Over this last month, I’ve heard this question more than a few times: how do I leverage my presence in other communities to grow my business?
These are not folks who want to build a community, but rather they want to know how to show up in other communities in ways that create meaningful value for their business. They see their presence in other communities as a way to market their business, but they are struggling to know how to do it effectively.
It was only after a conversation with my podcast producer that she pointed out the uniqueness of my heavily community-centric podcast launch strategy that I realized the auto-pilot community builder in me had actually achieved something quite remarkable.
In this piece I intend to show you the path to leveraging your presence as a community member to get new eyes on your business, nurture existing relationships, and ultimately convert new clients or customers. I’ll especially be reflecting on how I did this for my recent podcast launch and my own community launch.
A note to the community builders: if you pay attention, you will find a treasure trove of buried insights for what your members are seeking in your community and how you help nurture them to get there.
Join the Right Communities for You
While this full article and quiz explores into the 4 types of communities and which one is right for your business, this same matrix can be applied when it comes to discerning which community is right for you to join (not just build).
If you’re looking for a place to start, begin with networking communities.
Paid communities where your ideal customer or client is gathering to connect with others for a variety of outcomes they might be seeking. Find 3-5 that really fit the bill. Quality over quantity.
Plant, Nurture, Harvest, repeat
This is like an original Bri Leever metaphor back from my days at Sseko. I taught our team of sellers that to create an effective marketing engine that doesn’t start and stall, then start and stall, you have to work in a rhythm of equal parts planting, nurturing, and harvesting every week.
You’ll want to consider how your presence in communities can be 1/3 part planting new seeds of connection, 1/3 part nurturing existing relationships, and 1/3 part harvesting (or finally converting people towards the actions that will grow your business).
Planting: These are the actions you do that sow new seeds of relationship. The seeds are new people you have a 1:1 call with, new followers on social media, or simply new people seeing your content for the very first time.
Nurturing: These are the actions you do to nurture the growth of those new seeds. Nurturing activities can include your email sequences or newsletter and being consistently visible and providing value in places where these new connections gather, like… communities!
Harvest: These are the actions you do to convert warm leads to become customers or clients. Some of us get really caught up in planting and nurturing that we forget to harvest and actually prompt people to do the thing that will grow your business. It’s just as important to have routine harvest habits.
As a starting point, consider 1 thing you can do in each bucket weekly in the communities you are a part of.
Here’s my current weekly rhythms:
plant: skim the directory for aligned coaches and consultants, connect and personally introduce myself on LinkedIn if they have a presence there
nurture: read through posts in wins or places where people are asking for support. Like and comment thoughtfully and with curioisity.
harvest: post a new podcast episode and invite folks to listen, like, and review
The #1 Rule: Give, give, give, give, give, THEN ASK
If you have any hope of leveraging community in your marketing strategy, you MUST - I REPEAT THIS IS A MUST - posture yourself with generosity. You must be willing to show up in these spaces with a genuine desire to listen, learn, and support others in the community.
My fear with publishing this piece is that folks will flock to join communities that align with them and start spamming the hell out of other members.
Community building in any form is the long-game. It’s the container for finding and fostering new relationships and must be approached with integrity and generosity.
Unlike 1:1 relationships created outside of a community, your reputation will preceed you in a community.
Make sure it ‘s a reputation for showing up with generosity and curiosity.
Only then will people be willing to pay attention to what you share.
Be the best community member ever
If you’re just starting out, find 3-5 communities that feel the most aligned (you do NOT need as many as I have, I could do with some pruning tbh!), and make it your goal to be the best member that community has ever seen.
Here’s a few practical ways to do that.
Post your introduction
This is your big debut, it’s your one shot at grabbing everyone’s attention and being “the ___ gal” or “the ____ guy” for that community. In non-communities, I want to be known as their community gal. Share something that makes you stand out, share something personal, let people see you, share something vulnerable, share something you can support others with. After you’ve posted your intro, comment on 10 other intros. Search the intros for keywords that align with the type of person you’re looking to connect with.
See where you can help
Before you go in asking your questions or sharing all your best resources or displaying your genius, quietly show up in the comments.
The search bar is your secrete weapon here.
Search for:
people asking questions you know the answer to.
keywords used in intro posts you resonate with
people posting books, podcast, and other articles you already know and love.
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel, instead, contribute to the good stuff already flowing and people will quickly recognize your name as a supportive, generous presence.
When members come in hot, sometimes it can be off-putting to the rest of the group. You want to show that you’re here to be a team player and that starts with commenting on other people’s work, not shouting yours from the rooftops.
Find someone who can help you.
If your community has a system for offers (each member offers something), go through the list and find someone who could provide something you need and take them up on it! Showing up generously doesn’t mean you show up to provide all the answers, it also means you show your soft white underbelly. Asking for help (especially directly, 1:1) is a great way to start doing this.
Get a sense for the vibe of the community
Some communities are more direct about pitching and celebrating wins and what’s working well. In these communities, members will be quick to celebrate a win with you. Others are more intimate and members respond more supportively when you are vulnerable.
Even for my podcast launch week, I approached several different communities differently based on what I know the members respond to there:
Rosieland - I didn’t just want to brag about what was going well in this community, I wanted to be more vulnerable in this space. I talked about a whoopsie with the podcast - an episode that I couldn’t publish that was really difficult for me.
The Community Community - even though this 100% would be a great place for me to be vulnerable, my initial podcast guests all belonged to this community and some of my greatest supporters gather here, so when I found out the first 3 episodes hit 1K downloads in the first 48 hours, I shared this stat with them there.
It’s a soft social science, but an important one.
Get a sense for what types of posts members are going to be more drawn to supporting and adjust your material accordingly.
Sense what the community is missing
As a community builder, I’ll frequently join spaces that are lacking in the types of posts and comments that lead to true connection. While this is 100% the job of the community manager to create the structure that leads to this, as a member there’s actually a lot you can do to help make the space more valuable. If the community is giving performative, share a post with a mistake you made, what you learned, and ask others to share too.
My personal strategy for each type of community
Let’s go back to the Bri Leever Matrix on the Intersection of Business + Community (working title). Because depending on the type of community, I involve myself quite differently.
Now, to be clear, only AFTER executing what I’ve shared above to start and nurture the relationships in communities can you begin to consider a strategy for inviting the community to support.
Networking Communities:
These are the communities I’m currently most involved in and see the most potential for relationships there. There’s something about a paid community experience where members show up and pay attention differently. Good networking communities are hard to come by, if you know of any, send me a DM and let me know!
The Networking Communities I belong to:
Collaborative Communities:
These communities tend to be quite loud, noisy, and high-traffic, so you have to be strategic about how to leverage them. When I first began networking in the community world, these types of communities were the place to go for me. They became valuable primarily because I set up 1:1 conversations with folks I noticed were particularly active and/or referenced by other members.
Once I figured out who was who in the community world and how I could support them, my own personal network of community folks started to unfold. It became less important that I make my presence visible in these communities (though I do pop in about once a month to see how I can help) and it was more important that I nurture the relationships that I found inside of them (most of the core partners I found through these communities belong to all of them anyways).
Sometimes that happens inside the community, sometimes outside.
💡 Now that I have a goldmine of good content, my strategy in these communities is shifting.
Let me explain:
After thorough testing, I can tell you what DOES NOT WORK: posting weekly in the “promote it” thread or “share a resource” thread with my new podcast, blog post, or other piece.
Here’s what I’m testing next as a way to get more visibility on the podcast: for each podcast episode, I’m going to identify a few keywords.
In massive communities like CMX for example, I am going to search “toxic” and when I find someone sharing about a toxic community member and wondering what to do, I will comment with the link to this episode. You can also do this just by staying abreast to the conversations in the communities, but some of us don’t always have the capacity to share in real time. If that’s the case, use the search bar. Stay tuned to hear how this experiment goes!
The Collaborative Communities I belong to:
Community Club - watch the community dissection episode
Talkbase Friends Community - watch the community dissection episode
The Community Community - watch the community dissection episode
Nurturing Communities:
Nurturing communities tend to be much bigger and the value of the content I share here has to be geared towards serving their customer (conveniently also my customer). Some of these communities are really structured (like the Circle community, where to get any real recognition you have to be a Circle Contributor (which I was until I was taken off the list because my community is hosted on their competitor 😅)), others leave a lot of space for any expert to share their expertise.
When you join the community ask yourself: what do I need to do to be considered an expert here?
Because these communities tend to be bigger, noisier, and vying for customer attention, my strategy of choice is to set up workshops right before my own community launch to provide a ton of value while also exposing the weaknesses that my community supports. Note: it can take years of showing up consistently, providing high value, and developing relationships with the managers of the community.
You might not see results right away, but if your target customer is congregating here, it’s worth staying visible because they are bringing new members in every week. It’s also a good idea to try and get a 1:1 with the community managers of these nurturing communities early on. Ask them how you can help make their community spectacular.
The Nurturing Communities I belong to:
Heartbeat Community for customers - see my video tour
Circle Community for customers - watch the community dissection episode
Swarm customer community
Disco customer community
Transformative Communities:
The one place you don’t see me involved is in the transformative communities.
These are best to join when you legitimately want to experience the transformation journey they offer AND the people you’re doing it with also fall into your ideal client profile. I recommend your presence in this community is focused entirely on this journey and the long-term friendships and partnerships will unfold quite naturally with just the smallest bit of intention to have a 1:1 call with folks you meet there, do not try to use this space to market or sell you’re own services, you’re here to learn.
The Undercover Hype Squad
Now, there’s one other thing I did to help activate my friends and partners across communities in the launch of my podcast.
4 weeks before the podcast launched, I created a form for people to join my undercover podcast hype squad. I posted in each of the communities inviting people to be a part of sharing about the podcast once it was launched. Anyone who I’ve had a 1:1 call with (most of these were through these communities) got a direct email invite and follow up. My producer created an entire nurturing sequence for the launch squad.
By the time the podcast launched, we had nearly 100 people on this list.
While certainly not all of them shared about the podcast when it launched, and there’s no good way to quantify the impact, this dedicated group of people opting-in to support the podcast launch I believe was a huge part of our success.
I’m going to do a deep dive and reflection on the Dear Bri podcast and how in the world we hit over 1,000 downloads with just 600 people on my email list in an upcoming newsletter.
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