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Posts Tagged ‘strategy’

Posted on July 23, 2010 - by Kwame

Reasons Why Your Customers Should be Your Brand Ambassadors

All too often, businesses choose celebrities to be ambassadors and evangelists of their products. Celebrity endorsements can mean more sales for you but I think it is a short sighted way of marketing because it has some limitations.

I have two reasons why I think of celebrity endorsements as short sighted marketing.

1. People have their celebrity favorites. If you let celebrity “A” endorse your product, I may not be a fan of him and I won’t be moved to make a purchase because celebrity “A” is not my favorite celebrity and I don’t care what he has to say.

Give me celebrity “B” and I’ll buy your product, period! Can you afford to sign a contract with celebrities “A”, “B”, “C” to “Z”? I guess not.

2. Most people know that celebrities are paid to endorse products regardless if they like the products or not. Most of them do it for the money. You’ll have to use another strategy to convince them. I am this type of customer. Give me some real endorsement and I’ll follow you forever.

The best way around these two problems is to use your real customers and regular users of your products as ambassadors and endorsers of your product.

Here are 4 reasons why you owe your customers the ambassadorial right:

1. They give you their money. That’s how your business keeps growing remember?

2. They do your marketing for you by referring their friends to buy your products. Yes, you got that right; it’s called word of mouth marketing.

3. They help you improve because they give you their feedback. The awards for “quality”, “best product”, et cetera, was made possible because of them.

4. They use your product. They bought from you because they trusted you. You also owe them some trust and need to appreciate them. Fair right?

Why do you think Facebook is asking us to share our Facebook stories? Most of us have been evangelists for them and even continue to be. Sharing stories on Facebook means bringing back memories. Memories carry emotions along with them. Emotions sell. It means you’ll be promoting Facebook even more.

I read some people’s stories on Facebook and I thought to myself, “This site is really changing the world in other areas too, apart from business”. I think Facebook made their stories application public (you don’t even need to sign-in or sign-up to read people’s stories) in order to make us all see how they are changing the world and also encourage others to join. That sets our emotions in because they are not things Facebook is saying, it’s what ‘we’ (the users) are saying about what Facebook did for us.

My point with Facebook is that, they have created a category for their loyal fans (or evangelists) to share their stories. This has gotten blogs and other news media to talk about their (Facebook’s) new innovation and more people will jump on board to see what people have discovered/achieved through Facebook. It will also increase loyalty among current users.

Planning Your Company’s own stories:

So how do you choose ambassadors from your customers? Use the people who have already bought from you as your brand ambassador. Contact them and tell them you want 1, 3, or maybe 5 of them to be ambassadors of your brand. Tell them about the benefits and exactly what you want them to do to be considered. Whatever you do, don’t tell them to send an application in.

Tip: Instead of telling them to send in an application with a resume attached, you can organize a short quiz of say 10 questions and ask them to head towards there and answer the questions. Don’t forget to collect their names; email or phone numbers after the quiz so that you know who answered what. This whole process will let you assess the strengths of your ambassadors-to-be before you choose them.

Things to be considered as useful strengths for brand ambassadors are:

Good communication skills; language, grammar, etc.
Knowledge about your products
A little time to spare after their day job or on weekends.
Feedback givers or readers of your blog

After choosing your ambassador, send a message to your other customers and prospects and let them know the criteria you used in making the decision.

Get your brand ambassador(s) a blog on your domain to share experiences with your product and interact with other customers.

Do any of these to allow customer interaction:

1. Allow comments on the blog,

2. Get a Twitter account for ambassadors only,

3. Get a number for them where other customers can reach your ambassador. If your ambassadors are extremely busy during weekdays and can’t take the phone, allow calls only on weekends.

Just get creative. Play with ideas (gosh, I like saying this a lot ).

Treat your ambassadors like celebrities and let them show on their special blog. Put your product ambassador’s picture on your home page and link to their blog from there. Other customers will definitely like to be treated that way. This will increase customer loyalty.

Let your brand ambassador(s) work with your marketing team. They should report to the marketing manager or whoever you deem fit.

Some brand ambassador responsibilities include:

Gather feedback: let your ambassador(s) help you gather feedback
Organize meetups with other customers to talk about your product or show off their versions or models of your product. Note that this works best with physical goods
Report on product updates based on the feedback he or she delivered
Share their own thoughts and experiences with your products
Tell other customers what they are enjoying as ambassadors to your product.

Your brand ambassadors should be paid for all their work.

You can pay them back by:

Giving them the biggest discounts on your products
Giving them some cash benefits
Giving them some of your products for free
Letting them choose a cause they will like you to donate some of your products or cash to.

Try a combination of these payment methods or add your own.

Five benefits of using real customer(s) as brand ambassador(s) are:

Okay, let’s slow down for a bit. The four reasons I stated for why you owe your customers the ambassadorial rights are the first four benefits you will get from your customers if you make them brand ambassadors.

The only difference is that, there will be more of it; more money in your bank (sales), more referrals, more feedback and more trust. So the last benefit will be:

5. It creates new buzz for your business. People will talk about what you are doing regardless of them being customers or not. Just like what is happening with Facebook stories right now.

Even though you have all these ideas to try out, make sure your brand ambassadors approve of what is included in the contract.

Do you already have a customer strategy? What would you like to add or subtract?

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