27 May Enhance Your Presence with Brand Ambassadors
Tracking the return on investment for social media efforts can be difficult: quite often, you see your number of followers grow much more quickly than sales. But buying likes and follows isn’t enough; when it comes to social media, the quality of your followers will increase the bottom line – not just the number. Today’s post is all about employing brand ambassadors using grassroots marketing techniques to help you grow your social media presence in a meaningful way – and, in turn – sales.
What’s a brand ambassador?
A brand ambassador is someone who follows your company on social media and talks about it in a positive way in front of potential customers. This person should embody the brand she is endorsing and provide credible, trustworthy promotion and visibility of the brand and its products.
Why are brand ambassadors so effective?
1. People like to buy from people. By having real people represent and promote your brand, their followers can emotionally engage in the brand.
2. Word of mouth advertising works, and that’s exactly what brand ambassadors do! However, instead of just telling their friends and family, they tell all of their followers on social media, too. Choosing someone with a large built-in audience will further amplify your message, allowing them to more effectively promote your products.
3. There’s strength in numbers. There are lots of options in the marketplace, and having a group of people who can promote your brand in a consistent, positive way will increase your visibility and help you stand out in the crowd.
4. They build trust for your brand. Consumer skepticism is growing about traditional advertising methods; at the same time, paid advertising no longer reaches as many people as cost effectively as it used to in the early days of social media. In a recent Neilson survey, only 33% of consumers said they trusted paid advertisements, but 92% trust peer recommendations.
How do you find brand ambassadors?
Here at Stitchcraft Marketing, this is something we do every day for our clients! Here are a few tips to get you started:
Step 1: Identify your existing fans. Find people who are already posting positive things about your company and products online and follow them to get an idea of their social media voice.
Step 2: Share their posts. When they say something positive about your brand, share it on your own social media channels! By boosting their reputation as an expert, you will build goodwill and also make them more loyal to your brand.
Step 3: Track their activities. You’ll soon notice a measurable engagement that you can directly link back to the effectiveness and reach of your given campaign, and with the right tools, back to actual sales.
This all sounds great in theory, but how do we actually do this? At Stitchcraft Marketing, we have created a network of designers and bloggers who are influencers in our industry. Every day, we reach out to our network and send them products for review on behalf of our clients through our blogger outreach program. We’ve seen this as an effective way to reach new audiences and build brand recognition in the fiber community.
Click here to contact us online or call 719-539-3110 to learn more about how we can help you establish a brand ambassador program.
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