Winning Millennial customers with Brand Ambassadors

Andrey Brych
Jul 28, 2017 · 4 min read

First of all if you’re not familiar with the whole Brand Ambassadors concept, let’s talk about what are brand ambassadors, whats good about them and how do they differ from spokespersons. Brand ambassadors are people who endorse your brand, eat, sleep breath about it in front of potential customers thus providing credible and trustworthy visibility to it. In simple words, they are experts in their friends/colleagues groups. A spokesperson on the other hand may only have a name, but no an expertise or passion for your brand, and can result in a ton of wasted money.

It’s also worth mentioning that millennial customers have a very precisely tuned bullshit sensor when it comes to bad ads, and are very easy to scare away. On the other hand, they rank authenticity very high, and are more likely to get engaged with your brand if they can feel an open and honest communication.

According to the recent studies, millennials get psychologically boosted from giving advice, which is perfect news for brands that are going to join the chase after the millennial market, since they are much more likely share thoughts on purchases and write reviews on restaurants they visit. Mix their desire to be an expert in their social circles with their need to share and their obsession for new information you have got perfect ingredients for a powerful brand ambassador.

Here are 3 simple steps to win the millennial customers:

1. Educate them!

Do you remember what it used to take to be considered an expert a couple of years back? It took years of professional experience and hundreds of sleepless nights learning new stuff.

The whole concept of being an expert has dramatically changed. Millennials value opinions of their friends and Youtube bloggers that are in similar situations and share their own experience more and more.

That is the exact reason why you should invest time into starting an ambassador program. Your customers have to have someone to ask for advice when making important purchasing decisions. It’s always a great idea to arm ambassadors with some exclusive information (the one that cannot be easily found through traditional channels), which will further boost their feeling of being a part of a brand and will make their peers reach out to them as to a trusty source of new information even more.

2. Trust them to be themselves

It is uber important to give your brand ambassadors voice on the platform that is comfortable to use to their peers. It can be your blog or Facebook page or any other SM platform. A very interesting practise is to route customer product or service inquiries to them. There are a couple of platforms available that allows not only to route certain customer messages sent to the brands FB page to certain ambassadors, but also monitor the “health” of their engagement and record the customer conversation history (using the chatbot technology). Each month you can review the performance measurements of your ambassadors and give out some treats to the chart leaders. I’m not talking about cash compensations, more about special access to product or marketing development, that the general public will not be aware of for the next couple of month.

How can you measure your brand ambassador program? Well, it depends on what industry you’re in, but you can start with theses metrics:

Content (How many photos/videos were published)

Social outreach size (Number of friends/followers)

Traffic (How many clicks does the post brings)

Conversions (Number of sign-ups, that occurred after the ambassadors post or number of sales conversations that started as a result of a post)

3. Monitor, Listen and react

The social reach of millennials is much more wide than of the older generation, thus making a potential social media reach of brand ambassadors — colossal. This can be as powerful as it is dangerous. A small drop of negative feedback can transform into an avalanche of chaotic negativity and ruin your brand reputation for a very long time. The secret here is to use your ears and react quickly. Let them know you’ve heard their concerns and are doing everything you can to fix their issue.

Andrey Brych

Written by

Sharing my throughts on digital customer engagement. Business developer at cudato.com

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