Ambassador Relationship Health
A case study on flipping the perception from total to contintual
The term “ambassadors” is used as a way to denote influential digital content creators (influencers) that regularly promote a brand, either through a direct relationship with the brand, or through purely organic fandom. It is used interchangeably with the term “influencers,” but the intent of a brand’s influencer marketing program is to turn influencers into long-term brand ambassadors.
Objective
Take the narrative of identifying and growing a core community of ambassadors from sales/marketing/pubs and build it into an ambassador health progression to promote re-engagement of influencers.
Discovery
During contextual inquiry sessions with some NY clients, my team was seeking to observe how our primary users were deciding to choose digital content creators for their next influencer marketing campaign initiatives.
While we had been preaching the idea of re-engaging influencers in order to build a sustained community of brand ambassadors, our observations backed up our data: our latest cohort of clients were only reaching out to influencers once before moving onto a new group.
Brands were missing opportunities to create real, long-term relationships by abandoning budding brand interest as soon as it was produced and instead focusing on attaining new ambassadors.
This led to short-term brand buzz that would rise and fall with each marketing initiative, with little to no sustained growth.
Problem
Brands had become proficient in reaching out to potential new brand ambassadors, but lacked the tools or the knowledge to determine who to re-engage. Our software neither showcased nor promoted the narrative of community building that was the core of Tribe’s strategic recommendations.
As can be seen above, our grid-UI shows an aggregate view of a brand’s ambassadors. What it lacks is a sense of continuity; it’s difficult to tell if these are the top ambassadors now, or if they were the top ambassadors in the past.
Looking Internally
Given that our marketing narrative and digital strategy recommendations speak to community building, we looked into the internal tooling being used by our Publications & Research team to support their claims: dubbed the loyalty_reporter.
Our Pubs team had been using this tool to surface the most relevant ambassadors for each of the brands that they were reporting on. From there, they would build claims regarding “strong loyalty” and “posting frequency,” which were all time based measures.
However, such tooling was not available to our clients, which manifested itself in strategies that focused on first time engagement instead of continued re-engagement.
The Experiment
So, we set off to create a way to elevate our clients with the same tooling we possessed when doing our internal research. In order to make it relevant to our each brand, we needed a way to pull data from the value they had already been storing in their own accounts:
By assigning a running weight that ranked recent, frequent content creators higher than ambassadors that have posted less or stopped posting altogether, we were able to identify more opportunistic re-engagement recommendations.
A simple heat-map created a way to visualize and promote continuity through the re-engagement of ambassadors.
We then checked this new objective measurement of “top ambassadors per brand” to make sure it matched our internal team’s subjective knowledge of a few test accounts; aligning the internal team around the idea of “Ambassador Relationship Health” as a way to promote and communicate re-engagement.
Implementation
After sharing our “relationship health” heat-maps with a seed set of clients and collecting feedback, we worked towards a design that provided a new way for brands to determine who to activate or reach out to next.
And some iterations later:
Other aspects of Ambassador Health project
As can be seen in the above implementations, there were a handful of new additions that we included in this project to help our clients organize and make appropriate activation decisions:
Ambassador Tiers
based on the language being used within our publications and reports, which were in turn picked up by the industry: Micro(<100k followers), Mid-Tier(100k–300k), Established (300k–1MM), Powerhouse (1MM+). This allowed our software, reports, and clients to share a common vocabulary.
Follower Growth
Based on overall MoM follower count growth in order to surface rising stars in the influencer space.
Engagement
This ended up becoming part of a larger research project that we ended up building after our first launch. The idea was to give our users a better idea of how engaging an influencer’s content was with their respective followers. I’ll be following up on that in the near future!
What’s Happened Next?
Ambassador Relationship Health ended up empowering Tribe’s clients to make more strategic decisions with their influencer marketing budgets. By visually showcasing consistency over aggregates, we were able to change the conversation from “best ambassador” to “best ambassador right now.”
These conversations have since led our client success and publications & research teams to speak the same language to our community of brands, with whom we continue to develop a shared understanding of what it means to foster a healthy and long-lasting ambassador community every day.
