What are Brand Ambassadors?
Businesses often choose a person or celebrity to become the “face” of the brand. This is known as a brand ambassador. It is important for the talent to be well known to the target audience and to bring positive credentials to the brand. Ideally they have established networks and relationships to market the brand and can help drive brand awareness through word-of-mouth marketing (i.e. referrals, posting about the brand on social media or creating television campaigns). Any brand wishing to drive brand awareness through use of a social influencer or celebrity should have a well researched strategy in place to ensure success.
However, these influence style programs can often feel like they are the afterthought of the marketing operation, and be poorly thought through. Brand ambassadors need to be aspirational to the target audience, inspiring them to buy your brand over a competitors. To get the right property alignment, a good plan underpinned by market research should be on every marketers check list. Ruby believes there are a couple of simple pointers to that will make all the difference when developing a brand ambassador program for your business and brand positioning is crucial.
• Do your research.
You may need to commission fresh research, or you may have existing research that can provide some insight into the key properties of your brand or company that you want illuminated by the program. How is your brand positioned and how will the talent match your positioning? The research should also provide insight into what your internal and external stakeholders feel are the best features of benefits of your company or brand, or how to overcome existing barriers and disconnects.
• Identify your best ambassadors.
Again, research can be useful here. You can draw from your team, valuable employees, partners, customer or consumer advocates are often most useful here too.
- Skill up your best people (or try a mix of stakeholders) to create and deliver brand activities internally in the business and externally where required.
- Establish ambassadors as the go-to people for anything to do with brand or company values and thinking
- Enable the ambassador team to coach and inspire others to get involved in brand. d. Provide incentives for performance – these can go well beyond monetary. Brainstorm some ideas with the ambassadors themselves.
• Establish the program.
Build an ambassador program to excite and inspire your team to embed your brand and company values.
a. Create content themes based on strategy and desired brand perception
b. Generate new ways to bring the brand to life – pop ups, new platforms, edgier stuff
c. Perhaps you could inspire the ambassador team to solve real life challenges using brand led thinking. Perhaps you could augment with advocate customers who are part of the team.
• Deliver a simple but engaging program.
The Ambassador program should be:
• Visionary and have a clear aim and mission – it should also be measurable. How do we define success here?
• It should be easy to understand (e.g. what it is, why it’s important, and what’s in it for me?) and easy to participate in; offering flexible ways for people to be involved.
• Everyone should benefit from the outputs; even if they are not an ambassador – everyone should feel the buzz, and the warm glow.
• Each team/area or group could tailor its involvement; based on the needs and priorities of the business or business unit.
• The program should tap into existing channels and operating rhythms to be communicated and delivered effectively. For example, team meetings and activity, social media platforms, and other communication channels etc.
• Maintain, measure and adjust.
Link brand ambassador activity to your company’s growth plans and goals and check progress.
• The program should be monitored and adjusted to ensure its activities and goals are aligned.
• Link brand activity to the company values and show the value of bringing the brand to life beyond traditional marketing.
• Encourage tangible outcomes as a result of every ambassador activity – intent and impact – and share real examples of progress and outcomes to validate the program and demonstrate return on investment.