Supercharge Your Marketing with a Brand Ambassador Program
Brand ambassador programs can be marketing powerhouses for community-driven brands. Consumers tend to be intensely passionate about the brands they support with their hard-earned dollars, taking to the digital and IRL streets to share that enthusiasm with those primed to listen. By turning these passionate creators into sponsored brand ambassadors, brands can see positive gains in any number of KPIs: brand awareness, customer acquisition (and retention!), and revenue growth.
A well-planned and executed brand ambassador program can supercharge brand awareness and drive sales. Marketing departments looking to tap into the creator economy and forge these important long-term relationships with brand ambassadors.
So, What is a Brand Ambassador?
In the simplest terms, a brand ambassador lives and breathes your brand. Their core values align with yours. Their passion is unmistakable. These amateur creators take to their social media accounts to amplify and elevate your brand because they care – not just about your products or services, but what’s beyond the logo and SKUs.
Take a look at your customer database and you’ll find them, plain as day. They’re your top customers, the ones writing authentic reviews and recommending your brand to their friends and family.
For any brand looking to drive authentic awareness conversions with a brand ambassador program, true brand fans are worth their weight in gold. They’re already talking about your brand online and offline. What would happen if your brand could ignite community between other de facto brand ambassadors, incentivize content creation, and drive referrals.
That’s exactly what shoe startup Margaux did in partnership with SocialLadder – they identified their best customers and built a brand ambassador program community at scale.
In less than five months, Margaux mobilized and incentivized an army of ambassadors who created content on behalf of the brand.
This is why brands are relying on user-generated content (UGC) to support their word-of-mouth marketing strategies.
People trust real people and real opinions. They don’t follow social media accounts for polished, overly shiny content. They crave authenticity, and the best brand ambassador programs deliver.
Want to Scale? Start Small & Thinking Strategically
Scaling a successful brand ambassador program isn’t difficult, but it does require some clearly defined stages and goals to grow in the long term.
Set Goals for Your Brand Ambassador Program
Before you start reaching out to potential brand ambassadors, it’s very important to create clearly defined goals for your brand ambassador program. Set your expectations and requirements for each brand ambassador.
While goals differ from brand to brand, defining what success looks like makes it easier to gauge the success of your brand ambassador program.
- Increase brand awareness
- Generate sales
- Drive conversions
- Expand to new audiences
- Cultivate customer loyalty
Define Your Ideal Ambassador Program Type
There’s no “one size fit all” ambassador profile type. These will differ from brand to brand and industry to industry, and as ever, the ideal brand ambassador will map back to the goals of the program you are building.
PSECU, Pennsylvania’s leading digital credit union, turned to college ambassadors to help them reach new customers and teach financial literacy to the next generation.
PSECU ambassadors complete tasks (assigned by PSECU) to unlock exclusive rewards:
- Host online financial literacy workshops
- Post their PSECU Pride
- Refer a friend to join the credit union
Reward the Creators in Your Ambassador Program
Keeping your ambassadors engaged, motivated, and committed takes the right kind of rewards. Rewards don’t have to be cash payments, though many brands adopt this compensation mechanism.
Maria Cuasay, who helped create brand ambassador programs for Lyft and Opencare, says the “importance of incentives is really to catch someone’s attention.”
Think about what motivates your potential brand ambassadors, and offer these as a token of thanks for their support. Communicate how often they’ll receive their rewards and what’s required to unlock those rewards.
Track & Measure Your Brand Ambassador Program
Don’t let data go untracked.
Once you (and your ambassadors) understand will be tracked throughout the lifetime of your brand ambassador program, it’s best to use a creator management platform to bring all this data under one umbrella so you can evaluate what’s working, what’s not and how to pivot.
Some important metrics to track:
- Post frequency
- Impressions and engagements
- Soft metrics, like shares and comments
- Ambassador challenges (and % of completion)
- Issued rewards
A creator management platform makes it possible to communicate with your ambassadors, manage key elements of your brand ambassador program, and even discover new brand ambassadors.
