If you’re considering starting a brand ambassador or brand advocate program, you likely understand its value. It boosts brand awareness. Your top customers promote your brand for you. It engages influential early adopters. It gathers user feedback. It builds real connections with your customers. We especially appreciate how Hootsuite’s CEO Ryan Holmes describes the brand’s early growth by using an ambassador program.
But, as we’re all aware, understanding the value and actually beginning and running a successful program are two very different things. Here are some of the common questions (and answers of course) related to creating a successful program.
Who do I choose as my ambassadors?
There are several answers to this question, but generally, many brands prefer the application approach. This lets brands seek advocates with specific qualities and helps identify those who are most committed and align with the brand’s values. This can be done through a straightforward survey or application, enabling the marketing team to select a diverse group based on a clear set of criteria. Other methods include watching who is already sharing on social media or organizing events for you, keeping the program open for anyone wanting to be an ambassador, or running a competition.
How do I engage these ambassadors?
Engagement is a lot easier if you have a platform or online community to do it, because you can easily see and measure everything in one place. This gives you one place to suggest different activities to ambassadors, let them interact with each other and offer encouragement back to them.
How much time does this take to do well (really)?
As with anything, it depends on you. If you’re hosting lots of events and special activities for ambassadors, it can be a lot more time intensive. Or, if you’re planning on using email to communicate with advocates, plan for a lot of time spent going back and forth and answering questions. If you put time into developing a strategy and figuring out how you’re going to keep in touch with ambassadors from the outset, however, you’ll be in good shape to spend anywhere from a couple of hours to ten hours a week.
What should the ambassadors do on my behalf?
Here are a few activities that we like here, with examples from Urban Outfitters, Converse, and Evernote, to name a few. Depending on whether you’re a B2C or B2B brand, activities could include:
- hosting user meetups or Google hangouts
- sharing brand or product news on social media
- working at an event or booth on behalf of the brand
- blogging
- writing product reviews
- sharing product samples or brochures
- speaking at a conference or other event
- creating content, such as photos and videos
How do I prove out the value of a program to senior management?
This is usually the difference between using an ambassador platform and trying to do everything manually, because to show value (particularly to those more skeptical than you!), you need data and metrics and analytics. Determine what metrics are most important to your organization – ambassador engagement (and by amount of time or number of activities), ambassador satisfaction, amount of new content produced, amount of content/news shared, impact on sales numbers, number of ambassadors involved…then use a platform to actually track these metrics. Trying to do with your own spreadsheet is doable, but certainly more time consuming. (And we’re going to go ahead and guess that time is not something you have a ton of!)
How do I reward them?
Again, depends on the brand, but some of the best programs use free product, the opportunity to try out new products or features first, getting prominently featured on the website or social media, getting invited to special events, cool swag. Money can sometimes be used, but this isn’t always the best motivator, particularly when you’re trying to form long-lasting relationships with the people who are your top fans.
How do I ensure that I don’t lose them 6 months from now?
By listening to them! Ask for feedback on what’s working with the program and what’s not working. Reward them according to really awesome accomplishments. Allow them to gain more benefit by getting to interact with each other. Encourage them and recognize all the amazing things they do for you. And lastly, understand that there may be certain times in life when an ambassador has something else going on in life and has to step back for a few weeks or months. If you appreciate them, they’ll be back and they’ll be fans for life.
How many ambassadors is the right number?
Many brands start with programs in the ~25-50 ambassador range to keep it a tight-knit, exclusive group. Others start with 100 or 200, particularly when they have a college program and want to get good reach across universities in U.S. (or even the world). Other brands have a thousand or more. The most important thing is picking your strategy – do you want to keep it tight-knit and really know all of your ambassadors? Or is it more important to you to involve a large number of people doing more limited types of activities?
What other questions come to mind for you? Let us know in the comments!
A version of this post appeared on the Upward Labs blog.
Photo credits: Flickr, Susanne Nilsson; Flickr, Upupa4me; Flickr, Clyde Robinson