A brand ambassador program is a solid way to get people chatting about your company and what it has to offer. These programs typically come from social media and blogs, as your brand ambassadors create posts and other content in which they highlight your products. However, there’s a bit more to them than just providing influencers with products and watching to see what happens. A good brand ambassador program contains some structure, starting with the influencers themselves.
The first step requires you to choose your brand ambassadors. There are three main ways to do this. You can either personally invite influencers to be a part of your program, create an application that the potential influencers must fill out, or you can go through a company that connects you with them. For both the invitation and application route, you’ll have to go through each social media account separately to see how much interaction there is between the influencer and his or her followers. This obviously takes some time, so that’s a factor to consider. Using a platform that matches you to influencers saves you the time it takes to find and communicate with them. No matter which option you choose, if you don’t have your goals defined, your campaign won’t have a direction.
Your brand ambassador campaign goals can be as simple or in-depth as you want. With that said, simply “increasing brand awareness” isn’t enough. You have to put some numbers on it. Spend some time going over your goals. Do you want to see your sales increase by 40 percent? Or have your Instagram followers go up by 20 percent? It helps if you know what you want your brand ambassadors to accomplish, as you can plan different program components to meet those goals. You can also tweak things as the program moves forward if you don’t see any changes. Remaining a little flexible helps if you don’t see those goals being met. With that said, it may take some time for your program to gain traction, so some patience is required.
Many brand ambassador programs provide some incentives for influencers. Obviously, they receive free products, and in some cases, an additional payment. If you set specific goals for your influencers, you can reward them with bonuses for meeting them. It’s really up to you how you want to design this part of the program. Another thing to keep in mind is incentives for your influencer’s followers. Do you want to give them specific discounts to give out? Setting each one up with a different discount code is an easy way to track the effectiveness of each brand ambassador. You can also have them host giveaways of your products in which the main entry requirement is following both the influencer and your company on social media.
This is another crucial component of a brand ambassador program. Once it ends, you should ask your brand ambassadors a series of questions or even direct them to an online questionnaire. Their feedback will definitely help you develop and improve your brand ambassador program. You can set up these surveys to deploy immediately after the program ends, or even have a mid-campaign one to see how things are going. If you want to make any adjustments in the middle of the program’s duration (as long as you don’t have a contract with your ambassadors that doesn’t allow such things), then you can.
Developing a brand ambassador program requires you to set your goals and incentives before you choose your influencers. You shouldn’t run these programs on the fly. Need help finding influencers to be brand ambassadors for your brand? Contact Statusphere to get started!