A strong community is one of the most important aspects of a successful business. A community is what supports you and what helps you not only to run your business but to grow it as well. A lot of small business owners understand how important the community is but still don’t know how to grow it. Therefore I made a step-by-step guide how to build a community which helps you and supports you.
1. The Right Audience
Before anything else, make sure you’re targeting the right audience. This is the most common mistakes small businesses make. You don’t want to waste your time and money on people who don’t care about you so be sure you’ve chosen the right people. Do a research, determine who your target audience is and concentrate only on these people.
2. Seeding Your Community
The next step you have to take in order to grow your community is to seed it with users and content. A lot of businesses fail by thinking that they need to have a huge community from the very beginning. That’s not true, it’s much more important to grow your community organically and continuously. Valuable content is what attracts new participants most and therefore you need to do your best to provide your community with valuable content and then you’ll see it growing naturally.
3. Encourage Participation
Another great way to grow your community is to encourage participation. No one wants to be a part of a community which is passive and everyone is silent. The essence of community is having the same interests and sharing opinions, knowledge and valuable content. That’s why you must encourage participation of all the members, otherwise, your community will stop growing and people will leave.
4. Elevate Your Emails
Emails also can help you to grow your community but you need to use them wisely. People receive a ton of emails every day and delete most of them without a doubt. That’s why you need to elevate your email, to make them irresistible and awaken curiosity. You need to make people want to read them and to provide them with quality content which would lead them to join your community and be active members of it.
5. Member Benefits
Let’s be honest about this part – even when you share the greatest content, people rarely want to be members of a community without benefits. Gladly, there’re many different kinds of benefits that people look for. If you’re selling some products or services, you can offer free samples or share special discount coupons with them. You can also offer a free first-time consultancy for your services or make a contest. Actually, you can offer anything but the more valuable and satisfying the offer is, the more members will join your community.
6. Unique Personality
Well, and of course, your community must have a unique personality. It must be real and bold. You need to figure out what’s special about your community and what makes it different from all the others out there. In a world where are so many different communities pleasing the mass, yours need to be unique and have its own personality.
If you’ll follow this guide step-by-step, I’m pretty sure soon you’ll have a strong community for your business. You have to remember that these people are one of your greatest assets. Therefore you must do your best to keep them satisfied and make them feel that you care about them. Follow this step-by-step guide, build your community and make your business successful!