OVERVIEW:
Fuse is an independent marketing agency out of Burlington, Vermont that specializes in teen and young adult marketing.
For more than 20 years, Fuse has helped the world’s best consumer, sport and lifestyle brands speak with authenticity to Gen Z and Millenials by providing expert guidance on brand strategy, content, and experiential events. Fuse makes it possible for brands like Starbucks, Pepsi and Amazon to understand the buying trends of younger generations and engage these hard to reach consumers in ways that are innovative and engaging.
PAIN POINT:
Fuse is one of the leading teen and young adult marketing agencies in the US – not only do they work with global brands, but they have built a team of the most experienced staff in the marketing and advertising industry. They are known for offering their clients expert services to support strategy development for social media, digital, creative and experiential marketing plans.
Fuse has developed a flourishing reputation as the go-to experts for building Ambassador programs for various brands looking to engage hard-to-reach teen and young adult consumers.
Reaching teens and young adults is an important channel for brand growth, but it is not an easy task. Teens and young adults want to discover brands in their world; and when they do, they want for it to feel meaningful and authentic. This group of consumers don’t live in one place – they are social, on campus, and attending events. Young audiences want a brand’s presence to build value; something other than being bombarded by another ad.
Fuse knows that for a brand or product to stand out amongst this crowd, they need to create a human experience that feels personalized vs. a “one size fits all” strategy.
With Fuse simultaneously managing multiple brands and campaigns – a single brand could have over a hundred Ambassadors – the agency found themselves lacking a reporting platform that could pull both social media and event data in its entirety in real time. As the need for highly successful content creation campaigns continued to grow, Fuse knew they would need an all-encompassing, streamlined platform to ensure continued success.
For example – A busy college-aged Brand Ambassador would post an Instagram Story, then manually report back to Fuse the number of views and comments before it disappeared at the 24-hour mark.
Not shockingly, many of the busy Brand Ambassadors would forget to look before their story expired, which would require Fuse to spend valuable time gathering their own data and metrics to report back to clients.
SOLUTION:
Fuse chose SocialLadder for two primary reasons:
- SocialLadder’s integrations with the main social media platforms including TikTok and Instagram.
- SocialLadder is the only ambassador tracking platform that can track both social and field marketing (IRL)
SocialLadder’s media integrations automatically pull in metrics from the social platforms for both public and private accounts. This made it easy for Fuse to create campaign reports that they can quickly & easily share with their clients. The need for manually inputting results completely disappeared; no more valuable time spent following up with students.
As a marketing agency, Fuse is running multiple campaigns for multiple brands at the same time. The ease of creating separate campaigns that automatically tie posts results back to the appropriate campaign was essential for the agency to be able to run multiple Brand Ambassador programs from one single platform.
“SocialLadder is very easy to use, which means the Ambassadors report back quickly. We can report back to our clients faster than ever before.”
“I love the survey tool in SocialLadder; it is great for tracking tabling activations. The feedback we gather from Ambassadors after they complete an on-campus event enables us to measure the success of each event.”
-Ben Long, Associate Account Manager and former Brand Ambassador
RESULTS:
As an agency, timely and accurate program reporting is essential for client experience and retention. With the SocialLadder platform, Fuse is able to gather key measurements of success for each program by using the Campaign Summary Reports feature. This simple-to-share report provides Fuse campaign metrics in real time – providing the agency streamlined accurate results to include in its campaign recap decks.
CLIENT STORY: A technology refurbishing company wanted to build a college Ambassador program to spread the word about their more affordable and sustainable products on college campuses.
With Fuse spearheading high-quality Ambassador recruitment, creating engaging campaign activations, and day-to-day management, the agency knew they could seamlessly integrate SocialLadder’s reporting platform into the campaign. Starting with three Ambassadors at the University of Southern California and then scaling, Fuse had Ambassadors:
- Create organic content on Instagram and TikTok,
- Pass out gift cards and
- Attend IRL events to discuss sustainability and the brand.
SocialLadder made it easy for Fuse to be able to onboard & activate the Ambassadors. Features like segmentation helped ensure the ambassador tasks were hyperlocal & targeted to each specific campus. Saving 30% of their time from manual reporting, Fuse was able to focus their time and energy into Ambassador recruitment – growing the program from 3 to 20 ambassadors in just one semester!
TESTIMONIALS:
“The biggest thing I look for as a Manager and as a Director is ease of use. The question I ask myself is: ‘Are we running into any issues that are slowing us down or slowing any of our Ambassadors down?’ SocialLadder has saved us 30% of our time – that time savings is priceless.”
“Since bringing on SocialLadder, we have been able to provide a completely seamless experience over and over again – from training to onboarding to reporting. It has made our day-to-day operations easier.”
-Allison O’Brien, Account Director on Brand Strategy Team
‘I really enjoy the support SocialLadder’s team provides; from a Brand Ambassador perspective and as a management perspective. It is really nice to have a one-stop shop for everything you need to successfully run a Brand Ambassador program. Their technical support team is always quick to respond, which Fuse and the BAs appreciate.”
-Ben Long, Associate Account Manager and former Brand Ambassador
