How to Grow Your Community Without Hustling Harder

One of the biggest fears community builders have is launching a community and hearing… crickets. No members. No engagement. No momentum.

But after years of building communities for both my own business and my clients, I’ve learned that sustainable community growth isn’t about chasing more tactics, spending more on ads, or trying every marketing strategy you see online.

You grow your community by focusing on the right foundations, the right funnel, and the right data.

In this final episode of Dear Bri Season 3, I’m breaking down the exact framework I use to help communities attract new members consistently. We’ll walk through the three stages of a community marketing funnel, the biggest mistakes people make when trying to grow their membership, and a simple prospecting audit you can use to identify exactly where your growth is getting stuck.

I’m also sharing a real client example that demonstrates how a small shift in positioning and offer design increased conversion rates from 17% to 61%.

⏳ Timestamps

00:00:00 | The fear every community builder shares

00:01:57 | The foundations every community needs before growth

00:04:14 | Community marketing funnel stage 1: Awareness

00:06:07 | Community marketing funnel stage 2: Nurture

00:07:39 | Community marketing funnel stage 3: The Close

00:10:09 | A real community growth case study

00:13:11 | How to run a prospecting audit [Framework]

00:15:31 | Full recap

📌 Resources Mentioned

Leveraging Other Communities for Growth: https://www.emberconsulting.co/post/the-ultimate-guide-to-leveraging-your-presence-in-other-communities-for-business-growth

Ideablossoms: https://ideablossoms.com/

Recalibration Intensive: https://www.emberconsulting.co/growth-strategy-for-community-builders

4 Types of Community - The Masterclass: https://preview.mailerlite.io/forms/775267/185716772091987335/share

Book Your Discovery Call Today: https://www.emberconsulting.co/book-call

Hire a Skilled Community Manager: https://tally.so/r/w5gjZo

🎧 Episodes Mentioned

S3E1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SvqnZJojTo&t=4s

S3E2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP2NhaT03QM

S3E3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUntLq70AiM&t=253s

S3E4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz_qkyCCxNQ

S3E5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COoUA5iRZEU&t=18s

S3E6: https://youtu.be/gRr3Ybv_XPI?si=AJK5RuOMJTkaJdS7

More from Bri Leever:

🖥️ Website

📩 Newsletter

📹 Youtube

📱LinkedIn

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

I always ask people who are getting ready to launch their community, what's the very worst thing that could happen? And honestly, we all have the same bad dream. You open the doors to your brand new, well-designed, thoughtful community. You've worked on it for months. You're proud of it. And then crickets. No one buys. No one shows up. Or even worse, one person shows up. So now you still have to do the thing, but you don't even have a community. I've been there, I know what this feels like, and it is a very particular kind of painful. But here's what I've learned after years of building communities, both my own and for my clients. The answer to that fear isn't hustling harder or throwing money at ads or trying every growth tactic that you've found at a doom scroll at 11 p.m. Finding new members and then getting them to become members, it doesn't happen by accident. The answer is strategy and structure and sequence. And that is exactly what we're going to be covering today. Welcome to Deer Brie, an advice column for community conundrums, fiascos, and drama. Season three is brought to you by Ember Consulting. That's my community strategy agency, where we help coaches, consultants, and creators build paid online communities that are good for their people and good for their business. This season marks the first time Deer Brie is available in video on YouTube. So if you want to put a face to the voice, come find me there. The link is in the show notes. And this season is solo. No guests. Just me, Brie. And that's because after two seasons of hosting this podcast with guests and 10 years of doing this community work, I've been able to crystallize the most confusing conundrums and darkest dramas into a few simple insights and frameworks, which is what you're gonna find in this season. Simply put, I had too much to say and not enough time. So it's just me and you on this one. And finally, I usually record this podcast from Hawaii Island, so a special thank you to the Kanakamale people on whose land I currently reside. This is the final episode of Deer Bree season three, and I saved this topic last on purpose. So stick around because at the end, I'm gonna walk you through a very simple prospecting audit that you can do to figure out exactly where your growth is getting stuck and what to do about it. Hey, I'm Brie. Welcome back to Deer Brie. This is a show where we talk about building communities that are good for your people and good for your business. This season we've been building out everything you need to run a sustainable, thriving community. If you're new here, welcome. I'm so glad you found us. You might want to start at the beginning of season three because each episode builds on the last. I'll link everything in the show notes in the description. But if you've been here for all of season three, thank you. Genuinely, this season has been one of my favorites to put together. Now, let me tell you why I put this episode last. If you haven't yet done the work I recommend in episodes one through six, jumping straight to growing your membership will not work. I'm watching you, gently calling you out. Or it will work, but you will be working 100 times harder to get worse results than if you had the proper foundations in place. So let's start with a quick recap of what needs to be in place. I'll link to each of these videos in the corner on YouTube, but they're also in the description in the show notes if you're listening on audio. First, you need to understand your community model. There are four types of communities, and most of the confusion and struggle I see comes from someone operating in the wrong model for their business. That's season three, episode one. Episode two is about why your business needs a community at all, and specifically why the community you build needs to be one that you love. Because if you're not proud of the space you've created, you will hesitate to market it. You will find every reason, conscious and unconscious, to self-sabotage your own growth. Episode three is all about choosing the right platform. I recommend the all-in-one community platforms, and I give you my honest take on the top ones I actually build on and why. Because if your platform feels like a chore, you won't show up there, and neither will your members. Episodes four and five are the pricing deep dive. And I want to be direct here. Pricing is intrinsically tied to your growth. The myths and blocks that you're carrying around pricing your community will absolutely be the thing holding you back from attracting new members. And that leaves episode six, which is so rich. Honestly, one of my favorite episodes we've ever made. It's about community engagement. And here's the truth: unless you're already seeing the behavior, the conversations, the good traction inside of your existing community, throwing more members in there isn't going to help anyone. So you have to design the experience first. And to be honest, I can't think of a single client who came to me who was struggling to grow their community who didn't need work in at least one of these areas. If and only if this foundation is in place can we begin the real work of marketing and growing your community. So now that I've scared you or inspired you, let's talk about just that. Okay, foundations are in place, community is launched. Now it's time to think about your marketing funnel. Most of my clients have been in business for several years by the time we work together, so they already have an existing system. But whether yours is fully built or you're just getting started, here's the simple framework I use. Your marketing funnel has three stages. At the top of the funnel is awareness. This is about getting in front of new people, where someone becomes a part of your audience. They find out about you and they want to keep hearing from you. Some top of funnel tactics I love. One social media channel, just one, I don't care which one, you'll know because you'll actually want to be there. And two, your ideal members will naturally hang out there too. So, not three channels, one. Once you have over a million followers on that one channel, we can discuss you expanding to a second one. Another great tactic is leveraging search engine optimization on Google or YouTube. I actually put YouTube under SEO rather than social because that's more how it functions. You're getting discovered by people who are searching, not just scrolling. Collaborating with partners, getting in front of someone else's audience, either by hosting a workshop or doing a newsletter takeover or being a guest on a podcast. And one of my favorite strategies is to be present and genuinely helpful inside of other communities. I have a whole blog post on this strategy and leveraging other communities and your presence inside to grow your business and your community. We'll link to it in the show notes. One important note here: when you get in front of new eyes, you need to give people a very good reason to take the next step and stay connected to you. That usually looks like a lead magnet, something free and valuable that earns their email address for their continued attention. The middle of the funnel is nurturing. This is where your audience gets to know you, like you, and trust you. Good nurturing slowly shifts beliefs so people become the type of person who is ready and excited to become your member. Some middle-of-funnel tactics that I really love, an email newsletter. This is non-negotiable for me. It keeps your audience warm between launches and in between decisions. A podcast, and I'll share on a personal note here, when I launched Dear Breeze season one, my conversion rate from discovery calls to closed clients went from 12% to 40%. And that's almost entirely due to the one thing I changed, which was after each, in each discovery call, I sent people off with a podcast episode as homework. A podcast is one of the most powerful nurturing mechanisms I've come across for my business. And I have to give a shout out to my producer, Rosa, and her team over at Idea Blossoms. Check out their information in the show notes if you're looking for resources around this. Other tactics include hosting free public events, workshops, webinars, virtual gatherings that let people experience your teaching before they commit to giving you money. The bottom of the funnel is what I like to call the close. It's where someone moves from passively being in your audience to actively becoming a member. This is where you give them a really good reason to join today. And because they're ready. Some of my go-to bottom-of-funnel tactics are gateway offers. So this is a low commitment, low-cost first step that lets someone experience working with you before fully joining your community, active lead generators, discovery calls, or a very specific intake process, or even hosting a mini special activation. This could be a boot camp, a mini program, a challenge. It's designed to move people across the threshold. But here's what I don't recommend to get people through the close, and that's cheap tactics. Don't discount your community, don't offer a free trial, don't offer a free limited membership. We went into a very deep dive on this on episodes four and five, but the short version is discounting devalues your offer and it postures your members more as takers than givers, which in the community context matters. This season of Dear Bree is brought to you by Ember, my community strategy agency. Most of our clients come to us for one of two reasons. Either they are launching a brand new community and they need it done right the first time, or they're ready to make a significant change, either because they've outgrown their old model or they're getting ready to migrate to a new community platform. Either way, every project runs through the same five-milestone roadmap. We look at discovery, making sure your value proposition aligns with your business model in your community and your customer needs. We look at your community business model, the tech you want to use. We dial in your onboarding strategy, and create a robust launch or pivot plan. Every project with us starts with two initial strategy sessions where we get clear on your model, your platform, and exactly what needs to happen next. You walk away with two things. First, a customized ecosystem map. This is where we get aligned on your model, your value proposition, and really wrap our hands around what's going to happen in this community. Second, you get a personalized roadmap scoped for your specific community. We assess where you're at with each of our five milestones and lay out the steps for what you'll need to do to work through each of them. Two calls, two deliverables for $999. When you're ready to stop throwing spaghetti at the wall and start building with an intentional plan, book a discovery call. The link is in the description. And when you're ready to find someone to run it, Ember Fractionals can help you find and even certify your next perfect community manager for the job. Link is in the description. Now back to the show. Here's the thing I really want you to hear, and this is the part most people miss. Growing your community is not about introducing new tactics. It's not about finding the new channel and adding more to your plate. It is about discerning the one or two things that are already working at each stage of your funnel and investing more resources into what's working. If you're just starting out, yes, you'll need some time to experiment. And that's okay. Take it slow. The biggest mistake I see people make is trying on too many strategies at once and not being able to do any of them well and not being able to get the right information about what works. But if you've been in business for a while, you have data or you should. You have patterns. You might just not be looking at them the right way yet. Which brings me to something I call the prospecting audit. And I want to first tell you about a member in my community named LaToya because her story illustrates exactly what happens when you finally do look at the data. LaToya joined me in our latest recalibration intensive. That's a full day together online where we reflect on what's working, what's not, and walk away with a concrete plan for your community for the next three to six months. When LaToya came in, she wasn't struggling with awareness. She was getting discovery calls, people were finding her, and there was interest. But something was stuck at the bottom of her funnel because she was struggling to convert those calls into paying members and she could feel it in her own confidence. When we dug in, we found the issue. She had positioned her community as the very first step, the entry point in her client journey. But when we looked at her actual members and what served them best, we realized her community was much better equipped to be the last step of engagement. It's the place where people came for accountability and ongoing support after that foundational work was done. So we shifted her positioning. And then we zeroed in specifically on her gateway offer. That's the close. It's the very first step to working with her. We modified it in four ways. One, we focused the deliverables of that first step on diagnosing the problem, not solving it. Two, we made it more affordable, easier to say yes to. Three, we made it easier, way easier for her to deliver. Four, we made it way simpler for her members to digest. This offer as the stepping stone to her community became a no-brainer for prospective clients, and it was something that she could sell with genuine confidence. Her energy on discovery calls shifted noticeably. She was excited, clear, and so sure of herself in a way that she hadn't been before. Before these changes, her discovery calls converted to her paid community at a rate of 17%, which is not a bad number. But after, they jumped to 61%. And none of that would have been visible to us without running a proper prospecting audit. So this is something I give my members who join me for recalibration intensives, which we host twice a year, but I'm gonna show you here how you can run your own. Start by listing all the channels and ways that people find out about your work or become a member of your community. We are going to call these your sources. They are the places you are sourcing new members and clients from. Then we're gonna track two metrics for each source. Metric number one is how many people in the last 12 months crossed the threshold, meaning they took a low commitment step that indicated genuine interest in what you're doing. You get to define what your threshold is. The clearest and simplest metric is they booked a discovery call with you, but a discovery call doesn't always make sense depending on your model. So it might mean that they signed up for a free workshop series or signed up for a specific tool or resource. Your business will run the smoothest when any and all prospective clients can come through that same threshold. So discern what one is right for you and make sure it's trackable. Then track how many people crossed that threshold by source. How many people who found you on LinkedIn booked a call? How many people who booked a call with you found you through LinkedIn? How many people who attended a partner workshop ended up coming into the threshold? The second metric you'll track is conversions. It's simple. How many people from that source ultimately converted to becoming paying members? That's it. Two numbers per source, volume and conversion rate. Once you have these metrics for each source over the last 12 months, the picture gets very clear very fast. And you might be surprised by what you see. You'll quickly notice the sources that bring in the highest volume and which sources have the highest conversion rates. Those are not always the same source, and it's very valuable information. Now, the sources with the best combination of both, that is a dead giveaway for where you should spend more time, energy, and resources. This is how you grow with intention, not just by throwing spaghetti at the wall and trying new tactics. Okay, let's bring this home. Growing your community comes down to these three things. One, your foundation has to be in place. Your community model, platform, pricing, engagement. If any of those are shaky, growth is going to be an uphill battle. Episodes one through six of this season are all yours. Go back and watch what you need. Two, understand your marketing funnel. Awareness is at the top, nurturing in the middle, and the close is at the bottom. Pick one to two tactics per stage and do it really well before you do anything else. Three, run a prospecting audit. Look at where your prospective members are actually coming from and how well each source converts them. Then, invest in what's working. Growth is a derivative of design, not luck and not hustle. That's season three, seven episodes. And if you've watched all the way through, I want you to know I'm really proud of this season and I hope it's made a difference in how you think about your own community. If you got value from this series, please subscribe. It helps the show reach more community builders who need it. If you want to go deeper on any of what we talked about today, especially the prospecting audit and the kind of strategic planning work that I did with LaToya, I want to invite you to our next Recalibration Intensive. The Recalibration Intensive is one full day online together in a group. We look at what's working and what's not working in your community. Then we identify the one or two things that will move the needle most in the next three to six months. And you walk away with a real plan, not a list of ideas, an actionable plan. Our members tell me that after a recalibration intensive, they feel liberated, a lightness, and a simplicity for how to actually approach their community and growth for the next season. We host these twice a year. So if you want to learn more or get on the list for the next one, the link is in the description in the show notes. And final thing before I let you go, if this is your first time here, start with season three, episode one, The Four Types of Communities. It's the foundation for everything we talked about in this season. And the full free masterclass is linked in the notes. It will help you figure out exactly which community model is right for your business. Thank you so much for sharing some space with me on this episode. Please like and review wherever you listen. It genuinely helps more community builders find the show. To stay connected between episodes, sign up for the Ember newsletter. That's where I share what I'm building, what we're learning, and the things that don't make it into each of these episodes. It's also where you can hit reply and let me know what community conundrums are haunting you right now. Link is in the show notes. Aloha, and we'll see you in the next episode.