Defining and Attracting Your Ideal Brand Ambassador

in Brand Awareness

Recall that in our last blog post, we discussed how to use modern social tools to transform your customer base into your very own brand ambassadors. However, this is only half the battle. Defining your ideal brand ambassador and knowing how to attract them to your program are essential elements to your marketing strategy. In this post, we will examine how to define and attract your company’s ideal brand ambassador to get the most out of your brand ambassador program.

Defining Your Ideal Brand Ambassador

Who do you want representing your brand? Defining the characteristics of your ideal brand ambassador will determine how they contribute to your overall brand value. To get you started, we’ve identified four ideal characteristics to look for in potential brand ambassadors: social engagement, brand loyalty, population segment, and social influence. Why are these traits so valuable in a brand ambassador, you ask? Let’s take a closer look:

The Socially Engaged

Customers who are socially engaged are ideal candidates for your brand ambassador program because they possess the unique ability to communicate with many users across a multitude of social networks. This means they can get you widespread publicity for your brand. To identify these customers, start by monitoring your customer base for customers who frequently talk about your brand. Frequent social activity will likely correlate with high social engagement, meaning the customers that post the most usually get a high response rate from other users, thus making them ideal for spreading your company’s message.

The Brand Loyalists

While you’re monitoring your customer base for users with high social engagement, you should also be on the lookout for those with frequent social activity related to talking about your brand. People like to frequently brag about companies or products they love, and they often use a variety of social tools to make sure everyone hears them loud and clear. By finding and acknowledging the loyal members of your customer base, you can leverage their loyalty in coordination with your brand ambassador program. After all, you want your brand ambassadors to love the brand they are representing, and you’re guaranteed to find this ideal characteristic of loyalty within your brand loyalist customers.

The Majority

Think of your customers like M&M’s. You’ve got a few green ones, some yellow, a couple of blue, and a whole bunch of red. The M&M colors represent your population segments within your customer base, with the red being the largest population segment, and therefore a reliable representation of your average customer. Now are the red more likely to listen to the blue, or another red? The point is that people are likely to listen to members of their own segment seeing as these are the people they have the most in common with and thus are most likely to relate to. Identifying the members of the majority segment of your customer base that also possess qualities like high social engagement or brand loyalty is a great and accurate method for pinpointing customers that would make valuable brand ambassadors.

The Social Influencers

A social influencer is just a person on the Internet with a large social presence and social following. These people could include YouTube stars, celebrities, famed bloggers, etc. Identifying these popular social personalities and leveraging them in order to extend your brand to their wide range of audiences is something we here at Sideqik call Influencer Marketing. In fact, we’ve dedicated an entire blog post on Influencer Marketing that you can read here. Due to the Internet popularity and widespread reach that social influencers attain, social influence is an ideal trait to look for in potential brand ambassadors.

Attracting Your Ideal Brand Ambassador

So you’ve defined four ideal characteristics to look for in potential brand ambassadors, but now what? How do you convince the members of your customer base that you’ve identified as possessing these ideal traits to become brand ambassadors for your company? You need a way to incentivize, or attract, these customers to join your brand ambassador program. Implementing a reward system to recognize your brand ambassadors as stakeholders in your company is a great way to reward brand ambassadors for representing your brand and attract others to do the same.

Methods of Attraction

A great method of attraction is running an online promotion or sweepstakes competition. In doing so, you will energize your customer base to compete against one another for the prize or recognition your promotion is offering. Furthermore, this will help you identify the customers that exemplify your ideal brand ambassador qualities. For example, customers who feel compelled to frequently spread the word about your promotion to their social networks show that they are socially engaged and loyal to your brand’s message by giving you free and frequent publicity. Sideqik offers your brand a variety of promotion options including sweepstakes, hashtag voting, and photo contests. Check out all of the types of promotions Sideqik offers and how to leverage these in your branding strategy!

Brand Ambassador Benefits

Now that you have defined your ideal brand ambassador traits and strategized methods of attraction, you have created a prime opportunity to transform your customers into brand ambassadors. Be on the look out for our next blog post, Top 5 Benefits of Brand Ambassadors, to learn why brand ambassadors are such a vital part of your branding strategy.