet plays a big role in delivering an experience, but there’s just a little bit more to it!