Hey Fearless Friend!

Today on Stay Fearless or Die Trying:

1. 3 ways to build a community for your brand

2. Resources to help you get there

3. Fearless perks of the week!

Community building: What’s the benefit?

There are right / wrong ways to a) scale a community (irl or virtually) b) leverage a personal brand to build a community c) expose a community to a new audience.

A great team to have your goals in mind, a strong definition of your brand, and the motivation to overcome obstacles matter. When building a community, you can’t forget to capitalize on the power of people! Building a community is a great place for growth within an existing company, too. It can help you maintain your customer base, give you a chance to bounce ideas off your biggest cheerleaders, and have a squad of people ready to sign up for new projects you create. Now you know WHY community building works, but the next question is HOW?!

1. IRL Events

I talked about this last week when I talked about generating income, but IRL events are a great way to grow your community! IRL events allow community members to unite, meet each other (and you!), and expand their knowledge of your brand.

Here are some things to keep in mind when organizing an event:

• Have a clear objective: Whether your event is a meet-and-greet, a speaking event, or a product launch, you must be clear with yourself and your customers. This objective should drive marketing.

• Venue: Pick the right venue for your event. Speaking events can take place at schools or hotels, meet-and-greets can take place in public spaces, and product launches can take place at a mall. Pick the right venue for your event, and ensure enough space to fit the audience you’re attracting.

• Follow up: After the event, don’t think you’re all done! You must follow up with guests afterward to provide recaps and resources related to the event. Ask for feedback or a review to use in the future. Even reach out to customers that didn’t go and make them jealous they missed out!

2. Specify your market!

Growing a community takes work. It isn’t as simple as asking your social media followers to join, though that might be a great place to start! Once your membership has plateaued, you must get creative with finding new people. Remember, your community members are the first line of customers interested in your brand. They’ll be first in line for new products, give great feedback on your ideas, and spread the word about you to their friends and family. To curate this group, you have to seek them out.

A tried and true method of doing this is by utilizing platforms that people come to for help. Reddit and Quora are two great examples. Reddit is full of threads that are centered around asking for advice and sharing problems. Quora is a site focused on asking for help itself! Create accounts on both sites and use them to respond to people in your market. Invite them to follow your brand or to join your community. Explain to them how your brand solves the problem they’re asking.

Some Reddit threads to jump into:

• r/YourNiche: Search your place of expertise on Reddit! Whether it is r/selfhelp, r/makeup, r/marketing, r/compsci, or anything in between! Start with looking at threads that discuss what your brand is about. There are bound to be people asking questions that you can answer!

• r/Advice: This thread is full of people asking for advice in all different fields. You can sub-search through the thread for questions regarding your market.

• r/Startups: Even though your business likely isn’t focused on helping people with their startup, joining a community focused on starting up can connect you with people who have questions you might have, business models similar to yours, or customer bases that intersect with your market. Recruiting other startups into your community can only help bring insight, and possibly partnerships in the future!

One of the great things about Quora is when you sign up you’re prompted with this step:

Here you get to select topics that interest you which helps funnel questions your way. This is an easy way to get introduced to questions that relate to your business. When searching Quora for questions to answer, think about the questions that your business is meant to answer for consumers. For example, if your startup is centered around self-help, you can search “How can I feel better about myself?” You’ll see thousands of people are looking for that answer, and it’s something your business can provide!

3. Use the right platform!

This goes back to the concept of knowing your market well. There are lots of different platforms that you can host your community on, each one has different benefits, and different niches that they cater to. Here are some examples.

• WhatsApp: This one’s pretty simple! It works well with younger audiences as many already use WhatsApp for something in their daily lives. One of the cons of this platform is that everything happens in a single thread, which might make it harder to create sub-groups within your community.

• Slack: Great for groups centered around businesses. Perfect for professional audiences. You can create different threads and sub-groups as well. One con is that the free plan is pretty limited, and if your community grows to a large group it might not be sustainable.

• Facebook Groups: Straightforward like WhatsApp. You also can promote/advertise your group through Facebook’s advertising programs. One con is that it doesn’t allow for sub-groups, and if your audience is younger many avoid Facebook like the plague.

• Discord: Great for male-oriented and tech-centered groups. One con is that it is one of the more complex sites to use, and is focused more on live discussions as opposed to conversations that can take place over time.

• Telegram: A lot like WhatsApp, but takes it further by supporting larger groups, and different channels, and integrating support bots that can automate messages. One con is that, like WhatsApp, it is very focused on the messaging model and may not be useful for communities planning on scheduling calls, etc.

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