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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 to Incorporate Millennials Into Your Brand Ambassador Program

Using Millennials as Brand Ambassadors
Want to know how much it will cost to create a Brand Ambassador Program for your company? Check out Mack’s Rate Sheet.

In many ways, millennials are ideal for most Brand Ambassador Programs given who they are, how they communicate, and where their passions lie.  The starting point for the group defined as millennials is generally considered to be anyone born in ‘the early 1980s’, and most sources put the end-point for this age group as being 18-20 years later.  So for the purposes of this article, I’ll call millennials anyone between the ages of 15-35 in 2017.

Before we talk about how to incorporate millennials into your Brand Ambassador Program, let’s look at some of the key qualities and characteristics that define this group of people:

Millennials are digitally savvy: Millennials have used computers and digital devices for most of, if not their entire lives. Additionally, millennials are the first generation to grow up with a robust internet available to them. Millennials are quite comfortable with and even expect digital experiences in many if not all forms of communication.

Millennials thrive off connecting with others: Millennials as a group are definitely extroverted, they seek out communication with others, especially within their same age group. This is slightly in contrast to their older siblings who are members of Generation X (who may also be their bosses), as that group tends to be more self-reflective and values solitude more than millennials. Keep this in mind if there are no millennials involved in the planning of your brand ambassador efforts if you want to attract millennials to your program.

Millennials have a highly-tuned bullshit sensor when it comes to advertising: Having grown up with the internet and social media, they’ve also grown up with a lot of bad advertising. They are naturally weary of anything the ‘smells’ like advertising. On the flipside, they prize authenticity.   They view open and honest communication as a show of respect for them, and this improves brand loyalty and attraction for millennials.

Millennials support causes that benefit their communities and the planet on local, national and global levels: One thing that I think is quite impressive about millennials is that they are passionate about problems they view within their communities, but they are also more than willing to play an active role in working to solve those problems. They are very giving of their time to help support causes that they believe in, and that speaks to their credit. Keep this in mind when you move to fleshing out how millennials will be compensated within the structure of your Brand Ambassador Program.

 

Related: 10 Things to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program

 

So when you are fleshing out how millennials can be a part of your Brand Ambassador Program, you want to factor in the above qualities that define this group. Let’s look at the role you should ask millennials to perform as Brand Ambassadors, how you can best engage them, and finally, discuss the best ways to compensate them.

How Should You Ask Millennials to Act As Brand Ambassadors? When a brand launches an ambassador program, one of the first strategies is to attempt to leverage the Brand Ambassador Program as a vehicle to drive new sales. There are many other ways to leverage a Brand Ambassador Program (as a way to drive customer feedback, as a way to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, to help with product design), but driving sales is often a logical starting point, since budgets for Brand Ambassador Programs are often justified by the promise of new sales generated.

Yet when we consider working with millennials as our Brand Ambassadors, we need to factor in the unique qualities that define this group when deciding on the type of relationship we want and expect of them.  In short, we need to remember that:

  • Millennials are very wary of advertising messages
  • Millennials prize authenticity
  • Millennials are very engaging, especially with other millennials
  • Millennials are quite comfortable with the internet and digital tools

So for example, if you want millennials to work to drive sales as part of your Brand Ambassador Program, you need to tailor your efforts to incorporate the qualities that define millennials. Case in point, we know that millennials are very wary of advertising messages and that they prize authenticity. Using these together, if you ask your Brand Ambassadors who are millennials to sell to other millennials, you have to be willing to let them do so in a way that will make sense to them as millennial Brand Ambassadors, but also to the other millennials they will be talking to. For example, since millennials prize authenticity, you have to give your millennial Brand Ambassadors the freedom to openly discuss what they like AND dislike about your brand. It might seem scary to have your Brand Ambassadors out there openly discussing what they dislike about your brand, but if they are speaking to millennials (and many other age groups, for that manner), this will actually improve their ability to sell to those millennials.  In short, regardless of how you want your Brand Ambassadors to act on your brand’s behalf, you have to consider how they can most comfortably help your brand reach its goals.

 

How Should You Engage Millennial Brand Ambassadors? Two of the defining qualities of millennials is that they thrive off open communication, and they prize authenticity. So this means when engaging your millennial Brand Ambassadors, you want to give them as much honest communication and information as possible about your Brand Ambassador Program and how you want to work with them. Give them a thorough knowledge of what your Brand Ambassador Program is, what you are hoping to accomplish, and talk to them about how you want to work with them. If millennials have a sense that their opinions are valued and respected, and they feel as if they have a sense of ownership over the Brand Ambassador Program, they will be more invested in seeing it succeed. This willingness to honestly engage the millennials you are working with also speaks to their love of authenticity, which will appeal to them and help them become more invested in your efforts.

Also, keep in mind that millennials are also very comfortable with digital and social media tools. So another option could be to create an online portal, forum or group where Brand Ambassadors could connect with each other and share tips and ideas.  Also, you could have the brand’s management be involved with this group, so that the Brand Ambassador’s best ideas could be pitched directly to the brand, and quickly incorporated into the program. This incorporating of ideas from millennial members also helps them become more invested in the Brand Ambassador Program itself, as it send the strong message to the millennial ambassadors that their opinions are valued, and will be acted upon.

 

How Do Your Millennial Brand Ambassadors Want to Be Compensated? I’ve always said that your Brand Ambassadors should absolutely be compensated for their efforts. There’s a big time commitment involved, and everyone deserves to be compensated for their time. However, money is not the only way to compensate Brand Ambassadors, and only compensating with money has ramifications. I see many Brand Ambassador Programs that only focus on leveraging Brand Ambassadors as salespeople, and they are compensated with commissions on their sales. The potential problem with this approach is that it frames every customer interaction a Brand Ambassador has a sales-interaction only. The Brand Ambassador is typically only interested in completing a sale, and isn’t as interested in any customer feedback that might be collected, and which is often far more valuable than completing an individual sale.

Now that I’m off that soapbox, let’s look at how to compensate your millennial Brand Ambassadors. Having said all the above, I still think it’s fine to compensate millennial Brand Ambassadors with cash, but I also think other forms of compensation should be considered. For example, we know that millennials thrive on open communication, and they love authenticity. Keeping this in mind, you could adopt the rock star mentality and give your millennial Brand Ambassadors special access ‘behind the scenes’ at their favorite brand.  Give them special access to the marketing team, or to product development.  Let them know about upcoming products or initiatives that the general public doesn’t know about or that won’t know about for months.

Also, feel free to tap into their natural love of being active in their communities. For example, if a brand like North Face launched a Brand Ambassador Program with millennials as members, it might want to have a special Beach Cleanup Day just for its Brand Ambassadors.  An initiative such as this would be a way to not only reward millennial Brand Ambassadors, but also give them a way to improve their local community, which taps into their desire to be invested in helping locally. Perhaps this event could be made open to the public and even used as a sort of membership drive as a way for the existing millennial Brand Ambassadors to meet other millennials who would want to help clean the beach, but who may also become interested in learning more about joining North Face’s Brand Ambassador Program.

 

So there’s some ideas for how you can work with millennials in your Brand Ambassador Program. Since this group has already become the largest generation, working with them is no longer an option, it’s now reality. As with any solid Brand Ambassador Program, think about how your brand benefits from the program, and think about how your ambassadors (in this case millennials) will benefit.

Find a win-win situation for both your brand and your ambassadors, and your Brand Ambassador Program will be a success.

BONUS: Here’s this post in video form to make it even easier to share with your team:

UPDATE: Here’s an example of company brand ambassador programs that leverage millennials as members:

Red Bull’s Wings Team: This group of ambassadors (or ‘Student Marketeers’) mostly includes people who are deemed popular and influential within their local communities.  Members are involved in ‘activations’ involving the Red Bull drink, typically more than a simple product demonstration.  These can involve elaborate stunts such as ‘air drops’ or slipping free Red Bull into classrooms or in vending machines for free. The main goal is to connect with college students as these are also millennials.

 

 

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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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How One Fan Made Marketo’s Bad Day a Little Less So

So Marketo had a bad day yesterday. They forgot to renew their domain, causing the site to be down, and plenty of frustration and panic for their customers. Believe it or not, this happens.  A few years ago here I briefly lost the mackcollier.com domain for the same reason, I thought it was set to auto-renew, and it wasn’t.

As you can imagine, twitter had a field day with the news….

But the news could have been a lot worse for Marketo, if it wasn’t for one of its customers stepping in to help out:

Yep, Travis stepped in and helped out Marketo when he saw they were facing problems. Remember that your fans see your brand as being THEIR brand too. Fans have a sense of ownership over their favorite brands, and act in the brand’s best interests. Travis no doubt understood what a mess this would cause for both Marketo and its customers, and wanted to help a brand that he loved.

And to Marketo’s credit, they gave Travis his just recognition as their Superman…

There are many lessons here and plenty of ‘how the hell did they let this happen?’ questions to answer. But one positive that may come from this episode is if Marketo explores ways to better engage its passionate fans like Travis.

Every company has passionate fans like Travis, and unfortunately, any day could see your company facing a crisis like the one Marketo faced yesterday.  When that happens, you’ll want to have as many fans like Travis helping you out as possible.  The time to start creating, cultivating and engaging with those fans is today.

When did Noah build the Ark? Before the rains came. Over the coming days and weeks, Marketo will be doing a lot of self-auditing and examining how they handled this crisis and how to avoid similar ones in the future. If the brand is smart, they will devote some of their reflection to how they can embrace and empower all the fans they have like Travis in the future.

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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.

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Your Big Brand is Already Doing Influencer Marketing, Whether You Realize it or Not

airlines customer serviceLast week, I wrote about how social media isn’t hard, companies make it hard. The idea being that a lot of opportunities fall into the lap of companies every day in regards to their digital strategies, and often these opportunities aren’t capitalized on.

For example, right now there’s a mad rush by brands to get on the Influencer Marketing train. Brands want to know how they can work with influencers, and how they can get those influencers talking positively online about their brand. Big brands are paying millions of dollars to consultants and agencies to help launch Influencer Marketing campaigns.

And yet, they often miss capitalizing on free opportunities to interact with influencers that fall into their laps.

I was thinking about this as I read about my friend Ann Handley’s recent traveling nightmare with Delta airlines. The story was a breakdown in customer service that’s unfortunately all too familiar to those of us that fly frequently. But I wanted to pick this story up when Ann, after getting no help (or empathy!) from Delta reps at the ATL airport, decided to turn to Twitter and the @Delta account.

At this point, I want to back up for a minute. When a customer has a problem with a brand, they will typically try to contact the brand via offline or online channels BEFORE going to social media. I’ve been educating clients on this for 10 years, I’ve been blogging about it here for years, hell I even wrote a book about this. So when a company encounters what they might perceive as a ‘complaint’ from a customer on social media, they need to understand how the customer got there. Typically, as Ann did, they tried to contact the brand via other customer support channels, and did not get the help they needed. So they turned to social media, and at this point, they just want someone to LISTEN to them and show EMPATHY for their situation. In short they want the brand to say “I’m sorry you’re upset, help me understand what has happened so I can see what can be done to help you”. The point is, you have a customer that’s typically frustrated, who is upset with the treatment they have gotten from your brand, but if you show empathy for their situation and work with them to resolve it to the customer’s satisfaction, you have a chance to convert a ranter, into a raver.  Nothing creates an advocate faster than a brand that listens to the customer that has a problem, and who goes the extra mile to solve that problem.

Now that we’ve covered that ground, let’s turn our attention back to Ann’s situation with Delta. I’m not going to really comment on what happened with Ann at the ATL airport (because you should read the post) but suffice it to say that Delta’s customer service efforts in person at the airport were less than satisfactory as far as Ann is concerned.  So she’s upset, and a bit frustrated by the time she decides to try the hail mary of contacting Delta on Twitter for help.

And the second she did, whether Delta realized it or not, but they were engaging in Influencer Marketing. A quick click of Ann’s Twitter account tells you the following:

  • She has nearly 400k followers
  • She’s a bestselling author

In other words, she’s an influencer. And I’m not sure what the social media equivalent of a Q Score is, but Ann’s would be off the charts. Everyone loves Ann.

So Delta had a rare opportunity to interact directly with an influencer fall in its lap. According to Ann, here’s what happened: She tweeted to @Delta saying she needed help.  Approximately an hour later (see the problem?), she got a reply, and an exchange began. Ann was offered a voucher or free miles, but really wanted someone from Delta to explain to her exactly what had happened and how her situation was allowed to reach this point.  Delta told her on Twitter that they were dispatching a customer service rep to her location in the airport to talk to her.

Eighty-five mins later (see the problem?), she was still waiting for the CS rep to reach her when her name was called for standby for another flight and she left the airport. Still frustrated and upset, she squeezed into the back of her flight, and started writing what would become her blog post.

Again, brands like Delta will spend millions if not hundreds of millions on Influencer Marketing in 2017. Yet when they have a chance to connect with an actual influencer for free, they blow it.

And the great irony of this story? Ann is a professional speaker, and as a fellow speaker, I can tell you that one thing we love is new case studies to share with our audiences. So there’s at least one positive Ann can take from this last week.

The moral of the story is that there’s no sense in your brand chasing the Shiny Object of the day if you can’t nail basic customer service. Empower and train your employees to have understanding and empathy for your customers and 95% of your customer service issues will magically disappear.

And for extra credit: Understand that every customer is an Influencer to someone. Your brand is engaging in Influencer Marketing every day, whether you realize it or not.

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Social Media Isn’t Hard, Your Company Makes it Hard

I spend very little time here breaking down how to use social media tools.  I don’t do the deep dives that some other sites engage in where they show you all the advanced tips on how to get the most bang out of Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat.

Here’s the reason why: It’s not about understanding the tools, it’s about understanding the people that are using the tools. Becoming a Facebook ninja isn’t going to help your business a damn bit if you don’t understand why your customers are on Facebook and what activities they are engaging in.  Understand your customers first, then you can focus on understanding the tools.

Here’s an example: I constantly teach clients how they can better leverage social media to connect directly with their customers and improve engagement.  A dead simple way to do this is to follow this process: Respond to every customer mention of a specific interaction with your company.  If the mention is positive, thank them.  If the mention is negative, followup with them to get more information and figure out how you can best resolve the interaction to the satisfaction of the customer.  Of course there are other ways to respond and engage with customers, but companies love and even need processes, and this is a great starting point.

In short, if a customer mentions doing business with your company, you respond. For those of us reading this that sit on the customer side of the fence, this makes complete sense. Yet for many companies, its waters they are hesitant to wade into for fear of the unknown.

But it really is low-hanging fruit that companies can easily grasp to improve their digital efforts to engage with customers and increase customer loyalty. Case in point, yesterday during #AdobeChat, we were discussing how businesses in the tourism and hospitality industries should engage with tourists or customers that are creating UGC. At one point I left this tweet:

Then later, Enterprise finds that tweet and replies with…

And then I reply with…

It truly is this easy. I mentioned Enterprise (notice I didn’t even mark the mention as a reply, which proves they were purposely monitoring brand mentions), they responded and thanked me, then I pointed out their good behavior to everyone in #AdobeChat. BTW, there were dozens if not hundreds of business travelers in this particular chat, so that type of positive promotion is golden.

And it all started with Enterprise being smart enough to engage. Why isn’t your company doing the same?

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The A-Ha Moment When Credit Karma Discovered It Had a Powerful Marketing Department It Never Knew Existed

Fans love your brandKerry recently forwarded me this case study post from First Round on the early success of Credit Karma. More specifically, the article talks about how CEO Kenneth Lin made a daily habit of skimming Reddit. One day, the article explains, he found something that changed his life:

A thread about credit monitoring kicked off by a user suspicious that his company’s free credit check service was a scam — including a passionate response from a user defending and extolling Credit Karma. “Oh my god,” Lin thought. “That person doesn’t even work for us.” It was a purely organic moment — foreshadowing the word-of-mouth trend that would win the startup millions of users in the months to come.

Ten years later, Credit Karma has established market dominance, with more than 50% of all customers hearing about the site from other users. It’s Googled more than Geico — considered the standard bearer for companies that have managed to build sexy, personality-driven brands in patently unsexy industries. Which makes it all the more surprising that Credit Karma pulled this off with a staff 1% the size of Geico’s, a paltry budget, and no PR agency help in those early, critical, brand-establishing years.

One of the conversations I often have with companies in regards to digital marketing is about new customer acquisition. Companies want to leverage social media and content marketing as a way to drive new sales, but they want to do so often with limited resources.

One of the most effective ways to drive new sales and build awareness is to embrace your current, happy customers. As the above example proves, all companies have current customers that are out extolling and sometimes even defending their favorite brands.

The best part? A recommendation from a happy customer carries far more weight with potential customers than an advertisement from the brand itself.  Think about it: What would have happened in the above example if Credit Karma CEO Kenneth Lin had started a Reddit post promoting Credit Karma? He would have quickly been shouted down by other Reddit users for leveraging the site to advertise his company.  But when a current, happy Credit Karma user defends the company, people listen.

Years ago, I worked with a large, global brand on a brand advocacy initiative. Part of the project included sitting down with customers that were identified as being loyal advocates or ‘fans’ of the brand, and talking to them honestly about the brand and how it could best move forward.

At one point, one of customers noted that “You guys have to give us better tools to tell other people how awesome you are”. The other customers in attendance quickly agreed, chiming in with stories about how they were constantly interacting with other customers and having opportunities to promote the brand more effectively to other customers.

As this was happening, I made a point to glance around the room and look at the brand representatives in attendance. They were stunned at what they were hearing. “Wait, so you’re saying you WANT us to give you information to better promote our brand to other customers?”  “YES!” was the enthusiastic reply from the customers.

This is what you have to understand about your brand’s fans: They are proactively promoting you to other customers every single day. Right now while you are reading this article, somewhere, a happy customer is doing their best to convince another customer to buy from your brand.

Why in the world would you ignore this? Every single brand on the planet should have a program in place to identify, engage with and help its most passionate customers. These happy customers are already promoting your brand, and they WANT you to interact with them and WANT to work with you to grow your brand, so why would you not engage directly with them? You should be working with your fans constantly to not only collect feedback from the customers they engage with, but also work with them to help better promote your brand to those customers they encounter.

After all, they are the most effective marketing department you have, that you probably didn’t even know existed.

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Want More Customers? Here’s the Two Keys to Improving Your Company’s New Customer Acquisition Rate

How your company can acquire new customersNew Customer Acquisition is often the top marketing priority for the average company. And the marketing costs associated with reaching that goal are often among the largest marketing expenses that company will face. Today I want to talk about two things you can do to improve your company’s new customer acquisition rate, and greatly decrease the associated costs.

Sell the Benefits, Not the Product

You can’t sell a product unless the customer is ready to buy it. One of the biggest marketing mistakes most companies make is they try to sell their product to the customer before they are ready to buy it. When trying to acquire new customers, most companies make the mistake of making the first marketing communications they deliver be product-focused. On the surface, this makes complete sense, you can’t sell the product unless you market it, right?

The problem is, a new customer by definition is a customer that hasn’t bought from you before. Which means at minimum they aren’t familiar with your company, but often they also aren’t familiar with the product you are selling. So if you try to sell new customers on a product that they don’t understand or know why they would want, that marketing message is going to be completely ignored. You are literally trying to sell a product to new customers that they aren’t ready to buy.

So if they aren’t ready to buy your product, what do you sell them?

You sell them the benefits associated with owning your product. New customers won’t know they need or want your product, but they will be interested in the benefits that your product provides.

If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. You don’t sell the product, you sell the benefits the owner gets from the product. And many of the most successful brands in the world have been adopting this approach for years:

Red Bull doesn’t sell an energy drink, it sells what happens after you drink it.

Nike doesn’t sell shoes, it sells the activities you’ll be engaged in while wearing its shoes.

Pedigree doesn’t sell dog food, it sells happy and healthy dogs.

 

New customers often won’t know they need your product, but they will know they need the benefits associated with owning it.  So that’s what you sell them. 

Consider this example: Let’s say your company sells spark plugs. If you want to acquire new customers that don’t know why they should buy your spark plugs (or even what a spark plug is), then how do you speak to them?

One option is to create product-focused marketing. You talk to new customers about what your spark plugs do. You talk about how your spark plugs create a hotter spark that leads to less carbon build-up. You talk about how your spark plugs are tipped with platinum instead of copper. You tell the new customer that you are trying to acquire how your spark plug is made from the best materials.

And the reality is, you might as well be throwing your money away. Because the new customer has no idea why less carbon build-up is important, or why a hotter spark is important. So your marketing message is completely irrelevant to them.

The way to win the new customer’s business is to instead sell them on the benefits of owning your spark plugs. You tell them that buying your spark plugs will make their car more reliable. You tell them how it will increase gas mileage by creating a more efficient burn of the fuel. You tell them how it will result in the car running smoother and with more power.

Those are the benefits that new customers are ready to buy. So you sell them what they are ready to buy. Then, after you’ve gotten their attention by communicating the benefits to them, at that point you can talk to them about the product features because at that point, they will be interested in learning more about the product itself.

Remember:

1 – Sell the BENEFITS of the product first to New Customers. That gets their attention and makes them interested in learning more.

2 – When they are ready to learn more, THEN you sell them on the product itself.

Still not getting it? Check out this post.

 

Excited? You should be, but hold on, there’s an even better way to improve the rate at which you acquire new customers…

 

Your Best Customers Are Your Best Marketing

The best salespeople for your company are your current, happy customers. Period. There’s four reasons why:

1 – Your current customers understand new customers better than you do. While you may not have an existing relationship with new customers, your current customers do. Because those new customers are often their friends and family. As such, your current customers can promote your products in a way that is relevant to their friends and family. They understand what’s important to their friends and family, and that’s why when they promote your products, they speak in terms of the benefits associated with owning the products. They use their understanding of what’s important to their friends and family and customize their promotion based on what their friends and family are looking for. And that makes their promotional efforts more effective than yours.

2 – Your current customers are passionate about your company and its products. By human nature, we want to share the things that help us and make us happy. This is especially true when we find a product we love, that makes our lives better. We want to tell others about that product because we want to see others have the same enjoyment from owning the product that we do. When you are in a store considering buying a product and a stranger comes up to you, unprompted, and says “I have that, and I love it!”, it makes an impression on you. Because you realize that they didn’t have to say anything, and did so because they truly do love the product. You’ll likely ask their opinion, which the stranger will happily provide. If you were even slightly considering purchasing the product beforehand, a ringing endorsement from a stranger would probably be enough to convince you to buy it.

3 – Your current customers lower your customer-service costs. As current customers interact with new customers, they are able to answer questions and address complaints head on. They can also speak from the perspective of an owner, and speak to their experiences associated with owning the product being discussed. This can help overcome questions and worries the new customer may have, and can improve the chances that the new customer will become a current one. And this is an obvious cost-savings to your company, as every question that your current customers answer for you, that potentially eliminates an email sent or phone call made to your customer service department.

4 – New customers trust their friends and family more than they do your company. While your current customers know and understand the new customers you want to reach, those new customers also know and trust your current customers. So when a current customer recommends your product to their friends and family, or even to strangers, it carries a lot of weight. Perhaps more importantly, if a new customer is considering your product and a friend tells them NOT to buy it and instead buy a competitor’s product, that new customer will probably listen to their friend.

 

Here’s How You Get More Customers:

1 – When targeting new customers that have no attachment to your brand or knowledge of your products, you sell the benefits associated with the product. These customers aren’t in the market for your product because they aren’t familiar with it. So you sell them on what they gain by owning it. They will understand the benefits and how they are important.

2 – Let your current customers market for you. Your current customers are more trusted by their friends and family. Additionally, your current customers have a better understanding of how to connect with their friends and family than your company does. You should work with your existing customers to give them the tools they need to tell others about your company and its products. Research has found that customers that purchased 5 times from your company also referred 5 new customers, and current customers that had purchased 10 times from your company had referred 7 new customers. Your current customers are literally bringing you new customer at almost no cost to you. This is the type of behavior that you want to encourage.

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Study: 4.7% of Your Customers Generate 100% of Your Online Word of Mouth

Word of mouthIn 2013, EngageSciences analyzed online interactions with and from over 400 brands and drew a conclusion that’s not that surprising: A small fraction of your customers are driving all of the online word of mouth about your brand.

The startling figure from our research was that typically only 4.7 percent of a brand’s fan base generates 100 percent of the social referrals. So to put it another way, it is 4.7 percente of your social media following that generates all of the word of mouth results, and by results we mean conversions, not just reach. These are the advocates that can actually influence their friends to convert directly onto your campaigns, to connect with you as a brand or take up an offer.

Not that we are ignoring the other 95 percent, there is still plenty of value in this large segment. They’re connecting to you as a brand, the active fans are consuming your content and they are 20-30 percent more likely to buy from you as a result. But if we are looking at social media through the eyes of marketing and we want to improve our acquisition metrics, then it is the top 4.7 percent  that generates all of the earned media results and organic growth

This is exactly why it’s so important to engage with your fans.  So many companies view their marketing campaigns as the chief channel for customer acquisitions, when in fact its your fans that are driving new customer referrals.  The end result is that companies end up spending massive amounts of money on creating marketing messages that are designed to connect with potential new customers.  People that have little to no interest in hearing that marketing message.

The Loyalty Graph

The biggest takeaway for me in writing Think Like a Rock Star was studying how rock stars create fans and learning that they all pretty much have the same marketing strategy guiding their efforts.  While companies create marketing messages designed to acquire new customers, rock stars across the board purposely ignore new customers, instead focusing on their biggest fans with the understanding that those fans will acquire new customers for them.

The problem is most brands don’t know who those 4.7 percent are and don’t have programs in place to work with this elite group of advocates. Marketers are often seduced by trying to pay for access to influencers – celebrities, bloggers and industry analysts. However everyone else is trying to do the same thing, which negates the value of this approach.

I also noticed this when writing my book.  I interviewed dozens of top brands, and asked them about their programs for connecting directly with their fans and advocates.  Every brand told me the exact same thing: We don’t have any program in place to do that.  So much of the marketing focus is on customer acquisition that brands don’t realize that their existing fans are a far more effective mechanism for customer acquisition than any series of commercials they can create.

Your fans are special customer that thrive off interacting with you.  When you connect with them, it simply validates why they love your brand and encourages them to create more positive word of mouth about your brand.

The most positive, long-term impact you can make on your business is to build a program within your brand that allows you to connect with your most passionate customers and they with you.

Period.