Brand ambassadors can help your online business raise visibility, increase traffic, and humanize your brand. They provide high-quality content like photos, blog posts, videos, which encourage users to buy anything from Coke to Ferrari. In this article, we’ll tell you who are brand ambassadors, their benefits for eCommerce, and how to turn your employees into brand ambassadors.
Who is a Brand Ambassador?
Brand ambassadors are true enthusiasts of a brand or a company. There are three types of brand ambassadors: true fans/customers, influencers, employees. Usually, these people share the same values with a brand and have a specific target audience they can appeal to.
Influencers
Influencers are celebrities, bloggers, and opinion leaders, who have knowledge on a specific topic. They have a wide audience and can impact their behavior. The more popular they are, the more expensive it is to deal with them. Usually, brands pay influencers in the form of money, free items or services. The best thing about working with influencers is that they create more polished and professional content. Overall, using influencers as brand ambassadors is an effective but costly marketing strategy, which won’t suit small businesses.
True Fans, Customers, Employees
These brand ambassadors are individuals who have demonstrated brand commitment, visible advocacy, and love for your product. All of them work with small groups of followers such as colleagues, friends, relatives and random social media followers. This type of brand ambassador provides genuine, reliable and free content for your business. Unpaid content includes reviews, user-generated content, and other social proof. For example, you can encourage your followers to post your items using specific hashtags.
Benefits of Brand Ambassadors for eCommerce Business
Partnership with brand ambassadors is a great marketing strategy. It helps to increase sales, boost brand credibility and your business scope. However, it won’t work if you provide customers with low-quality products, low page speed, poor user experience, etc. Simply put, if you want to get the most out of brand ambassadors, your eCommerce website should be perfect.
Want to Know If Your Online Store Works Smoothly?
Now, let’s take a look at some advantages brand ambassadors may bring to your online business.
Increase Your Traffic
Usually, brand ambassadors have their blogs on different social media like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc. Using their power of word, brand ambassadors can give feedback on your products or services, launch giveaways, polls and live streams. All these activities link back to your resources and provide referrals. It increases traffic to your website and reaches out to potential customers who don’t follow your brand’s social media.
Strengthen Brand Reputation and Gain Trust
Brand reputation is one of the most important factors that influences decision-making. Creating a brand reputation is only half the battle, you need to protect it too. Otherwise, you’ll lose sales, potential and loyal customers. Brand ambassadors protect your credibility and increase trust. For example, they can help you to cope with negative news or comments. In addition, they easily neutralize unfortunate situations and positively portray your business.
Brand Humanization
When shopping online, customers can’t relate themselves to a brand. Online business is only a name and picture that users see from the screen. Brand ambassadors solve this problem and make your brand more human, which is good for sales. Customers can see that your products are used by people like them who have families, children, hobbies, etc.
Improve Social Media Marketing
Social media has become a powerful channel for selling goods online due to the pandemic. It’s the best time to dive into social media with the help of brand ambassadors. They have an established audience that shares your brand’s values and vision. Spread branded content, product bundles and free samples with help of reposts to gain better visibility and traffic.
How to Turn Your Employees Into Brand Ambassadors
In December 2021, Mobecls team hosted the eCommerce Tech Inspire Summit to discuss cutting-edge trends, new technologies, COVID impact, and other hot topics. During the summit, experienced eCommerce experts shared their insights, tips, best practices, and more. One of the invited speakers, Sharissa Sebastian, delivered an excellent speech on the topic “How to Turn Your Employees Into Brand Ambassadors”.
About Speaker:
Sharissa Sebastian is a certified global leadership and executive coach with an MBA, MSc in Technology Leadership, and her PCC Certification (500+ coaching hrs), in addition to 15+ years of corporate leadership experience and coaching several Fortune 100 executives.
Also, Sharissa is a TEDx speaker, a writer for Forbes and the Huffington Post, a member of Forbes Coaches Council, an author and an international keynote speaker. She has years of experience in helping leaders draw on their strengths, see their value and be able to bring out the best in others all while having fun, being fulfilled and not burning out. Her clients include leaders and executives at companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Harpo Studios Inc, Bank of America, Mars Wrigley, Gilead Sciences, Intuit, Victoria’s Secret, US Bank, Ameriprise Financial, Nestle, and others.
Key Points:
- Learn about the environment that’s needed to create and nurture brand ambassadors.
- How to attract, train and equip your employees to become ambassadors.
- Understand what motivates your people to become evangelists of your brand.
- Measuring and tracking success. How to rinse and repeat what’s working and get rid of or change what is not.
