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What Makes a Great Brand Ambassador?

Authors: Kristen Matthews Kristen Matthews
Posted Under: Customer Experience
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What Makes a Great Brand Ambassador?
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Social Influencer Case StudyAmbassador prowling: Hunting down people who love your brand or locating the people who will love your brand they just don’t know it yet.

Sounds a little creepy, maybe, welcome to the world of marketing.

Yesterday I wrote a post on how Gini Dietrich promoted her book with the help of brand ambassadors. In the event you missed it, check it out real quick here.

I want to dive a bit deeper in to that awesome example and thoroughly explore with you what makes a good ambassador for your brand and how you can find them.

Ambassador Criteria

No matter what type of product or service you offer, you can’t promote it without the help of awesome word of mouth recommendations that come from people who sincerely love you.

Here are some standards to hold people to before giving them an ambassador badge:

  • They are an engaged part of your community
  • They are customers who like you
  • They are active on blogs and/or social channels
  • They are influential in their sphere

Rounding Up Current Ambassadors

Hopefully you have a pulse on the people who say good things about your brand or at least simply like you.

Put these people in a contact database so that you can continually communicate with them and stay on their brains.

Locating New Ambassadors

You can never have too many ambassadors, right?

If you feel like your group of people who like your brand is lacking you should probably find some new brand fan friends.

The key is finding the people who love the niche your brand falls in to, they just haven’t been introduced to your product or service yet.

Bloggers are easiest to search for contextually so define really specific criteria for ambassadors. I would try to think of a genre and then two niche topics within that genre that a good ambassador would write about.

For example, when I am looking for bloggers for GroupHigh to serve as brand ambassadors, my genre is PR or marketing. From there, I look within that very large vertical for bloggers who have written specifically about blogger outreach AND influencer marketing not “or.”

Equip the People Who “Fit” With the Right Assets

For the customers who like you but don’t really advocate much, make a list of 5 creative sharable assets you can equip them with. Here is a starting point inspiration for you. I invite you to make your own list and tweet a picture to me @kristenwords.

  • A super fun, creative, obscure, slightly offensive, earth shattering, ground breaking infographic
  • A white paper addressing a topic their audience would be interested in
  • A how to guide that solves a pain point for their audience
  • Embedable video content
  • High resolution images of your product or service that they advocate the most for. Maybe have a super cute kitten posing with your product in the pics?

Notice a trend here?

The content that you arm your ambassadors with doesn’t necessarily serve your needs, it serves theirs. Which in return serves yours.

Secret to Success

In my post yesterday I discussed how Gini was fortunate enough to have a large network already in place after years of hard work. Therefore, she was able to take ambassador applications and handpick 150 for her book launch.

outreachmarketingvirtualsummit-250x250The secret to success is quite simple folks, it just takes a lot of work:

Focus most of your effort on building a strong network around your brand. Engage with your community continually and make them feel part of your brand’s family.

Time consuming? Yes. Rewarding? Absolutely.

What makes a great ambassador for your brand? Share in the comments below!

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