Role Of Brand Ambassadors And How To Manage The Team Effectively?

For a team of brand ambassadors to be successful, it is essential to select the right channel and train those in charge of spreading the message.

Forming a team of brand ambassadors from a group of workers from the company itself makes more sense every day. Many organizations have already realized that their workers are not immune to the changes in habits that affect other consumers. They too are increasingly active on the Internet and in social networks. 

They also talk about brands, create content and share experiences with other users. In addition, what these workers share on their social networks is perceived by other users as more credible than the content that comes from brands. It is one of the advantages of horizontal communication – between equals – compared to vertical communication in which both interlocutors are located on different planes. 

Faced with this reality, there are not a few companies that have opted for articulate a team of brand ambassadors  based on the participation of their employees . However, this accurate initiative may lose effectiveness if a series of basic rules are not taken into account:

Resist The Temptation

When a company develops a program whose objective is that the activity in the social networks of its employees favors the reputation of its brand, it is easy to fall into the temptation of asking them to become mere transmitters of the corporate message. To do this would be a considerable mistake. Firstly, because  almost no one will willingly participate in a program that essentially hijacks their social media profiles to advertise a company (and if participation is not voluntary then disaster is guaranteed); and secondly, because  the followers, friends and contacts of each worker in the social networks will be – like the rest of the consumers – consummate experts in ignoring advertising messages, so if they see that worker’s profile as a showcase for your brand, they’ll ignore your messages (or even stop signing up with your audience). That is why it is much more effective to suggest to our team of brand ambassadors that:

• Repost only brand-generated content that you believe in and identify with  (and even better if that content has a high ratio of motivational, human, or technical versus ad-inspired themes).
• Share content related to news and trends in your industry in general, and not necessarily your company in particular . This will gradually position them before their audience as experts in a field, rather than as heralds for the firm that pays their salary.

Select The Right Channel

Today there is a great variety of social networks, each one with its specific peculiarities, its type of users and its scope. The language of the 280 characters of Twitter has little or nothing to do with the professional attitude of LinkedIn or the casual image of Instagram or  Tik Tok . Certain content will work better on one or another network depending on its more or less visual nature, its technical nature, its target audience, etc..

It is convenient to carry out this type of analysis to ensure that, once the necessary effort has been made until the message is broadcast, we are not speaking to an audience for whom we are irrelevant or who do not share our language. If our employees are also going to be our team of brand ambassadors, it is better that they carry out their activity wherever our interests are at stake.

Provide Training To Program Participants

Being a brand ambassador is not a trivial task. It would be questionably effective and even irresponsible to tell our employees to enter into conversations about our brand with no criteria other than their good understanding and with no more knowledge than they have as occasional users of a social network. Ambassadors should be trained -at least in an introductory way- in aspects such as the use of different social networks, the creation of effective messages, the management of trolls and reputation crises, online identity, etc.. Precisely this training should be presented as the first reward received by the ambassadors for their participation in the program and be beneficial for both parties: the worker will obtain knowledge that will be useful both in his professional activity and in his personal activity and the company will obtain a better take advantage of the work of its collaborators as a team of brand ambassadors.

Also Read : Client Management

Establish KPIs, A Scorecard And Measure The Results

The activity of a team of brand ambassadors can have a wide scope and a long journey, but it is essential in this type of program to know where we want to go, to be aware of whether we are doing it well and to be able to modify our strategy on the fly if the results are not being as expected . 

It will be convenient to ask ourselves if what we want is, for example, to increase our number of followers on social networks, get positive mentions, solve a pre-existing reputation problem, or generate leads or sales. And since hardly anyone has a crystal ball, and the social is often capricious and dependent on variables that are difficult to grasp, we should not be reluctant to rethink our strategy and rectify according to what the numbers are telling us.

It is still a common opinion among some businessmen that, given the free and open forum nature of many social networks, it is not possible to influence what is said in them about our brand. But that is a wrong conclusion. Although our actions may not be decisive and our degree of control may not always be desirable,  a well-trained and motivated team of brand ambassadors can have a significant influence on aspects such as brand awareness or reputation . Investing in the employees themselves to build that team will create a valuable asset for the company.

Also Read : Salesforce