How to Redesign Your Online Community: 4 Sure-Fire Tactics

Your online community can be your biggest salesperson.

We say this because your online community is a means for you to attract more customers, increase brand awareness, and boost ROI.

And the design of your online community is the glue that binds your member’s interests. But as you measure the performance of your online community, you might spot certain problems that prompt you to consider a community facelift.

That’s where community redesign can be your best bet.

Redesigning your online community improves the user experience, drives engagement, makes people keen about your community, and enables you to add more members to the list.

Let’s deep dive into exploring more about the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of community redesign.

Why Choose Community Redesign?

The reasons to redesign your online community can be plenty. The most common ones are to attract more customers, increase engagement, and make your community more appealing for the members by ensuring a better UI/UX.

You might want the look and feel of your online community to resonate with your brand identity. That can also be a potential reason to opt for community redesign. Also, if your existing community lacks certain engagement elements such as gamification, you could redesign it by adding various gamification elements such as leaderboards, avatars, and more.

4 Tactics to Redesign Your Online Community

When it comes to online community redesign, there are a number of styles and directions you can take your community into. The design can be classic or classy, playful or modern.

However, your online community should have your brand identity and style, and should resonate with your line of work. To latch on to the look-and-feel you want for your community, certain rules are always applicable.

We have penned four tactics to help you make your online community compelling.

1. Start With an End Goal in Mind

Before you start redesigning your online community, you must identify what objective you wish to achieve by redesigning your community. Create an outline of what your actual goals are, create a list, set priorities, and attach data to understand the goal better. For instance, if your goal is relationship building, break it into sub-tasks, and plan on how to achieve it. Framing the entire process at the start will simplify and clarify the pathway to your end goal.

2. Engage All Teams in the Community Redesign Planning

Cross-collaboration is a key aspect of making your online community dynamic. Since your sales and product teams benefit immensely from online communities and they connect with customers at the fore-front, you should involve them in the redesigning process as well.

The point of view of different teams will direct you to see the community from different perspectives of users and what matters to them. And this will definitely help you understand how to redesign a community that enhances customer experience.

3. Run Checks on What Needs More Improvement

Measure the performance of your online community by analyzing what is working and what’s lacking in your online community. Run checks on why you need a community redesign. Once you have the answer, compare the existing look and feel with what you want and strategize ways that need to be changed. For example, three-quarters of the world’s population will use the internet on phones by 2025^[i]. So, if your community does not withstand mobile responsiveness, carry out the improvement steps. Whatever calls for an adjustment, your next step should move in that direction.

4. Add New Features

To ensure that your community isn’t just a virtual ghost town, you must make it user-centric. To make it user-centric you can add new features like gamification, searchable repository, personalization, and try to incorporate the ideas and features that your community members tell you about. These should keep them coming back to the community.

The bottom line here is that if there’s a disconnect between how you view your community and what your members want, the community will not flourish. And if you see that happening, it’ll be time to give your community a new life and strength.

If you want to get ahead in the community redesign game, incorporating these four tactics is sure to take you a long way from where you are to where you want to be!

Wish to Redesign Your Online Community for Better Engagement? Talk to Us!

References

[i] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/24/smartphones-72percent-of-people-will-use-only-mobile-for-internet-by-2025.html