Are you getting ready to build or relaunch an online community? Much of your success depends on how well you prepare. In this article, well share a three-step framework that you can use to establish a strong foundation for your online community.
By planning ahead with this framework, youre more likely to be aligned with your stakeholders, catch any potential issues early, and get users participating quickly.
As with any project, if you don’t have clear goals, it’s easy to get off track. Thats why we start with defining the goals for your community at each level: organizationally, departmentally, and for your end-users. What does each group want to get out of an online community?
To create goals for your online community, start by thinking about what you’re trying to achieve at this point in your community journey. These questions can help:
Once youve gone through these questions, you might find that groups have different and even conflicting priorities for the community. In this case, you might need to do some additional brainstorming, prioritizing, and consensus-building to think about how you can align these goals and build a community that supports every need.
As your community grows organically, your goals might change. Well cover this more later when we talk about community maturity, but first, lets look at some examples of goals you could have:
Tip: Dont try to pursue every goal you could aim for at once. It’s better to do one or two things well than to do ten things mediocrely.
Once youve determined your community goal(s), you should let that inform the type of community you choose to create.
Next, choose the type of community that best supports your goals.
Here are the most common community use cases:
The use cases of a community often correlate with its maturity level. Many online communities initially focus on support, enablement, or product-related discussions. As they mature, they tend to expand to encompass more complex functions such as advocacy and specialized interest groups.
However, starting a community with these complex functions is generally not recommended, as they can be demanding and may not offer immediate rewards to new members. The decision to expand the scope of a community should be a strategic one that you make based on the communitys readiness and user base strength.
Once youve chosen a community type, its time to launch your online community and get it engaged.
After youve established your goals and chosen your community type, your next step is to get customers signed up and interacting in the online community. To do this, create a plan to engage these members, encourage their participation, and bring them back to the community. As your community matures, you can nurture active users into advocates, who can help you share thought leadership and introduce new people to your community and company.
To form a community acquisition strategy, start by thinking about whats in it for your users. Create clear reasons to join that tap into what theyre looking for. For example, if its a support community and you know they want to solve their problems quickly, make one of your calls to action (CTA) get fast answers. Try these ideas to attract new users:
Once youve launched, think about what will keep users coming back. One helpful exercise can be to brainstorm activities to engage specific personas.
Try these online community engagement tactics:
To assess the potential of an engagement tactic to generate community activity, ask yourself: Is this going to encourage customers to continue the conversation with each other and with us? Sometimes, you may have to test it to find out.
Tip: Dont exhaust yourself or your resources during launch. Its tempting to want to do everything at launch or relaunch, but hold back some of your engagement ideas to sustain that excitement. Keep excess ideas in your content calendar to make sure you’ve got something great every month, every quarter, and every year. This will help keep your community successful for the long-term.
The online community platform you choose may have built-in tools to make your engagement job easier. For example, Higher Logic Vanilla offers tools like leaderboards, polling, points and badges.
Your advocates will generally emerge over time, but there are a few things you can do to develop a community environment that fosters advocacy.
Heres an important thing to know about advocates: Users who share content in the community are taking the first steps towards advocacy, so don’t underestimate the value of these creators.
Consider rewarding creators in ways that are meaningful to them. This might mean shout-outs, tangible rewards, or special recognition. Dont hesitate to ask these individuals what theyd like to see more of in the community. You can also engage them by asking for their help with specific questions they have expertise in or by inviting them to speak at a community event.
In addition, you can try implementing gamification tactics, such as ranks or leaderboards, to motivate customers to get involved, whether theyre participating in promotional activities, product feedback sessions, or community discussions.
The more you can encourage customers to talk to each other and answer each others questions, the more you can help them develop the confidence they need to become an advocate in the future.
This framework is simple, but it can be overwhelming when you start getting into the details. Simplify the process by asking yourself these questions:
Remember, by forming a well thought-out plan, youve already taken a huge step forward on your journey to community success.
Looking for more resources to help you along in your online community journey? Grab our Customer Community Playbook.