If you are looking for your next growth strategy, it might be time to consider starting an ambassador program.
But, starting a brand ambassador program is only the first step in this compelling marketing strategy.
Once you launch your program, you will need to start creating engaging and fun activities and campaigns for your ambassadors to take part in. But not all program activities are created equal.
Some campaigns and activity types always seem to stick with ambassadors and get them excited to participate in the program.
While are others just... flop.
But today, we want to focus on the activities that always yield success. These activity types help increase brand recognition, promote trust, and delight your ambassadors.
So let's talk about the nine best campaigns and activities that you can incorporate into your ambassador program today!
What Is an Ambassador Program?
An ambassador program is a marketing strategy a brand can incorporate to mobilize their biggest fans and customers and have them complete activities or campaigns in exchange for various rewards.
Brands start an ambassador program to reach a variety of goals, including:
- Increase brand recognition
- Bump in sales
- Relationship and reputation management
- Creating a thriving community around their brand
Brands do this by recruiting passionate customers and having them create content (both online and offline) to help reach all of the goals listed above.
Ambassadors can work with the brand for short-term and long-term periods, depending on the brand's contract length.
Brand ambassador marketing helps market your products to the masses genuinely, helping position your brand as trustworthy to new, potential customers.
How to Start a Brand Ambassador Program
Your brand will need to take a few crucial steps before launching your ambassador program. While it might seem overwhelming, it is manageable when you have a thoughtful strategy and solid tooling that makes setup easy.
Here is an overview of the steps it takes a brand to launch its ambassador program:
- Define your goals and metrics
- Plan your recruitment strategy
- Define your tooling
- Plan your overall strategy - activities, ambassador rewards, etc
- Start recruiting ambassadors
- Launch your program
- Continually maintain and keep things fresh
The Benefits of Brand Ambassador Programs
The benefits of ambassador programs are infinite. Your brand will yield many rich advantages with proper planning and commitment to the program, including growth, recognition, and a more profound sense of community.
Moreover, brand ambassadors help turn happy customers into advocates to live long supporters. Your ambassadors will help convert more customers and stay committed to your brand for the long run.
Some of the benefits your brand can gain from hosting an ambassador program include:
- Increase in brand awareness
- Additional content streams
- Improved credibility and promoted trust
- A more 'real' approach to marketing
- More word-of-mouth
- Community building
- Less expensive with a higher ROI
The Most Popular Ambassador Campaigns and Activities to Ignite Your Community
Starting an ambassador program is the first step in unlocking this powerful marketing and community-building strategy.
If you are starting your ambassador program or looking for new ideas to keep activities fresh, try incorporating these nine campaign types into your activity rotation.
UGC that Includes Your Product
You might have heard the term product seeding before, but what does product seeding mean?
This is the key to generating more UGC and more buzz around your brand.
You will send your brand ambassadors product, and they will create content with your product on social media. This helps generate more
- word of mouth buzz
- User-generated content
- Product feedback
- Affiliate sales
- website traffic
You can earn from product seeding common types of UGC: haul or unboxing videos, funny reels or TikToks, and various product images with product reviews.
We recommend giving your ambassadors a prompt and letting them get creative! Don't be too stringent on how they should structure the content, or else it will read ad ingenuine.
Try Hosting a Giveaway
If you have been on social media over the past year, you have probably seen a rise in the giveaway.
Rightly so, because free is music to the average consumer's ears.
If you are looking for a way to generate some quick buzz and increase engagement, then sync with your top ambassadors and host a giveaway.
Be sure to have your ambassadors instruct their audience to follow your brand and try to get more traffic directed to your website.
The ambassadors will do their job of helping you generate more traffic to your social media channels or website. Still, it's important to remember that most people will follow you just for the chance to win the giveaway.
So your job is to delight them and convert them into a customer. Along with other marketing techniques, you can achieve this by utilizing your brand ambassadors to help you increase word of mouth, UGC, trust, and promote your brand to the masses.
Create Blog Content or Translate Articles
Ambassadors are natural content creators, so don't hesitate to ask them to create blog content or guest blogs for you.
Being a solid writer or storyteller often comes naturally to content creators and ambassadors because they often write or tell compelling stories on their social media.
Additionally, ambassadors can be great translators. If you have a global team of ambassadors and want to translate your content to other languages, use your ambassadors to do just that.
This is a prevalent activity for crypto brands.
By utilizing your ambassadors to create written content, you will be able to get a fresh take and a new voice to add to your blog posts.
You can give them a prompt with something they are knowledgeable about, such as social media content creation.
Going Live or Host an Instagram Takeover
Do some of your top ambassadors have a large amount of social pull? Meaning do they have a large platform with tons of engagement?
Coordinate with them to go live on your social media or have them do a takeover.
They could go live and teach a master class on their niche. Maybe you work with many athletes, so invite each of your top-performing ambassadors to go live on your social and have them create fun and engaging content.
For example, one ambassador could talk about nutrition, the next could do a live workout, and another could do a yoga class.
Then, reward your other ambassadors for attending the live or engaging with the content that the host publishes!
Engaging with Your Content (in Exchange for Points)
On CrewFire, we offer engagement activities where a brand can link their Instagram or Twitter, and ambassadors will get alerted each time the brand posts on either of the platforms.
Once an ambassador engages with the content, we automatically reward them points which they can use towards cash or points.
This activity type is wildly successful, with brands seeing 2x to 3x more engagement since utilizing this activity. In addition, with relatively little work, the ambassador gets to help the brand they love (most engagement activities take under 2 minutes to complete).
The best part is you need to post, and we do the rest. And with the help of your ambassadors, you will be able to see more engagement; ambassadors love it because they want to support you.
Generating Affiliate Sales
We talk about affiliate marketing a lot here at CrewFire, but it works so damn well.
It's a win-win strategy for the brand, the ambassador, and the consumer.
But still, even with all the evidence of brands seeing MASSIVE spikes in revenue after starting an affiliate program, we still have people asking;
Is affiliate marketing legit?
And we are here to say that yes, affiliate marketing is legit and extremely lucrative!
You can utilize your ambassadors to boost sales by providing them with a custom coupon code or affiliate link. In addition, your brand ambassadors can make content with your product and direct their followers to your website to purchase from you.
Why do you think websites like Honey are so wildly popular?
Because everyone loves a discount, and most people trust the recommendations of friends and content creators that they follow.
Prompt Ambassadors to Share Your Content on Their Feeds
Another relatively low lift but high reward activity type is a share.
With this activity type, you will provide the content that you want the ambassador to share, and they will share it on their feed or in their story.
You can focus on a top-of-funnel strategy to help generate more brand recognition with the help of your ambassadors or focus on specific materials, such as blog posts, company or product updates, or discounts and sales.
This activity is accessible for ambassadors to complete and a popular one since ambassadors can get rewards and help give you the necessary exposure to reach your growth goals.
The best part? You can do this all in CrewFire. 😄
Create Tutorials or Guides Using Your Products
Another fun campaign you can propose to your ambassadors is for them to create a tutorial or guide for your product.
This can look like many things:
- Long-form video on YouTube
- A written article on Medium
- A short-form video on TikTok or Instagram
- Going live
Give your ambassador the product and let them use their content-creating abilities and creativity to make an exciting and sticky tutorial!
You can repurpose this.
Activities Focused on Building Community
Lastly, we had to touch on activity types that strengthen your community and give your ambassadors the chance to meet one another.
There are a variety of ways to do this, including:
- Asking them to follow their fellow ambassadors
- Having your ambassadors participate in your lives on Instagram
- Jump on a Zoom call together
- Go to in-person events together
We have found that the stronger the community, the stronger the ambassador program. So while it might seem that you should only focus your ambassador strategy on growth and increase in sales, that isn't necessarily an essential piece.
The more of a family the ambassadors, feel they're in, the more committed they will be to both the program and your brand.
Ambassadors are customers, too, so invest in them as much as you do the social strategy that ties into your ambassador strategy.
Conclusion
If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out our 8 tips for boosting engagement when engagement in your ambassador program takes a dip!
Ready to turn your customers into your thriving crew of brand ambassadors? If so, watch the epic CrewFire demo video or get in touch with us to learn how you can drive more referrals, word-of-mouth, and user-generated content for your Shopify store.
Get in touch w/ Rony (CEO - CrewFire)
- Email: Rony@crewfire.com
- Book A Call: https://www.crewfire.com/call
