How to Build and Grow Your Influencer Community

Taylor: Hi, everyone. Taylor here from Tribe Dynamics. And today, I'm going to be walking you through the four key steps to building and growing your influencer community and doing so in a genuine and sustainable way to ensure the greatest ROI. Let's get started. So, the first step is to identify your existing community. Good news, when building out your influencer community, you probably don't have to start from scratch. If you're a passion- driven brand, it's highly likely that there's already a group of content creators, organically posting about your brand online. So, the first step as an influencer marketer is to identify these influencers and begin to build relationships with them. The size of your existing squad of influencers can vary from brand to brand but no matter how big or small, this group is the foundation of your program. So, why should you reach out to the influencers who are already posting about you before reaching out to new ones? It's simple. The influencers who are already excited about your brand are not only the ones who are the most likely to continue organically posting about you, they're also the ones who are most likely to be responsive to your outreach and enthusiastic about building a relationship with you. So, investing in these influencer relationship will likely result in higher, long term ROI. Something to keep in mind as you seek out your existing brand fans, is that while your brand's identity and aesthetic may be important to maintain across your own social channels, earned media succeeds because it is varied and diverse. So, when building out your influencer community, look beyond follower count or a specific aesthetic or demographic and always prioritize genuine enthusiasm for your brand. After you identify your existing community, it's time to move on to step two, understanding your existing community. By zeroing in on this core group of influencers, you can better understand who they are and why they feel connected to your brand. Maybe you make their holy grail moisturizer or maybe they were moved by a fundraising initiative that you launched. It's important to know and keep track of these details so that you can more easily and effectively build meaningful influencer relationships because relationship building is all in the details. When you find an influencer who likes your brand, be sure to take note of their favorite products, their personal style, the kind of content they create and really anything that can help inform how you should reach out to them. Then as you begin to get to know these influencers better and learn more about them, be sure to continue updating and expanding your influencer database with more information so that you can more meaningfully connect with individuals in your community at scale. Not only does keeping track of the details help you foster deeper relationships with influencers, it also helps you identify what aspects of your brand are resonating online. Do you have a single product that nearly all of your community loves or a brand story or mission that your influencer fans feel really connected to? By keeping track of the details, you can better understand what your unique value proposition in the influencer space is, which is something you can leverage when growing your community. Now, let's move on to step three and this is the big one, building deep and authentic relationships with your influencers. Now that you know who makes up your community, you can begin to truly connect with these influencers and build lasting relationships through consistent and personalized outreach. Relationship building can look different from brand to brand or even from influencer to influencer. It can be as small as engaging with an influencers content from your brand's own account or as big as setting up a one- on- one meeting between the influencer and your brand founder. But regardless of scale, your outreach should be thoughtful, consistent and as personalized as possible. And by keeping track of those details we just talked about, you can make personalized campaigns much more systemized and manageable. And finally, step four. The one you've all been waiting for, it's time to expand your community. You've identified your existing fans, engaged with them, strengthen those relationships and now you ideally have the headcount and the resources to grow your community. But again, rather than starting from scratch, one of the best ways to grow your community is to seek out the influencers who used to be part of your community but for some reason, lost interest or stopped posting about you and reengage those creators. Then once you feel ready to move beyond your existing or past influencer relationships or if you're just a smaller brand that has fewer influencer relationships, you can begin to target new influencers and introduce them to your brand and products. But it's important to not shoot aimlessly in the dark when looking for new brand fans and instead, target the influencers who are primed to like your brand. What I mean by that is look for the creators who are already talking about your brand's competitors or vertical. If an influencer loves the products from one of your direct competitors, they may be excited to see how your brand's products stack up, opening the door to a potential relationship. Or if your brand is launching a new product or expanding into a new vertical, you can seek out influencers who have used relevant hashtags or keywords in their past content and include them in your launch campaign. And of course, once you surface and target the potential fans to grow your community, it's back to step one, identify the influencers who responded to your outreach, understand what made them connect to your brand and work to foster deeper long- term relationships with them. So, I know we covered a lot in this video but one of the most important things to remember is that building and growing a sustainable influencer community doesn't happen overnight. It's a long game but it's completely worth it. And in this ever- changing digital landscape, consistency and strategy and an always- on execution are key. Here at Tribe Dynamics, we've seen time and time again, that the brands that invest in these always- on community building strategies that we covered today are the ones that see success that last, even through the most turbulent of time. Thanks so much for tuning into this video. We hope you found it helpful. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for even more ways to level up your influencer marketing game. And feel free to leave any comments on this video with any other questions or topics you want us to cover. To learn more about how Tribe Dynamics influencer marketing analytics platform can help your brand measure and evaluate the success of your community building efforts, please visit our website and request a demo. Thanks so much and we hope to see you again soon.