Brand ambassadors are key to helping an organization expand the reach of their business online. If you have employees who love working for the company and believe in your brand, you have a chance to empower them to become some of your very best brand ambassadors.
Regardless of their position in the company, every employee can have an important part in helping you build a strong successful brand. The key really is in their energy, engagement, and commitment to the company.
Best of all, many of your employees may be already actively promoting you on social media. You just haven’t formalized the process and rallied them into a team for maximum impact. Here’s how you can empower your team members to become brand ambassadors with these five easy tips:
Create a positive environment
In order for your employees to talk positively about your brand, the first step is to make sure they actually enjoy working for your company. You need to create a pleasant working environment in which your employees feel valued and satisfied.
Your employees need to feel part of the team and see how they are contributing to the company’s mission. When team members feel appreciated, they’re more likely to work on your behalf and to go the extra mile for your requests. That includes spreading the word about the company.
Offer a set of guidelines
Before your employees start spreading the word about your brand across social media, you need to create a social media policy. These set of rules will guide your brand ambassadors in posting content that is in line with the company’s vision.
Get your team in the same room to introduce them to the policy and train them on how they can spread the word through social media and through their offline relationships.
You want to be clear about what they should and what they shouldn’t do. Create a “rules” sheet so they can hold onto it access it in the future. These guidelines will help your brand ambassadors avoid posting like wildfire with messaging that is off-brand.
Equip employees with the right tools
You want to create the lowest barrier to participating, so to have a successful brand ambassador team, you may need to create an easy social media toolkit that has ready-made assets already in it. Pre-write copy, design graphics, take photos, determine hashtags and customize all assets for the different platforms you plan for your brand ambassadors to use.
You can upload the entire toolkit in a cloud-sharing platform so that your employees can easily download the assets and simply copy and paste text and/or attach images to different posts across networks.
This makes posting on social media channels extremely easy to do. Your brand ambassadors won’t have to worry about using something that is outside of the guidelines, and you can have peace of mind knowing that they are posting messages that fit into the voice and aim of your promotional strategy.
Provide incentives
Who doesn’t love a little friendly competition? Create a challenge among brand ambassadors to reach the goals of the promotion campaign. You can award prizes for the employee who recruits the most referrals using special hyperlinks or the person who generates the most sales.
You can reward your best ambassadors with bonuses, a small office party, giveaways or getting off work a few hours early. Incentives like these can motivate your team to go above and beyond.
An interesting fact to note is that companies which have recognition programs in place have about 31 percent lower voluntary turnover than companies without such programs. So, the bottom line is that incentivizing their efforts can really work on your behalf.
Build a relationship of trust
Hopefully, you’re engaging some of your most energized and loyal employees as brand ambassadors, people who really believe in the brand and are committed to it. But to get everyone on the same page, you might want to hold a focus group and allow all your employees to test and give feedback on the product or service they will be promoting.
You’ll get honest feedback that you can incorporate into your marketing strategy – and you’ll contribute to them feeling empowered as your spokespeople. They’ll feel like they have an insider view and that you are taking their opinions seriously — and that’s one step in the direction of building true loyalty and trust with your ambassadors along the way.
Final thoughts
If you’re ready to see your brand take off — and for your employees to feel valued and part of the bigger picture — then consider forming a team of brand ambassadors who will communicate positively about the company on social media.
What you’ll find is that they will influence their networks and those people will influence other circles, creating a ripple effect that will have a positive effect on your brand.
Featured Image: Pixabay
This article first appeared in www.smartbrief.com
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