Creating a community of loyal customers, followers and fans to build social buzz around your brand might sound easy when you’ve already got over 20k followers on Instagram. However, we know from first-hand experience that embarking on your own journey to build the foundation of a solid ambassador marketing strategy comes with a multitude of challenges.
In this post, we’ll show you how you can harness the power of brand ambassadors to generate content, build brand awareness, drive sales and ultimately, deliver better results.
8 Ways to Use Ambassador Marketing to Boost Sales
1. Activate Your Existing Community
The keyword here is “existing” and we can’t emphasise it enough. The only way you’re going to see positive ROI from ambassador marketing is if you take your existing customers and turn them into your brand ambassadors.
Why’s that? Well, your existing customers are already loyal to your brand. They’re familiar with your product and no doubt already love it which is why they keep coming back for more or why they crush all over your brand on social media.
These loyal fans will naturally and authentically shout about your brand when they make the switch to becoming your brand ambassadors, except now, they’ll reap the rewards as well.
2. Incentivise Your Ambassadors to Create Content
Getting enough fresh content for daily posts on social media is a headache every marketing professional faces and it can be a costly exercise when hiring professional photographers, stylists or videographers. One of the most cost-effective ways to generate organic content is through your brand ambassadors.
If you’re an A-type personality you’ll naturally be worried about the quality of the content you might receive from customers who aren’t professional photographers, models or stylists. Fear not. With the right ambassador marketing tool, you’ll be in total control PLUS the technology in smartphone cameras is so good these days, who needs a professional photographer anyway?!
When looking for curated content from ambassadors that you can reuse on your own social channels, it’s important to set all the parameters around the kind of content you want your ambassadors to create. Make sure to set clearly defined terms and conditions or show ambassadors an inspiration board to guide them in the right direction.
More importantly, to ensure high-quality mobilisation can happen through gift cards, cash, freebies or points rewards but ultimately you’ll want to compensate ambassadors fairly and transparently so that you build their customer loyalty towards your brand while simultaneously having them create hype.
UGC images, left: @maltipoo.kona for BRKLZ, right: @dancer.mila for Fabletics, cover: @adanielarocha for NA-KD
3. Optimise Campaigns to Target Sales Performance
With an army of ambassadors on your side, you’ll be able to create hype around every new product that you launch or every holiday season campaign you run. Mobilising ambassadors to shout about your brand online is the first step in creating a buzz on social media.
We recommend planning far ahead of time to optimise you ambassador marketing campaigns to target sales performance. First, you might want to ship free products to specific ambassadors as part pre-campaign prep to get ambassadors to create the content you'll need for the campaign. Thereafter you're ready to deploy your ambassador superfans with marketing tasks to generate big sales.
4. Build Brand Awareness
Nothing builds brand awareness quite like a community of brand ambassadors representing your brand online. Whether that’s through promoting your products, mentioning your brand in their bio, creating awareness around new product launches or advocates for the causes that are close to the heart of your brand’s mission.
Building awareness about your brand in the online space is paramount in building a trustworthy name, an emotive factor that's hard to quantify but oh-so important in the psychology of consumer behaviour.
Your online presence and reputation is everything when it comes to consumers making purchases through your eCommerce store so when someone has already bought one of your products and refers to your brand through word-of-mouth marketing - you’ve found the sweet spot!
Hot tip: To build trust online you can leverage your brand ambassadors for all important product reviews.
5. Track Revenue With Discount Codes & Tracking Links
It’s no secret that the goal of any ambassador marketing campaign is to drive sales. When you’ve invested time, resources and finance into a strategy - you’ll, no doubt, want to see ROI!
When you reward ambassadors fairly for their efforts in driving sales, you can expect to see massive sales! Of course, that comes with a little creative planning from your side but we strongly believe that when the right ambassadors are fairly compensated for their sales efforts you’ll see major growth for your brand. Let's look at 3 ways you can track revenue.
By assigning unique discount codes to each of your ambassadors to share with their respective communities, you’ll be able to reach a much larger scope of prospective customers. Integrating your eCommerce store with your chosen ambassador marketing tool is important in this regard, as it will enable you to keep track of how many unique ambassador discount codes are being used.
This indicates which of your ambassadors are more prosperous for your brand, subsequently helping you distinguish what kind of brand advocates connect better with your target audience and provide you with better ROI. This connection is the one you’ll want to continue nurturing as it will drive social buzz (plus brand awareness) and revenue at the same time - and you’ll be able to monitor it!
Code drops, a unique feature to our platform, are designed to help brands move stock on their webshops that aren't moving as fast as they’d like, without the need for them to have to put a sale on their website. Their ambassador community has 24 hours to grab a discount code and buy a product, creating a sense of urgency which results in rapid sales for brands.
Tracking links are unique links generated for each individual ambassador that allow them to earn commission on sales made via their link and more importantly, as the name suggests, they allow brands to track those sales. Ambassadors can share their link with their friends and followers and each sale made through their link will be attributed to their account.
6. Segment Ambassadors Based on Performance
With our platform, you’re able to assign specific Missions to particular niche groups within your larger community of ambassadors. This means that you can curate exclusive Missions to ambassadors who generate the most revenue for your brand to get them to generate even more sales.
A function like this is incredibly helpful when it comes to the administrative side because it lets you regulate the availability of your marketing tasks across your community.
Brands are able to create custom segments depending on how they want to target specific ambassadors with particular Missions, for example, higher-paying reward Missions may only be accessible to ambassadors with higher follower counts and might be called the “10k+ Instagram” segment.
7. Set Clear Goals & Monitor Results
The results of your brand ambassador strategy will depend upon the outcomes you set from the start. If your goal is to drive more UGC (user-generated content) - make sure your campaigns are set around that.
If your goal is to drive sales, you’ll want to push discount codes, tracking links or code drops. All of this is possible with a ton of manual effort but if you really want to succeed and succeed at scale - you’ll want to do it with the right tool.
8. Use the Right Tools
Harnessing the power of brand ambassadors at scale and tracking revenue is only feasible with the right tools at hand. We’ve created an easy-to-use platform that allows you to automate your processes and communicate with a large number of ambassadors in a single click.
