Creator communities are quickly becoming a staple of influencer marketing. Here’s how to build an influencer community to be your brand’s advocacy factory.
There’s no better time than now to build an influencer community.
Especially since always-on campaigns are an expectation for consumer brands.
The value of influencers isn’t even a question anymore. Instead, brands are asking:
Enter the era of influencer communities as the answer to all of the above.
Through community-building, brands can drive an always-on content engine while saving countless hours on creator outreach, vetting and fulfillment.
Below we dig into everything you need to know to build an influencer community based on our experience powering thousands of creator campaigns.
Influencer communities are groups of loyal content creators who opt-in to consistently post about your brand. These creators are authentically enthusiastic about your products and are committed to posting about your brand long-term.
There’s a big difference between an established influencer community and creators who occasionally tag your brand in their posts.
Don’t get it twisted: those one-off creators are still super valuable! However, consider that building a true influencer community involves:
Bubble Skincare is a great example of a brand that nails all of the above with its TikTok influencer community. The brand regularly features its community members in its content and goes out of its way to repost videos from micro-influencers with only a few thousand followers.
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You can think of an influencer community as a scalable brand ambassador program, although some marketers use the terms interchangeably.
The distinction between influencer communities and traditional brand ambassadorships is that communities typically involve more freedom and less stringent posting requirements for creators. This is a win-win for both sides as you empower creators to do their own thing while you eliminate needless check-ins but still get consistent UGC.
The more brands we talk to, the more “community” comes up in conversation.
And based on current influencer marketing trends, we totally understand why.
For starters, brands are struggling to sustain word-of-mouth. According to our internal influencer platform data, brands are working with 36.36% more creators year-over-year.
Campaigns are increasing in size and scope to meet a variety of goals. This includes ranking in social search and staying top-of-mind via organic content and social ads.
You can only cover so much ground through one-off collabs. On the flip side, communities help brands meet the growing demand for UGC without spending all of their time on finding and vetting influencers.
Below is a snapshot of why influencer communities are so valuable to brands as an alternative to one-off collaborations.
Given the legwork involved in any influencer collab, creating a community of influencers might seem like something “extra” instead of a core priority.
The reality? Community-building is quickly becoming a must-do for consumer brands.
Especially those in competitive industries like beauty, food and CPG.
Let’s dig deeper into why scaling influencer communities is a priority for brands today.
The sheer amount of time it takes to manage all of the moving pieces of finding and onboarding new influencers is exhausting.
This includes:
Imagine the time spent reaching out to and vetting 50 new creators by hand versus re-engaging community members who know you and you’ve sent products in the past.
You trust them. You don’t need to audit their profiles again and their shipping information is on file. That results in fast and easy fulfillment in exponentially less time.
Rinse and repeat that process and consider the 100s of hours saved over months.
When we say “consistent,” we mean it two ways.
For starters, communities offer a way for brands to activate influencers to produce ongoing UGC on demand and at scale.
Again, let’s say you’re revving up for a product launch and you need 50 people posting about it on TikTok. Depending on the size of your influencer community, you can tap into those creators immediately and provide them with content briefs and products ASAP.
Contrast this with conducting manual outreach to all of those creators and then going through the months-long process of getting posts.
Secondly, communities offer consistent UGC in the sense that you don’t have to spend as much time approving or offering feedback on every single post.
The more you work with your community and establish trust with your influencers, the more familiar your creators become with your products and audience. That results in on-brand UGC you can promote organically or via social media ads.
Here’s a short clip from our influencer community webinar that goes into more detail:
Community-generated influencer content can also serve as a consistent source of creatives for UGC ads on TikTok and Instagram. If you have content usage rights built into the requirements of your social media influencer community, those creators can serve as a standalone studio for UGC ad creatives.
Especially for the sake of running high-performing UGC ads featuring your community. You can think of influencer communities as your own ad creation studios.
Food for thought: the value of influencer communities isn’t exclusive to brands.
Creators crave community, too! That’s because communities offer a way for influencers to get more upside from their collaborations. This can be done through:
Providing upside to creators in your community can result in a snowball effect of positive word-of-mouth. The more content creators that shout out your community, the more new influencers are eager to join. It’s a win-win as you grow your influencer community and reputation as a brand at the same time.
The idea of building an influencer community from scratch might be daunting.
Here’s the good news: if you already have an influencer list or have a history of doing collaborations, you’ve done the hard part already.
Now it’s a matter of setting up the infrastructure to turn your list of creators into an actual community.
Below we break down how to create a community of influencers consisting of both new creators and the ones you’ve worked with in the past.
Pop quiz: Who do you want to be part of your community?
(And no, this isn’t a trick question!)
Setting up requirements is the first step to building an influencer community. Consider that brand communities have exclusive requirements not only to make the more enticing but also to ensure that it attracts relevant social media influencers based on your priority platforms.
For example, you may have requirements or minimums related to the following:
Once you figure these details out, you can bake them into your community application and start the process of influencer recruiting and vetting.
Growing an influencer community typically means establishing multiple channels to funnel in new creators. Most importantly, some sort of landing page featuring an influencer program application.
Keep in mind that building a community involves building momentum. You may need to conduct influencer outreach both among your current crop of creators and prospective ones when you’re getting your new community off the ground.
That said, a slow and steady approach means you’re less likely to get overwhelmed by applications and approvals. This process can be incredibly time-consuming if you’re doing it all DIY and have to manually check that creators meet your community criteria.
While some brands turn to influencer platforms to pick up the heavy lifting here, many of these platforms don’t actually vet their creators.
You can get the best of both worlds with an influencer platform like Statusphere that allows you to upload and segment your existing creators while also sourcing new vetted ones from an opt-in community based on your brand’s requirements.
Community-building doesn’t happen with a stop-go strategy. This applies to when you first start building but even after you’ve established your creator community.
For starters, don’t be afraid to publish links to your influencer program application via your website, email, social platforms and beyond. You can also do ongoing promotion for your community through content, reposts and ads.
Another way to make your community more enticing is to be upfront about the benefits and upsides that you offer. Check out how Fashionphile does it in the example below:
[Fashionphile example of providing upside to creators]
Let’s say you’ve accepted 20 new creators into your community. Now what happens?
You should organize and segment creators sooner rather than later. Ideally, in a proper platform and not in an unwieldy spreadsheet that takes over your schedule. Some influencer management platforms allow you to sort your creators by factors including:
The more information you can gather about your creators when you get them into an influencer management tool, the better. Platforms like Statusphere can automate influencer targeting and segmentation based on 250+ first-party data points. That means you can run hyper-targeted community-based campaigns with no manual data entry.
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Again, brands committed to community-building need to live up to their end of the bargain when it comes to offering collabs. That means consistently sending products to community influencers that have requested them.
Fulfilling a high volume of influencer seeding kits or gifted products can become a logistical nightmare as your community grows. While it sounds like a nice problem to have, this can result in shipping lag times and errors that will quickly sour your creators.
If you plan on building an influencer community, you need to account for the time and legwork involved in shipping products month after month. While Statusphere’s software automates product seeding campaigns and fulfillment for brands, here are some suggestions to avoid influencer fulfillment headaches:
Community and influencer management requires strong attention to detail.
Beyond simply offering collabs and shipping products, personalizing partnerships should be a top priority. If you want to build a loyal community that sticks around, your approach to managing influencer relations is make-or-break.
Here are some of our favorite tips for influencer community management to personalize community partnerships:
The last point is crucial and something that any brand can do regardless of size and scope. The more of your community-building that you automate, the more of these personal one-on-one touchpoints you can make.
To wrap things up, let’s look at three real influencer community examples from successful brands and what makes their strategies work.
We’ve already talked about Bubble but they deserve another shout-out! The brand highlights how strong word-of-mouth is key to scaling an influencer community. Consistent promotion and reposting of their brand ambassadors means that their community growth efforts are always front-and-center. Not to mention that the brand regularly reposts content from micro-influencers with only a few thousand followers.
If you’re into fashion, Princess Polly’s community content is can’t-miss across TikTok. The brand has a massive affiliate community which includes tons of try-ons and fashion hauls, both of which are proven types of UGC for TikTok.
Princess Polly’s high volume of creator content has also helped them rank in social search for terms including “chic outfits.” The brand’s thousands of sales across TikTok Shop highlight how building an influencer community translates into real business impact.
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Celsius’ thriving Instagram influencer community is the blueprint for food and beverage brands eager to scale high-quality UGC. In terms of requirements, the brand requires one Instagram feed post and two Instagram Stories per month in exchange for a case of free Celsius product.
The brand works with a combination of professional fitness influencers and student ambassadors alike. Celsius also promotes monthly retail challenges for creators who produce in-store content featuring the brand in the wild.
As more brands scale influencer campaigns, building communities is a natural next step.
By creating an influencer community, you can build long-term relationships with creators who are truly loyal to your brand. This means you can earn on-brand UGC on an ongoing basis. All at scale and all with less hand-holding.
Of course, influencer communities require serious legwork to get off the ground if you’re doing it all DIY. It’s an uphill battle unless you have the right marketing stack.
That’s where Statusphere’s influencer marketing platform can help.
Our software serves as an all-in-one influencer management tool for brands to build and manage their communities at scale without all the manual legwork. We eliminate time-consuming communication and automate the process of getting products into vetted creators’ hands ASAP.
Want to see how our platform works? Get in touch with one of our experts to see how Statusphere can help your brand build authentic connections with influencers at scale.
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