Every company has brand ambassadors but who are they and why should you care? More importantly, how can your company effectively engage and utilize them?

Let’s Start With the Who

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of brand ambassadors, they can be defined as someone who represents the company, offering their support and embodies the brand’s characteristics. They generally fall into three primary categories: paid, customers, and employees. Let’s do a quick breakdown of these:

Paid Ambassadors

Paid ambassadors include both Influencers and Affiliates. These are any highly-visible individuals with a following of fans who agree to help promote your brand. While engaging with influencers requires compensation, the benefit lies in the trust they have built up with their audience. Don’t just grab the biggest celebrity you can, however, focus on who will truly resonate with your brand’s audience.

Customers

Satisfied customers are the brand ambassadors perhaps most trustworthy to prospective customers. Someone who has tried your products or used your services, been happy with the results, and will happily share their experiences with just about anyone who will listen. These ambassadors will cheerfully refer you new business or validate another potential customer’s decision to work with you.

Employees

Employee brand ambassadors are such by default. Happy employees equal opportunities for happy brand ambassadors. Often, your employees already use the company’s products or services and are proud to tell their friends and family of their role within it, your services and products, or benefits community engagement efforts. On the other hand, unhappy employees are dangerous to the brand. When a weak company culture begins to affect their moral, the likelihood of customers having negative interactions with them increases.

Why Are Brand Ambassadors Important?

Every company should be recognizing and utilizing brand ambassadors as part of their overall brand strategy. Ambassador marketing helps grow brand awareness through a variety of channels. Ambassadors are also earned media and help authenticate your company in a way that paid media simply can’t. A whopping 89% of people most trust recommendations from people they know (word of mouth). What’s more, ambassador marketing has soared in recent years. 68% of brands say they plan to use, or launch, ambassador marketing programs in 2023. 

So How to Engage These Ambassadors?

There are dozens of ways to engage brand ambassadors, and your company or organization’s brand strategy, coupled with your marketing efforts, should help determine your best course of action. A few quick ideas to get you started:

• For influencers, having a good pitch is essential to getting them to agree to be ambassadors. Influencers have spent considerable time and capital building up their audience’s trust, and as such, will be very selective in which brands they promote. Do your research and look for any potential influencers who may already be interacting with your brand – they’re the most likely to say yes.
  
  
• If you’re not already, amp up engaging with your customers via social media. Respond to everyone’s comments, tweets, and likes. Retweet or repost your customer’s happy shout-outs. Address negative reviews in a thoughtful, caring manner (and hopefully turn an unhappy customer into a new ambassador!). Your ambassadors won’t necessarily be talking about you in hopes you will recognize them, but it will certainly go a long way when you do.
  
  
• Utilize your happy employees to create testimonials about why they came to work for the company. Did they use the products/services? Did they have an excellent brand experience previously? Were they drawn to the brand’s mission?
  
  
• No matter which type of ambassador you try to engage, make sure you’re giving them the tools they need to be effective. Make your social and blog posts easy to share. If you have products, make some samples available for both them and anyone they refer. Offer incentives, such as previews of new products and services, to better give them the feeling of being part of your brand’s inner circle.

When engaged correctly, brand ambassadors can be an extremely effective piece of your brand’s overall strategy and promotional efforts. If you want help identifying who could be relevant ambassadors for your company or organization, we can help! Connect with us today to get started.