People buy from people they trust. Being invited to a community meeting by someone they already trust and look up to is an extremely powerful way to get warm leads through their endorsement. That’s why community guesting can give you a huge advantage over your competitors, and acts as an excellent lead generator.
Let’s take a look at how to find the right communities and pitch to their organisers, what you can offer their audience, and how to maximise the lead generation opportunities with community guesting.
Finding the right communities to partner with
Choosing the right communities to visit as a guest is a way of pre-qualifying the leads you generate from this activity. It’s worth taking time at this stage to find active communities that are most aligned with your ideal customer personas.
The first criteria to apply is whether the community is free or paid. For lead generation, it’s better to focus your efforts on paid communities – here’s why…
Free groups
Look at these Facebook statistics:
- 10 million + Facebook groups
- 1.8bn people use Facebook groups every month
- 400m are in a group they find meaningful
- 50% of all Facebook users are in 5+ groups
- 80% of all Facebook users are in at least 1 group
And that’s just Facebook. The huge numbers involved in free communities is very tempting. And maybe at the brand awareness stage, you might want to connect with the biggest free groups in your niche.
But we’re talking about lead generation here. How likely are they to tune in to your training session – nevermind convert into a sale?
Free does mean accessible, but it usually also means less committed. You can join a free community and never attend meetings, show up for workshops, or contribute anything.
If your focus is lead generation from your guesting experiences, you need to be much more targeted and certain of the audience you’re presenting to.
Paid communities
And that’s where paid communities are brilliant for connecting with future clients. These communities may be smaller in number, but are much more effective for lead generation because the level of membership commitment is higher.
A sense of exclusivity comes with the price tag and people get a deeper sense of belonging. Members that are paying to be there are more likely to invest their time into the community.
A smaller, more niche group means that you can focus your training on helping with a specific challenge. This is incredibly valuable to the whole group.
You’re invited into a cherished community by a well-respected member, which is a trust endorsement in itself. Your training showcases your expertise and is directly relevant to the audience’s pain points. There’s no reason why your sign-off lead magnet wouldn’t deliver more of the same – so the likelihood of further engagement is high.
You need to focus on finding paid communities with an audience of your ideal clients, that align with your values and you know you can help.
What are you bringing to the party?
As ever, the audience drives your offer – what will be genuinely helpful to them? This takes understanding of their preferences, pain points, needs, and aspirations.
The way you deliver this help is up to you, it can be any of the following formats:
Masterclass
You teach a specific piece of information, or a skill, that they can immediately apply to their own businesses. For example: ‘5 steps to improve SEO on your website.’ Or ‘3 things we’ve learned from our recent market research.’
Critiques
You discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the audience’s existing assets. With your insights providing reasoning and improvements suggestions – not just judgement. For example, a marketing agency assessing landing pages for members of the audience.
Q&A
Answer questions from community members that are within your field of expertise. These could be gathered ahead of your visit, so you have time to give a more measured answer, or asked live.
Case studies
You can present case studies of previous clients like the community members, telling the story of how you helped them – illustrating how they can do similar themselves.
Live zoom coaching
The power of this offering is that it spotlights your expertise. You genuinely don’t know what you’re going to be asked. But you apply your knowledge skills and experiences directly to their problems and help them identify a way forward. Think about the last time you saw someone do this, it’s very impressive.
You can take a more prepared approach, where you know the questions they’re posing or have seen the assets for evaluation, before your meeting with the community. Or you can opt for a more off-the-cuff, live situation – where you’re presented with things on-the-spot and give your advice.
As long as your preparation includes knowing the audience and the value of your offering, you’ll be able to smash either type out of the park.
What to include in a community guesting pitch
People who create their own communities are, rightly, protective of them. They won’t just let anyone come and talk to them – it has to be relevant and useful to their particular niche.
Audience investment in paid communities is strong and not likely to tolerate any time-wasters. If the audience doesn’t see what’s in it for them, they just won’t show up – even with the community leader’s endorsement. And the community leaders know that.
Your pitch to the community leader, organiser or admin needs to be personalised every single time. Put some time into drawing up a template that you can tweak to each individual pitch.
Top pitching tips
- Find the right person: Contact the right person in the community. Sounds obvious, but it shows a distinct lack of research if you don’t – which makes it look like you’re not that interested.
- How you’re going to help: Get straight to the point with how your free training will benefit their community members.
- Grease the wheels: Show interest in their community. Comment on a recent success, interesting article, or charity fundraiser. A bit of flattery never hurt anyone, and people are more likely to invite you for a visit if you seem genuinely enthusiastic about them.
- Who are you?: Put together a really short summary of who you are, to make it easier for them to make a decision. Not a full CV, a 1-pager that includes your relevant experience and skills, a headshot, socials, books, awards/badges, and any statistics that prove your expertise (like high follower numbers on your socials). This helps answer any of their questions about you and check your authenticity online before replying.
Keep your email short and straightforward, end it with an offer to chat about how you can help their members, and attach a concise document with all the info they need in one place.
Making the most of this brilliant access for your lead generation
As a guest in a community, you have amazing access to potential customers – but you need to maximise the opportunity for lead generation.
After all your research, you’ll deliver perfectly pitched training that everyone loves. You also need to have everything in place for you, including:
Lead magnet
A good guest never shows up empty handed. Your lead magnet is the gift you leave at the end of your training session. It is:
- Something that’s irresistibly relevant
- Connected to the training you’ve just given – maybe extending or broadening the same area of knowledge
- Completely free
- Valuable enough to pay with their personal details
ScoreApp has a whole range of templates for different types of lead magnets that saves you hours at the design stage.
Follow up emails
Let the nurturing email sequences begin! Getting people to sign up for your lead magnet is not a ‘one and done’ situation. It’s just the start of your relationship with them and you need to put in enough effort to grow it from ‘guest-listener’ into ‘business-customer’.
Shareability factor
Get connecting on the socials! Write about the experience of being their guest and big-up their community’s vibe. Talk about what you shared and learned from their excellent questions.
Did it inspire you to research something else? Did they raise an industry problem you weren’t aware of? Suggest a hashtag at the end of your training, so you can all keep the conversion going and they can continue to ask you questions – if you have the capacity for that kind of engagement.
All of this interaction gives them another opportunity to build trust and click on your marvellous lead magnet.
Repurpose content
Just like all other content, you can use your community guesting experience to create other types of content:
- Post direct quotes from you and the community
- Turn a compilation of their lead magnet quiz results into an article or whitepaper
- Use something unexpected to direct your next piece of research
- If your training session was recorded, and mutually agreed, post short clips to highlight specific points (Not the whole thing, that takes away the exclusivity from the community.)
Content is never just one thing – think about what else you can create from your experiences as a community guest.
Make the perfect lead magnets for the communities you visit with ScoreApp
If you want community leaders to choose you as a guest, you need to prove that you can help their audience. You’ve got that bit in the bag! To make sure you maximise this lead generation opportunity, you need the perfect lead magnet to:
- Provide extra value to the audience after your visit
- Get their details, so you can start your own relationship with them individually
- Develop a deeper understanding of their pain points, needs and aspirations
ScoreApp’s got your back here, you can create things like:
- Standalone quizzes around your training topic
- Waitlist quiz to test new ideas for product market fit
- Full sales quiz funnel that takes care of them at every step on their path to purchase
- Video mini course to build stronger connections and drop more of your wisdom their inbox
Create the perfect lead magnet to take to your next community guesting experience with ScoreApp today – for free!
