How to Build a Brand Ambassador Program

Come on, let’s be honest. Do you know what exactly a brand ambassador program is?

A brand ambassador program formalizes your relationship with people who have a special connection to your brand and engages with them to help you increase your visibility and enhance your corporate branding strategy. Through a brand ambassador program, it is possible to recruit your biggest advocates to your cause: people who are already committed to the company. These people are willing to promote your company willingly, without being asked to do it.

Your ambassadors will focus on promoting the brand by increasing sales, generating conversions and/or increasing brand awareness, both online and offline. Therefore, a brand ambassador program allows the company to channel the power of trusted referrals to achieve your company’s goals efficiently.

As part of the program, you can provide “premium” information, including key brand and campaign messages, so they can help attain your word-of-mouth objectives.

It will also be necessary to give some basic guidelines to follow when representing the brand. But even with these guidelines, the ambassadors will manage to promote the brand in an authentic, unscripted way. The use of a program is to help get the word out about you on social media, on other websites, at public events, at trade shows, at face-to-face interactions and through networking.

5 steps to create a brand ambassador program

Setting up a brand ambassador program may seem complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, if you have satisfied customers, it’s already a good start. Here are 5 steps to create a brand ambassador program.

Know what you are looking for in your brand ambassadors

Before starting an ambassador program, you have to find the right fit for that matter. But even before that, what you need to know is what qualities make an ambassador suitable for you to implement your program.

Whether they are authorities, targeted audience ambassadors or customers who love your brand, you want ambassadors who help you achieve your brand’s specific objectives. That is, those who embody your brand’s philosophy and have a special connection to your brand.

Find and outreach your ambassadors

Note that this is not an irrelevant task. Naturally, before you find them, you have to know who you are looking for, but once you know, it’s spend time to get going and search. You can find ambassadors through three main systems: manually searches on social network, through software programs or using an application process.

Before you decide to implement a brand ambassador program, you may already know people who told you on social media how much they like your brand. If you have that information or they’ve posted back, that’s a good place to start.

You can search social network for more people who have used your hashtags or tagged you in their posts, but this can be time-consuming and frustrating. And searching for people who have mentioned your brand (without tags or hashtags) is even harder. But you can get started.

Instead, the software can easily find people who have been involved with you.

Or you can also do it by opening a call for applications so that others can send you their “resumes”. All you have to do is to open an application form on your website.

Set, share and track objectives for the brand ambassador program

Now that you’ve recruited a group of authentic and enthusiastic ambassadors, it’s time to reach an agreement with each of them, give them the information they need to be brand experts and set goals together.

Establish what the mission of each one of them is, what you would like them to share, what image of your brand do you want them to project to users?

On top of that, you will have to decide whether you will pay or compensate your ambassadors for their collaboration. Some programs pay ambassadors with products, some with money, and some don’t pay at all. Whatever you choose, you must define and communicate it to your ambassadors. Tell them what their reward will be.

You can choose whether or not to pay your ambassadors, but reward them for their work anyway

As mentioned earlier, when setting your goals, you should establish whether and how you will pay ambassadors. Yes, most ambassadors agree to do it without getting paid, but a reward is a great way to show ambassadors how valuable they are.

Always make an effort to keep a good relationship with brand ambassadors and keep them updated and informed.

When you start a long-term relationship, you don’t just get in touch with someone once and take off just like that, with no further contact. You keep in touch with them and strive to build a relationship of trust.

With brand ambassadors, it’s exactly the same. Don’t stop communication after initial calls or emails. Rather, always leave the lines of communication open with your brand ambassadors. It’s important that ambassadors can easily contact you if they have any questions or concerns.

It is also important for ambassadors to provide feedback to help build your brand. Ambassadors want your company to succeed. They will often offer different perspectives that will help you make campaigns and promotions work better with certain audiences. And they are excellent candidates for testing and commenting on new products.

But make sure the feedback is mutual and goes both ways. Recognize ambassadors for their successes, encourage them and reward their efforts. You can also make constructive and kind suggestions on how they can better promote your brand (as long as it doesn’t get in the way of their creative control).

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