How to build a community in 2024

How to build a community in 2024

The content landscape is now incredibly saturated with everyone looking to be a content creator.

The problem is that people don’t often stick around after seeing one of your videos; they’ll jump to the next one.

Retention and loyalty are hard to establish as a creator now with so much competition but creating your own community around common interests is proving to be incredibly effective.

Why? Communities foster relationships by creating an environment for viewers to consistently come back and engage with relevant content, ideas, problems and general talking points.

This familiarity and togetherness provides a really strong foundation for credibility, authority and loyalty.

Before you go right ahead and make a community, you should know the 4 core principles to building a successful one first.

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Principle 1: Define a Clear Purpose

Platforms may be saturated with content and creators but make no mistake, we’re spoilt for choice when it comes to communities too.

So it’s important for people to understand why your community exists in the first place.

As well as helping visitors understand why they should join, having a clear purpose behind your community also helps guide event planning, resources, live discussions, and overall activities on the inside.

Having a strong purpose can separate and differentiate your community from the rest and make it more appealing to potential members.

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Principle 2: Focus on Providing Value to Members

We’re all onboard with the premise of improving loyalty through having a community but first and foremost it’s there for your viewers, subscribers, or users - so providing what’s valuable to them should always be the core effort.

The way to do this is by diversifying the content and activities you can offer inside the community such as exclusive content, resources, or opportunities for collaboration.

Expanding the formats of value delivery are also a good way to test what your community respond to best. For example, you could experiment with webinars, e-books, podcasts, or AI generated content.

Continuously testing and then gathering feedback is how you understand the evolving needs and preferences of your members.

It’s only by understanding where the most value is for our community that you can accurately balance between providing free value and introduce monetisation strategies for other access and offerings.

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Principle 3: Foster Engagement and Participation

Once you have members join, there’s two things you’ll need for a successful community:

1. Active involvement
2. Engaged interaction

Because these two drive growth and member retention. You can’t have a lively and active community without engagement or activity from your members.

There’s a few ways we can do this. Firstly, choosing a platform like Skool to host your community is a great start with its gamified features and already popular usage.

You can then start initiating discussions, host live events, Q&A’s, and organise collaborative projects to give your members a real feeling of community and togetherness by feeling the rewards of regular input.

Those can also be rewarded with gamified features such as leaderboards, badges, and rewards to incentivise more involvement and engagement.

Once this flywheel is up and spinning, it creates a safe and welcoming environment where members always feel encouraged to share their thoughts, experiences or any feedback.

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Principle 4: Build Strong Relationships

Building real connection with your community members goes a lot further than improving retention.

When you have strong relationships they can drive community growth on autopilot when members become advocates and ambassadors. It’s like having your own marketing team for a self sustaining hub of like minded peers.

If you invest in the previous principle and create a welcome environment that fosters more engagement, it makes this step a lot easier and should come naturally as a byproduct.

You can reinforce this motion with more personalised events such as meet ups whether they’re in person or virtual so it helps put a face and voice to a name in the community.

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Monetization Strategies for Communities in 2024

Monetising your community shouldn’t feel like a bad thing. If it does then it’s probably a sign you haven’t got the right balance between monetisation and value delivery.

When you have a thriving community you essentially have a market of its own full of invested people. Monetisation strategies should be simple in terms of understanding what your community would pay for.

What we need to understand are the different vehicles for monetisation:

• Offering paid memberships or subscription tiers
• Selling community-specific merchandise
• Providing exclusive content or access
• Hosting paid events or workshops
• Implementing affiliate marketing programs

Which vehicle best suits your community will depend on its purpose and what value you’re providing already which should be clear from the first two principles above.

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The Role of Technology and AI in Community Building

For real leverage and effective marketing, you could consider using AI tools like Argil to support any of the above monetisation strategies with automated promotional content.

Use Argil to create engaging video content around community offers to promote membership benefits, events, and merchandise.

The added benefit of using Argil for content that scales is you can also create multilingual content to keep any segment of your community engaged and even push it to a global audience.

To use Argil for free now, join us.

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Conclusion: Community Building as the Future of Audience Growth

With this guide on how to build a community in 2024, you now have the necessary know-how to future proof your audience building.

The modern content landscape requires more than just making a good video now because of saturation. Communities are the foundation for longer term success whether you’re a content creator or an entrepreneur selling anything.

Start exploring how you can leverage Argil to build your community. We have a free one of our own - Argil Academy to help you with content creation, or you can skip our waitlist here and start making your first AI videos for free.

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