#146 Leveraging Quality Content To Build Community
I have been thinking a lot about quality lately. The barrier to entry to creating content and building digital products feels lower by the day. And that means there is a lot more competition and noise out there.
But there are two things that have a high barrier to entry...
Creating something of quality
Building a community
And these two things are the differentiators that will help you outlast your competition 10/10 times.
Let’s get into it –
On the Creator Science podcast (dropped last week!) Jay asked me "how do you define community?" and in a broad sense, a community is a group of people with shared values, interests, and/or goals.
But in the context of my work we build memberships that treat community as the product.
I went on to explain that I don't consider a social media audience a community... which is a hot take. A lot of creators refer to their social media following as their community.
And I do respect that, at the end of the day when the creator calls their audience a community, they're saying, "I'm here to serve you, support you, and get to know you."
But a social media audience is very one-to-one (many times over, as Jay says). And a true community drives connection amongst audience members... and social doesn't do this well.
What do you think? Does Taylor Swift have a community? Or a cult-following of raving fans that call themselves Swifties?
When I think about cult-following, creator-led brands like bossbabe, I think about how they're building identity.
If you start to identify with the brand... Swifties. Bossbabes. Creator Scientists. Then I think we're on track to build community.
But what do they have in common? They're creating something of high quality. Full disclosure I'm not a Swiftie... but you can't argue that Taylor put together a tour and show that was completely unique and served her fans. Each show was 3.5 hours and 10M+ fans attended. Crazy.
One of the things I've learned from Jay's creator research is that quality content wins. Jay invested so much into his YouTube channel and making the production incredible from day one. He quickly hit the 100k subscriber mark in the first year on YouTube.
Quality content builds trust. But I think there is an opportunity where engaging, quality content overlaps with identity-building content.
Which brings me to why I wrote this article today in the first place...
I was SO inspired by Roger Cole's "Things You Can Do In Canva" 30-day series. He created this amazing case study about it and it's sooo worth reading the whole thing.
He gained 300,000 followers during this 30-day series because it was that good. But he shared in his case study that the best part was how much value his audience got from the series. And he started the identity defining moment by describing them as "Canva Besties".
This is exactly what I'm talking about – building something quality, tracking analytics along the way to keep increasing the quality, and measuring the outcomes to determine what comes next.
As for the community piece, I think Roger has a huge opportunity to capitalize on this series growth + success. Don't you?
Your Next Step
This is what I'm going to do...
Jot down a ton of content ideas (especially series)
Rank the ideas based on how valuable it will be for your audience
Rank the ideas based on how much connection and engagement it will drive (will people feel an identity?)
Choose one to experiment with that has the highest scores in both categories
Jot down ideas for how to make it super high quality
I get asked a lot what kind of top-of-funnel content works best for growing your membership or what kind of funnels to try. My answer is always to focus on retention and product-led growth strategies.
But this kind of content builds trust, engagement, and drives toward community building. It's the kind of content worth your time.
Give it a shot and let me know how it goes!