Brand Ambassador within Influencer Marketing has for a while been a hot topic.
To collaborate with a Brand Ambassador means that you allow an influencer to be the face of your brand and product over time. It can be very beneficial for your brand to be associated with an influencer who has a well-trusted voice in the industry. Also, the influencer has an incredibly great impact on their followers’ purchasing behaviour.
We are now consuming more media than ever before, which means that there’s no better time to collaborate with a powerful content creator who daily analyses what’s working on their audience.
A good example of a successful ambassador cooperation is Adidas Runners. They collaborate with both larger and smaller influencers to boost their branding and interconnection with their consumers. In fact, some of the biggest sport brands place large amount of money on influencer marketing.
Hear what our previous Head of Influencers, Simone Pohjolainen, have to say about brand ambassadors!
What are the benefits of having a brand ambassador?
It is more cost effective to work long-term with different influencers if you wish to build brand over time. This means that you allow the influencer to build a strong personal relationship with your brand. When working with longer collaborations, it builds loyalty and trust between the brand and the influences. This may result in getting more than what you pay for, just because the influencer actually uses the product or service.
We see that the best results comes when the influencers themselves are allowed to control their content. With longer collaborations, it’s easier to give the influencer space for creativity when you get to know each other and knows what works best for the target audience. You should provide space for posts depending on the real life of the influencer or specific events, which is very natural to the recipient.
How do you choose the right influencer for an ambassador collaboration?
It’s important that the company’s values match the ambassador’s. You should consider choosing a profile that stands for the company’s values and not choose an influencer based on personal reasons. It is also important to look at what results you want to get from the cooperation.
The ambassador you choose to co-operate with should be someone who will be able to meet the goals you set. For example, if your goal is to drive conversions, you should work with an influencer that has a high conversion rate within your business segment. It’s important to review the influencer’s target group to ensure that you reach the right people to achieve your KPIs.
The ambassador should also be someone who genuinely likes your product or service. You should let the influencer test and evaluate your product or service before the collaboration, because the influencer will create more trustworthy content if they know they’ll continue to use the product or service outside of the collaboration.
Once you’ve set clear goals for the campaign…
you must also set your metrics. Branding campaigns are not always easy when it comes to measure the results. Therefore, it is important to make sure to create value by collecting valuable data. One possible way of doing that, may be to follow up with a survey against the target group after the collaboration. Or to create a custom landing page. You’ll have to be creative!
Finally, I want to emphasise that ambassadorship is many times incredibly good, but worth pointing out is that it’s not always the best option for you, no matter what the trends say. For example, in case of product launches, ambassadorship is obviously not necessary. Procedures and profiles needs to be evaluated in each campaign. Research and data are the key!
