5 Steps Process To Build Thriving Community From Scratch In 2023

Earlier to build a brand from a commodity, marketers used to look at building brand equity, coming up with unique USPs, etc. But not anymore today’s its all about building your online crowd. There is nothing more powerful than it.

But starting a commodity is hard, you don’t know where to start from, how to turn the chaos into building a system where you are building both engagement and new members in your herd.

In this article I will help you with five steps, that will help you in building community at 2023.

Who should build Online Community?

Literally anyone who wants to reach wider audience; here are some examples;

• If you are a florist and want to build community to cater to your local region.
• A brand that wants to build an online community to engage with the team
• A tech company who wants to build community to offer product updates and take feedback
• Content creator who is looking to build a community to offer “Premium” content to their community members.
• College student who wants to plan a mass national bunk.

Or if you are passionate about some subject and wants a place where you feel safe to share your thoughts and engage with like minded people.

Just like I said anyone.

Below are five steps process to help you get started with community building in 2023. The process is divided into two sections.

1. Execution, and
2. Monitor

Now without any further due let’s dive into building your community.

Step 1: Define what kind of community you want to build?

Building a community requires lots of resources, money and valuable time. So it would be best if you only started community building after researching.

While researching, you should start by identifying your community’s purpose. This will play a foundational bock for your community’s success.

To find your community’s purpose, you can start by finding out what problems or gaps are in the market—and building a community around that.

Knowing about problems and gaps in the market and working on building your community’s purpose to cater for them will help you scale and monetize it faster.

In this step, you should work on identifying your target audience.

You need to find everything about them. And while you are in the process, dig deeper to know what will drive your targeted audience to join your community.

Do you know having both strong community purpose and understand of target audience, helped Harley Davidson to build a huge community.

Step 2: Plan out your Community’s Growth Plan

To better understand this stage, let’s say our community purpose is:

“Build a safe community in Slack, devoid of any politics or bias. Where Social Activist & Sociologists all over the world will come to discuss, help each other, and share insights to help building good education and healthcare in Rural Areas”.

Now you have to plan a strategy on how you will achieve that. Here, having a solid community purpose that you prepared on “Step 1” will play a crucial role in your success.

Because not just will it fuel your growth plan, but it will also help you in building a branded community online.

In this step, you should also figure out how many teams member will be required to support and scale that community. Figure out are your tech or other assets ready that you will use in building the community.

Identify what other marketing channels your community will support? And what other marketing channels will bring support to build community.

There will be tons of other questions that will come into play; here I am mentioning some of them for you to start working on;

1. What will be the inner culture? 
2. How are you going to onboard new members?
3. How are you going to promote discussion? 
4. What will be your community’s name? 
5. How are you going to attract new members? 
6. How will you screen new members?

Also, remember that this is an ongoing stage, and for successful growth and scale, you will be revisiting this stage quite often.

Last by not least, do not make the mistake of not setting SMART goals for your community. And as you will grow, you will have to keep a tap on important KPIs.

Just like analytics is an important pillar for Social media marketing success, similarly analytics is also a pillar for community success.

Step 3: Embark On The Journey

After setting the foundational stone for your community, now you should launch it as soon as possible.

See, I believe in a fast-paced approach when it comes to building something. I want to see my quick results, or mistakes and instant feedbacks.

Unlike some other marketing channels, community building takes time. And you can’t make it successful in the one go, it is an ongoing process. But delaying the launch in the hope to make it perfect will be the big mistake from your end. Delaying the launch will only stop you from collecting insightful data, that you would have gathered if you had started.  

But on the brighter side, think of community building as a dry land where you as a gardener is given the responsibility to nourish it and sow seeds in it. You will do this by continuing to add new and relevant members, keep on communication going and other tasks – but just like Gardner, however skilled or knowledgeable they might be they can’t make a forest out of a dry land in one go. You also can’t but you can take the initiative to embark on this journey.

Here is one article by Social Media Today to help you on community launch strategies.

Step 4: Supervising and Caring for the community

You need to create a space where members can feel both open to participate in the discussion and safe to raise a point. Besides that, you have to create and successfully execute an operational plan which will help you in running your community smoothly.

In this stage, consider giving thoughts on the following; 

1. How will you onboard a new member? 
2. How will you make the conversation happen? 
3. What will be community standards and rules? 
4. How will you avoid self-promotion? And what rules will be for that? 
5. What actionable steps will be to solve conflict and crisis when they come? 

Overall, build yourself an actionable operation plan. It should also be flexible, where you can tweak it as you go and grow. 

Step 5: Caring and Growing

For a kid to grow up as a healthy, happy and valuable member of society, along with basic human necessities, it also needs love (lots and lots of love, and a place of compassion and growth.

And it all comes from parents, teachers, family members, friends and every other environmental element that directly and indirectly interact with it.

Here you need to take responsibility to care for your community.

You have to give it time, have to listen to it, and sometimes also will take bold steps. And though you will make mistakes during the process, you must learn from them and keep growing. It’s easy.

Wrap Up

Community building does take lots of time but in the end it’s a worth investment. Though I have covered almost everything that you would need to start building community, and I will keep on adding more resources and details, though these steps will remain same.

What else do you think needed to be here? Do add them below in the comments.