The fact is, we all rely upon people's reviews for our buying decisions and this can become the key for Your market adoption.
Whether it's about buying a new Ape Image or another organic facial cream, social media plays a very important role in discovering products and services we use in our everyday life.
In this Ultimate Guide to ambassador marketing, we will cover all aspects of brand ambassador management planning, strategy and recruitment.
Who is a Brand Ambassador?
Often times, brand ambassadors get confused by influencers, so thus ambassador marketing as influencer marketing. However, both the terms are quite different. While an Instagram celebrity might be an influencer, they may or may not be the brand ambassador for a company.
Brand ambassadors are community members, users and customers who are familiar with your ideas and products and want to share about it. They can be local influencers, global influencers or even can be everyday users. The big difference in them and typical influencers is, they are your users and customers so they will cost less and will have much higher brand loyalty than a typical influencer.
What brand ambassadors can do?
ShuttleOne a Singapore based lending platform leverages brand ambassadors for creating more awareness on social media. Hypersign at the same place, used ambassador program to bring new customers to their platform.
Here are some of the goals you can achieve with ambassadors?
- Creating user generated content
- Generated more leads
- Spread your message and promote the brand narrative on social media
- Build brand awareness and authority
- Create high social media engagement and reach
In short, ambassador marketing is your go-to strategy for creating massive impact without spending money on advertisement.
Pro Tip: You can retarget people visiting your website through ambassadors and exponentially improve your advertising campaigns.
This leads us to the main chapter of this tutorial, which is How to launch and run a brand ambassador program
Ambassador Marketing Plan Architecture
Your monthly marketing strategy must have a budget for ambassador program
While in all marketing models, customers are kept at the bottom of the funnels, a community driven marketing does exactly opposite.
Ambassador marketing turns your users and customers into your flag holders who are responsible to bring more customers for your business.
So in a sense, influencer promotion becomes a natural way to grow a brand easily. In Afleet, we have developed all the tools that you might require to manage a successful ambassador program without selling your soul.
3 Steps to launch your first ambassador program
Recruitment
It begins with an announcement through your email list, social media and whichever channel of communication you use. Here requires a form with basic questions a potential ambassador can fill along with the perks and benefits of the program.
Before you make an announcement, keep a list of benefits, rewards, type of activities and expectations from ambassadors. This is all the information which we will use in our announcement.
Here requires a dedicated ambassador manager who will evaluate all the applications and onboard right people.
You can use Afleet to launch a recruitment form in one single click. For our premium partners we offer a dedicated blog post with complete program details which you can share with your community through social media.
Management
Once we have a list of selected ambassadors, now it's time to invite them for a call to explain the rules of the game. If you are using Afleet, you can gamify entire ambassador experience with reward points and tasks.
Ambassadors will earn reward points for completing their activities which they can later convert into real rewards (we will talk about rewards in the next section). You can completely customise what is going to be the max cap as well as the number of reward points ambassadors will receive when they complete a campaign.
This creates a fun environment for everyone in the community and they feel excited and engaged. Ambassadors can submit their work for each campaign from their dashboard. You can either accept or reject their submission. If you accept, platform will automatically distribute reward points to the ambassador.
Reward
Incentives make sure that good ambassadors are getting paid for their efforts. This doesn't only have to be in terms of money. You can create any type of rewards through Afleet ambassador software. You can also decide the required points to claim the reward. Ambassadors can claim their rewards and you can manage it all from a single dashboard.
Remember, money is not the only reward you can offer. Social rewards, appreciation and recognition is a beautiful way to know an ambassador how important their work is.
Now when you know what it takes to launch your first ambassador program, let's talk about some common questions that you might have before launching a program... shall we?