A brand ambassador is not the same as an influencer who is paid for a short-term promotion campaign. A brand ambassador is an independent voice that loves your brand so much that is ready to spread the word about it across their audience.
In this article, you’ll find out how to choose and find a brand ambassador on Instagram.
Who Is a Brand Ambassador & Why Does Your Brand Need One?
Influencers, creators, celebrities, and even your regular customers can become your brand ambassadors.
But the main difference between an influencer marketing campaign and a brand ambassador recruiting is that ambassadors are ready to become the face of your brand, not just post a couple of stories about your product, get paid, and then forget about it.
Brand ambassadors share the same values as your brand does, they promote these values across their audience, and they love your brand.
Why Should You Team Up with a Brand Ambassador?
This is not a necessity or rule to recruit any brand advocates. If you’re comfortable with conventional influencer marketing, that’s fine. Truth-be-told, not any business even needs brand ambassadors.
But let me explain what brand ambassadors can help you with:
- They increase your brand awareness.
If your brand advocate is a celebrity, influencer or creator with a significant audience, they can drastically increase your brand awareness. And thus…
2. They enhance your website traffic.
The more target buyer personas know about your brand, the more traffic you get on your company website. A key insight here: a brand ambassador’s audience needs to be your target audience.
3. They increase conversions, leads, and sales.
Once the target audience visits your website, it is likely they would love to learn more about your product — test a free trial, get something you offer for free, or simply buy your product right away. Isn’t it what you strive for?
4. They offer their loyal audience to you.
Their audience becomes yours by default when you start partnering.
What Do Brand Ambassadors Do, Exactly?
They promote your brand without pushing it. The whole thing about choosing a brand ambassador is to pick a person that looks coherently as the face of your brand. For instance, if your business is banking, celebs like Ronaldo are probably not the best choice.
Brand ambassadors spread your unique brand philosophy and values on social media, their website (if they have any), live events, networking, and alike.
You need to share your brand message with your ambassador, inside information about your brand and any other insights that help them understand your company. But we’ll talk about it a bit later.
How to Find a Brand Ambassador on Instagram
So you see the benefits of working with a brand ambassador, and now you want to find some. How? There are several ways.
Instagram search
In this article, we’re talking about Instagram specifically, but the tips I’m going to provide are valid for any social media channels.
Instagram search works poorly, but you can still use it. For instance, you can search by specific hashtags — your branded hashtags if you have any or relevant tags that are associated with your business.
You can also utilise the Tagged tab on Instagram, see who mentioned you and then repost these publications to your page with Combin Scheduler. Then you outreach these users, whether it’d be your customers or famous Instagram bloggers.
Your goal is to find people who love your brand and voluntarily shares positive feedback on your products.
But this method is time-consuming and daunting.
Combin Growth
Special tools like Combin Growth with an advanced search function are designed to streamline the exploring process. With the app, you can search your potential brand ambassadors by several relevant hashtags, place, and likes/comments count under their posts.
And you can also find the most relevant for you by sorting the results by the ER the posts have.
Let’s imagine you’re a fashion designer from London and you need to find a local ambassador for your brand. Here are the parameters you can set for this search:
You can also choose advanced filters like gender, language, activity, and followers/followings count.
Here are the results of our search. Now you can outreach them on Instagram and offer to become your brand ambassador. After a thorough analysis of their audience, positioning, reputation, and page statistics, of course.
Your current customers/followers analysis
Open several random Instagram accounts of your followers and see who they’re following. This will give you a clue what your audience is interested in.
Application form on your website
Not precisely a way to find brand ambassadors on Instagram, but a way to find them in general. If your website traffic is high enough, you can use it to recruit your brand advocates creating an application form.
Apart from generic questions, you can also ask why they love your brand, if they’re ready to promote it on social media, live events, and alike.
Specialized tools
The market offers plenty of tools that help entrepreneurs find the relevant brand ambassadors and influencers. Brandbassador, Influencer Marketing Hub or Influence.com are just some to name.
How to Develop a Brand Ambassador Program
So you’ve found your perfect brand ambassador. What’s next? Define all your collaboration conditions, either verbally or in a written contract.
You should include into your agreement the following:
- Your goals.
Explain what you need a brand ambassador for and what it means to be your brand ambassador. Here you can enumerate the liabilities of the brand advocate — which channels they should use to promote your brand, how often they should post your brand-related publications, which events they need to attend or host, etc.
- Your message and values.
Define your brand philosophy clearly and express how you want this to be transmitted by the ambassador on Instagram — posts, stories, branded hashtags, live events, online workshops, or any other form of promotion.
- Motivation system.
Define what you will offer to your brand ambassadors — money, free products, discounts on some of your premium products, ability to become a wholesaler, or anything else.
It’s important to find out what the ambassador expects from the collaboration.
Not all of them are interested in money — for some, it’s professional or personal growth, for others — the growth of their social channels, and for some — even an ability to belong to something significant.
So if you haven’t thought through the motivation system, you need to talk to your brand ambassador and figure out what they want.
- Set KPIs.
Remember, your primary business goal is to sell. Brand awareness, the large website traffic and lots of Instagram followers are nice, of course, but it means nothing if you get fewer sales than you expect.
Your brand ambassador, naturally, cannot guarantee you an instant sales boom, neither can your marketers or social media managers, but it doesn’t mean they don’t need to take responsibility.
Set KPIs like the monthly amount of sales, per cent of leads you’d like to get from the campaign of a specific ambassador, and so on. And don’t forget to set a tracking parameter (UTM, exclusive promo code, and alike) to understand where the traffic comes from.
You will also have to control the performance of the ambassador’s content. Ask the statistics of each promotional post — reach, engagement rate, and engagement rate by reach are the most important.
- Content guidelines.
Your brand ambassador, no matter if this is an influencer, popular Instagram creator or a celebrity, knows their audience better than you do, so it’s vital to define some guidelines on how they can promote your brand. Still, don’t offer a script they should strictly follow.
Takeaways
Recruiting of a brand ambassador is an actionable and promising promotion way you should consider. People trust their favourite celebrities and creators.
Yet, it’s complicated to choose a relevant person for this role. You need to pay attention to their audience, reputation, values, personality and Instagram page statistics.
As this is proper business cooperation, it’s better to formalise your relationship and set up an agreement where all the conditions are clearly stated.
Don’t be afraid to experiment! If you build the strategy properly, even the boldest ideas can lead to unexpectedly good results.
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