How to Recruit Student Ambassadors in 4 Steps

Are you looking to recruit student ambassadors for your college ambassador programs?

Perhaps you have several questions about the recruitment process. For example:

Who should I recruit? How do I recruit student ambassadors?

For the success of your ambassador program, recruiting student ambassadors is crucial. After all, you want to save time and resources, or you’ll waste it in recruiting ambassadors you don’t want.

Planning this process is important to have candidates who truly represent your brand and want to actively participate. 

With the right system in place, you will successfully recruit student ambassadors to your program continuously. 

In this guide, we will help you exactly how to recruit student ambassadors who will give you the results you desire.

The steps we will be covering are:

1. Create an ideal student ambassador profile
2. Find student ambassadors
3. Reach out to student ambassadors
4. Train and onboard your student ambassadors

Let’s take a look at how you can do just that!

Recommended: 6 Benefits of Student Ambassadors: Creating Community on Campus

What Student Ambassadors are

Before we explain how to recruit student ambassadors, it’s first important to know what student ambassadors are.

Student ambassadors are college students who represent your brand in a positive light. They share your products on social media and with friends and family.

While student ambassadors may not have a massive following like macro-influencers, they are still considered micro-influencers because of their influence in their community.

Why they are important

Perhaps you are wondering, “Why is recruiting student ambassadors so important?”

The main reason why student ambassadors are powerful is because they are:

• Most in touch with media and technology
• Have substantial disposable income to use
• A large population
• Open-minded to try new things

Student ambassadors create content, post reviews, and participate in marketing initiatives on an ongoing basis. By sharing their authentic love for your product, they better reach new audiences in various mediums.

Ultimately, it establishes trustworthy, authentic relationships between brands and your target consumers.

+ Read More: Why are College Ambassadors so Powerful?

1. Create an ideal student ambassador profile

When creating a student ambassador program, think of it this way:

You are recruiting someone for a position in your company. Think first about the characteristics you are looking for among your candidates.

Once you have the ideal characteristics, compare this profile with your candidates. Look for their connection with your brand.

Are they already customers? Do they really like your products?

This aspect is important to include in your ideal campus rep profile because that’s what makes ambassador marketing work.

Why?

You are marketing through people who genuinely love your products. They are students who have positive experiences and want to share their experiences with others. This leads to other people trusting their brand recommendations.

Therefore, recruiting any student you find is not going to help your ambassador marketing efforts. You need to choose who will best represent your brand.

However, if you plan to expand your brand that is not well known yet, then you need to build this connection first. You can do this by communicating what your brand is all about and sending some products to try.

What other characteristics should you look for when recruiting student ambassadors?

These are a couple of things that you should consider:

• Well-connected and involved on campus
• Prior experience with marketing or interest in growing their marketing skills
• An established online presence whether it’s high engagement and/or followers
• Good at creating content that aligns with the brand
• Shows interest and alignment in your brand’s purpose and values

Also, don’t be discouraged by small follower counts.

Micro-influencers (college students) with a couple of thousand followers or even hundreds, are still valuable to your marketing strategy. Since they have a closer relationship with their network, their branded content will be more trusted and connect more people.

+ Read More: Influencers, Affiliates, or Ambassadors: Which works best for you?

2. Find student ambassadors

So, you have your ideal student ambassador profile. What next?

It’s time to find student ambassadors that you want to recruit to your program.

Here are things you can do to find and recruit student ambassadors of your liking:

Create an application page

Most brands with an ambassador program create a page on their site with all the information about their program and an application form to apply. 

By doing this, you can decide when to open the application form. This is because there could be periods where it is unnecessary to add more student ambassadors.

Additionally, the application page will allow people to know about the program and make it easier to receive the information you need from candidates.

People who love your brand will search on Google to see if you have an ambassador program. So, just by having a page, you gather ideal candidates who already like your brand.

However, you need to go through all the applications to recruit the student ambassadors you want. Sometimes, you will receive thousands of applications which can be time-consuming.

This is not the only way to find ideal candidates, but having an application page is great. 

Look for candidates on social media

In most ambassador programs, student ambassadors will create social media content, so it makes sense to look for them there.

First, think about social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok that you are most interested in.

Then, you will need to do some digging. Here are some ideas you could try:

• Look at your followers on your platform
• Look at the followers of influencers related to your industry
• Search college-related hashtags
• Browse locations
• Look at the followers of college’s profiles
• Browse LinkedIn for students interested in brands, marketing, etc.

If you aren’t receiving qualified applications through your website, or want to find candidates yourself, social media is useful. You can have better control over who joins and invite students who are open to becoming ambassadors.

Check out our Ultimate Student Ambassador Guide

Student ambassador recruiting software

The best way to find and recruit student ambassadors that fit all your desired characteristics is with a brand ambassador platform.

SocialLadder’s Candidate Discovery Module allows you to easily search and find candidates that fit your ideal candidate profile with the help of machine learning.

With SocialLadder, you don’t have to go through thousands of applications or profiles on social media to recruit the right student ambassadors. 

You can browse through student profiles and look at their stats and score based on how qualified they are, saving you all the time you would spend on this process.

Then, you can easily chat and invite them to be part of your program, which you can manage and track from the same platform.

3. Reach out to student ambassadors

Okay, so you now found student ambassadors you want to recruit. What’s the next step?

It’s time to reach out and communicate with them to join your program!

Email

If you are going through an application form to recruit student ambassadors and you selected your ideal candidates, email them with further instructions.

If you’re still finding more candidates, you can message your email list. This way you are directly telling your customers that you are recruiting student ambassadors.

Then, you can redirect them to your application form or continue the conversation through email. However, we recommend using the page on your website because it will be more organized.

You can email your list every time you are open to receiving applications. This way, the people who didn’t get a chance to apply will get notified.

Social media

With social media, it’s okay to send direct messages, but make sure you first follow the candidates. In addition, try not to use “spammy” language or automated messages. The more authentic you sound the better.

Another effective way to reach out to student ambassadors is through their comment section. Oftentimes, DMs get lost, so it’s more likely they check the comments on their posts. 

Comment on the people you are trying to recruit with a short and polite message saying you’d love to collaborate. Once you get their attention, you can continue the conversation in the DMs.

After, follow up with the candidate a couple of times if you don’t get any response. However, do this without being spammy or annoying. Just follow up to make sure they got your message.

4. Train and onboard your student ambassadors

You created an ideal student ambassador profile. You found candidates, and you reached out to them. What’s the final step you may ask?

Once your candidates have accepted to join the program, you now need to provide them with documentation such as guidelines and expectations to help them understand their role.

This is a very important step because you want everyone to have the same guidelines for the content to be on-brand and consistent.

For this part of the process, we recommend you create an ‘ambassador handbook’ with all the information your campus reps will need to do a great job.

Make sure you check out our guide on training student ambassadors to know how to successfully train and onboard them.

Final thoughts of recruiting student ambassadors

Student ambassadors are the best tool to reach target demographics in an authentic, trustworthy way. But to reach their full potential, you need to recruit the right student ambassadors and train them consistently.

Some of the benefits of optimizing your recruiting process include:

• Improved ROI in marketing campaigns
• Higher brand awareness in target markets
• Increased word of mouth (referrals)
• Great user-generated content

Take Kendra Scott as an example.

Kendra Scott began their Gems Campus Ambassador Program. Their student ambassadors, Gems, drove awareness to a larger audience and led retail and online sales.

Seeing this great success, Kendra Scott wanted to expand their brand ambassador program even more.

With the help of SocialLadder, the results were tremendous:

• Managed 200 ambassadors on 100 college campuses.
• Increased EMV per post +104%
• Increased overall impressions +169%
• So much more!

+ Read More: Kendra Scott’s College Ambassador Program Increases Social Media Impressions by 169%

While there is no set formula for recruiting student ambassadors, it’s important to recognize the potential and impact of student ambassadors.

If you’re ready to start your student ambassador program, book a demo here!