How many companies are on the web today? We could say all of them, including websites and/or pages on social media, even the smallest and most deeply rooted in one’s territory. It is now a sine qua non, it is indispensable, but it is not enough.
In full digital transformation, it is not only necessary to keep up with the times, on the contrary, it is necessary to anticipate market needs in a digital and innovative key. If you want your company to make the most of its online presence, don’t overlook the brand ambassador.
In this way you will increase the awareness of your company’s brand, you will acquire new customers, you will retain the ones you already have and you will increase sales.
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Keep reading to discover the crucial role of a Brand Ambassador and how they play a significant part in promoting and representing a brand to a broader audience!
What is a brand ambassador?
As the translation suggests, it is a person who plays the role of brand ambassador, i.e. the brand spokesperson. He is a person inside or outside your company who has the task of promoting the brand and stimulating sales.
He must be very knowledgeable about your brand and your products and/or services and must have a primary role within a social network that is considered of strategic importance for the development of your ambassador marketing. The peculiarity of this figure is that in carrying out his role he behaves in an authentic, strictly personal way, the rule is that it should not be something obvious and obvious.
In essence, you give them a slice of your company’s online marketing that is done on a personal and direct level, as if it were word-of-mouth marketing. The results are there and they are decidedly good: 90% of consumers are more likely to purchase if recommended by someone.
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Difference between brand ambassador and brand advocate
A distinction is a must, in order not to create confusion in areas that may appear very similar such as ambassador marketing and advocacy marketing. In both cases, we indicate a marketing activity that makes use of people who actively promote the products or services of a company as if it were a personal initiative.
In reality, the brand ambassador is nominated by the company and paid to carry out this role, while the brand advocate is a consumer who appreciates the brand or is satisfied with the products or services offered and who works voluntarily.
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What does a brand ambassador do?
At this point, after having identified who your brand ambassadors will be and having trained them, after having established the objectives you want to achieve thanks to their work, the target, the budget, and the times, we move on to planning the activities that will be carried out. It is good to create a group, for example on Facebook, so you will always be connected and you can share useful information for your business.
Main responsibilities
Based on the fixed objectives and the reference targets, you will have to choose which social networks to bring your ambassadors into the field and set up an editorial plan with them that provides for the days and times on which the contents that will be prepared will be published. They will be the ones to elaborate on them based on the indications you have provided in the welcome kit, it is up to their initiative and their ability to prepare effective and captivating content.
The work that brand ambassadors will do for you can also be useful for promoting events you have organized and their presence at these events will allow them to do storytelling on various social networks. Let’s summarize: identify the most authoritative influencers because they are more consistent with your product or brand and able to communicate with effective storytelling.
Also, contact the relevant figures in the sector and convince them to be your brand ambassadors by agreeing on how to do sponsorship and compensation; monitor subsequent results, and measure increases in sales, online mentions, and visits to the website or social pages.
Daily activities
A brand ambassador will have to monitor product requests every day, to be able to verify any changes or improvements to be made. In addition to the sales volume, a very important part concerns the collaboration with the sellers: delivering the product to them without having communicated the characteristics and functions beforehand would be a mistake since they would not be able to exploit its benefits during the sale. Last, but not least, the activity is to control the inventory, so that the demand for the product can always be satisfied.
Salary
A surprising figure concerns the earnings of this professional figure. We are talking about figures well above the average, with revenues of around $40,000, which can very well reach $60,000 if the brand ambassador in question presents experience and truly performing skills.
Skills required
The brand ambassador requires various skills, all functional to the creation of relationships and interactions with the various sponsors. Effective communication, both human and online, is necessary, together with optimal time management regarding appointments, interventions, and content publication times. Since the unexpected never fails, add to all this a great predisposition to problem-solving and multi-tasking work, essential in dynamic and constantly changing environments such as social networks.
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Speaking of brand ambassadors, we have seen that both your employees and influencers or bloggers can fill this role. If it’s your employees, the social platform to be preferred is LinkedIn, if they are influencers or bloggers the most used social network will be Instagram. Let’s go into a little more detail.
LinkedIn is the social network developed for doing business, the link between the company you work for and your profile is close and everything is built around people’s digital identity. Another important factor: B2B was born thanks to relationships between people. You can already guess why this is the right platform for your brand ambassador employees.
Your strategy is this: you pass a lot of your corporate communication through the activities of the profiles of the people who work for you and who therefore represent you on this social network. How they operate on LinkedIn affects their reputation but also the corporate one, you must consider this aspect and think in terms of ambassador marketing. Once you understand this mechanism, you have to make all the moves and investments that allow you to make the most of this LinkedIn feature.
Only by training your internal brand ambassadors will you be able to operate profitably and use the structure of the social network to your advantage. You will have to worry about training, and providing tools, policies, and content to your employees, so they can build a solid online reputation. This will help them have a network of contacts that are useful to you, they will be seen as competent people and therefore the effectiveness of each subsequent action will be improved.
Instagram is a social network in which people are linked not only by friendships but also by interests and passions and here shopping experiences and personal evaluations are shared. For this, it is a platform that is very attractive for your brand. If your brand ambassadors are influencers, they are already at home on Instagram and have a large number of followers with whom they have a close bond. These are real people who are also consumers so they are seen as normal.
However, they can communicate naturally but with impact and can influence opinions and purchasing preferences. 74% of consumers trust advice from direct acquaintances and 64% rely on comments posted on social networks. These data testify that to gain consumer trust it is useful to get in touch with someone they trust.
Examples of famous brand ambassadors
From what has been said so far, the brand ambassador can be both an employee of your company and an external person, an influencer, or a blogger. It is the company that decides who to carry out such an important and very interesting role.
Why contact your employees? Simple: who better than them knows perfectly your brand, your vision, your mission, your products or services? They work for you, share your values, and actively participate in achieving your goals. Looking at it also from another point of view, it is a way to leverage their active participation, their involvement, and their enthusiasm. Retain your employees who will retain your customers, you only have to gain.
If, on the other hand, you look outside and entrust the role to influencers and bloggers, you are relying on professionals who have a large following and who will give a strong boost to the diffusion of your brand and products. Some examples of famous brand ambassadors are Camilla Coelho, a Brazilian influencer, and her collaboration with Singapore Airlines, or the famous Cristiano Ronaldo and his various partnerships in the world of sport and beyond.
As real people themselves, they can get their friends and followers to follow your social page, and share links and content, all while engaging audiences and making your brand appear different and tangible. Find the right influencer for your target and a good part of the game is done if you create a group of brand ambassadors, your brand will go viral.
Once you have chosen who your brand ambassadors will be, you will have to worry about providing them with all the material necessary to carry out their business: first of all, a sort of welcome kit in which you will provide all the information about your brand and your company. If you want them to promote you, they’ll need to know you very well and you’ll need to clearly explain what you expect from them.
Conclusion
Ambassador marketing allows you to bring your brand to your customers in a new way and with an innovative approach and then rely on very high communicative effectiveness of the messages but with lower economic investments than classic advertising campaigns. Add this tool to your digital strategy, you can create a synergy of marketing techniques that will allow you to be competitive, strengthen your brand and increase sales.
If you found the reading interesting and you want to learn more about some aspects of the brand ambassador and the world of digital strategies, I suggest the Digital Coach Course in Digital Strategy.
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