Grow Your Customer Base with an Ambassador Strategy

As an entrepreneur, building a solid customer base is the priority of the business. In this time, it seems to be easy to use the power of the Internet to reach out to the mass audience, however, there are still barriers to creating a strong impression and convey the precise message to the customer.

In fact, it comes across as authentic as it suggests by a third-party organically. Study shows that approximately 91% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product after reading its positive online reviews and recommendations.

Apparently, word-of-mouth marketing can be considered as an efficient method to have the trust of customers, and building the brand ambassador team is one of the prominent ideals of this marketing strategy.

It’s no doubt that brand ambassadors can elevate your company’s brand awareness. The current trends seem to concentrate on social media influencers, who work as ambassadors and promote your business to their millions of followers.

The thing is through personal niches, ambassadors are able to expand the brand’s presence; based on that, it probably converts to sales. But without good tactics, merchants usually fail to create an effective ambassador program.

The following is our recommended guideline for those who yearn to build an effective ambassador strategy:

Step 1: Be prepared and set a goal for the ambassador strategy

Meticulous preparation is the first step of any strategy, so you should examine your resources and budget to have the amending implementation.

The first factor you should care about is the goal of your campaign. A precise and impactful goal is obliged to the success of your campaign, which demands the analysis of your strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths could include:

• flexible customer assistance
• unique features or benefits that your product offers
• The knowledge or skills of your specialists.

Weaknesses could include:

• inadequate financial resources
• paucity of your brand's reputation
• inefficient time.

Imprint on your mind these words: “Make it ambitious, but still be capable of your resource." To achieve it, we highly recommend you to divide your "big vision" into the small goal for each phase of the program and have a potent tool to keep track of the entire progress.

You should use the SMART method (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) to clarify your goals for the tracking progress. Establishing proper goals ensures that your program is achievable within a specified time and you can measure your progress during as well.

Here we suggest certain common goals you should prioritize:

Brand awareness

Getting brand awareness from customers is the gate to succeed in the influencer marketing campaign. You can approach a broader audience that has a strong connection with your ambassador. It helps spread awareness about your brand to the targeted consumers.

High social media engagement

The social channel is the most prevalent channel of your ambassadors to interact with your followers - your potential buyers. The high engagement of the audience to these channels means that your brand actively reaches out to the customer.

Read: 10 Strategies to Grow Customer Engagement and Loyalty in E-Commerce

Sales lead generation

The primary purpose of all marketing plans is to generate leads and drive sales and profits. The effective strategy is to invest the efforts to the ambassador who can give you the notable conversions. The more leads you create, the more success your ambassador campaign is.

Traffic

Increasing your website traffic is an important influencer marketing goal that deserves your consideration. But not all traffic is created equal. You should concentrate on getting traffic that is relevant and which can lead to conversions.

These goals are essential. Without identifying what you desire to accomplish, you cannot have a well-organized implementation to obtain the best results.

Step 2: Find and Engage the Appropriate Ambassadors

Depending on the target audience, finding a proper brand ambassador is crucial to tap into those you want to promote your products or services.

So you have to identify their image as well as their "online reputation" to decide who resonates with your brand's message. You need to select each of them carefully as all ambassadors represent your brand.

Now you have had a clear idea about your suitable influencer, the next step is to start choosing or combining the best channels to recruit the best ambassadors for your brand. Here are some recommendations:

On social media

Most influencers work in multiple channels, and social media is a must-check channel you have to notice. Starting your collaboration with one influencer, you have the key to open to the wider community of followers.

Search engine

Google Search is a compelling tool to search for any information. So you should utilize this engine to find influencers for your business.

For example, you can enter the niche keyword next to the original query, such as “food bloggers” to find the influencer in the F&B market.

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Using social media platforms

Manually finding the influencers may take you a lot of time, so we recommend certain platforms to support you to save effort for this work:

Social Bakers

All you need to do is fill in information about Region and Interest, the tool will generate influencers with over 100,000 followers with their details profile.

Influenex

Influenex is a useful tool to work with Youtubers. Not only it finds, analyzes, and manages Youtube influencers, but also its search filter helps you select more suitable influencers.

Buzz sumo

Using BuzzSumo’s Influencer Marketing tool, you can look for influencers related to your industry and your topic, that helps you tap into the relevant buyers in your business field.

Also, you can read this document for the full knowledge of engaging the ambassadors.

Once you successfully build the profiles of your ambassadors, it’s time to contact them. Keep your communication lines clear with them so that they can contact you whenever they are interested.

The active engagement can help them comfortably support your brand, thus leverage your ambassador strategy or program. We suggest you some way to productively interact with them:

• Contribute meaningful comments to their posts.
• Gently start a fruitful conversation.
• Reshare their content on your channel.
• Reach out to them with sincerity by email, private chat, and face-to-face interaction.

Maintaining absolute transparency with them is the first thing to build a long-term relationship, thus, retain them to your program.

Step 3: Motivate and Empower Your Ambassadors

The major key of having a triumphant ambassador strategy is to motivate your ambassador. You should furnish them with creative tools, and benefit them, such as:

• Your exclusive products
• An invitation letter to your events.
• Educational benefits to “keep your career moving”
• Discounts on communications expenses.
• Opportunities to earn trips to entertainment.

Beyond the influencer-business owner relationship, you should consider them as an indispensable part of your team.

Be open to get feedback from their performance and encourage them by recognizing their effort as a valuable gift to your brand.

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Perhaps it will take some training to maximize the performance of your brand ambassadors, guarantee the story they're telling about the company well and confirm they feel relatable to your brand.

In many cases, we find out that many ambassadors play a role as the enthusiastic marketing team members. It helps you save time and effort to execute your marketing program.

Step 4: Measure Your Campaign

You need to keep track of the goals in the first step with these essential Key Performance Indicators to decide the progress of your campaign. You can then modify the activities if needed and maneuver your effort for each goal.

Here are the top metrics that you should focus on:

• Cost Per Lead (CPL)

CPL is taken by dividing affiliate marketing campaign expenditures by the number of leads obtained from the campaign. It measures the cost-effectiveness of the lead generation that was created by the affiliate.

• The Conversion Rate (CR)

This is one of the commonly used KPIs in affiliate marketing. It measures the percentage of people encouraged to buy your products by the affiliate.

• Social Engagement

Social media engagement combines the number of comments, shares, and mentions earned by operating the affiliate campaign. Once the campaign becomes viral, it causes the success of affiliate marketing.

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It is all about the work of optimizing your primary value creation process and attempting improvement. Without measurement, you are unable to know the result of the campaign, and the wrong thing you had during the implementation. What you learn from these mistakes can improve the next program.

Final thoughts

Ambassador marketing becomes popular in the business world because of its effectiveness for approaching and building the trust of the broad audience.

The ambassador not only promotes your product or service but also convinces their followers of the value of your brand. Besides, clear and concise influencer marketing goals are needed for a successful influencer campaign. The more strategically you put into planning, the more successful your program will be.

Do you feel ready to implement an efficient ambassador strategy? Please leave us a comment below.

This article is contributed by UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing (formerly Secomapp).

Further reading: Referral Marketing vs Affiliate Marketing: Here’s What You Need to Know