Paying Your Brand Ambassadors With Products

Creating marketing activities and rewards for an ambassador program can be a time-consuming process. From creating fun and effective activities to offering rewards that incentivize your ambassadors, the process of creating activities and rewards requires a lot of trial and error.

After gathering data on hundreds of programs on our brand ambassador platform we put together some tips that we see the most successful ambassador programs using to create activities and rewards.

To put it simply, you must create effective activities that enable ambassadors to create great content and maximize their referral revenue.

When it comes to rewards, be sure that the rewards you create align with your brand’s KPIs. Some example KPIs include customer purchase frequency, average order value, and increase the ambassador’s overall lifetime value.

By implementing 6 simple tips, you can easily time and create a valuable ambassador program that contributes at least 20%+ of your total brand revenue.

Check out the #1 brand ambassador template to learn how Skirt Sports used BrandChamp’s ambassador software to convert 1,000 of their most engaged customers into brand ambassadors, generating 70,000 tagged Instagram photos and hundreds of thousands of dollars in measurable referral revenue.

In this video, you’ll see some examples of effective activities and rewards and learn the following:

• 3 tips for creating engaging marketing activities
• 3 tips for building an effective rewards catalog

Brand Ambassador Activity Tips

Create Evergreen Activities

The first tip for creating your activities is to start off with your Evergreen Activities. Evergreen Activities allow your ambassadors to complete them frequently and for the life of the program.

Example instructions for an Evergreen Activity:
Take a photo of yourselves featuring the brand’s products and include a positive quote, story, caption followed by your discount code. Include #yourbrand @yourbrand in the caption

Example of Kaged Muscles Evergreen Activity:

Example of Southern Marsh’s Evergreen Activity:

By laying out minimal instructions like “include a positive quote, story, caption followed by their discount code” you can guide ambassadors to create an authentic and “less-spammy” advertisement for your brand.

Also, by keeping the task at hand open, “Take a photo of yourself featuring our product”, this allows your ambassador to get creative when producing the content that they truly want to share with their audience.

When asked about letting ambassadors be creative, Kaged Muscle representative, Nolan Heyer, mentioned:

“We started off giving ambassadors really detailed creative requirements, but found that when we gave them a bit more freedom to align the promotion with their audience their content would get more engagement.”

Before establishing your Evergreen Activities, also be sure to educate your ambassadors on the best practices for creating quality content. Share YouTube videos on tips for taking pictures, create a content playbook for ambassadors to follow, and guide them with examples that they can follow.

Example Youtube Videos include:

Other ideas for educating ambassadors include:

• Hosting webinars for making content
• Sharing example content frequently with ambassadors
• Creating a playbook for creating content

When your ambassadors are not educated on best practices and push bad content:

1. It’s not effective in generating meaningful referral sales
2. It looks like spam and impacts the trust your ambassador has with their social audience
3. Doesn’t create engagement on your ambassador’s content
4. Forces audiences to ignore your ambassador’s recommendations

With education and great Evergreen Activities, you can ensure that your ambassadors will know how they can contribute to your program at any given time.

Offer Themed Activities

The next tip for creating effective activities is to assign a theme to specific activities. Themed activities allow your ambassadors to create content that revolves around their daily lives. Some example theme’s that any brand can use for their marketing activities include:

1. On the grind
2. Home routine
3. Advice or wisdom
4. Cool view or background
5. Out and about
6. Positive deed
7. Recent Wins
8. Current mood
9. Journey story
10. Setbacks or challenges

Example of Kaged Muscle’s Transformation Tuesday Activity:

Example of Skirt Sport’s #SkirtJump Themed activity:

Build Special Occasion Activities

To make your program fun, fresh, and exciting to participate in, create activities based on all the special events that go on in your community.

By offering activities based on special events, i.e. Valentines day, you can reward your ambassadors for participating in an event that they already celebrate.

Special Occasion Activities don’t need to just be holidays either. Create annual, quarterly, or monthly activities based on company events, product launches, clearances, milestones, etc.

Example of Skirt Sport’s Special Occasion Activities:

Skirt Sport’s Flat Me activity allows Ambassadors to earn points any time before a race by showing off their race day outfit.

Skirts Sport’s International Women’s Day allowed ambassadors to earn points by posting a photoing of themselves wearing a product and talking about International Women’s Day:

With Special Occasion activities we can develop deeper relationships with ambassadors by rewarding them for including the brand in their most memorable content.

Let’s now go over the 3 tips to create effective rewards for ambassadors completing the activities above.

Poor Performing Activities

With poor performing activities, participation dramatically decreases. Incentivise ambassadors with new opportunities to earn easy rewards by keeping activities fresh, fun and exciting. Some factors that create poor performing activities include:

-Forcing ambassadors to follow strict guidelines
-Having ambassadors promote sales on a monthly or weekly basis
-Restricting the social media platform where ambassadors can create content.

Remember activities should be fun!

Pay Your Brand Ambassadors With Rewards, Not Cash

Start with Low Hanging Fruits

When creating a rewards catalog, you need to first start off by creating some low hanging fruits for your ambassadors.

Low hanging fruit rewards should be:

• Obtainable by ambassadors after they complete a few marketing activities
• Boost the ambassador’s purchase frequency
• Increase the average order value from each individual

Example Rewards in BrandChamp:

Flexible Mid-Tiered Rewards

After setting up your Low Hanging Fruit rewards you can then start to get flexible with your mid-tier rewards.

These mid-tier rewards should offer awesome discounts not found currently on your website and only available after an ambassador is able to complete 2 plus weeks of activities.

Mid-Tier rewards should also be flexible and constantly changing to meet brand KPI’s and incentivise your community.

Example scenario’s to meet your Brand’s KPIs:

• Looking to clear out specific inventory? Offer mid-tiered discounts on this product to give ambassadors the ability to own more of your brand’s products. This is a win-win scenario as it allows you to clear inventory and in turn increase’s ambassador’s loyalty as they collect and promote more of the brand’s products
• Got a new product launch? Create discounts specific to the new product so that ambassadors can claim the reward and then help promote the launch with your brand.
• Want more participation from Ambassadors? Create new rewards only exclusive to the ambassador program, inform ambassadors about the new rewards, and explain how they can easily earn them.

Finally, you can now create some rewards that incentivise the top contributors in your program.

Exciting High-Tiered Rewards Ambassador Rewards

The final step for setting up your rewards is to create rewards that you would be excited in obtaining.

These rewards should be big-ticket items that compensate ambassadors that save their points.

Some examples of how to deepen your relationships with the ambassador’s that are the most active in your program include:

• Feature on the Ambassador page of your website or social media platform
• Offering Big Ticket item
• High valued gift card

Example of High Tiered Rewards:

Poor Performing Rewards

When rewards perform poorly in a program, engagement from your community decreases and your brands KPIs will be harder to reach.

Be sure that you track activities on a monthly basis and

Some examples of poor performing Rewards include

• Bumper stickers
• Water bottle
• Key Chain
• Gift Cards for other companies

Examples of Rewards that Ambassador’s claim the most

• Free Products
• Gift Cards
• Discounted New/Old Product
• Discount on next order

Offering bad rewards not only affects your ambassador’s motivation to complete activities but also makes them feel undervalued and unappreciated.

Closing

If your ambassador program has had the same activities and rewards since you started it, look to use one of the tips above to make your program more fun, engaging and incentivising for your ambassadors.

Not only will the tips above help you to create better activities and rewards they will most importantly help you save time when it comes to planning out what you want your ambassadors to contribute to your brand.

When your activities and rewards are updated, be sure to let your ambassadors know what they can do to earn awesome rewards.

If you’d like to see how easy it is to create activities and rewards for your ambassadors in BrandChamp, please schedule a demo to learn more.