If you've just set up your community page and now find yourself stuck and don't know where to go next, you're in the right place!

This article will help you focus your community strategy for some awesome growth.

Watch our video on community strategy then read on to learn how you can build yours.

Your Four Questions

Your Community Experience

The Strategy/Experience Loop

Summary

Starting a community comes with a bunch of questions: How can I get new members? How do I get people to talk to each other? How do I know people like my content? What kind of events should I plan? Is my community good enough to charge people a subscription?

These are all important questions, but answering them requires a community strategy. And to do that, you can narrow dozens of questions down to just four.

Take your time answering, because your entire strategy will be based on them (no pressure really!).

These questions help because they give clarity to your goals and help you anticipate possible problems.

Once you know the answer to these two things, on a general level and for your community members, creating a strategy becomes easier.

Let's look at an example community to see what kind of answers you can expect.

If we're the community manager for the Ultimate Aquariums community, here are our four questions and the answers that come with them.

Once you've got these answers, you can start building your strategy based on the needs of your users and what you want to achieve.

To understand your strategy better, we're going to walk through an example of a new user to the Ultimate Aquarium community and track their community experience.

Let's take a look at KC, who wants to build the perfect aquarium for his new pet goldfish.

He's joined the Ultimate Aquarium community to learn from the community's resources, lessons, and members experienced in building aquariums.

Based on the four answers above, we can imagine his experience would go something like this:

As we can see, the community experience is all about growth through education and connecting with others who have more experience.

What a community manager does is anticipate this experience and rises to meet the needs of the user.

This is how you can build a strategy based on the experiences of your community members.

This strategy is designed so that your members see continuous growth, rather than remaining stuck in one place. Growth means your user is engaged and encouraged to participate in the community.

It's all about creating good experiences, and adjusting your strategy as the user experience becomes clear!

Based on the community experience, here's what the Ultimate Aquarium Community needs from its community manager:

And that's it! Take some time to think carefully about your community strategy, be flexible, and adapt to the needs and experience of your users. Remember that it's a loop, so you'll always be adapting and changing your strategy as your community grows.

We hope this helps you develop your community strategy! If you have any questions, reach out to us in the chat and we'll get back to you ASAP.

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