Cultivating a Strong Online Community – Lessons Learned from CrossFit

In 2000, Greg Glassman set out to change organized fitness – specifically the way individuals display strength, endurance physical capacity and athletic performance. He strongly believed that traditional organized fitness was “broken” so he developed a workout model that contained a variety of movements including those from gymnastics, weightlifting and cardiovascular conditioning. He started with a bare-bones website and single gym in Santa Cruz, California. This workout is now well known as the monster-sized brand, CrossFit that reaches hundreds of thousands of people in over 13,000 CrossFit affiliates all over the world.

Cultivating a Strong Online Community (CrossFit)

How did his company experience such dramatic growth so quickly? In one word: Community. If you’re on Facebook or Instagram, chances are you have more than a few friends posting about their latest personal records (AKA PR’s). CrossFit embraced the principle of community from its inception and it has evolved with consistent improvement both online and offline. This brand literally took on a life of its own as the community grew the brand (the brand didn’t grow the community). Regardless if you love CrossFit or you’d rather knock it, there’s a lot we can learn from their super-strong community.

Establish a Forest from a Single Seed

Most businesses aren’t fortunate enough to have their communities grow their brand for them (at least to this magnitude). But even a small business, such as a realtor, can establish a vibrancy within their community by building and strengthening those relationships one person at a time.

Botany of Your Business

The success of your business’ customer relations comes from strong leadership, forward-thinking visions and a strategic plan of cultivating a strong online community. For an online community to thrive, you must let go and allow them to grow organically. Like CrossFit, the unknown can be scary or intimidating, but organizations must refrain from controlling conversations and instead focus on keeping customers active with engaging content. It’s all in your head anyway…so just get started already!

Thrive, Don’t Just Survive

Glassman referenced content marketing in his interview on 60 Minutes as he spoke about offering free online videos to users to help them learn more about fitness. He found that the more video they gave away; the more money they would make.

No doubt, content plays an important role in growing and cultivating a strong online community. By offering content that is drawn directly from the needs and wants of your community, you’re showing real value and solving their problems.

It’s not about you. It’s about them. You must create optimal growing conditions (educational, inspirational and entertaining content) to not only bring in the new clients, but also to allow your current customers to thrive. And once you have a consistent content schedule established, it needs to be shared on social media (that’s where your customers are, you need to reach them there).

Nurture Your Business with Post Café

Your community is made up of humans, so the more you create one-on-one connections and offer strong, valuable content, the more you’ll thrive, too. Don’t let your business end up like a shriveled-up tree without any leaves, it needs to be watered at the proper balance in order to stay healthy. The water is your content and Post Café is your limitless watering well.

Let the experts at Post Café help you get started with all the content you need to get noticed; call us at 732-218-9377 to learn more!