Who Do You Want in Your Community?

When it comes to building a community, you need to be clear about who you want in it. This goes beyond the ideal customer avatar, because your community members will be people who share your values and not just an interest in your products.
However, like with your customers, you need to define in detail your ideal community members’ profile.

You can think about this in two parts:

Personality

Because of your community’s emphasis on shared values, the personality and characteristics of your community member will be more important to you than in any other group.

You will want them to believe in the same values as you, but you’ll also want to attract people who are:

• Engaged
• Enthusiastic
• Participative
• Thoughtful
• Reflective

In this way, you’ll have a vibrant, active community of interested people.

Characteristics

These are the more concrete aspects of a person. They will include demographics like age, gender, and profession.

You’ll want to add aspects that relate to the type of community you’re creating, such as:

• Customers of a specific product
• Customers in general
• Leads for a specific product
• Fellow professionals in your industry supporting each other who can add value and are committed.

For example, if you’re building a community as a pre-launch strategy to a new version of an existing product, then your general database of customers will need segmenting. You’ll want to include people who purchased the initial version of your product as well as those who bought related offers.

Research What Your Target Community Members Want

Just knowing who you’ll target with your community marketing isn’t enough. You need to know what those people want from your community.

Don’t forget that a community involves reciprocal communication, and the best way to engage people and have them respond is to provide what they’re looking for.

First, think about why people want to join community group, whether online or local neighborhood groups.

As human beings, we feel a need to belong and being a member of an exclusive group gives us that feeling.

Other psychological needs met by communities are:

• Sharing with like-minded people
• Having a platform to voice opinions and be heard
• Being in a safe space where they can be themselves
• Receiving respect and acknowledgement.

Secondly, there are the specifics of your community. That could be:

• Customer support
• Low prices and money off
• Networking opportunities
• Accountability
• Emotional support
• Motivation
• Advice

You will have some idea of what people are looking for once you’ve defined your ideal community member. But you’ll need to do some research to gain further insight. Find out where these people hang out on social media, read what they are talking about, and ask questions for further clarification.

At this stage, your focus is on gathering data. In a later module, we’ll look at how you can meet these psychological and practical needs with your community.

You will need to meet at least some of the needs of your group members if your community is to grow and thrive.