Relaunching Your Online Community? 5 Steps to Get it Right!

Is your online community active but still failing to meet its business goals?

Most communities mistake hypo-engagement for slow progress. They fail to realize that even the communities built on a weak idea can survive for a long time. Moreover, the little to no activity in the community gives them the illusion of engagement. And the community hangs by a thread of hope that one day there will be enough members to achieve the actual goal.

Does this scenario sound familiar to you? We hate to break it to you, but getting new members won’t work.

So, what’s the solution? A detailed assessment of your community idea and relaunching it with a strong concept that adds value to your customers.

This brings us to the main question-how to relaunch your online community, so it reaps the desired outcomes?

A community relaunch is a great opportunity for the brand to reconnect with its clientele and assess their requirements, expectations, and more. It solidifies your customer relationship and boosts engagement in the long run all while working towards your business goals. So, let’s decipher some ways to revamp your existing community to get the most out of it.

5 Steps to a Successful Community Relaunch

A community relaunch doesn’t have to be expensive. It could be as simple as understanding what your members expect, and picking that up as your community concept. You already have a community, now all you need is to find some inspiration to spark engagement.

Here are 5 techniques that will enable you to relaunch your online community, the right way-

1. Build Credibility

Your community is your brand, so start with creating positive awareness around it. You need to persuade your customers to join your community by delivering exclusive value. This is a pre-launch stage where you will spend time participating in other communities, asking questions, attending events, etc. It will help you network and understand what your community is lacking. From your learnings, you can start experimenting with your ideas. Work on your unique idea as this gives you the added advantage of gaining credibility.

2. Nurture Relationships

The above step should help you network with at least 50-100 people. These are the people who recognize you and willingly give time to you. So, keep engaging with them to nurture your relationship with them. Ask them questions, respond to their question, ask them for feedback and take appropriate action. Make them feel heard and acknowledged. This is honest work and the most reliable way to achieve great results.

3. Identify Your Community Concept

By now, you should’ve sustained relationships with those 50 people and have a good idea of what they expect. Leverage spreadsheets to keep a record of the data to identify patterns. Start with asking people about the challenges they face. It will help you identify a few topics that they really care about. At this point, you are looking for topics your network cares about but doesn’t have a place to talk about it. These topics will be the concept of your community.

Now, develop your list of community concepts by interviewing people. For instance, if their common challenge is ‘sedentary lifestyle’, you might be able to identify a few common themes, like-

• Never having enough time to exercise
• Lacking the motivation to maintain a consistent fitness regime
• Concerns about maintaining work-life balance
• Wants to stop procrastinating
• Uncertain about when to start
• Not spending enough time on physical activity

4. Validate Your Community Concept

Now that you have identified your community’s concept and listed out themes, it’s time to validate those ideas. Start with surveys asking people to rank which of these they care about. Or, you can start testing community concept ideas directly by talking about them with the community members. Discard the concept with the lowest ranking. You can repeat this process every time you need validation for your new concept.

5. Test Your Community Concept

Testing your community concept is the best way to evaluate your ideas. Some of the fast and cost-efficient ways to test your ideas are-

• Create an asset around your idea, like a Whitepaper or an Infographic, and see how many impressions it gets.
• Create a Facebook group around the topic and see how many members it gets.
• Host a webinar around the topic and see how many people attend.

A feasible idea will instantly generate a positive response from your audience. If it’s not an instant win, it isn’t THE idea for your community. Keep trying until you come up with an intriguing community concept.

Most communities are facing stagnancy because they skipped the conceptualization stage. If you skipped the conceptualization phase, then spending money on new member acquisition is a waste. So, get to the conceptualization phase and keep testing ideas until you land a hit one.

Wish to Create a Strategic Community Relaunch Plan That Stirs Up Engagement? Talk to Us!