Engaged Community: How to Unite Your Brand Ambassadors?

A few years ago, we were in the era of mass marketing: we created a product that we had to sell to as many people as possible. Today, the situation is quite different. Consumers face a multitude of brands and products and are bombarded with advertising stimuli throughout the day. When choosing which brand and product to buy, they will naturally turn to the brands they feel closest to: those that align with their personal values, those that tell them a story, those whose community they feel part of. This is where the power of community marketing lies.

At the height of digital and social media, successfully building a community of consumers around your brand and its universe is a strategic, complex, but essential challenge.

Nadia Gabriel, CEO of Trustt and founder of a community of 270,000 members on the Mon Vanity Idéal platform, has shared her best practices with the editorial team to multiply brand community engagement!

Improving Community Engagement in Six Key Steps

Understanding a Consumer’s Motivations for Joining a Community

In a community, the consumer wants to be an active participant (we now speak of consum’actors) and be on equal footing with the brand. It is therefore fundamental to identify the consumer’s deep motivations: they want to be part of a group, with specific codes and rituals. By joining a community, their main motivation is to create social connections, share, and gain recognition from their peers. They wish to adhere to something bigger and feel a sense of belonging.

This new marketing approach, which is no longer based on an individualized relationship with the customer, is called tribal marketing. It aims to facilitate interactions and conversation between group members, to facilitate the exchange of advice and tips “to share a lifestyle, whether through an online space or” events. Community members are no longer just potential buyers. They access another status and become active and dynamic elements in the brand’s life.

Integrating an Ambassador Program into Your Website

To develop your activity with your community, implementing an ambassador program is a very good strategy. The Trustt tool offers an ambassador program that combines sampling, sharing of community content, and use of reviews (in the newsletter, on the homepage, and on product pages).

Like all companies, your brand starts from an observation or a problem. Then, you develop products to address it. If your team claims that the products are great, your communication will have only weak results. However, if your community members relay their effectiveness, the impact will be much more significant!

Your fans allow you to detach from an overly advertising strategy. It’s worth noting that 50 consumer reviews on a product page correspond to a 30% increase in conversion. The reviews from your community and the generated social posts are therefore real trust vectors that need to be reinvested in your communication strategy.

Example of Trustt Ambassador Program

Humanizing the Brand by Being Transparent

Today, a company can no longer survive if it merely sells a product. Consumers are more than ever in search of experience and tend to consume products that carry a real approach (a co-creation initiative, an eco-design approach, an innovative concept…).

For example, the famous textile company Le Slip Français shares videos on its social networks of artisans making products in French factories. The posts show production from all angles: the different stages, as well as all the hands involved in the production chain. As a result, the final product is no longer perceived as a simple T-shirt: it becomes the result of serious, meticulous work… This restores value to the product!

In addition to buying a quality product, consumers are buying the fruit of the labor of people perceived as close and familiar. Justine Hutteau, founder of DNVB Respire, shows on Instagram and LinkedIn the behind-the-scenes of product development as well as the personalities behind the growing Respire empire. This transparency automatically brings consumers closer to the brand, who want to take part in the adventure and feel like actors in the success of this team that is familiar to them.

Respire reveals behind-the-scenes of the brand

Therefore, it is necessary today, firstly, to demonstrate complete transparency towards one’s target audience regarding the characteristics and origin of products. Secondly, humanizing the brand and showing the personalities at its helm allow building an engaged community around the products, but also and mainly around the team that shares the values of the target audience.

Give the why of how

Why do we do what we do today? What makes us get up in the morning? What drives us?

These are questions that brands will have little trouble answering. Yet, few invest these messages in their communication!

Called “Why”, “pourquoi” or even “vision” of the brand, this message is fundamental to building an engaged community. It’s always surprising to see what you can get people to do when you explain to them why they’re doing it!

A community is, above all, a person who rises up against the status quo. It’s a person who wants to make things happen, who acts for a change they would like to see occur. Let’s take the example of the DNVB Spring: the co-founder, Laure Favre, filmed herself in a supermarket, in the cleaning products aisle. Behind her, dozens and dozens of plastic containers… Filled 80% with water. No need for long speeches to convince, Laure Favre simply questions our way of consuming products made of single-use plastic and filled with water that we have at home.

From there, Spring was born, a brand of compact and eco-friendly cleaning products. Every member of the Spring community is aligned with the brand’s vision: paying for water and plastic, no thank you! By explaining to her community why she created Spring and against which status quo she stands up every day, Laure Favre has managed to build a highly engaged community that shares and relays her values!

Example of a LinkedIn post from the DNVB Spring

Seek out super-contributors and establish rituals

Super-contributors are a small group of people who are part of the community but do more than others.

Every community has its super-contributors, who are the most involved and thus become the closest to the brand. We can think, for example, of content creators on Wikipedia: it is estimated that 1% of Wikipedia users provide 50% of the content! This principle applies to every community: a small percentage of people will be more involved, more present, more active on social networks, and will have more interaction with the brand. It is absolutely necessary to try to unite this group of internet users, pamper them, and why not bring them additional value. In any case, it is with this minority that we will have the most points of contact.

It is essential to set up kinds of rituals that will mark the feeling of belonging to the brand. Each tribe has its rites, its small actions that make it belong to this community and not another. These rituals can translate into weekly appointments, for example with a type of regular content that can be addressed to one’s community?

One of the best examples of tribal marketing that comes to mind is the Weight Watchers brand, which has created a genuine community of support and sharing. The brand has adopted specific wording and replaced words like “calories” and “foods” – which can be psychologically anxiety-inducing – with much more stimulating and encouraging words like “fitpoints”, “smartpoints”…

This specific vocabulary allows community members to recognize each other, which brings members closer together while reinforcing the sense of belonging to the Weight Watchers community.

The company has also created groups on social networks so that the community can share their tips, tricks, and successes… It’s a private conversation space, reserved for members – thus for a small privileged group – which gives a sense of exclusivity and values the community members.

In the B2B sector, the Doctolib application has dedicated an exchange and conversation space, Doctolib Team, to practitioners present on the application.

What private group can you set up to replicate this space dedicated to conversation, exchanges, and advice? An Instagram account dedicated to your super-contributor audience, with exclusive posts? An even more intimate WhatsApp group for your most valuable subscribers, to encourage interactions and send them high-value content?

Sharing UGC from the community

Sharing user-generated content is finally an excellent driver of engagement. A simple like or comment is no longer enough to show the brand’s interest and its proximity to its community. One should not hesitate to maximize the value of their community by sharing UGC (User Generated Content) on the official accounts of your brand, or even on the homepage.

Some skincare brands publish before/after photos of their consumers on the homepage of their e-commerce site, which allows them to build their community but also affirm the credibility of their products. We can also capitalize on email marketing to relay high-value content and UGC. Let’s not forget that the conversion rate of e-commerce sites increases by 111% when they reshare consumer content! This practice is extremely powerful in giving the community the feeling of really mattering to the company and contributing to its success. The user appreciates the visibility that the brand gives them, they will be even more inclined to share more content on their networks!

We can cite the example of the famous GoPro brand, which relies on photos taken by their audience with their own cameras: it’s an excellent strategy to feed the brand’s social networks with authentic and quality publications! Content creation can indeed become a laborious and time-consuming project for companies. Social publications created by fans are therefore content that is always wise to exploit.

The brand also organizes contests, such as the GoPro Awards, which encourages fans to take their best shots with GoPro devices to then participate in the contest. GoPro then rewards the most beautiful content with gift cards, products, but also with recognition from other members of the GoPro community. Recognition is a very strong personal driver for a community: here too, you would be impressed to see everything it is capable of doing to “be validated” by your brand! GoPro then shares the best content on their social networks, which generates a flow of UGC, and then integrates it into the “community” tab of its website, entirely dedicated to building the latter.

“Community” tab of the GoPro website

Last but not least: building your proprietary community allows to be less dependent on intermediaries such as Facebook, Google, polling institutes, influence marketplaces, and sampling tools.

Thus, the community foundation of a successful brand is no longer an option today, but it’s still necessary to equip oneself to do it, to be able to scale and address as many customers as possible: that’s why the Trustt solution has been developed!

Now you are informed to ensure relevant and high-value community development!