What's next for Community Platforms in 2024?

At Steadfast Collective, we saw a wave of brands moving from traditional marketing and website building to community building.

The brands we work with use our expertise to help move their customers with solid brand affiliations towards becoming advocates and critical community members.

Many beautiful communities we know utilise the likes of Circle, Mighty Networks, Guild, WhatsApp or Slack.

In 2021, we saw a gap.

Often, a brand isn't looking to build a traditional online community platform.

They don't need a forum, social network or a place to host course content.

The brands we're working with are often looking for a way to gather their community in a more subtle and streamlined way.

This could look like this;

- Building a member-led marketplace to sit alongside their existing retail business.

- Integrating their CRM system (Salesforce) into a customer-facing platform, allowing the customers to join cohorts and book sessions.

- A mobile shopfloor CRM system allowing for quick recall of customer data, allowing for a safer data collection, with options to invite customers into membership

This is what we're seeing for 2024.

Extend, not silo.

A wave of community extensions, integrations and tools, rather than separate places.

Too often, we're seeing brands build their community 'over there' while all the action is happening elsewhere.

Community teams are left with their own tech stack, their own team members and their own KPIs.

Community is everywhere, so the community shouldn't be a 'marketing play' but should be woven into the foundation of how you design your business.

Technology has a part to play in all of this, too.

How can you extend your technology usage to help unify your community and team?

Retail Example!

You're building a wonderful e-commerce experience on Shopify, allowing customers to buy coffee beans, brewing equipment and bespoke mugs.

You know your dedicated customers come back time and time again.

You've run a few barista workshops in person and online, but bringing together your top 10% of customers could help move them from being loyal to advocates.

We wouldn't want to draw customers away from your primary business goal: selling coffee, so a separate application/community platform doesn't make sense here.

We suggest looking at how we weave community into your checkout process.

Your community is invited to join, and in doing so, they're able to buy some new roasts early, leave reviews, and have discussions about products on the product pages for non-members to read.

This would give your members a platform to showcase their passion and expertise and give back to the community while rewarding them with perks.

This isn't rocket science

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

Community isn't rocket science; it's effort.

It's putting in the time and committing to consistent progress and value-creation for your members.

If this sparked something inside you, reach out - let's chat!