How to Recruit External Communities?

Consumers are now overwhelmed by company offers: it’s in this context that disinterest and distrust towards traditional advertising messages and brand offers have emerged. So, who should one consult to choose a product or service and be sure to make the right choice? Virtual communities are the new essential strategic challenge not to be underestimated if a company wishes to sustain its activity. Trustt explains how to grow your brand community through your ambassadors’ communities.

What is a Community?

A community or tribe is a group of individuals who share the same representations and the same news and values of attachment to a brand, a project, a center of interest, or a vision. A brand will be adopted by a group because it responds to the identity and values of the latter, because the company is heading in the desired direction.

For there to be a community, it necessarily requires a place of exchange and that the members who compose it have the motivation to dialogue and interact between different profiles.

In the digital age, many internet users share the same affinities, the same centers of interest, and the same concerns. Similar profiles gather around brands to exchange with each other on social networks. These profound changes that modify the relationships between brands and their customers push companies to orient their marketing strategy towards a more community-based approach in order to continue their development and stay ahead of the competition.

Structure and Engage Your Communities to Develop Your Brand’s Aura

Before thinking about expanding your community on the web and recruiting new subscribers – new candidates for your panel – let’s first return to the basics.

1- Clearly Define Who Your Brand’s Community Is

It is important to have clearly determined in detail who your community is. Who do you want to address? What targets interest your company? What type of candidacy to choose?

Identifying the groups, profiles, locating them, finding the way to contact them for consultation is one of the first challenges of your community marketing strategy as professionals, community managers, or marketing directors!

Knowing each specificity of your personas like the back of your hand is essential to define who the members of your brand community are and give them a framework. The relevant choice of an ambassador candidacy is essential for your company.

It is also important to be constantly on the lookout and note everything that is said about your brand and your sector of activity by clicking on the web.

To refine your choice of profiles, engage in conversation with your customers to better understand their needs and expectations regarding your offers.

To do this, regularly collect data to deepen your knowledge of the behavior of your community members.

2 – Determine the Different Universes Within Your Brand Community

Next, understand that within the same brand community, several different brand communities can exist.

These different communities – or subgroups of your own community – are centered on the same brand but favor a different system of norms, a cultural identity, and a universe that can vary from one community to another (according to their age, job, hobbies, training, project, resources…).

Clearly identifying who the different subgroups that make up your brand community are allows you to subsequently refine your community marketing strategy to give it several directions in order to expand your community and recruit new candidates.

3 – Cherish and Value Your Organic Ambassadors

Members of your own community (fans of your brand and your offer, customers, experts in your field, employees…) are a valuable source of visibility and credibility for your targets. The member of your community becomes responsible for your influence among their circle and their followers on social media. Moreover, their content creation skills are very useful for your company’s community manager and other employees!

This is why it is “important to pamper your candidates, to show that these ‘employees’ matter to you in order to reinforce their choice of belonging to your community”. Communication with them is essential to create good human relationships by valuing their work on social media! Even if they are not employed in your company (salaried), they are essential collaborators for your communication on the web, true digital professionals.

To show your appreciation, you can implement this strategy:

• Provide them with specific benefits, gifts, exclusive promotions, invitations to private physical or virtual events, resources and useful offers to help them evolve as professional content creators;
• Send them free products for them to try in advance and give you their detailed feedback following their use or learning of a service;
• Offer them to participate in the creation of your products and services or in your communication actions. This can be around a subject or cause that is dear to them. Current consumers want to be part of the life of brands and be active participants!

These recruitments of ambassadors for your company are very important to develop your notoriety and image on the web. These candidates often have a significant network in the digital sphere (Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn…) and real skills in communication and social media strategy. They know how to use the new digital tools offered by social networks and have various resources and content to offer to companies.

How to make your brand shine through external ambassadors?

Here are 3 techniques to grow your community using a network external to your own brand community:

1-Identify your top contributors

The super-contributors of your brand community are a small group of individuals particularly involved in the life of your brand. They like, comment, share, and tag your brand on social media.

These top contributors stand out because they do more than others. These collaborators are active on the web and interact with your brand regularly, or even very regularly. This service can be permanent depending on the human relationships you have created with these “talents”.

These are therefore extremely precious! It is essential to spot them, seek to unite them and pamper them through your communication and the proposed missions.

To do this, you can set up a private group on social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn or WhatsApp for example. In this private group, you will share with them exclusive high-value resources that they won’t find anywhere else and support for training on networks as web professionals.

This privileged space for exchange promotes more human interactions, attachment to your brand, and your top contributors will feel truly special and valuable thanks to their work for your company.

In this way, they will not hesitate to spread the aura of your brand beyond your own community to their respective communities whenever the opportunity arises. Ultimately, these top contributors participate in recruiting new ambassadors and allow you to expand your community in the digital world.

2- Set up partnerships with influencers

The deployment of your community on the web and the recruitment of external ambassadors obviously cannot be done without setting up collaborations with influencers! It’s real management as an employer to recruit talents and candidates for your company!

Thanks to the identification of subgroups in your community, you can set up several types of collaborations with influencers representing different categories.

Having clearly identified all the universes, you can establish truly relevant partnerships adapted to the different systems of norms and cultural identities of each category within your internal community.

In this way, you refine your community strategy and enable the external recruitment of ambassadors beyond your initial fan base. You break boundaries and expand your field of possibilities. Of course, this involves finding good influencers to carry out these campaigns successfully. To recruit the right influencers, Trustt has created a tool that identifies the perfect panel for you and guarantees the success of your campaigns. Thanks to a unique machine learning technology, the SophIA® algorithm, instantly cross-references thousands of data points and analyzes the most qualified influencer profiles for your product campaign.

3- Launch an Ambassador Program

In addition to developing products or services that align with your target audience’s real expectations, increasing your sales, reducing your research and development costs, and staying ahead of the competition, implementing an ambassador program allows you to reach and recruit new candidates for your community.

No more campaign management issues! With the Trustt tool, you can easily set up an ambassador program on your website to develop your proprietary community. Your prospects and/or customers “only need to submit their applications (precise profiles for ambassador recruitment) on your website, and you only need” to launch product campaigns to promote your offer and collect valuable data on the use of your products.

The content generated by your ambassadors (UGC) (experience feedback, video reviews, before/after photos, blog articles, and authentic and detailed reviews) present on your website’s product pages and on each of your ambassadors’ respective social networks plays a crucial role in spreading your brand’s aura on the web and in recruiting new members for your brand community.

Brands That Have Successfully Created a Proprietary Community

To better understand how you can recruit external communities, here are cases of several brands that have succeeded in this challenge.

Lego, the famous construction toy brand, has managed to create a true proprietary community. In the 2000s, the brand was on the brink of bankruptcy… Today, it is one of the leaders in the toy market. What is its strategy?

The brand has managed to create targeted partnerships with Star Wars (still ⅓ of sales today), Disney, Friends, the Simpsons, and Harry Potter. The brand thus acquires part of an existing external community to expand its own and vice versa.

But it “is also by relying on” its own community that the brand has been able to expand it! Thus, one of the top contributors to Lego’s engaged community directly created a site gathering stop-motion videos to stage Lego characters and “universes. Other Lego members and enthusiasts quickly enriched this site by posting their own videos. I” ncidentally, this site is still active, and Lego uses the videos that its community uploads for communication.

Thus, many brands associate with each other to leverage existing communities. For example, menstrual underwear brands will partner with dietary supplement brands to create contests or collaborations to benefit from each other’s community and increase their own. Many French brands join forces in contests to make themselves known to communities close to those already existing (Les Secrets de Loly X Garancia).

Exponential Growth Thanks to Its Own Community

It is therefore important to remember that one of the major tools for ensuring brand growth is to rely on your own community.

Indeed, a brand’s community is a readily available wealth! Relying on your existing and highly engaged community allows you to develop your notoriety, whether through their contributions on social networks or blogs, posted reviews, or word-of-mouth effect.

Loyal and satisfied consumers of a brand are more likely to talk about it around them.

As a reminder, according to several studies, a satisfied customer tells 3 people in their circle about it (which creates as many potential new customers), while a dissatisfied customer tells an average of 10 people!

Moreover, loyal customers buy more often and spend more than new customers. They know the added value of a product or service and trust the brand. “Relying on your own community is therefore a strong growth lever, much more so than” acquiring new customers.

It is therefore essential to pamper your loyal consumers and maintain a strong connection, particularly by offering them exclusive benefits or involving them in the development of your future products.