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Research Study: Here’s the Types of Content We Want (and Trust) From Influencers

influencer shopper Influencer marketing continues to thrive as brands look to align themselves with social media darlings who have cultivated the audiences that brands covet. A new study from SlickText has some wonderful insights not only into the type of content we want from influencers, but how those views change across different age groups.

Before we get into the study’s findings, what IS an influencer? An influencer is someone who can produce a change in behavior for other people, via the content they create. So in general terms, any content creator is also an influencer. The influencers who are the most coveted then, are the ones that can product the change in behavior that a brand desires.

Here’s some examples:

  • If 7 Eleven wants to connect with millennials to help drive sales of a new flavor of Slurpee, then the brand might partner with popular streamers on Twitch
  • If Ford wants to connect with married adults to promote its new SUV, it might partner with YouTube content creators who do video reviews of automobiles
  • If the state of Missouri wanted to draw attention to its bicentennial celebrations happening this summer, the state might partner with travel bloggers to create images and videos of landmarks in Missouri for Instagram

 

With that overview of influencers in mind, let’s take a closer look at the study’s key findings:

Reviews from influencers are considered the most helpful and desired content

38% of respondents listed reviews as the content they preferred from influencers.  Additionally, almost 35% of respondents said that unbiased product reviews is the content that makes influencers feel more authentic. This type of content also helps develop trust with the influencers’ audience. This is why you are seeing many influencers shift toward product reviews and unboxings as their main source of content. If the content is tightly focused on a particular product grouping, space or line, it can quickly establish the expertise of the influencer and help them develop a niche following that’s highly desired by brands.

Now, I mentioned that the study found that 38% of respondents listed reviews as the content they most preferred from influencers. Reviews are the most preferred form of content from influencers, and that held for all groups and genders except for Gen Z women. Females in this group prefer how-to content. Additionally, Gen Z women said that the best way for influencers to win their trust is to interact with them. This ties into what I’ve written here before about how streamers on Twitch use the platform to engage with their followers as individuals.  This makes their ability to influence the behavior of a large group scale more effectively than it can on other social platforms.

 

Too much sponsored content erodes influencer trust.

All age groups agreed that too many sponsored posts made respondents less likely to trust the influencer. This creates a problem because for many influencers, sponsored content is their main or only source of income.

For influencers trying to walk that line when it comes to sponsored content and maintaining trust, it helps to be completely open with how sponsored content is required to help support you. I’ve noticed on Twitch that streamers are extremely upfront about their sponsored content, and why they need it and how it helps support them. I was watching one streamer and someone donated $100 as he was playing a game. The streamer thanked the person profusely for the donation, and then explained to his audience that he had taken his car to have a tire replaced earlier that day and that it was an expense he wasn’t counting on, and that donation would cover the expense. This level of transparency with your audience helps establish trust and I think it even makes the audience (at least on Twitch) more likely to donate more since it helps them understand how the streamer will use and need their donations.

As always, honestly and transparency leads to trust.  In all areas of life.  There’s many more interesting takeaways if you want to check out the study for yourself.

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NIL Laws Are Now In Effect In Multiple States

And just like that, the worlds of branding, marketing and amateur athletics are completely changed.

Starting today in multiple states, college athletes can make money off their Name, Image and Likeness. These NIL laws that go into effect in states across the country today will forever change college athletics, as well as branding and marketing.

Very soon, every college athlete will be a potential influencer that brands can work with. Think about that for a minute, I saw an interview with a sports marketing firm that said overnight the number of marketable athletes who can earn endorsement dollars will go from 5,000 to 500,000.

To say this is a massive sea-change in the worlds of branding and influencer marketing is a massive understatement.

I got an email from the University of Alabama yesterday that gives some guidance on what these new NIL laws mean for fans.  Here’s a portion of that email:

May a booster or fan enter into an agreement with a University of Alabama (“UA”) student-athlete (“SA”) for the use of the SA’s name, image, or likeness (“NIL”) in exchange for money, goods or services? Yes, subject to the restrictions imposed by Alabama law (PDF). Before entering such a contract, the SA is required to disclose any proposed contract for use of their NIL to UA. It is possible, and likely, that federal laws and NCAA legislation will ultimately provide a nationwide, uniform approach to NIL governance, at which point restrictions on these agreements are subject to change.

Alabama has a page set up with more information on NIL here. In short, athletes can make money off their name, image and likeness. But any agreement cannot be dependent on athletic performance (such as you earn X number of dollars for every touchdown you score) and the school cannot work with the SA to help facilitate deals.  The school can educate SAs on the process.  The student athlete cannot tie deals to their involvement in university events and can’t wear the logos of their school without permission.

My friend Kristi Dosh has been all over this story for months. She has a great post on how most student athletes will now be facing many of the same compensation questions that bloggers and content creators have wrestled with for years now.

What Will Change as a Result of NIL Laws?

Now you suddenly have up to a million new influencers on the market, and they will be doing a lot of experimenting with monetizing their images. It’s honestly going to be a fun time for marketing geeks, as we get to see the creative ways in which these student athletes monetize their images and brands. As for those of us who will be lucky enough to guide and work with these student athletes and help them with their efforts.

But make no mistake, the world of college athletes as we know it will never be the same. This. Changes. EVERYTHING. It will honestly be tough on these student athletes to manage everything. And it will likely raise issues; what if the star quarterback decides to show up late for practice because he was shooting a commercial with the local auto dealership? What if the star running back wants to sit out the second half of blowouts in order to stay healthy for more endorsement deals? It’s going to create a lot of issues that casual fans won’t fully appreciate, or approve of.

The bottom line is this is the beginning of the end of amateur athletics.

But it’s also going to be insanely exciting to see what happens next. These student athletes are ridiculously savvy when it comes to social media and content creation. Many of them have already built engaged communities on Twitter, Instagram and other social sites. Those networks can now be monetized for the first time, and I for one am looking forward to seeing how it plays out.

If you want to get all the latest information on NIL laws and to see where we have been and where we are going, check out Kristi’s site The Business of College Sports.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Clubhouse Arrives on Android, FB’s Group Accelerator Program, Gen Z Likes Influencers

Happy Monday, y’all! Some big social media tech news this week as we are already in the middle of May. Summer is around the corner!

 

The wait is finally over for Android users, Clubhouse is here. It looks like it’s being rolled out to US users first, with the rest of the world getting it soon. This may actually get me back on Clubhouse. An influx of new users will bring new perspectives and it will be interesting to see how this impacts the quality and type of rooms, as well as the overall experience. Plus, it will be curious to see how this impacts download numbers.  I suspect this won’t have the impact it would have if this had been launched for Android a couple of months ago when Clubhouse was white hot. The buzz has cooled considerably toward Clubhouse, so this could give them another shot in the arm, or be much ado about nothing. We’ll find out soon enough.

 

Following Clubhouse’s lead, Facebook is putting more support behind its accelerator program for groups. From Facebook: “Selected community leaders will spend five months learning from experts, coaches and a customized curriculum so they can organize and strengthen their community to work better together. Participants will then spend three months executing their initiatives. They will collaborate with advocates and leaders in the community space and work with the Facebook team to bring their ideas to life.” Selected admins will receive training and mentorship, funding, and access to new products and features before they go live.

 

I’m a bit surprised that millennials aren’t following more influencers on social media. This study found that 28% of 16-23 year olds follow at least one influencer on social media, and 23% of 24-37 year olds do. The same report found that the main reasons we use social media are: “keeping in touch with family and friends (50%), filling spare time (37%) and reading news stories (36%).”

 

So that’s it for another Monday’s Marketing Minute. Another big content week on tap here, posts every day through Friday.  Hope you have a wonderful week, thanks so much for reading!

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Why Twitch is a Game-Changer For Letting Millennials Influence At Scale

Have you ever seen something, or heard an idea, and you knew it was significant, but you also knew that you didn’t fully appreciate why it was so important? I’ve spent a LOT of time with Twitch streams the last couple of years. The content creators are highly entertaining, and the best ones are great marketers, so I enjoyed watching the streams from that angle as well.

First, let’s back up a minute. What is Twitch? In short, Twitch is a site where people go to watch other people play video games. I know, on it’s surface, it sounds ridiculous. Why would anyone watch someone else play a video game, when they could play one themselves? But if you have children who play video games, it’s a safe bet they have spent time on either Twitch or YouTube watching people play those same video games. Often, people start out watching Twitch streams because they want to learn how to get better at playing a particular game. Twitch has functionality to let content creators stream themselves playing video games. But additionally, Twitch has chat functionality, which lets streamers talk to members of their chat inbetween games, and sometimes even during games. In fact, Twitch streamers can talk about (almost) any topic with their chat. You can go to Twitch and subscribe to a content creator’s stream, and this gives you access to join the streamer’s chat room and talk to other subscribers, as well as the content creator.

So I began to spend more time watching streams on Twitch over the last couple of years. I could tell all along that there was something bigger happening that I really didn’t fully grasp. So I kept watching, until one day, something clicked. I noticed that that the streamers kept referring to their chat as ‘chat’. As if the entire chat (and we are talking millions of followers in most cases) were a real person, and more importantly, ONE person. It’s common to hear streamers playing and then say things like:

“Chat, you’re doing that thing again!”

“My chat is saying the same thing.”

“Chat, I’m not playing that game, just stop!”

Now this may seem insignificant, but what these Twitch streamers have done, intentionally or not, is they have found a way to connect ‘individually’ with millions of people, at the same time.

They’ve found a way to scale their ‘personal’ attention from one person, up to millions at a time.

The biggest problem in dealing with traditional influencers is that their personal attention can only scale so far. If you’re wanting to work with an influencer on Twitter or Instagram, they can’t individually connect with more than a few dozen people. After that, it becomes problematic. This is why brands have begun to work more with microinfluencers or T-Shaped Influencers in recent years, because even though these influencers have much smaller followings, their networks are typically more niche and they have a much better ability to connect with their followers on an individual level. Which is one of the key drivers of true influence.

 

Twitch is different

A problem with traditional social media is that influencers lose the ability to connect with and influence individuals as their network grows. Twitch is different because it effectively lets the influencer livestream around a topic that the network is already interested in; video games. Chat functionality lets the streamers/content creators stay engaged with individuals and the content creators can even play games with the members of their network. All of this helps streamers better connect with more people. If you think about it, this is similar to a radio talk show. The host can take calls from the audience, so that gives them another layer of engagement. But with Twitch, they can talk in chat with the streamer, or the streamer can play a game with them, and they can talk directly with the streamer while playing the game with them.

These multiple layers of engagement make it easier for a streamer to build and hold influence with its audience. Think about someone on Twitter with say 250k followers. They can tweet, post Fleets, and livestream. But most will only tweet. They can interact directly with with individual followers, or with multiple followers via a hashtag. But the Twitter platform doesn’t lend itself to engagement at scale like the Twitch platform does.

 

What’s the key lesson here? 

What is influence? My definition is that influence is the ability of a person or entity (such as a brand) to create a desired change in behavior in a person (likely a customer) or other entity. We need to trust someone to be influenced by them, and a key way to achieve trust is interaction. This is where the traditional influencer model of one to many breaks down at scale. But, the functionality built into Twitch (chat room, being able to play games with subscribers) helps the content creator/streamer overcome the influence at scale issue, to a degree. So if you’re vetting influencers to use in your marketing campaign, one of the key factors to look at is the platforms they use, and each platforms ability to help the influencer achieve one-to-one interactions with its network.

Another way to look at this is if you are a brand that creates content, how can you best one-to-one interactions with as many people as possible? Maybe you do a sponsorship working with influencers on a platform like Twitch, or maybe you try using these platforms yourself.

Just focus on creating as many positive interactions with each member of your desired audience. That helps facilitate trust, which helps create influence.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Growing Distrust of Influencers, Driving More Sales With Email

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and is ready to have a great week! Here’s a few stories that caught my eye the last few days:

 

I thought this study from Ipsos was very interesting. It found that most consumers don’t put much trust in influencers. In fact, the study found that consumers felt that influencers were only marginally more trustworthy than politicians! Yikes! I do think these results are a bit of an outlier, but at the same time, I do think trust levels for influencers are falling. A big reason why is because influencer marketing has become a cottage industry. Big money is flowing to these influencers, and some are creating content around their sponsors that looks and feels more like an ad, and less like organic praise for a product they use and enjoy.

 

Interesting findings from eMarketer on what we want from our emails. Emails that are pointing us toward products based on our purchase history seems to be the clear winner here. It makes sense, we often want and need products that compliment or are similar to what we’ve already bought. This works in stores as well. How many times have you seen a small display of ketchup placed to the french fries in the freezer section? Or maybe a display of buns placed next to the hot dogs? These are reminders that hey, you might want this product that works well with the one you have already bought. This is simply taking a tried and true upsell opportunity from offline, and bringing it to online in the form of smart email marketing.

 

One of the areas of marketing that I think is ripe for growth is visual representation. Pictures are so important to driving engagement on social media, so if you can nail the visuals, you have a much better chance at grabbing your audiences attention. I love this tweet from Alabama’s football team. Look at how they utilized including multiple images in a tweet. They included two images, and have them both combine to form one larger picture. This is a great example of leveraging visuals to drive higher engagement rates. This is an area I want to focus on with my own content.

Hope you have an amazing and productive week!

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The Difference Between a Brand Ambassador and a Brand ‘Spokesperson’

brand ambassador, brand spokesperson The terms ‘brand ambassador’, ‘brand spokesperson’ and ‘influencers’ are used almost interchangeably these days, so let’s talk about how each group is different. Once you understand the differences, you will have a much better idea of how to use each in your marketing strategies.

A brand ambassador is a person who works to promote and represent a brand in its marketplace. Brand ambassadors are often current customers who were already advocating for brands before they started working with them. Brand ambassadors have a working relationship with the brands they represent, and are given instruction on how to interact with customers in the marketplace, based on the business goals for that brand. Typically, a brand will have multiple ambassadors, and their involvement with the brand is organized and executed via a formal brand ambassador program.

 

A brand spokesperson is a person who works to promote and represent a brand in its marketplace. Brand spokespeople are typically chosen because they have a following either online or offline. Often, these people are viewed as ‘celebrities’ and are often known outside the industry where the brand exists. The term influencer is used almost interchangeably here with brand spokesperson. An influencer is more often someone who has built a following online, whereas a spokesperson is more often someone who has built a following offline. In either case, whether a brand is working with a spokesperson or influencer, there is typically a financial relationship in place. In short, the spokesperson or influencer will leverage their following to promote the brand and drive attention to the brand.

 

How to Select and Work With Brand Ambassadors

In my experience working with companies to help them create brand ambassador programs and in talking to companies that have launched their own efforts, the ultimate success of the brand ambassador program is typically impacted by the selection process for the ambassadors.  Your brand ambassador program will be more successful, all other things being equal, if the people you choose as ambassadors for your brand are currently fans of your brand.  Existing brand advocates make the best brand ambassadors.  Brand advocates have a higher level of understanding and passion for your brand.  They are already actively promoting your brand to other customers, you are simply going to better organize and empower their efforts by making them part of a formal brand ambassador program.

Another option is the so-called ‘open cattle call’ approach to finding brand ambassadors.  Typically, anyone is accepted (first come, first served), and the incentives offered are a chance to make money or get free products, etc.  Often, it can be positioned as a chance to get free products from major brands, and maybe even be paid for creating content that promotes the brand.

The problem with the ‘open cattle call’ approach is obvious.  That person’s prime motivation for wanting to become an ‘ambassador’ for a particular brand is to get free products and to be paid for creating content that promotes the brand.  Basically, they aren’t participating because they love the brand, they are participating because they love getting paid.

When money is the primary motivation for being involved in a brand ambassador program, it changes the behavior of that person.  The ‘ambassador’ will typically create content that isn’t authentic and based on actual opinions, but instead will focus on creating promotional content that the person feels the brand will pay them for.  And readers of the content can easily see the disconnect, it would be odd if I suddenly started blogging about how amazing Luv diapers are (as someone who has no kids), and noted at the end of my post that I was paid to write said post.

On the other hand, existing brand advocates want to become ambassadors for your brand because their motivation is based on seeing your brand succeed.  They literally LOVE your brand and will usually jump at the chance to work with it to better connect with customers and help move the brand forward.  Although compensation is involved with them as well, brand advocates usually prefer more direct access to the brand and maybe advance access to upcoming products versus simply getting paid.  Brand advocates prefer access over cash in most cases.

So if your company is thinking about creating a brand ambassador program, carefully consider who you want to be involved as ambassadors for your brand.  Do you want to bring in existing customers that love your brand, or ‘brand spokespeople’ that have little to no natural affinity for your brand?  The smart bet is on your existing customers that love your brand and want to see it succeed just as much as you do.

 

How to Select and Work With Brand Spokespeople and Influencers

Over the last 15 years, I’ve worked with many companies on their influencer and spokesperson campaigns. In fact, I’m in a bit of a unique position as I have ample experience working with brands to help them create and launch influencer programs, and I’ve also worked with brands AS an influencer in their influencer programs. So I can speak to this topic from both the brand and influencer perspective.

The biggest mistake I see brands make in choosing an influencer to work with, is the brand only looks at the size of the influencer’s following. The second biggest mistake I see brands make when choosing influencers is to ignore how much engagement the influencer can create around their content. These two areas work in tandem, because it is very difficult for an influencer to have personal interactions with their followers once the influencer’s following reaches a certain level. The influencers ability to connect individually does not scale very well. (Note: the one exception to this rule seems to be Twitch streamers. They have found a very unique way to reach a mass audience, at scale.)

When I work with companies to select and vet influencers to work with, I tell them to focus on the following:

  • Always select influencers who are actual customers of your brand. The importance of this cannot be overstated, as you want to work with influencers that already use and love your products if at all possilble.
  • The influencer’s ability to drive engagement is always more important than their following. What is influence? It’s a person’s ability to create a change of behavior in someone else. If an influencer can’t create engagement around their content, then they likely don’t have much influence over their network. In other words, their ability to create engagement is a great indicator of their ability to influence others.
  • When possible, select influencers who have a long history of working with brands. These influencers are more familiar with the process and more likely to understand what the brand wants from the arrangement.

 

The Key Differences Between Brand Ambassadors and Brand Spokespeople/Influencers

  • Compensation: An influencer will typically be compensated financially. An ambassador can be compensated financially, or with other perks such as products or early access to new products, access to key executives at the brand, etc.
  • A brand ambassador is typically a current customer of the brand, an influencer often is not.
  • Brand ambassadors often have a long-time working relationship with the brand that’s organized via a formal brand ambassador program. Most brands work with influencers on a more limited or specific amount of time.

 

Hopefully this helps you understand the differences from the brand’s perspective when it comes to working with ambassadors, spokespeople, and influencers. I’ve worked with brands since 2008 as both an influencer, and in helping brands craft amazing ambassador and influencer programs. If you have a question about how these processes work, feel free to contact me:

 

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What I Saw and Learned at Adobe Summit 2019

This year I made my third trip to Las Vegas for the Adobe Summit as part of the Adobe Insiders group. This is a group of influencers who serve as on site ‘correspondents’ for Adobe in helping to promote the event and share key insights. We also serve to advise Adobe on the focus, structure and strategy behind Summit, but that’s in a more limited capacity.

I wanted to share some of the things I saw and learned in my 4 days in Las Vegas for Summit. This post will be structured to cover two main areas. First, I wanted to discuss the event itself, some of the key takeaways and topics discussed. After that, I wanted to talk a bit about the structure of the Adobe Insiders group as I know many of you are working with influencers at your companies, and it’s always helpful to see how other companies work with influencers.

Retention is the new ‘Growth’ 

This was a big theme at Adobe Summit. The idea that by delivering amazing experiences for your customers, you retain them longer, reduce churn, and the associated costs from acquiring new customers.

This is, of course, a theme that’s near and dear to my heart, and was a big driver behind my writing Think Like a Rock Star. The idea that your current customers can do a much better job of acquiring new customers and driving growth than traditional marketing efforts. Tying into this theme was the importance of delivering amazing digital experiences to customers. One of the key focus points of the entire conference was the significance of personalizing the experience that the customer receives.

Now, this is where I want to play devil’s advocate a bit. Many of the sessions and discussions I saw and participated in at Adobe Summit around the idea of personalization centered on the idea of delivering a personalized experiences to the customer in order to complete a sale. This is understandable, as Adobe’s Experience Cloud suite of products are focused on helping businesses increase customer sales to a great degree. But when marketers think of personalization when it comes to digital experiences, this effort needs to be applied throughout the buying process, not just when the customer is at a consideration stage. In fact, the ability to personalize content and experiences prior to the consideration stage, is key to moving the uninterested or unaware customer to a point where they are ready to buy. ‘Personalization’ to many marketers means “how can we customize the sales offer to each individual customer, in order to increase sales?”, while ‘personalization’ to many customers means “give me relevant content and experiences at every touchpoint, regardless of whether I am ready to buy or not”.  That is a disconnect that many marketers need to be aware of, and address by closing that gap between customer expectations, and what marketers deliver.

Tying into the idea of delivering better experiences was the idea of the B2E business.  You have B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer), but then you have some businesses that sell to both consumer and business customers. And in some cases, the buyers may be buying for both their business as well as personal (consumer) use.  So the idea of the B2E (business to everyone) was mentioned early and often at Adobe Summit.

The underlying idea was to stop thinking of a client as being solely B2B or B2C since we are rapidly moving toward a business environment where many companies will have both consumer and business customers, and marketing will need to reflect that and offer a sort of hybrid approach that’s still relevant to end customer.

BTW I would be remiss if I did not mention the exhibit hall/trade show area at Adobe Summit. Summit has always done a fabulous job with its trade show area. At many events, the trade show area is a huddled group of booths that event organizers are constantly pushing attendees toward, that most attendees really don’t want to spend time at. But Summit’s ‘Community Pavilion’ is so nicely done. The area has plenty of booths and all the things you expect at a conference exhibit hall. But it also has a ton of activities, food and drinks, and other attractions that suck you in and keep you in the area. All this is entertaining and makes you want to walk around and see the sights. And as such, increases the likelihood that you will stop by a few booths and talk to the exhibitors. With all the ancillary activities happening, it gives everyone a reason to come to the area, slow down and mingle. Which greatly increases the chances that more attendees will stop by more booths as a result.

 

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@kateoneill is doing some serious hand talking with @kerrygorgone #adobesummit

A post shared by Mack Collier (@mackcollier) on

In addition, Adobe provided ‘recharging stations’ throughout the conference area, which were greatly appreciated.  Adobe Summit has grown incredibly in just the last few years.  The first time I attended in 2016, I believe the attendance was 10,000.  This year, it was a little over 17,000. The event just keeps getting bigger and I honestly did not talk to any attendees who ever got tired or felt overwhelmed, just the opposite in fact.

Adobe Insiders Influencer Group

I wanted to shift gears a bit and talk a little about the structure of the Adobe Insiders group that was on-site and working with Adobe during the Adobe Summit.  2016 was my first year working with Adobe as a member of its Insiders group.  I believe the size of the group was under 10 in 2016.  I was also part of the Insiders group in 2017 when it was around 20 members, and this year the group totaled around 60 social media, marketing and technology influencers.

The over-arching goal of the group was to help promote the Adobe Summit and for each of us to share relevant insights and information from the speakers, keynotes and even attendees. Our feedback and insights were shared across all our usual social media channels, with an emphasis placed on Twitter since its much easier to track and access mentions on Twitter, especially at volume. The main hashtag used, #AdobeSummit, was a top trending topic on Twitter for pretty much the duration of the event. The work of the Insiders group played a big role in that.

I advise and consult with many companies who are working with groups of influencers or brand ambassadors. I always advise these companies to create platforms and channels to allow the group to become connected and to interact with each other prior to the event. Adobe did a wonderful job of facilitating communication channels for the group, including a private Twitter group, a Slack channel, conference calls, and even through #AdobeChat. It helped build camaraderie among the group, and by bringing some of the same members back every year, we form a bond as well.  Some of the members of this year’s group I knew from working with them in 2016 and 2016 at the Summit.

And what a group it was. I was able to see many old friends and a few people like Ann Handley and David Armano that I hadn’t seen in years.

All said, Adobe Summit was a wonderful event and I loved every minute it. Typically, I hit what I call ‘The Introvert’s Wall’ on the 2nd or 3rd day at an event. I get exhausted and honestly am ready to go home. That never happened in my 4 days in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit. The event kept my interest and attention throughout, and being able to spend so much time with my friends in the Insider group as well as my friends at Adobe made it a wonderful week. Information is already up for Adobe Summit 2020, and I hope I will see you there!

Disclaimer: Adobe sponsored my trip to Adobe Summit and the opinions I shared about the event here and on other social media channels were my own. 

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How to Create a World-Class Brand Ambassador Program

Creating a World-Class Brand Ambassador Program

This post on 10 Thing to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program remains one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written. So to start off the new year, I wanted to do a deeper dive into the topic of creating and launching a successful brand ambassador program, and walk you through the process from the brand’s point of view.

So where do you start? How do you measure results? How do you choose your ambassadors? How do you integrate the program with your other marketing and sales functions? We’ll get into all that in this post, so read on…

First, I have to say of all the consulting work I do, helping companies build out brand ambassador programs is probably the most fulfilling. I love the challenge of creating a plan that’s going to help companies better build relationships with their most passionate customers. It’s so rewarding to know that you’re helping to build something that will greatly help the brand, but even more importantly, that will provide a much better product and experience for the customer.

If I were going to work with your company to help you build a world-class brand ambassador program, this would be the process:

Plan Your Brand Ambassador Program; How Does the Brand Benefit, and How Will Your Ambassadors Benefit?

Related: How to Incorporate Millennials Into Your Brand Ambassador Program

At a high level, your brand needs to ask and answer two questions when you start fleshing out your brand ambassador program:

  1. Who is our ideal brand ambassador?
  2. What relationship will we have with our ambassadors?

To further expand on the second point, you want to as clearly as possible detail how your brand benefits from an ambassador program, and how your ambassadors will benefit.

The benefits to both your brand and its ambassadors need to be clearly defined, and very obvious and desirable to both parties. Too many brands can clearly point to what they want to accomplish with an ambassador program, but they struggle to detail meaningful benefits to the ambassadors if they participate. This is why it’s so key to create solid benefits to the ambassadors. You want your ambassadors to be thrilled to join, in fact you want so many customers applying to be ambassadors that you could never accept them all.

Think of it this way: Let’s say you want to launch a brand ambassador program because you want to increase sales of a particular product line by 20%. That’s a pretty heavy lift that you’re asking of those ambassadors, so you have to do some heavy lifting of your own and make it worth the ambassador’s while to join and then be committed to acting in a way that will help you realize that 20% increase in sales.

The more clearly defined and OBVIOUS the benefits you offer ambassadors, the more likely they will be to want to join your program and help your program reach its goals.

    Benefits - Ambassadors

  • Salary
  • Greater Access to Brand
  • Early Access to New Products
  • Recognition and Promotion
  • Professional and Personal Development

          Benefits - Brand

  • Increased Sales
  • Increased Promotion
  • Product Feedback
  • Customer Feedback

As far as measuring and tracking results: Clearly define what your goals are for your brand ambassador program. Maybe you want to increase sales, or decrease calls to customer service centers, or improve customer sentiment online. Start with your core goal, then clearly define precisely what you want to see happen.  The more precise you are with your goals, the more accountable everyone will be for reaching them.  Don’t just say ‘increase sales’, say ‘increase sales by 8% for the first year of the brand ambassador program’. And your KPIs will flow from your goals and desired outcomes.

An additional note about goal-setting: Don’t be afraid to regularly revisit your goals and measurement tactics to make sure you’re on a realistic course. This is especially important during the first year of your brand ambassador program. Self-audit frequently, at least every 3 months, monthly is better for the first 6 months. There will be a lot of trial and error involved in launching your brand ambassador program at all levels. Be mindful of this, and don’t be afraid to change course if something isn’t working as expected.

Your Brand Ambassador Program Needs Internal Ambassadors

Before you do anything else as far as fleshing out your brand ambassador program, you need to know who will own it and who will fight for it internally. Ideally, you want more than one person who are customer-centric, and who can clearly communicate to their bosses the value of the brand ambassador program, especially in the early days when a direct impact on the business bottom line will be harder to quantify. These will be the people that understand how a brand ambassador program will benefit their brand, but they can also envision how such a program will improve the product and brand experience for the ambassadors, and all customers.

Your Brand Ambassador Program Should ALWAYS Be Integrated Into Your Existing Marketing, Sales and Customer Service Efforts

The quickest way to ensure that your brand ambassador program fails is to put it on an island within your organization. Left by itself, a brand ambassador program could take years to see measurable results that justify its cost. At best. Few companies will be willing to invest the money necessary to reach that point. The good news is that a brand ambassador program can begin benefiting your company almost immediately, if structured correctly.

A well-designed brand ambassador program will directly impact and positively affect most of the core functions of your business:

  • Marketing: Ambassadors will help promote your products to other customers
  • Sales: Ambassadors will drive new sales
  • Customer Service: Ambassadors will interact directly with customers both online and off, addressing their concerns and answering their questions.
  • PR: Ambassadors will not only spread positive news about your company, they will also proactively defend it against trolls and attacks.
  • Product Design: Ambassadors will collect valuable product feedback directly from customers, which your company can then implement to improve product design.

Think of it this way; You’re not reinventing the wheel by launching a brand ambassador program. As my friend Kelly Hungerford says, a well-designed brand ambassador program makes everything your company is already doing, work better.

Kelly Hungerford

" A well-designed brand ambassador program makes everything your company is already doing, work better."


Start Small, Grow Big

For most companies, the idea of launching a brand ambassador program is a completely new initiative. There’s a steep learning curve involved at first, and much of the process will honestly be trial and error in the first days. To minimize the expense and improve efficiency, it makes sense to start with a smaller core group of ambassadors. The idea is that you want to iron out the kinks with a smaller group, then once you’ve got the process nailed (and you’re seeing the results you want), then you can branch out with a larger group.

For example, if you are targeting single moms, maybe start out with a group of say 5 or 10 ambassadors, and over time as you develop your program, you can scale it out to 100 or even 1,000 single moms. If you want your brand ambassador program to drive sales at your retail locations, maybe focus on only your San Jose market at launch, with the idea being to eventually branch out into a national program.

Create Channels to Directly Connect Your Ambassadors to Each Other, and Your Brand

This can be something as simple as a Facebook or LinkedIn group or a Twitter group DM or a Slack channel.  Also, you want to have the brand representatives that they will be working with regularly present and active in these groups as well.

Why this is important:

  • It gives your ambassadors a place where they can get to know each other
  • It gives your ambassadors a place where they can share ideas, bounce questions off each other and get help
  • It gives your brand a place where they can directly communicate with your ambassadors
  • It gives your brand the ability to quickly and easily collect feedback from your ambassadors
  • It communicates to your ambassadors that you take their feedback and connection seriously, which further motivates them to be more active

Beyond this group, you want to ensure that your ambassadors have as much direct access to your brand representatives as possible, as often as they need it.  Let’s say one of your ambassadors is ‘in the field’ and talking to a potential customer about your product. The customer is considering purchasing your product, and asks a technical question that your ambassador doesn’t know the answer to. If your ambassador had a way to message a brand rep and quickly get that information, it could result in an easy sale. This works regardless of how you will be using your ambassadors and across many core functions such as sales, PR, customer service, customer feedback, etc.

Collect and UTILIZE Feedback From Your Ambassadors

No matter what your working relationship is with your ambassadors, you should always focus on how you can empower your ambassadors to do a better job of collecting feedback from the customers they interact with, and from the ambassadors themselves. There’s a couple of key reasons for this:

  1. Think of the feedback collected from your ambassadors as being free market research. They will interact directly with current and potential customers, and get unfiltered product and brand feedback. The ambassadors will also have their own feedback to provide.
  2. Current and potential customers are more likely to give HONEST feedback to an ambassador than to your brand. Your ambassador will, for the most part, be viewed as just another customer by the people they talk to, so those people will let their guard down and give unfiltered feedback. That feedback may be more critical, but it will also be honest, and it will tell your brand exactly what it needs to do to win that customer’s business.

Your brand’s ability to collect and utilize feedback from its ambassadors is one of the biggest benefits from launching a brand ambassador program. The feedback your ambassadors collect from other customers aids your marketing, PR, customer service, and even product design. It’s invaluable, and a core tenet of your ambassador program should be to design it so that a premium is placed on collecting customer feedback.

All Your Ambassadors MUST Be Compensated

Whenever I talk to companies about compensating ambassadors, I stress two points to them:

  1. All your ambassadors MUST be compensated
  2. Paying them with cash should be your last option

Let’s take a closer look at each point.  First, you must compensate your ambassadors. The level of involvement and work you’re asking of ambassadors is about the same as a part-time job. By compensating your ambassadors, you are communicating to them that you value and appreciate their hard work, and that you aren’t taking it for granted. This keeps them motivated to work hard on your brand’s behalf. On the other hand, if you don’t compensate your ambassadors, they feel as if you are taking advantage of them and their time. Because you would be.

On the other hand, you should only compensate your ambassadors with cash if there are no other options. Paying ambassadors with cash frames their work as being a job. You don’t want the ambassador’s involvement to be viewed as work, you want it to be viewed as an act of love. They love your brand, and they want to work in a way to help grow and foster it.

So if you take cash off the table, how do you compensate your ambassadors? I always tell clients that cash should be the last option and ACCESS should be the first. Give your ambassadors better access to your brand and its products. Let them talk directly with the people that bring their favorite products to market. Let them have a first-look at new products, before even the press gets a chance to review them. In fact, in many ways giving ambassadors early access to new products can be a simple extension of what your brand is already doing with reaching out to the press to let journalists review your products early before they hit the market.  Treat your ambassadors as special people, because they are. Give them early access to products, give them tours of your facility, let them talk directly to the product and brand managers that help bring their favorite products directly to market.

And above all, ask your ambassadors how you can make their involvement worth their while. You will be amazed, but one of the best ways you can compensate ambassadors is to give them better access to your brand, and to take their suggestions seriously. Listening to your most passionate customers and ACTING on their feedback is one of the best ways you can reward them.

To be honest, simply paying ambassadors is pretty lazy. If that’s your best idea for compensating your ambassadors, then you really don’t know them very well. Go back to the drawing board till you come up with a better idea.

Don’t Just Read This Post, Act on it 

Too many people will read this post, think it’s a great idea to launch a brand ambassador program, then do nothing about it.

Yes, it’s a lot of work.

Yes, it may be hard to convince your boss to commit to it.

Yes, it will take a lot of time.

But the bottom line is, your customers are worth every bit of it. A well-run ambassador program is one of the greatest competitive advantages your brand can have. And as a brand employee, there’s nothing more satisfying than working directly every day with customers that genuinely LOVE your brand.

That’s what you get to do if your brand runs an ambassador program.  Start today, building the case internally for launching a brand ambassador program. Analyze your business, and detail all the ways that a brand ambassador program could positively impact your bottom line.  Scroll back up to the section on integrating your brand ambassador program as I’ve already given you the list.

Create a proposal for a brand ambassador program and present it to your boss.  Don’t position as ‘this is what it will cost us’, instead present it as ‘here’s how our brand will benefit’.  At worst, a well-run brand ambassador program should pay for itself.  At best, it will be a huge competitive advantage for your business.

Besides all of that, you are creating something amazing for your customers. You are creating a vehicle that allows your brand to not only get a better sense of who your customers are and what they think, but that also takes that customer feedback and IMPLEMENTS it and utilizes it within your brand.

And if you need help making the case to your boss and creating your plan, feel free to email me.  I’ll be happy to answer any question you have about creating a brand ambassador program, even if we don’t work together on it. I’ll be happy to help you get started, no strings attached, just reach out and I’ll be happy to help answer any general questions you have.

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How Facebook Just Changed Influencer Marketing and What Needs to Happen Next

Last week without much fanfare, Facebook made a pretty big change to how brands work with influencers on its site.  Previously, a brand would have to share an influencer’s post before they could boost it. Now, brands can boost any influencer’s post as long as the influencer is authorized to tag the brand in their updates. The influencer tags the brand in their update, then the brand can boost the influencer’s update.

Why is Facebook making this change? The suspicion is that Facebook will begin suppressing influencer posts that are tagged for brands to boost in an effort to get brands to spend more on boosting those posts to achieve the reach they need to hit their campaign marks. Facebook has been doing this for years with brand content, and this would simply be an extension of that strategy.  If Facebook does start suppressing brand-related updates from influencers, that could also lead to influencers and brands not disclosing their working relationship in an effort to keep their organic reach. This would be an FTC violation, but with expensive influencers, some brands might risk the fines. Which would further erode consumer trust in such content.

And, of course, any moves Facebook makes in regards to dictating how brands can work with influencers will likely be mirrored on Instagram, since FB now owns IG. So these changes will have a big impact for any brands that leverage paid social in their influencer marketing plans.

What Will Happen Next

For agencies that are committed to influencer marketing, these moves will make their lives a bit easier as influencers can now do some of the back-work for them as agencies no longer have to add influencers and approve them for boosting, which will simplify their workflow. If Facebook does start suppressing the organic reach of influencer posts (in an effort to drive more paid support), then it will likely mean that budgets for paid support will have to increase. It could also mean that Facebook will crack down on influencers using fake followers and bots so advertisers will have a truer sense of the real size of an influencer’s network and reach.

That’s on the agency side. For companies that are working with influencers in-house, especially mid-size and smaller companies, these moves could dictate a re-assessment of its influencer marketing strategy, especially if most of that strategy is currently running through Facebook and Instagram.

From the company side, here’s two changes I would hope to see when it comes to influencer marketing:

1 – Companies need to start treating influencers as business partners. Kerry is spot-on here. Too many companies have the mentality that they want to ‘rent’ an influencer’s audience for the duration of a campaign. By working and even investing in influencers long-term, this allows the influencer to more effectively connect with their audience on the brand’s behalf, and the content they create for the brand will be more credible with the influencer’s audience. Plus, this commitment to working and growing together makes it easier for the influencer to become an actual advocate or fan of the brand, which further helps the authenticity of the influencer’s content that promotes that brand.

2 – Companies need to focus more on working with influencers who are also existing advocates and fans for their brand. Doesn’t it make sense to work with influencers who are already signing your brand’s praises? Of course it does. One of the problems that brands face when sponsoring content from influencers is that it often comes across as an obvious paid endorsement from the influencer. “They are just saying they like that product because the brand is paying them”, is often the knee-jerk response to such content. But your brand’s fans are already promoting your content for free, so why not invest in deepening that relationship?  And yes, many brands will read that and say “Well if they are already promoting us for free, why pay them?”.  Because these fans of your brand are also directly engaging every day with your customers. Not only are they selling for your brand, they are also collecting incredibly valuable product feedback from other customers.  Feedback that can be acted on and incorporated back into the business and marketing processes to further increase sales.  Whether I am working with a client on influencer marketing or brand advocacy/ambassador efforts, I always stress to them that it’s not just about the direct sales. Focus also on the indirect activities that the influencers or ambassadors can engage in on the brand’s behalf that will also lead to sales.

 

If your brand or agency uses Facebook for its current influencer marketing efforts, how will these changes impact you?

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A Quick Overview of Lenny and Larry’s Brand Ambassador Program

Lenny and Larry's cookies brand ambassador programI am constantly looking for nutritional snacks and such for when I travel. I am an extremely picky eater, plus I had my gall bladder removed a few years ago, and if I don’t eat regularly, it can cause headaches and slight nausea. So having tasty and ideally nutritious snacks while traveling is a must for me.

About a year ago I discovered Lenny and Larry’s nutritional cookies. The problem with most ‘nutritional’ cookies or bars is that they taste terrible. Lenny and Larry’s cookies actually aren’t that bad, in fact they taste great when compared to similar products. Additionally, they are very easy to digest, with a great protein to fat ratio.  Each cookie (4 oz) is massive and enough for 2 servings, with 6 grams of fat per serving and 8 grams of protein.

Needless to say, The Complete Cookie is now my go-to snack when traveling. So the other day when I was on their site, I noticed they have a page that explains their brand ambassador program. I want to review their program because I know a lot of you are curious as to what a brand ambassador program looks like ‘in the wild’.

Before I discuss Lenny and Larry’s brand ambassador program, I wanted to review some of the key elements that a good brand ambassador program will have:

1 – A process for helping ambassadors better sell your products to the potential customers they will interact with regularly.  This could be coupon codes or samples that ambassadors can share with potential customers to encourage a purchase.

2 – A process for letting ambassadors collect and share product feedback from their interactions with potential customers, as well as their own product feedback. This is especially beneficial for letting ambassadors share feedback from potential customers on why they don’t currently buy your brand or its products.

3 – A way for ambassadors to directly communicate and connect with each other around shared ideas and beliefs that are core to them, that also relate to your brand and its products. For example, if your company makes cooking utensils, it might be a good idea to create a message board that unites ambassadors around the idea of cooking.

 

Based on what I see on this page, Lenny and Larry’s brand ambassador program is focused on having its members drive sales.  Period. There’s also a passing mention of driving digital WOM with the #TeamLL hashtag, but it’s obvious that the main focus of the program is additional sales.

From the page:

“Our Brand Ambassador program is our way of saying thank you.

Every ambassador gets a personalized landing page with a unique URL. Every time someone purchases after following your tracking link, you are handsomely rewarded. The more you promote, the more benefits you’ll receive.

Rewards:

Free cookies
Monthly discount codes
Official Lenny & Larry’s swag
$$ Commissions $$ (extra income)”

Which is a good start. A solid brand ambassador program should absolutely make it easier for its members to generate new sales from the potential customers they will interact with. However, if the main/only focus of the program is to encourage members to sell products, it can create problems. For one, the members will start to have sales-oriented interactions with potential customers, as you see here:

So let’s say that I am a fan of Lenny and Larry’s, but not interested in becoming an incentivized salesperson for the brand.  In this case, it appears the program doesn’t offer much for me. Here are some things I’d like to see added to the program (and to be fair, Lenny and Larry’s could be offering some or all of these elements now, but I don’t see any mention of them on the brand’s website):

1 – A way to directly connect with other brand ambassadors. I would like to see a forum or maybe a private Facebook group or some digital mechanism to let me interact with other members of the program.  Lenny and Larry’s creates healthy snacks so I am sure there are many fans of the brand that also have a lot of knowledge of the brand’s products as well as healthy eating and living that they could share with other members.  This type of knowledge-sharing would benefit all members, as well as bring them closer together.  Which also creates a better experience for the brand ambassadors, and this gives them another reason to be loyal to the brand.

2 – A way to directly connect with the brand and share thoughts and ideas. Think of this as a brand advisory council or similar.  Members no doubt have ideas and opinions on how to improve the program or change it based on their interactions with potential customers.  It would be great if Lenny and Larry’s had a mechanism in place to directly connect the group with the brand. When crafting a brand ambassador program remember that while leveraging ambassadors to drive new sales is important, leveraging their feedback from interactions with other customers can also pay huge dividends.

3 – Give the members early access to new products that are in development. If you’re already a fan of Lenny and Larry’s products, you’ll probably be interested in any new flavors to existing products, or any new products in development.

 

The point here is, if you’re going to create a brand ambassador program, give members multiple ways to participate. Not everyone wants to sell your products, even if they love your brand. Give your ambassadors special access to what’s happening with your brand, and multiple options for how they can participate and extend the relationship with your brand. I think Lenny and Larry’s brand ambassador program is a good start, as long as they are open incorporating new elements, starting with giving existing ambassadors more input into the future of the program.

Having said that, I know how hard it is for the boss to sign off on launching a brand ambassador program without there being a direct impact to sales, so I totally get the focus on attempting to drive sales through existing ambassadors. This is typically one of the first and biggest roadblocks I encounter when working with clients, the boss can only see a brand ambassador program’s value through the lens of how many new sales it will immediately generate. This affects execution and roll-out and if not carefully positioned, can negatively affect the progress of the initiative.

If this post has piqued your interest in launching a brand ambassador program, here’s a bit more information on how to get started creating an amazing brand ambassador program.