How to manage Brand Ambassadors

in Brand Awareness, Influencer Marketing

As we have discussed before, brand ambassadors are important regardless of the size of your company. When trying to attract new customers it is important create unique content on a regular basis and one of the best methods to ensure steady content is through a well developed brand ambassador program. By managing Brand Ambassadors efficiently you will begin to develop trust with their audience and in the long term draw more ambassadors who want to join the culture you have cultivated.

The first step in any successful strategy is to pick the goals which you want to accomplish and the social channels which you want to develop a major presence on. Decide early the type of content you will be publishing and stick with your decision. Publishing to a separate social channel every week can be confusing for customers and make it difficult for your fans to find new content when it is created. By focusing on specific social channels you are able to focus your energy on making something unique which will draw more traffic than trying to cover every outlet available online.

Red Bull's YouTube channel centers around extreme sports and the athletes they sponsor — Red Bull’s YouTube channel centers around specific sports and the athletes they sponsor

Drawing in potential customers and ambassadors is only the beginning, it is also important that you manage your ambassadors to ensure that quality content continues to be produced and that your ambassadors continue to be engaged with your brand. Red Bull is a prime example of brand ambassador management done right. By sponsoring athletes and competitions which thrive from a visual medium, and professionally producing and publishing those videos to a single location on YouTube, Red Bull makes it easy for fans to not only follow their favorite extreme sport but also to discover new athletes in a similar space. Fans end up following the Red Bull channel so that they do not miss any new uploads. They also receive notifications alerting them of new content which leads to fans discovering more athletes to follow. This creates a culture where athletes want to be involved with Red Bull, they want to be represented alongside some of the bigger names on that channel and exist under the Red Bull name.

This is why keeping your ambassadors involved is important, you want them to feel like they are part of the development of your brand. Reward them for their loyalty, clothing is a great way for them to casually promote your brand in everyday social situations. Another common practice is to promote influential ambassadors to an “elite” status and offer special perks such as VIP invitations to events you may be hosting. Offering something unique to your product can go a long way towards making your brand stand out and keep your ambassadors invested.

So now that you have the incentives and goals for your ambassadors, what do you do with them? The best method to manage your brand ambassadors is to keep them happy. By representing your brand you will expect them to produce certain content and the best way to do this is by leading them in the general direction you ultimately want them to be in. Returning to the Red Bull example, their YouTube channel is all about extreme sports so to ensure that the content created fits with that specific image they make sure that their ambassadors are able to continue participating in those events, creating content and awareness for the brand in the process. Brand Ambassador programs are a team effort, which is why planning and following through on your campaigns is so important and while having someone outside of your company represent you can seem risky, by being diligent about how you run your brand ambassador program you can ensure that those talking about your brand will be as enthusiastic as you are.