The role of a brand ambassador has undergone substantial changes in recent years, originally the domain of celebrities with large followings, the task has increasingly fallen to smaller opinion leaders, and niche micro-influencers with a social media presence.
An endorsement coming from an authoritative source has long been considered a surefire way of generating buzz, building trust and credibility among the masses. While this still holds true, the rise of the social media influencer has led to a paradigm shift in how people perceive fame, authority, and expertise.
As a result, businesses and organizations require a fundamentally altered approach to engaging with endorsers, who perfectly align with their mission, vision, target audiences, and demographics. In this article, we cover some tips and best practices for businesses to get the most bang for their buck when working with brand ambassadors.
1. Define the Role of The Brand Ambassador
The most common reasons behind failed endorsements campaigns, is often the brand itself, and oftentimes this is the result of going-in blind, with no objectives, targets, or benchmarks to track performance against.
Before even looking for a suitable ambassador to endorse your brand, the first step should be to define their overall role and contribution to your campaigns. Only when this is clarified, can the search for an ideal candidate begin.
This is all the more critical when working with social media influencers, with a number of factors such as their background, content, audiences, and posting frequencies coming into fray. There are extensive guidelines and best practices in this regard, such as HelloSocial’s guide to finding Instagram influencers, which can help set benchmarks, goals, and objectives to hold influencers accountable.
Only by clearly establishing the roles and responsibilities of an ambassador, or influencer can you hold them accountable and ensure they are upholding their end of the deal.
Some of the roles and responsibilities of a brand ambassador include:
- Comprehending the firm’s vision, mission, and goals.
- Creating and building brand awareness through their platforms.
- Generating content that lets people know how they can benefit from the product or service.
- Represent the company at events like trade shows, product launches, and grand openings.
- Help shape opinions in consumer communities.
- Offering product or service reviews.
- Helping the brand maintain a positive image.
The above are the typical roles and responsibilities of any spokesperson or representative of a brand, however, depending on the unique requirements of each organization, product, or service, new components can be included to reflect the same.
The roles and responsibilities you choose to include will ultimately depend on the goals you wish to achieve with the endorsement campaign. When one of our fashion clients launched an influencer campaign without role clarity, Growth Hackers stepped in to map responsibilities, and their reach doubled within 4 months.
2. Create a Dedicated Application Form
Working with renowned celebrities and personalities often includes extensive negotiations and discussions behind closed doors. However, to grab the attention of smaller influencers, and minor internet celebrities, a dedicated application form is a great place to get started.
This helps generate applications from a wide range of candidates, across different geographic locations, backgrounds, content types, and target audiences. From this large pool of candidates, businesses can select an influencer who perfectly aligns with core objectives.
Just by putting out an application form, and signaling intent for an endorsement campaign, businesses can receive responses from across the board, including individual influencers, agents, marketplaces, and occasionally even well-known celebrities via direct messages on social media.
Ideally, the application form, and the information leading up to it should provide a brief primer on the campaign, the organization behind it, and what would be expected of the applicants. This helps filter out unsuitable candidates, all the while further spreading the word on your campaign.
The form can be posted on your website, with snippets distributed across relevant forums and marketplaces. You can also integrate it with your CRM, with all data, and responses tracked, to ensure effective, and transparent decision making towards the end.
Before Growth Hackers introduced a dedicated application form for one of our beauty clients, influencer outreach was scattered and inefficient but after we launched it, 72% more qualified candidates applied and aligned with campaign goals.
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3. Know the Qualities You Want in a Brand Ambassador
After the stage has been set on the goals and objectives of a campaign, the next step is developing a deep understanding of the qualities you seek in an ideal influencer for your brand. This should ideally guide your outreach, and intake processes, while forming an effective framework for the selection, or elimination process.
There are a number of different characteristics that form the crux of the experience and image that an organization would like to convey, here are some of the popular ones to keep in mind.
Large Following
The most important quality to look for in an influencer is someone with a significant following, particularly online. Everyone looks for information and shops online these days, which is why it is so crucial for an ambassador to have an online following.
Such ambassadors can be incredible drivers of growth, especially in the early days of a business. They may also have a huge fan base even though they do not interact with others online, for example, a famous athlete or actor.
Socially Active
Another vital quality to look for in an ambassador for your brand is someone who is socially active. The job essentially entails interacting with others and driving relevant conversations, making social adeptness a crucial quality.
Your ideal candidate should be engaging and active on their respective platforms, and a great way to gauge that is the level of activity seen on their posts from loyal followers. By engaging such an influencer, you are essentially leveraging their own brand to build yours.
Professionalism
With every Tom, Dick, and Harry joining in on the influencer bandwagon, a lot of them lack the necessary training, or professional representation that can ensure they stay on-course to comply with terms and fulfill their contractual obligations.
The only way to ensure professionalism is by looking up their performance in previous assignments, and their conduct while dealing with customers, followers, and related brands. Since 2016, at Growth Hackers, we’ve vetted hundreds (Maybe thousands by now) of influencers, and campaigns with thoroughly professional ambassadors see 77% fewer compliance issues and higher audience trust.
Word spreads quickly in this industry, and if a certain brand ambassador has failed to live-up to expectations in the past, it’s best to stay clear of them going forward.
There is also the risk of their religious, political, and personal beliefs being imprinted on the brands they endorse. Which is why it remains crucial to have each prospective candidate thoroughly vetted, to ensure that even their personal inclinations align with the brand.
Credibility
An ideal candidate would be someone who strives to maintain their credibility among fans, followers, and audiences. This is increasingly hard to come by, with most C, and D-list media personalities taking up any and all assignments that come their way.
In recent years, even a number of A-list celebrities have endorsed crypto scams, and various dubious MLM schemes, essentially tarnishing their credibility for quick cash. While they still maintain their fanbase, any association with such personalities doesn’t project the right image for most brands.
Relevance
We live in a fast-paced world, and people can achieve fame in a few days only to be forgotten in a few weeks. Therefore, you need a brand ambassador who is relevant, not just during this period in question, but also to your key demographics and audiences.
Relevance, in this case, also means that the ambassador is relevant to the product or service you want them to promote. For example, an athlete promoting sportswear is relevant, as against endorsing a baby food brand. Ensuring the relevance of an ambassador is paramount.
When one Fintech client initially partnered with a trendy influencer whose audience didn’t match their product, Growth Hackers intervened and re-aligned the campaign with a relevant ambassador. What was the outcome? It resulted in a 297% boost in engagement (Might seem impressive but not that hard as the influencer they initially picked was completely irrelevant).
Flexibility
Being an influencer, or spokesperson for a brand is not a typical nine-to-five job. You should ensure they are flexible and can adjust to your company’s schedule.
You may require them to attend an event at night, or even fly to a different country, which they should be willing to do, given sufficient notice. They should be flexible enough to fulfill your request if they are likely to represent your brand, products, or services for the long run.
4. Advertise Your Brand Ambassador Program
If you are a small business, getting well known influencers, or ambassadors for your brand can be quite challenging. On the other hand, large companies will receive extensive pitches from agents, and managers to have their clients as ambassadors for the brand.
In order to widen your pool of applicants, a small business should advertise its intent, and requirements for a celebrity ambassador as far and wide as possible. One of our e-commerce clients struggled to attract the right influencers until Growth Hackers guided them to advertise their ambassador program widely, resulting in a 3x increase in qualified applications within 10 weeks.
Your current and past customer base is your best source for such a brand ambassador. For example, a famous musician who has used your product before is more likely to become an official representative of your brand than someone who has never heard of your brand.
It would be best to cast as wide a net as possible when advertising your ambassador program. Use social media to reach as many people as possible and advertise on every platform.
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5. Look for Experience
Many influencers today think they only have to record videos of themselves using a product or reviewing various services to be official ambassadors, but that is far from the truth. Being a brand ambassador is a full-time job; when hiring one, you should always consider the applicant’s experience.
They should particularly have experience successfully promoting other products, which involves measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for past campaigns. These KPIs may include sales, social media engagement, and conversion rates.
At Growth Hackers we know from firsthand experience that hiring an inexperienced influencer is like putting a rookie pilot in the cockpit: you might get lucky, but the flight is far riskier than it needs to be. Working with an experienced candidate, who has already worked with leading brands in the past, and successfully complied with contractual obligations is a great way to ensure a seamless experience.
Final Words on Hiring Brand Ambassadors
The growing heft of micro-influencers with 10,000 to 100,000 followers, focused on a particular niche offers a great opportunity for brands. They bring a certain level of credibility, and legitimacy, that has long disappeared among the multi-million dollar red carpet crowds.
With the right planning, approach, and execution, brands and startups can witness strong traction, and steady growth in brand equity when working with a few dozen brand ambassadors, instead of one or two, like in the past.
Growth Hackers is an award-winning small business branding company helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners outsource the hiring process by helping them hire top-notch brand ambassadors to improve their brand visibility, generate qualified leads, acquire and retain users.
We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
