What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you see the word “brand ambassador”? It’s usually a person that talks about a business and promotes its products. Most business owners have this idea that a brand ambassador has to be a role model, and that he or she should also be able to represent the brand well. Because of this, it’s quite common to get a celebrity to be a brand ambassador. But, you don’t have to spend a massive amount of talent fees on hiring a brand ambassador. Your customers can do that for you.
Getting brand ambassadors doesn’t need to be complicated. You can enlist your existing customers as your brand ambassadors if you know how to convince them. It’s all about meeting your customers’ needs and exceeding their expectations. Rewards can also serve as an incentive to get your customers to help you. In this article, you’ll learn about ten ways to turn your most loyal customers into your top brand ambassadors. With these tips, you can transform a buyer into a brand advocate.
How to Get Your Most Loyal
Customers to Promote You
The great thing about loyal customers is that they like you. You don’t have to convince them. They already trust you. This means that they don’t just recognize your brand and remember it, they also like the product and service so much that they buy from it again and again. Because of this, they are the perfect brand ambassador candidates. Here are some ideas on how you can get your customers to promote you.
Give Them an Incentive to Promote Your Brand
Sometimes, all your customers need is a little push to get them to promote your business. You’ll need to give them an incentive if you want them to do anything for you. The good thing is that it is secure. All you need to do is create a referral program so that you can easily invite your most loyal customers as your referrers. The program is simple. You can set it up in your Shopify or another eCommerce website with some referral marketing software. You don’t even need to be a big brand to do this. Even online stores like Best Hunting Bow Labs can do this, so you can do it too.
The key to running a successful referral program is to have an attractive reward. This will ensure that you are getting the right prospects to your referral program. You must attract the right people because you’ll want the referrals to convert. It’s not useful to have tons of references if you have no sales to show for it. Fortunately, there is a wide array of rewards that you can consider. Aside from the freebie concept, you can also give away a discount code or some cash. What is appropriate will depend on the products that you are selling and your target market.
Have a Product That’s Worth Sharing
You can’t expect your customers to share your products if they didn’t like it. The first prerequisite to getting customers as brand ambassadors is to have products that provide a positive customer experience. You’ll want your customers to talk about your products. But are they good enough to be shared?
Another factor that you should consider is the uniqueness of your product. If you are just another online seller, then your chances of getting shares are lower than a business with unique products.
Moreover, you’ll want your customers to craft stories with your products. You’ll want them to share experiences or create some viral content that will get your audience’s attention. In this age of social media, you need to give your prospects something interesting for them to share it. It should also be relatable and worth sharing with their family and friends.
Go Beyond Their Expectations
How can you get your customers to talk about your brand? You have to exceed their expectations. You see, every customer has a specific set of expectations when they buy a product or service. When you manage to meet their expectations, they will like it, but they will not be motivated to share it. However, when you go beyond their expectations, they will be thrilled, and they will share their experience with their family and friends. It’s imperative to meet the expectations of your customers, but it’s more important to surpass their expectations if you want them to start talking about your brand.
There are many ways to do this. First, you should put yourself in the shoes of your customers. This will help you understand how they feel about your products and services. From here, you can come up with a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves. Once you’ve managed to meet the must-haves, you’ll be reaching your customers’ expectations. Once you meet the nice-to-haves, you’ll be exceeding them. It’s essential to make a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves. You can gather some data about this by asking your customers about their expectations.
Encourage User Reviews
When a customer uses your products, he or she may like it but may not talk about it. With this, it’s crucial to encourage customer reviews. This is when a customer narrates in detail how the product improved his or her life. By doing this, your customers become instant ambassadors for your brand. This is because they share your brand with the public without expecting anything in return.
PRO TIP: Want to encourage more user reviews? You can incentivize it. You can implement a hashtag that they can append to all written reviews. From here, you can choose a winner regularly. The winner gets to get the incentive for the week. You can select winners based on the number of engagements in the review or based on how well the feedback is written. This will encourage more customers to write reviews about your brand.
Feature Their Business
If you have a B2B business, you’ll also want to add incentives for your customers. You can feature them on your website. The great thing about serving businesses is that they don’t only have more money to invest, they are also willing to promote you as long as you encourage them as well. This is the reason why cross-promotion is so effective. It’s like businesses helping other businesses.
Through this, you can turn not just a person but a brand into your ambassador. This way, you don’t only have individuals vouching for your products and services. You also have businesses that have worked with you. This is great for your portfolio, primarily if you have worked with big names in a particular industry.
Make It Exclusive
There is something about joining an exclusive club that makes customers feel more compelled to promote your products and services. This is the reason why some brands like Adidas create an ambassador program where they look for influencers who’ll want to promote their products. What makes this approach different is exclusivity. There will only be a limited number of people accepted into the program, and they are also chosen based on specific requirements like followers and engagement counts. This will encourage members to join the program because of the rewards.
PRO TIP: Another approach for exclusivity is to create a referral program for one influencer. This referral program will have rewards that are exclusive to that influencer’s followers. This approach works because you give the influencer something unique to share with their followers. You don’t approach them asking for promotions. You give them a reason to promote you.
Offer Memberships with Perks
Another system that I’m seeing is the formation of memberships. Instead of getting your customers to buy a product, you sign them up as a member. To become a member, they need to purchase the product and provide a membership fee. This will entitle them to product discounts as well as other perks such as exclusive invites to events or something similar. Again, the nature of the perks will depend on the quality of the target market. You have to consider the different types of rewards and choose your compensation based on who you are targeting.
Have Offline Events
Another way to encourage new brand ambassadors is to have offline events. In these events, you can invite influencers or have a pop-up shop where you can get online customers to your offline retail shop. This is great for brand promotions because you get to meet your customers face-to-face. You can approach this in two ways. You can have an invite-only influencer event where you ask them to promote the brand in exchange for the exclusive invite, or you can get new customers in an offline game. This is great for bazaars where you ask your customers to promote the product to their family and friends, and they will get a reward in return. This is an excellent way to get your customers to help you because you get to talk to them in real life.
Encourage Conversations with Hashtags
There is a reason why brands encourage their target market to communicate with hashtags. It’s because it allows their reviews or posts to be recorded in one hashtag stream. What is a hashtag stream? This is a stream of content that you will see when you click on a hashtag. When a brand creates a hashtag, all the conversations and content that have that hashtag will be displayed in the stream. This is great because it will allow your customers to promote you without them realizing it.
How do you do this? Well, you need to encourage conversations. You can do this by asking a question or by asking your customers’ opinions about something. It can be as simple as a new product color or as complex as what they think about specific issues. Being a brand ambassador doesn’t need to involve a title. A person can be a brand ambassador as long as they do their part in promoting your brand.
Turn Them into Affiliates
Did you know that you can also turn your customers into affiliates? It’s as simple as implementing an affiliate program on your website. Most referral software that you use will have this built-in, so you don’t need to worry about using separate software for creating your affiliate program. You can use the same software you used for your referral program.
Having an affiliate program allows your customers to promote your products for you. They will do it because they will get a “cut” for supporting you. Usually, this is a percentage of the sales. This means that they will get to earn an amount for every sale they refer to you. To do this, they have to act as brand ambassadors, promoting your brand to everyone they know. Usually, this will attract marketers, but it can attract customers as well. You can show them the affiliate program when they check out. Show them that they have a chance to make some money if they manage to get new buyers for your website.
Are You Ready to Turn Your Customers into Brand Ambassadors?
Brand ambassadors don’t need to be models or celebrities. They don’t have to be influencers with tons of followers. A customer is just as capable of promoting your brand to their family and friends, and their promotions are more effective in generating sales. The key is in their circle of trust. Since customers promote your brand to people that they know and like, they are more likely to convert these people into customers. Since they can share their personal experience with the brand, their story is more compelling and effective in getting people to do the same.
By Arlen Robinson of Omnistar