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Online Community Strategy and Marketing
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Community Strategy for online community hosts
Launching an online community takes time, energy, and organization. Someone must take ownership of the project. A strategy is a plan of action to obtain a specific goal or result. Without setting the stage for a community strategy, a launch can be postponed due to a lack of clarity, leadership, and goal setting. Understanding the difference between the roles and responsibilities of community leaders, hosts, and managers can help one better understand them. The key is to know who you are, where you fit, and what teammates you’ll need to assist you on this community journey.
Community Hosts sets the vision, purpose, and values
The host sets the vision for the future of the online community, gives guidance and support to the community manager, and directs how content is created.
The host would also decide on the structure of an online community and the strategy for which the community would be led to include a marketing plan, creation of an ambassador program, securing sponsorships, developing educational materials, reporting to investors, reporting to grant funding authorities, or developing a crowdfunding campaign.
The host may decide to hire professionals who offer services to support them or delegate aspects of the community launch, marketing, education, building, or funding to the community leader or the community manager.
Some could say that a CEO of an organization could be considered the ‘host” as they are in charge of steering the company towards success while ensuring a positive community culture that aligns with the business and revenue goals.
A community guides the community culture.
A community leader could be an advocate, ambassador, facilitator, mentor, or volunteer who takes an active authority within the community. The leader can be a person who works closely with the community host and may also be the “go-between” for community hosts and managers.
Community leaders could be course instructors, co-hosts, partners, coaches, ambassadors, stakeholders, investors, or advocates. A host may hire a community leader to help with marketing, creating a content plan, project management, or overseeing an online community’s progress, growth, and health. The leader could create the overall operations or training manual for a community manager to implement. These could be documents like a marketing plan and writing a playbook for a community manager to provide the processes and systems that the person would use in daily operations. Additionally, a community leader may be assigned to write community guidelines and community onboarding manuals or to create onboarding videos to support the members.
Community Managers coordinate the community
A Community Manager implements the community host’s vision, purpose, and mission by transforming it into actionable steps. Communities managers are usually partners of the host, volunteers, or working part-time for an organization such as a non-profit, a startup, or an online community led by a business owner.
It has been traditional to seek volunteers to manage an online community when a budget does not allow a paid staff member to oversee it. Depending on an online community’s size, scale, and purpose, a CM may also be responsible for content planning, event facilitation, leadership development, marketing and promoting the community, member onboarding, and continuously dealing with community problems or challenges. Knowing the difference between a community leader, host, and manager is the key to identifying the community strategy and who will take ownership of each step in the community-building process. It will also help establish a timeline with benchmarks, goals, and outcomes.
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