The phenomenon of brand ambassadors is being terribly misused by so many small enterprises. This is due to the fact that they believe that one can’t create brand ambassadors, at least not in the way in which they persuade influencers to work for them. With influencers, you get to directly negotiate terms under which they’ll endorse you, while brand ambassadors are supposed to promote you out of their own volition. So, how do you motivate someone to start working for your brand, for free and in their own spare time? Well, there are five reliable techniques out there that you should start with.
1. Open feedback channels
The first thing you need to understand is the fact that the last thing that a person needs is to overcommit to someone who won’t give them anything in return. This is why you need to keep your feedback channels open and listen closely to what your audience is telling about you. You see, your customer service is one of the most reliable tools in the effort to generate brand ambassadors.
Coincidentally, this is also one of the first things that your audience might start praising if, eventually, they do decide to praise you. Ironically, it’s even possible to turn your community into an unofficial customer service branch, thus making a scenario where your brand ambassadors end up doing the part of the job that was meant for your customer service.
2. Endorse user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is a relatively old concept that’s currently undergoing a renaissance of its own in the era of digital marketing. One way in which this works to your benefit is by motivating your customers to make testimonials, guest posts and reviews of their own. All three of these can move your brand forward and make your content strategy that much more efficient.
On social networks such as Instagram and Snapchat, this is even easier, due to the fact that people tend to take thousands and thousands of images where they can tag (thus promote) your brand in a matter of seconds. Finally, creating content is not all of the appeals, seeing as how people also feel more interested in seeing content created by those they consider peers.
3. Buy their loyalty
This may sound outright wrong or even erase the idea of brand ambassadors being any different from influencers, however, there are other, a tad more indirect ways to buy one’s loyalty. Instead of giving them money and asking for an endorsement in return, you could look for a way to reward their prolonged loyalty, thus creating a scenario in which they feel compelled to give back. For instance, if you decide to do so via a MasterCard gift card, you’ll give them something that actually has material value. This is more reliable than gaining their loyalty through content or customization of service, seeing as how these two methods are more subjective and harder to achieve.
4. A win-win scenario
One more way to persuade your audience to endorse you is to make a scenario where they stand to gain something in return, directly. The simplest way to do this is to make a referral program-based system. This will create a situation where your audience gets awarded a reward (in term of redeemable points, discounts or even cash rewards) for every single new customer they bring in. Needless to say, the very existence of this system now brings you a double-fold advantage, due to the fact that these new customers will be drawn in to achieve their own discount/reward. This alone is powerful to start an avalanche in your favor and help make the promotion of your brand much more cost-effective.
5. A unique customer experience
In the end, you need to make your audience feel special when doing business with you, which is why you need to be different. As Maya Angelou once said, people will forget what you said and what you did but they will never forget how you made them feel. The same can be tested during your next branding campaign. By personalizing the customer experience and focusing on a P2P instead of B2B outreach in your marketing, you can achieve just that. In order to make this work, nonetheless, you’ll have to do your fair share of analytics and give your best to get to know your audience.
Conclusion
Sure, even these methods can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to transform every single person you encounter into a brand ambassador; however, this was never the objective in the first place. What you’re aiming for here is transforming a large enough demographic. Furthermore, once they start endorsing you, they might just keep doing so without any further incentive. Speaking of positive ROI, it simply doesn’t get any better.