Once you’ve decided to turn your customers and fans into brand ambassadors, you’ll have an entire community of loyal brand advocates ready to create social buzz around your brand online. This may seem like your ticket to success, but incentivising your ambassadors with the right kind of tasks is what will actually inform the success of your ambassador campaign.
In our experience, gamified marketing tasks or what we call Missions, are the best kind of tasks to get your ambassadors going. You’re probably thinking, but how do I incorporate this into my ambassador marketing campaign? Well, let’s jump into it together!
If you hadn’t guessed it yet, gamified Missions are interactive marketing tasks that you can set up for your ambassadors to talk about your products or services online. The rewards given to ambassadors that complete Missions normally range from redeemable webshop gift cards to freebies and exclusive access to marked-off products.
One of the easiest ways to benefit from this kind of system in your brand ambassador program is to use an ambassador marketing platform. Our tool allows brands to integrate their program with their webshops.
It also enables the process of assigning tasks by the brand's Community Manager to be done from one centralised space. There are 4 types of rewards available in our ‘Mission Maker’ that brands can use to incentivise their brand ambassadors - points, gift cards, cash, and free products.
In the platform, you’ll be able to craft a Mission for your ambassadors from scratch by selecting what you’d like them to do (for example, comment on or like one of your brand’s Instagram posts) and what rewards they can receive in return. The platform also provides Mission templates, which are super handy for those days when you run out of interactive task ideas.
It's important to note that Community Managers can craft these tasks through their web-based admin dashboard while ambassadors interact with the Missions through the on-the-go mobile app.
An in-app point system is a great way to gamify your ambassador Missions because it offers tangible numbers showcasing an ambassador’s contribution to your marketing efforts.
In our app, points aren’t traded in for cash, gift cards, or freebies. Instead, they’re used as a way for ambassadors to level up in the app. Some brands even use the point system as a way to reward ambassadors further, for instance: giving the top 3 ambassadors with the most points at the end of the month a cash prize.
Still not convinced this gamifies anything? Think about it this way: the app acts like a game where you can reach scores, rewards, and higher levels by completing ‘Missions’. It really adds an element of ‘fun’ to one’s ambassador marketing strategy!
Now that you’ve got the point system, we’d suggest you firmly establish separate tiers of recognition as a means of encouraging your ambassadors to level up from bronze to silver tier, for example.
You can structure it in such a way that each successive tier equips your ambassadors with the opportunity to earn a higher commission on the sales they make, or to be able to withdraw any cash earnings straight into their bank accounts. A nifty thing about using our platform is that you’ll be able to make certain Missions available to specific tiers - but more on that in the next point!
You’re able to assign specific Missions to particular niche groups within your larger community of ambassadors. This means that you can curate exclusive Missions to ambassadors in a silver or gold tier, for example, or if they are in a particular region.
A function like this is incredibly helpful when it comes to the administrative side of curating and assigning niche or geographical-based Missions because it lets you - the brand - regulate the availability of your Missions across your community.
Brands are able to create custom segments depending on how they want to target specific ambassadors with particular Missions. For example, higher-paying reward Missions may only be accessible to ambassadors with higher follower counts and might be called the “10k+ TikTok” segment.
Perhaps you have a few ambassadors who are particularly gifted stylists and you want to target Missions towards them when searching for new UGC. Don’t hire a pro stylist that has no affiliation to your brand - simply create a Mission that's only open to your “Star Stylists” segment and reward them for their talents.
If your ambassadors are split between hemispheres, for instance, you can’t really assign the same seasonally-themed Mission to everyone at the same time. By segmenting your ambassador community and allowing them access to specific Missions, you’ll be able to assign winter-themed or summer-themed Missions to ambassadors in the relevant region.
Ambassadors are added to segments manually by your Community Manager. We recommend adding them to a segment upon approved application to your ambassador community.
Unlike segments, which are manual, filters are based on data and are much easier for brands to use because the moment an ambassador fits the parameters of a filter they are automatically added to a saved filter and will see any Mission associated with that saved filter.
Brands can filter their ambassador community and ensure they only see certain Missions. Onepiece did this when they created a Mission for ambassadors who live in the UK to go to Selfridges and ask management if they stocked Onepiece products.
As a further example of how brands can utilise Missions to target specific outcomes, a Mission could have a filter on the audience you want to target. For example, only women, aged between 20-30, with an IG following of 5k+ and engagement rate of 6% who have completed 10+ Missions and generated $50+ in revenue can see and complete the Mission.
Phew! That’s a mouthful, but we hope it’s demonstrated just how granular you can go with ambassador filters on our platform.
Level up your ambassador marketing program with linked Missions. With our platform, you’re able to link one Mission to another, so that when your ambassadors complete the first task, they’ll automatically be redirected to the next one. This is what we call linked Missions.
This is a super fun trick because it enables brands to create ‘Easter egg’ Missions where their ambassadors will have to find the hidden (or linked) Mission for an extra reward.
A linked Mission will enable you to offer an exceptional prize that your ambassadors may ‘race’ each other for by completing a series of Missions that lead up to the penultimate marketing task.
This could be something along the lines of “Race to complete 20 sales Missions to receive a free product of your choice to the value of $100” or “Complete 100 sales Missions and stand a chance to earn a free holiday to Turkey in the grand prize Mission”.
UGC images, first: @thetravelingchelss for Ocean Bottle, second: @byhannahnils for Casely, third: @peytonjada for Controlled Chaos Cover: @priscillamoy for Onepiece
If you find that you have an excess amount of stock that you’re hoping to sell, you can launch a Code Drop.
Code drops allow brands to move stock that’s been slow to sell by setting a time frame for how long the discount code is available for. The discount code associated with the Code Drop will only be available for a certain period, which will create a sense of urgency for your ambassadors to claim a code and get a significant discount on a product.
Similar to the Mission above with discount codes on particular products, you could also provide your ambassadors with a unique link to share with their followers that will take them to a particular product on your webshop. Each time a sale is made via that link, your ambassador will earn commission.
One of our partnered brands used this feature to sell their excess leggings. They incentivised their ambassadors to use the tracking link by hosting a small competition of which ambassadors could sell the most leggings.
Those that sold over 20 pairs were each given an additional reward alongside their earned commission. Adding that little competition alongside the Mission increased the amount of ambassador engagement around the task - and heightened the brand’s sales!
The team invite feature gives your ambassadors the chance to invite their friends to the app to become part of their team. It’s like recruiting new ambassadors, except this time your ambassadors are doing it on your behalf (with their friends!).
Once their friends are in their team, any sales they make will earn the ambassador a commission too. Plus, it can also be used as a way to level up within the app.
If you’re aware of another brand on the same ambassador platform as you, and you feel you may share brand advocates of a similar nature, you’ll be given the chance to create a collaborative Mission that allows the ambassador communities from both brands to work together.
This is really helpful when it comes to generating greater brand awareness, as it will create exposure for both brands via two ambassador communities and their extended followers.
NA-KD and Hunkemöller (both our partnered brands) recently teamed up for an ambassador collab campaign. They created a Mission where ambassadors from both brands had to follow the other on Instagram. Over 400 brand ambassadors completed the Mission, which yielded excellent results in terms of community building!
If you’d like to learn how to activate a community of brand ambassadors to create social buzz around your brand, book a demo with us today.