Attract new members, monetize and promote community activities!

How to attract new customers? How to be active in the community? How to monetize the community? These are the three most core issues in building a community. This article analyzes and explains these three issues, and I hope it will be useful to you.

We have seen the success of "Luoji Siwei" by the well-known self-media person Luo Zhenyu, but we don’t know that he spent a year accumulating fans by producing an original high-quality video every week without considering monetization.

You see that a certain social e-commerce company has achieved tens of millions in profits through the community, but you don’t know that they may have accumulated a foundation from the WeChat business era.

The popularity of the community is self-evident. Companies and individuals have seen the huge potential of communities and want to build communities and seize the opportunity. However, if you want to build a community, are you really ready?

People always have a lot of questions about communities. To sum up, they are nothing more than the following three questions: how to attract new members, how to make the community active, and how to monetize the community. These are also the three core issues in building a community.

In order to ensure that the community can remain active, continue and be profitable, I need to think clearly about the above issues before building the community. This article will discuss the above three issues.

1. How to attract new members to the community?

If you want to know how to attract new members to a community, then three more questions will arise, which are also the three questions we should understand:

1) What is a community and why do we build one?

2) What is the positioning of my community and who is the target group?

3) What value can my community provide?

1. What is a community and why do we build one?

（1）What is a community?

I wonder if you have ever encountered this situation:

"Xiao Ming, our company has 10 user WeChat groups. You can help run them and make them active."

"Xiao Wang, we are going to build a community. Please add 500 people to the WeChat account in the next two days."

Is this a community? No, this is a user maintenance group! It's like after sales.

What should a real community look like?

Please think about a question. There are 4 groups: relatives and friends group, Xiaomi fan group, English learning club, and hometown association. Which one is a real community?

Let me analyze with you step by step what elements a group must have to be considered a true community.

First, we exclude hometown associations and friends and relatives groups because although these two groups have the same label attributes, they do not have a very clear goal and no unified group rules.

Xiaomi fan groups and English learning clubs both have unified rules and goals, and can achieve specific goals through effective community operations , so these two can be considered real communities.

What is a community?

A community is a group of people gathered together through social platforms, with the same attributes and unified goals.

The stronger the common attributes of this community and the more precise its goals, the greater the fission value generated by this community. So a community must have three elements:

1. The user groups in the community must have the same attribute labels ;
2. The users of the community must have the same goals ;
3. The community must have its own operating system .

(2) Why do we build a community?

As we mentioned earlier, a community is a group of people with similar attributes and common goals. That is, a group of people achieve a certain goal and realize a certain value through mutual collaboration:

• Set up a community, check in and post your weight every day, and strive to lose 5 kg every year
• Form a community, discuss an H5 case every week, and jointly create the most awesome H5 communication
• Set up a community, discuss a photography technique every day, and publish a collection of group members' photography at the end of the year
• Form a community and launch several crowdfunding campaigns every year to help ordinary people realize their dreams
• Build a community, test enthusiasts every day, and make the best MIUI in China

A community must be able to bring some value. Otherwise, the community will be worthless, meaningless, and unable to last long.

2. What is the positioning of our community and who is the target group?

Running a company requires company positioning, making a product requires product positioning, and a community is no exception. This is the key to building a community. If the community positioning is not clear, then the subsequent planning and operation will definitely be unclear or even disorderly.

To understand the positioning of the community, let’s first look at the main categories of the community:

• The first type is product-related communities, such as Xiaomi and Hammer fan groups. These communities are basically filled with product fans and loyal users, and everyone is concerned about the product and brand.
• The second type is the "like-minded" community, represented by Ten Points Reading, etc. Community users pursue a sense of identity and a sense of superiority;
• The third type is knowledge communities, represented by Qiuyeppt. Community users focus on their own growth, so they value whether the community can continuously output valuable information.
• The fourth type is resource-based communities, such as Zhenghe Island and Changqing Club, which are generally groups that gather industry elites. Users in them mainly expand their own personal connections and resources, hoping to achieve the goal of cooperative relationships.
• The fifth type is the project collaboration community, represented by everyone being an operator, etc., which is established based on direct material interests and personal connections.
• The sixth type is a mixed community, which covers some of the above types. Communities divided by occupation, industry, etc. all belong to this category and are oriented towards BD cooperation, which is also the focus of everyone's attention.

3. What value can my community provide?

A community without value has no meaning of existence. Even if it exists, it is just a simple chat group. Let’s take the almighty bear, the Bear Club, as an example:

There are four types of service values ​​provided by Big Bear Club:

First, the value of content. I provide them with training regularly and share my recent insights and some big market opportunities.

Second, platform value. Organize or help members organize some activities so that they can find like-minded people. The Big Bear Club is a platform for equal communication and resource sharing, where members can find many people to help them and also get professional advice and guidance from people in various industries.

Third, resource value. For example, if someone is engaged in mobile games, I can introduce him to my channels. If someone is engaged in e-commerce, I can introduce him to my relationships and resources. Resources within the community are shared and can be well matched with each other. As long as you have enough strength, I can find enough resources to support your success.

Fourth, consulting value. For most of the ordinary members of the Big Bear Club, I provide them with consulting value services. Many members may not have very strong abilities, but by listening to my training and the information I provide, they can improve their lives or improve their business models, which are all very valuable. If they are small business owners, I will tell them how to make products. If they are office workers, I will tell them how to do marketing, and so on.

Let’s review these three questions again: What is a community and why do we build a community; What is the positioning of my community and who is the target group; What value can my community provide? The answers to the above three points can be summarized as: having common attributes, having unified goals, and achieving certain value. If you understand these three points, then the problem of how to attract new customers can be easily solved. When attracting new members to the community, we can operate based on these three attributes:

1) Common attributes;

2) Unify goals;

3) To achieve certain value;

Are there any specific methods?

Here is a simple example:

Let’s say we set up an “exercise and fitness boot camp” with “cycling” as the theme. Then we can conduct a survey on the user group:

Search "how to put on makeup" through "Baidu Index". Baidu Index can reflect the search behavior of netizens. The group of netizens who searched for “how to put on makeup” have a demand for makeup. Then we have found our target group.

(Geographic distribution of user portraits of the keyword “how to put on makeup” in Baidu Index)

From the above picture we can see that the geographical attributes of the population: Guangdong, Beijing, and Shandong ranked the top three in the search index. This is one set of data.

Look at another picture:

(Age distribution of user portraits of the keyword “cycling” in Baidu Index)

The age attributes of the population are mainly concentrated in: 20~29, 30-39 years old, which is another set of data.

With the above data, it will be easy. We can use social software such as Weibo and QQ to search for attribute labels such as Guangdong, Beijing, Shandong, 20-39 years old, etc. to obtain relevant user accounts, send private messages or add friends to communicate and share experiences, and then guide them into the group.

This is just one way. There are many ways to attract group members to join. If you want to know more, you can read a 5,000+ word article I wrote before, "After the community is created, how to effectively attract "precise" members to join?" 》.

2. How to activate the community?

First of all, we need to understand the definitions of groups and communities. WeChat groups and QQ groups are not real communities, they are just platforms. The so-called active community is not the active WeChat group or QQ group, but a combination of online and offline.

I believe that many friends who work in the community have encountered similar problems:

As requested by the leader, a group was formed, but in order to pursue scale, the levels of the group members were uneven.

This is not really a community, it’s at most a customer maintenance group.

Why does this phenomenon occur? Even if teachers share their experiences, no one in the group responds, and members can only be activated by sending red envelopes?

The most fundamental reason is that there are no restrictions on group members and the community has no clear group rules. In a large group of so many people, one word from each person can annoy people to death. So many group members chose to block it. Even if there are teachers who come to share, they cannot see it.

Therefore, the solution to this problem and to keep the community active is:

1. Strict threshold for community;
2. Continuous output of useful information;
3. Combining online and offline activities;
4. Cultivate a sense of identity among community users;
5. Win-win situation within the community;

To ensure the quality of a community and keep it active, many rules and methods are needed, which cannot be fully covered in one article.

3. How to monetize the community?

This is a very practical issue. No one is willing to spend so much energy running a community without seeking returns. A community without profit cannot last long.

Four monetization methods are summarized here: membership, product, traffic, and tool.

1. Membership

The membership system has become the mainstream. The core logic of the membership system is to increase users' sunk costs through prepayments, so that community members can stay in the community and continue to consume.

The essence of a membership community is to provide services .

Of course, the scope of services is very broad, including providing industry information, providing resource links in the industry, providing display platforms, providing knowledge and answering questions, etc.

The profit model of membership communities is undoubtedly membership fees. The condition for monetizing through a membership system is to have the ability to output content over a long period of time and to attract traffic by outputting content.

Currently, the communities that are doing relatively well in membership systems include Fan Deng Reading Club, Wu Xiaobo Channel, Big Bear Club, etc.

In these communities, the main incentives for community members are privileges, points, profit returns, etc.

2. Product category

Many people think that as long as they pull a group of people into the same WeChat group and then sell goods to them, they will create a product-based community.

In fact, a very important prerequisite for building a product-based community is to make a product that cannot be easily copied and to bring users a strong sense of participation through community operations.

For product-based communities to continue to exist, they essentially need to rely on word-of-mouth marketing .

A community that builds deep links with users can easily make users become word-of-mouth spreaders of the product if the product quality is excellent.

When a group of users with the same interests, cognitions, and values ​​gather together, a swarm effect will occur.

They interact, communicate, collaborate and infect each other, which can actually have a "feedback" effect on the product itself .

However, in order to attract precise target users in the early stages of a product-based community, it is necessary to find an irresistible traffic-generating product or service .

3. Traffic

The main profit model of traffic communities is to gather traffic and promote products . Of course, this product is not necessarily your own product, nor is it limited to a certain type of product.

The view of traffic-based communities is that you have a community where "people gather together based on the same interest tags, values ​​and sense of identity", in which users interact stably and have high stickiness.

Then, as long as the community size is appropriate, this group will become a channel for various promotions because the people in the group are precise.

Simply put, it means gathering traffic and using it to make money.

For example, the common Zhihu mutual like groups, Pinduoduo bargaining groups, mini-program mutual aid groups, movie download groups, etc., the people in these groups are all precise traffic .

After many people have established such communities with precise traffic, as long as community members have a sense of identity and trust in the community, they can promote other products in it, such as course distribution, novel distribution, etc.

4. Tools

The concept of a tool-based community is: the community is a tool.

To some extent, a community is like a product. If it is a product, you need to provide value, and value is value in a specific scenario. Talking about value without considering the scenario is empty talk.

To build a tool-based community, you need to find the pain points of your target users , and then solve their problems and increase their stickiness by providing corresponding tools.

• For example, what pain points do people who work in communities usually encounter?
• WeChat groups cannot be managed automatically - so there are tools for group management robots
• The fission process cannot be switched automatically - so there are tools like live code
• There is no way to store audio in WeChat groups - so there is a tool like audio export
• …

Therefore, as long as tool communities have the ability to strategically attract traffic and accurately grasp user needs , and can provide tools to solve user pain points, they can become a thriving community.

Conclusion

Building a community is not as simple as creating a group. It is not something that can be accomplished overnight. You created a community on a whim, but what should you do if it cannot make a profit in the long run? Therefore, all of the above are things that need to be considered before building a community.

Author: Kiss the Breeze

Source: Kiss the Breeze