Quite possibly the most vital component contributing to the health and growth of a company is brand loyalty.
Ambassadors are a great asset every brand should invest in as they’re on the front line to help promote and represent your brand. When you recruit your fans that are customers to become brand ambassadors, something special happens. Your brand gains the authentic voice it needs when welcoming new customers with a positive initial first impression and leaving them with a positive experience as well.
Building relationships with your ambassadors will also provide the opportunity to convert them into loyal customers. The math is simple. The ambassadors promote and feature the brand and refer new customers, then they’re rewarded with free products, discounts, and exclusive opportunities. With their discounts, ambassadors now purchase more of your products driving both lifetime value and loyalty for your brand.
To create brand loyalty, the three important components to remember are, be authentic, engage your customers, and provide social proof. Brand ambassadors are great at helping to do this in an authentic way that engages potential customers. Let’s now take a closer look at these three components.
Be Authentic
Consumers love authenticity. 63% of consumers would prefer to do business with a brand they view as more authentic than its competitors. With ambassadors, brands like Vibe Kayaks get an authentic voice and a source of authentic content. Plain and simple, today’s consumer needs authenticity. Consider these stats as well.
- 82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading authentic content
- 90% of consumers find authentic content useful
- 61% of consumers say they feel better about and are more likely to buy from, a company that delivers authentic content
Engage your Customers
Interact with your customers as much as possible. Follow through on conversations with customers and relish the opportunity to fix a problem. You never know, sometimes the brand’s biggest doubter can become the most passionate believer after being exposed to the service you provide. Utilize brand ambassadors and their promotional content to help you with this. Ambassadors provide a real human that both potential and existing customers can reach out to and can offer product reviews and videos to help answer consumer’s questions. When a brand has engaged customers an increase in frequent purchases, brand loyalty, and lifetime value can easily be achieved. take these stats for example:
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- Engaged customers are five times more likely to buy only from the same brand in the future
- Highly-engaged customers buy 90 percent more often and spend 60 percent more per transaction
- Comments, customer ratings, and reviews influence purchase decision for 84% of millennial women
- 77% of consumers are more likely to buy a new product when learning about it from friends or family
Provide Social Proof
Social proof is a great way to win over your potential customer’s trust and loyalty. With social proof, individuals use the feedback of others to determine the correct course of action in a given situation. For example, Inner Fire Apparel ambassadors shares video with their followers reviewing products for the brand. This video provides social proof for the product as it represents an authentic review coming from a real person. By having ambassadors share this content with their followers, friends and family members your brand will be providing the social proof that consumers need to make a purchase.
Take a look at these statistics backing up the importance of utilizing your ambassador’s content.
- 90% of people say online reviews influence their purchase decisions
- User generated videos on YouTube get 10x more views than content created and uploaded by the actual brand
- User generated content is 35% more memorable than other media, and 50% more trusted
- Millennials find UGC to be 35% more memorable than content that came from mainstream sources
Conclusion
Ready to get started? Check out our step by step guide on how to create an ambassador program.
Be authentic, engage your customers, and provide social proof, it’s that easy. What’s even easier? Using brand ambassadors to relieve some of the work for you! Not only do they provide that authentic voice your potential customer trust but they also offer your brand a chance to create one more loyal fan.
Reward your ambassadors for what they do and watch them surprise you time and time again. By rewarding customers, fans, and ambassadors to represent your brand, I can assure you with the stats above that your brand will be on the right path going forward.
Interested in building brand loyalty? Learn how BrandChamp’s ambassador marketing software platform can help you manage an ambassador program and engage customers by requesting a personalized demo here.
