Five Year Roadmap

Year 1: Building a Foundation

Focus on 1 or 2 Platforms

Starting an online community by focusing on one or two platforms is important for success in a few ways. First, it’s more sustainable than trying to be everywhere simultaneously, quickly leading to burnout. Second, you can engage more meaningfully by focusing on quality without being spread thin. Third, you’ll grow faster by being consistent and providing high-quality content.

While it seems counterintuitive, building up on one or two platforms allows you to become an expert at those platforms. You’ll learn how they push posts to the target audience and how to attract new members. Once you’ve become a resource in your niche, your new community will begin to support your brand and help it grow over the long term.

Content Strategy

• Create a posting cadence that works for you. 3-5 times a week with a focus on what you do. It is okay to repeat yourself.
• Focus on what you do and topics that you can make simple for people who may need them.

Metrics to Follow

Year one is about getting into the flow of creating the posts. Don’t focus on metrics too much. Focus instead on staying on target with your posting cadence.

3-5x a week should be 156-260 posts by the end of year one.

That being said, these metrics can be good indicators that what you are doing is working.

• Follower growth
• Engagement rate
• Likes & comments

Its a long road, but you’ve got this.

---

Year 2: Building up your Community

Build your community and refine your sales funnel

After year one of building a community and learning about the platform of your choice, it's time to add and refine your sales funnel. We don't mean to be pushy and ask for your audience's business, but to provide more value to them with your offer(s). Here's a few reasons why now is the time:

1. You have more information

   Throughout year one, if you've spent time engaging with your community, you should know some of their pain points. Collecting data about your community can give you an understanding of your customers' likes and dislikes.

   You can see what made them engage with you, what topics got the most interaction, and what led them to seek more of your services. You'll also find where you have opportunities to grow and smooth out any kinks in the pipeline. Where are people getting lost? Do you have a logical progression that moves people closer to purchase while providing value at each step? Are carts abandoned? Refining your sales funnel will create a smooth experience that leads to higher conversions.

2. You’ve built some authority

   Gaining trust is earned slowly, but lost faster than the blink of an eye. You've built the foundation of credibility by showing up consistently and providing value for a year. You have a warm handshake with your audience, making them more likely to consider your products or services.

   They’ve consumed enough value from you to ask for a follow, sale, or signup. Just make sure that it makes sense for them to do so. Also, continue to provide value without asking them overly aggressively.

3. Create sustainable sales

   You can’t rely on new followers and first time sales. Create a system that rewards repeat customers and builds loyalty with clear expectations. The goal should be to maximize the value of your existing audience.

   Repeat customers tend to spend more than first time customers because of the work you’ve already done to build trust. Here you can continue to target them with automated emails, ads, and pages calling for their action. By setting up your funnel to target repeat customers, you leverage your past efforts for more sales.

Content Strategy

• Introduce a new form of content. (Live feed, Q&As, tutorials, animations, stories, reels, blogs, etc.)
• Share customer success stories and repost user content from those who shared your work.

Sales Strategy

• If you haven’t already, now is the time to set up and email list.
• Retargeting your current clientele is often more profitable than cold outreach.
• Test ads toward your current audience.

Metrics to Follow

• Email signups
• Repeat customers
• Follower count

---

Year 3: Scaling your Systems

Streamline and Automate

Here you are in year three of online community building. By now, you’ve likely built a community by being consistent and found ways to resonate with your audience. Doing everything by hand and working on a small scale is holding you back from furthering your sustainable growth potential.

Year three is about scaling your business and shifting to a system of repeatable and efficient outputs that frees up your valuable time. Break through the ceiling of your own time and energy by strategically shifting to systems that amplify your reach and position your business for much greater long term success. Scaling allows you to reach a larger base, generate more income, and become a sustainable powerhouse of a brand.

1. Systemize your content

   Instead of spending the time researching and building content from scratch, you need to streamline its generation.

   • Batches: Dedicate your time to creating a piece of content that can be broken up into multiple posts. A long format piece of content can be ripped and remixed into a month's worth of content. Batching sets the expectation and gives space for idea generation between batches.

   • Repurpose/repeat: Don’t feel the need to say something new whenever you create content. Take a previously high performing blog or video and break it into smaller short form posts for a series that leads into the broader subject. Your previous work can be broken down into image carousels or short informational videos, giving you another few weeks' worth of posts.

   • Schedule it: Use a social media scheduling app. Once you have a batch of content ready, upload and schedule it so you don’t have to manage each individually.

2. Sales System

   By year three, you shouldn’t be handling every lead by hand. You should have a well defined user journey that guides prospects from your social channels to your sales proposition.

   • Email: Set up email campaigns for new subscribers after they sign up. Continue to provide them with value through this email campaign, and it will help move them to purchasing without having to do the work multiple times.

   • Website: A well-designed website can do your business while you’re asleep. It can handle a large influx of traffic and answer questions before people reach out about them.

3. Operations System

   Continue to systemize routine tasks in your day to day operations. A stand for administrative tasks can streamline and get them out of your hair, or better yet, delegated.

   • Templates: Create templates for your services, whether that’s sales proposals, contracts, bids, invoices, or project explorations. This creates a consistent experience, helps you stay on track, and builds trust with new clients.

   • Delegating: Identify what you are comfortable giving up to someone else. You can hire an employee, a virtual assistant, or a freelancer to help you with these tasks. Delegating frees up time to tackle more pressing projects or problems.

   • Numbers: Tracking performance and reviewing the numbers will show you where there is room for improvement. See what is working or what isn’t and pivot to a new strategy. Analytics are included with many platforms available today, so don’t ignore what's already available.

   Streamlining your business in these ways can prepare you for explosive growth without manual effort. Don’t get caught overwhelmed and drop the ball.

Content Strategy

• Create content in batches and use scheduling tools to distribute them.
• Systemize breaking content into various chunks for more posts.

Sales Strategy

• More offers and improvements. (Email campaign, Website, Chatbots, FAQs, etc.)
• Seasonal campaigns can build sales during times that might have been down in previous years.
• Consider partnerships with other companies or influencers.

Metrics to Follow

• Conversion rate
• Order value
• Returning customers
• Abandoned carts

---

Year 4: Establishing Expertise

Push to become a leader in your industry/niche

Pushing to become a leader in your industry changes you from being a participant to being the authority. The tone setter that other resources look to for guidance. It ensures your community’s long-term sustainability.

Why is that important

In an oversaturated online marketplace, just being a participant isn’t enough. Anyone can start a group or post content, but less take the next step to be the expert. Positioning your brand as the industry leader is the ultimate form of standing apart from the competition. Don’t just be a voice in the crowd; become irreplaceable.

When you become a leader, people are drawn to you like a magnet. They seek out your wisdom, experience, or products for their own needs. Your content will get more engagement because it carries more weight than the average participant. Your community will grow authentically without extra strategy or tactics.

Building your community in the first two years was more about fostering engagement. Now that you’ve built credibility, it's about building on that level of trust. Trust is what allows you to take your offers to the next step with high-profile affiliations and collaborations. You become the go to source when anyone wants to hold events around your industry.

How to become an industry leader

By doing more of what you’ve already done, providing value and creating helpful content but taking it a step further.

• Foundational Content:  Create a core piece of content that defines your industry as you see it. Its time to move beyond the social media and blog posts, and create a definitive guide to your view on the industry as a whole. (Book, presentation, webinar, podcast.

• Call for Collaboration: Instead of attending industry conversations, start hosting them. Host a webinar with other industry leaders, interview them, survey them, and generate new insights from the data.

• Lift your Community: A true leader elevates and inspires others to lead. Platform members of your own community, give them a voice and share their stories. Inspiring leaders within your community creates a self-sustaining ecosystem that feeds itself.

Platform

• Expand and experiment with emerging platforms if relevant.

Content Strategy

• Offer more value with tips and how-tos.
• Host a webinar with guest speakers who have large followings.
• Lift your community by sharing their stories.

Sales Strategy

• Build upon offers with memberships or subscriptions.
• Test new offers such as high ticket items, bundles, or limited edition products.

Metrics to Follow

• Webinar signups
• Repeat customer lifetime value
• Abandoned carts

---

Year 5: Sustainability from Loyalty

Target the audience you already have

A loyal community is the peak goal for anyone building an audience. It drives sustainable growth, inviting new members to join a proven model. Focus on maintaining that loyal base and it will create a resilient community and truly sustainable business.

Increased value and profit

New customers take time to build trust, while existing customers are more likely to repeat business. A level of established trust makes people more likely to repeat purchases. They are also willing to spend more on new offers or exclusive products. A business built on a loyal customer base will generate more revenue from them than from newly converted customers.

Loyalty among your community is valuable not only because they are your consumers, but also because they become a powerful marketing tool. Community members give their own testimonials to your products, which is more effective than any advertising. That is why amplifying their voices is recommended as your community grows. Word of mouth is still very effective.

A loyal base also aids your business during economic downturns and uncertain markets. That loyalty makes your business far more resilient and just might buy you time in a volatile market. Your community can give you their feedback at these times and help you to improve your offers and innovate more quickly.

A community will help you grow and can become a sustainable entity outside of your business. It can grow independently of your direct input and be your greatest sales assistant. It will take time to build, but it is worth the time and energy.

Content Strategy

• Community driven content (Customer groups, loyalty challenges, etc.)
• Redistributing top performing content across channels.

Sales Strategy

• Referral/rewards program
• Adjust to trends and strike early

Metrics to Follow

• Referrals
• Retention
• Profit margin

---

Things to consider along the way

Test, Tweak, Adapt

• Shift your wording, strategy, platform, and product push to see what platform works best for your traffic, make changes when you see too little, and note where you see growth.

Budget

• Money can be earned back, but your time can’t.
• Reinvest in yourself or your company each year for tools that will help production.

Be Human

• Automation should be a part of your system and not a replacement.
• Your comments, voice, and replies are all content that can help or hurt your cause.

Don’t Panic

• You don’t have to follow this plan exactly just keep it simple. You can change the timeline to fit your growth plan, we just want to see you get started. Most importantly, show up and put in the effort. Slow, steady growth through your community can support you during tough times.