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Want to Create a Brand Ambassador Program? Here’s 10 Things to Remember When You Do

Brand Ambassador Programs, Social Media

Your family owns 5 bakeries across the northern part of your state. The bakeries have developed a reputation for creating delicious cakes and pastries, speedy deliveries, and exceptional customer service. Which has resulted in a lot of happy customers!

You manage the social media presences for the five bakeries. You are monitoring the Facebook page for your bakeries today, and as usual you have several new comments from customers. These comments are almost always positive, and today’s mentions are consistent with a typical day:

Sarah: “The birthday cake we bought for my son’s 10th birthday party was delicious! It made the party, I had three moms come up later and ask for the recipe, and I was tempted to claim I made it, but gave them your address in the end (ha!). So expect Tina, Jess and Kym to show up soon!”

Tom: “You guys saved our Thanksgiving! As always, we were too ambitious in our dinner-planning and just didn’t have time in the end to bake the pumpkin and pecan pies we needed to finish off desert. You guys came through at the last-minute for us, even delivering on the day before Thanksgiving! As an added bonus, our out-of-town relatives loved both pies and said they would be stopping by as they leave town in a few days to take another home with them!”

Amber: “Have been a happy customer for the last 5 years, your double chocolate cakes and blueberry streusel muffins are my favorites, they always make our meals special. Are you planning on opening a location in Lancaster? All my friends have heard about how delicious your cakes and muffins are, so you have a ready customer base if you do!”

 

In reading these comments, a light bulb goes off: These customers have taken ownership of the sales, customer service, marketing and promotion processes for your bakeries. Without guidance, these customers have taken it upon themselves to help grow your business.

But what if you could give these customers guidance in how to better promote your business and grow your customer base? What if you had a way to work directly with these customers to give them the tools they need and WANT to help share why they love your business with their friends, family, and other customers?

That’s where a Brand Ambassador Program comes in. Over the last few years, companies have begun to realize the benefits of having a way to connect directly with their most passionate customers to drive business growth.  While customers as a whole don’t trust brands, they do trust other customers.  Especially passionate customers that love their favorite brands.  While a marketing message from a brand will likely be ignored, a passionate recommendation from a fellow customer will be taken far more seriously.

This has a lot of companies researching how to create a successful brand ambassador program, and how to work with brand ambassadors. Let’s start with some definitions:

What is a Brand Ambassador? 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, but some brand ambassadors are chosen because they have a large following or are viewed as influencers. 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.

What is a Brand Ambassador Program? A brand ambassador program is a business program that organizes brand ambassadors and creates an ongoing, working relationship between the brand and its ambassadors. A brand ambassador program is used to manage the ongoing, working relationship between the brand and its ambassadors, and provide ongoing training and instruction for its ambassadors, as well as support. Most brand ambassador programs work closely with other areas of the business, such as marketing, sales, customer service, and product design.

So if your company is considering launching a brand ambassador program to connect with your brand advocates and ambassadors, here’s 10 things to remember:

1 – Spread the word internally as well as externally.  Getting internal buy-in is just as important, if not moreso, than getting customers excited about your efforts.  If your brand advocacy program doesn’t have INTERNAL advocates pushing it along, its chances of success are going to be greatly reduced.  Launching a brand ambassador program takes time and energy.  Immediate ROI will be very hard to prove, it’s a long-term process.  Which is why it pays to have a team of people that are pushing for patience.

2 – Research, research, research.  You’ll have to invest a lot of time in discovering WHO your brand advocates are.  You might think you know who they are, but there’s rarely a ‘one-size-fits-all’ view.  You’ll also have to monitor ALL conversations with your customers.  Not just online conversations, not just offline ones either.  Look at both.  Also, make special note of the customers that go the extra mile to connect with you, the ones that write you letters, even if they sound negative.  Companies often confuse passion for the brand with negativity aimed at the brand.

Whenever I talk to companies who are curious about launching a brand ambassador program, one of the first questions is “How do we find our brand ambassadors?” The good news is, potential brand ambassadors will often find you! Customers who are good candidates to be ambassadors for your brand will often proactively reach out to your company. They will email you with feedback on your brand, they will respond to you on social media, they will call your customer service department with feedback.  Ideally, you can select enough qualified ambassadors for your brand by simply cataloging the customers who are already connecting with your brand proactively.

3 – Start small, grow big.  You don’t have to have a million members in your brand ambassador program.  In fact, I’d rather have 10 truly passionate brand advocates than 10,000 members that are merely ‘meh’ toward the brand.  If you start small and select those that are truly passionate about your brand and its vision, the growth will come organically as these passionate people will help you identify others just like them.

Additionally, it simply makes good business sense to start small with your brand ambassador program, especially if this is your company’s first attempt at such a program. Whenever you take on any new initiative like this, especially when working directly with your customers, there will be mistakes made. This is why I advise my clients that if possible, start with a small group, nail down the process, then you can expand the scope of the program after you’ve worked the kinks out. In other words, start small, nail the process, then grow.

Here’s an example of how this could work. Let’s say your company has fitness centers across the United States, your company has 425 centers and operates in 23 states, but you have the most locations in the Chicago, Los Angeles and Atlanta markets. Instead of rolling out a comprehensive, nationwide brand ambassador program with 500 members, it might make more business and logistical sense to launch a 10-person brand ambassador program for just the Chicago market. After spending the first year perfecting the program and process for the Chicago market, in the second year you could launch brand ambassador programs for the Los Angeles and Atlanta markets. After nailing down the processes for these markets, your company can then roll out a comprehensive, and nationwide, brand ambassador program.

4 – Make membership exclusive.  This ties into the previous point, but you don’t want ALL your customers to be members of your brand ambassador program.  You want to give them hurdles to jump, obstacles to overcome.  In other words, you want to weed out the customers that aren’t committed to the brand, or the program.  The true advocates for your brand will already be doing much if not all of what you would require of them as members of the program.  It also pays to cap membership, and to give the existing members a huge say in who the future members are.

5 – Connect with your advocates and create ways for them to connect with each other.  Your advocates are special people, you don’t want them on an island, you want them connected.  Create a central ‘homebase’ for the current members of your program, but also stay connected to other advocates that aren’t yet members.  And make your existing ambassadors aware of these advocates, and have them ‘vet’ them for possible membership in your formal ambassador program.

6 – Pay your ambassadors.  This is one of the biggest misconceptions about brand ambassadors.  They DO want to be compensated but most do NOT want to be given money.  Sure, we all love money, but for a true brand advocate they usually want other things.  Like access, empowerment, and acknowledgement.  A few years ago when I worked with Dell on its #DellCAP events, the customers weren’t paid to come (travel was covered), but they were given access.  For example, they got to tour Dell’s Social Media Listening Center, then they got to spend 30 minutes talking to CEO Michael Dell.  That’s pretty heady stuff for a Dell advocate.  When they go back home, their friend might brag about having the latest and greatest Dell laptop, while they can respond with ‘Oh yeah, well Dell invited me to their world headquarters and I got to chat with Michael Dell himself!’  That’s a great example of rewarding your advocates.

Here’s another example: I once worked with a software company to design a brand ambassador program for its users. The majority of the users of this software were small business owners. After surveying its users, the software company discovered that these small business owners were desperate for social media and content marketing advice. So we created a series of webinars just for members of the brand ambassador program that would have a different expert deliver a webinar on a different marketing topic to brand ambassadors. This benefit had nothing to do with the software company, it was completely focused on what would be valuable to brand ambassadors. If you’re brainstorming ideas for possible benefits you could give your brand ambassadors, check out this exhaustive list of benefits that Harley-Davidson offers members of its HOG group.

7 – Give your advocates direct access to the brand.  The members of your brand ambassador program should be given direct contact with multiple key executives within the brand.  In fact, I would suggest making 1 or more of the ‘top’ members of your brand ambassador program part of the team that’s responsible for reporting on the progress of the program to the C-Suite.  The idea here is to make sure that the voice of your brand’s biggest defenders and advocates is always heard at the company, from the top down.

8 – Create a feedback loop between the brand ambassadors, and the brand.  I outlined the process for this loop in this post.  You need to have a way to let your ambassadors have direct access to the brand, as mentioned above.  But at the same time, the brand needs to respond to the brand ambassadors and give them feedback on their feedback.  Additionally, the brand needs to take the feedback from its ambassadors and distribute that feedback internally and not just silo it among the employees that are working directly on the brand ambassador program.

9 – Give your ambassadors the tools to create something amazing.  Again, you want to start small and grow organically.  And you want that growth to be fueled by your existing advocates.  You want to embrace and empower your existing advocates, thus the creation of the brand ambassador program.  But you also want your existing ambassadors to have the tools to embrace and empower other advocates that aren’t yet members.  And tying back to the earlier points about giving ambassadors direct access to the brand, when your existing ambassadors find other advocates, they can immediately bring them to the brand’s attention.

10 – Transfer ownership of the program from the brand, to its ambassadors.  When you create a brand ambassador program, you need to realize that long-term, this will belong to your advocates.  You’ll always be there, and you’ll always have a voice, but the idea is that you want your most passionate customers to eventually take over this program.  Maybe you’ll start out with a ‘board’ over the program made up of 5 key brand executives, and 5 brand ambassadors.  But over time, as your ambassadors become familiar with the program and its function and goals, you need to let them have control.  Again, you don’t want the voice of your company to dominate this effort, you want the voice of your most passionate customers to have control, because those customers are going to be connecting with other customers.

 

 

But perhaps the most important thing to remember when creating a brand ambassador program is who you will be working with:

Every single day you’ll be working with customers that love you. Customers that love your brand as if it were their own, and who will work with you every day to see it grow and prosper. Let’s be honest, it’s pretty awesome to work every day with people that love you and believe in you. That’s exactly what happens when you create and launch a brand ambassador program.

 

BONUS: When you are ready to pitch your idea for a brand ambassador program to the C-Suite, make a plan that details exactly how the program will benefit the brand, and exactly how it will benefit the ambassadors who participate. Carefully and clearly spell out all the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that will be measured and tracked, as well as an explanation of why it is important to do so. Also, give a thorough timeline of the roll-out of the brand ambassador program, for at least the first 6 months of the program, 12 months is better. Assume that there will be a healthy amount of skepticism from upper management about the success of a brand ambassador program (since your brand has likely never launched one), so the eventual signoff by the CEO or CMO will greatly depend on how well you address these concerns head on.

So there’s some ideas to consider when you get ready to create and launch an official brand ambassador program.  This won’t be easy, and it will take a lot of time, but if you are committed to connecting with your most passionate customers and willing to empower them, the results will make program a huge success.  If you need help getting started, let’s explore how we can work together to create an ambassador program for your brand.

 

DOUBLE BONUS: Want to see a great example of an employee brand ambassador program?

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Case Study: Patagonia’s Brand Ambassador Program Focuses on Product Design and Development Over Sales

Did you know Patagonia has a Brand Ambassador Program? Probably not, but the brand has had an ambassador program since at least 2000. This makes sense when you consider that Patagonia has never made advertising of any kind a priority for the brand. Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard has often proudly proclaimed that the brand only spends one half of one percent of revenue on advertising.

Patagonia’s effort is a bit different from most brand ambassador programs in a few notable ways. Most brand ambassador programs, much to my disappointment, are structured largely to drive sales. Most brands view their ambassadors as potential promotional channels, with little or no thought given to how else these ambassadors could be leveraged to help the brand.

To be fair, Patagonia does use its ambassadors to promote the brand. But that’s not the only or even most important function that Patagonia’s ambassadors serve.

When you view Patagonia’s ambassador page, you’re immediately struck by how the ambassadors are organized based on the outdoor activities they excel at:

  • Climbing
  • Fly-fishing
  • Skiing
  • Snowboarding
  • Surfing
  • Trail-running

These are athletes, and typically athletes that are well-known and respected among their peers. So in that regard, you may consider this as more of an influencer marketing effort than a true brand ambassador program. But Patagonia has an ongoing, working relationship with these ambassadors, and they are paid a salary for their involvement in the program.

So when you consider that Patagonia is working with athletes who are well-known and influential within their respective disciplines, a working relationship based on sales promotion is assumed. Which makes this quote from the brand on the role and responsibilities of its ambassadors very interesting:

"Patagonia's ambassadors are known for not only being athletes, but for being integral to the company's product development and product testing. The company's ambassadors work closely with the design department to test, refine and validate products in the harshest and most remote locations on the planet."


I loved seeing this because as I've often written about here, leveraging brand ambassadors as a product feedback channel is one of the smartest things a brand can do. I'm sure Patagonia's thinking here is to put its products in the hands of elite athletes with the thinking being that they can give better feedback on how the clothing functions in their typical activities. Patagonia then can take this product feedback and leverage it to improve the product's design, durability, and function.

It's really the best of all worlds for Patagonia. They've created a program where the ambassador have real input into the products they use. This means the ambassadors will be far more knowledgeable about the product and how it functions, which also helps them better promote it to other customers. Which is beneficial for Patagonia, since it's ambassadors are elite athletes who are well-respected and who are very influential among their peers.

Now How Do You Apply This to Your Own Brand Ambassador Program?

When it comes to the influencer vs fan debate, I've always said that the best of both worlds is to find an influencer who is also a fan of your brand. In a way, this is what Patagonia has done. They aren't just asking the ambassadors to promote Patagonia's products to their following (as you would with an influencer), they are also stressing that they want the ambassadors to use their products and give them feedback after they have done so. In addition, they've also carefully picked ambassadors who are already engaging in the same type of activities that Patagonia's customers are when those customers buy Patagonia's products. So the products are getting a real-world testing, which results in better feedback.

For your efforts, follow the model that Patagonia uses and focus on ambassadors who either already use your products, or who live a lifestyle similar to that of your current customers. Basically, you want to make sure that the ambassadors you pick are people that will be using your products in the same way that your customers would. This means that your ambassadors can give you better feedback and it means your brand can apply that feedback to improve the product. 

Remember, leveraging your ambassadors to promote your brand is fine, but that's hardly the only way you can work with them in order to grow your brand. 

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How Much Money Can a Brand Ambassador Program Save Your Company?

How much money will a brand ambassador program save your company?

Too many companies avoid launching a brand ambassador program because they view it as a new expense that will live by itself within your organization. Nothing could be further from the truth. In actuality, a brand ambassador program is an investment that makes your existing business processes more effective and efficient. When your boss asks why your company should launch a brand ambassador program, you say “it takes what we are already doing and it makes it better.”

Earlier this month I wrote a post titled How to Create a World-Class Brand Ambassador Program. In that post, I stated that at a later date I would be writing a more in-depth post describing how your brand can better integrate a brand ambassador program into its existing business structure.  This is that post.

A well-designed brand ambassador program will directly impact and improve several key business and marketing functions, such as; customer service, product design, brand reputation management, sales and promotion.  Let’s look at how a brand ambassador program could save your company money in each area:

Reduction in Customer Service Calls/Interactions

Your brand ambassadors are constantly interacting with current and potential customers both online and offline. Often, they can answer questions and help solve problems that others are having.  Each time they do, it eliminates the need for that person to contact your brand’s customer service reps.

Over time, this can generate a serious cost-savings for your brand. Once you know the internal cost your brand assigns to each customer service call or email or social media question (these numbers can be different based on the channel they originate from), then you can begin to determine the exact amount saved by your brand ambassadors.

For example, let’s say your brand has determined that each call to a customer service rep costs the brand $8.32.  This means that each time a brand ambassador helps a customer and eliminates a call, your brand saves $8.32! Let’s say you have 50 brand ambassadors in your program and they average eliminating 40 calls a year per ambassador. That’s a cost-savings of $16,640 a year for your brand!

 

Customer Feedback Improves Product Design 

So what would this look like in the real-world? At a basic level, it would simply involve training your ambassadors to be better listeners to other customers and to better record their feedback and thoughts so your brand can act on it. Keep in mind, your brand should also be doing this with your customer service teams, routinely asking them to give you reports on what customers are consistently saying, good and bad, about your brand, and its products.

Another option could be creating an online group/forum/community where ambassadors or even other customers could share brand and product feedback. Dell has already been doing this for over a decade with its Ideastorm online customer feedback site. The idea behind Ideastorm is so simple, it’s brilliant. Customers submit ideas for improving existing products, or offering new ones. The community then votes on the ideas it likes, and the most popular ideas get reviewed by Dell, and possibly implemented! With Ideastorm, Dell is basically crowdsourcing its customers for ideas. It’s a great way to get very low-cost market research. Rock stars like Lady Gaga have been doing this for years, creating sites just for fans, then using feedback and ideas generated by those fans to influence tour stops and merchandise selection.

According to Dell, each idea submitted to Ideastorm (over 27k so far) has a value to the brand of $10,000, and the site has generated over $100M in additional revenue for Dell! All because Dell got serious about listening to its customers and implementing their ideas.

 

Proactively Empowering Ambassadors to Engage With Customers Improves and Defends Your Brand’s Reputation

It’s one of the nightmare scenarios for social media managers across the country: Encountering an angry customer complaining about your brand on social media. What’s worse is finding a post on your Facebook brand page criticizing your brand that was left TWO HOURS AGO! Since that time, 5 more people have piled on, and now your Facebook page is filled with complaints about your brand, front and center for all to see.

If you’ve ever had to deal with such an issue on social media, you know what a headache it can be. One way to greatly lessen the chance of having to deal with such a social media firestorm is by empowering your brand ambassadors to defend your brand online. The great thing about your fans is that they act like guard dogs. If someone comes into your yard (or Facebook page) and tries to start trouble, they bark.  Loud. If the person is a troll, the barking will often scare them away. If the person is a customer with a legitimate complaint, your brand ambassadors can often help the customer AND alert your brand so that a representative can reply as well. Your brand ambassadors can alert you to complaints that need to be addressed as well as issues they are seeing other customers mentioning repeatedly. To be clear, your brand should already be aggressively monitoring customer feedback, but having your ambassador alerting you as just means that you can deal with any potential issues quicker, which improves both your brand reputation and your ability to handle customer complaints before they grow into a bigger problem.

For example, one client told me that by aggressively monitoring feedback from customers, it effectively creates a two-week window for the brand to solve a widespread problem and address customer complaints before industry press notices and reports on the issue. This is a function of the brand being proactive in addressing complaints from customers, and a big part of that is getting information from customers as soon as possible. Having your ambassadors interact with customers daily can help your brand identify potential issues and respond in much less time. This improves your brand’s reputation, as well as letting you deal with customer complaints quickly, regardless of whether it’s an individual issue or a systemic one.

 

Your Brand Ambassadors Can Greatly Reduce Promotional Costs, Especially For a Product Launch 

I’ve always told clients that cash should be a last resort when compensating your brand ambassadors. Instead, I challenge clients to think about how they can use access as a form of compensation. The problem with paying ambassadors with cash is that you frame their work as being a ‘job’. If you’ve chosen the right ambassadors, then you’ve chosen special customers that already love and promote your brand. You’re just working with them in a formal way to help them do what they already love doing.

Customers that love your brand want more access to your brand. One easy way to do this is to give your ambassadors early access to products before they are made available to the public. This is a true perk for your ambassadors, plus it also serves multiple benefits to your brand:

  1. It allows your ambassadors to give your brand immediate feedback on the product. This allows you to get a better sense of which features/characteristics of the product they enjoy, and you can highlight these features when you promote the product to your general customer base.
  2. Giving your ambassadors early access to new products allows them to create word of mouth about the products. This drives interest and demand for the products at launch. Think of how you give the press early access to review products so they will write about them. It’s the same idea here, the big difference is, your ambassadors LOVE your brand and will be more likely to enthusiastically promote the new product to others, and passionately so!

So how does this translate into a cost-savings? By letting your ambassadors drive promotion prior to and during launch, you can potentially reduce the amount of money you would normally spend on traditional advertising to support the launch. Ford has done this in the past when launching new vehicles, they would lean on ambassadors to build buzz and interest. Here’s Ford’s EVP Jim Farley detailing how this worked for the automaker during a product launch:

“What happens is, by launching the vehicle early, getting people involved in talking about the new global Focus or the new Fiesta is the US before it goes on sale, we can lower the amount of traditional advertising we do after the vehicle goes on sale.  That’s where the massive cost savings have been.  I’ll give you an example; On the Fiesta Movement, we had higher unaided nameplate awareness than Fit or Yaris, and we spent 10 cents on the dollar, than a traditional tv ad campaign.  So by starting earlier and using social media to spread the word about the new product, we’re really reducing the amount of traditional advertising we have to spend.”

So by empowering its ambassadors to help promote these car models at launch, Ford spent 10% what it would have spent on a television ad campaign to achieve the same level of exposure!  Scott Monty, formerly Ford’s Global Social Media Lead, added:

“We had a higher level of awareness for the subcompact than for vehicles we had in the market for 2-3 years; we collected over 125,000 hand-raisers who indicated they wanted to learn more when the car became available; and the conversion of reservations to sales was 10X higher than our traditional conversion rate.

All before we began any major media efforts toward the launch of the Fiesta.”

Additionally, this speaks to how we tend to trust messages that originate from fellow customers more than those that originate with a brand.  A message coming from a brand is often viewed as being an advertisement, whereas we tend to be more likely to pay attention to and trust a message or recommendation that comes from a fellow customer. Ford tapped into that dynamic with the results it saw with its launch of the Fiesta.

The takeaway? Tapping your brand ambassadors to build awareness for your product can be more cost-effective than using traditional advertising to generate the same levels of exposure!

 

A Well-Designed Brand Ambassador Program Will Improve Your Existing Business Functions and Save You Money

Most companies plan a brand ambassador program to be a stand-alone effort. It shouldn’t be. A well-designed brand ambassador program will positively impact several of your core business functions, resulting in increased sales and lowered costs:

  • Customer service costs are lowered because your brand ambassadors are interacting directly with customers, helping them solve their problems and answer their questions. This eliminates the need to contact your customer service reps, which saves you money.
  • Customer feedback can improve product design and identify issues before they become larger problems. Since your brand ambassadors are interacting directly with your customers, they become aware of potential issues with your products in advance, giving your brand time to address them and improve the designs. This saves you money by improving customer satisfaction and potentially eliminating the need for later product recalls.
  • Your brand ambassadors will help defend your brand online, which reduces the brand’s need to engage and ‘put out fires’, which saves your social media team a lot of time, and perhaps more importantly to them, a lot of headaches.
  • Brand ambassadors are powerful promotional partners, especially when you have a new product launch. Giving your ambassadors early access to new products before they are made available to the public lets them create promotion and buzz for the products before they launch. The increased promotion can potentially reduce or even eliminate the traditional marketing efforts you were planning to support the product at launch.

There will always be costs associated with launching and maintaining a well-run brand ambassador program. But with proper planning, your brand ambassador program should not only generate profits, it should save your brand real money.

Want to learn how much money your company could save with a brand ambassador program? Email me today and let’s discuss the possibilities!