Many brands rely on social media channels to build brand awareness and gain traction with their sales and marketing efforts. Over the last few years, eCommerce has exploded, and conducting business online is the new normal. As a result, the number of companies seeking out brand ambassadors or micro-influencers to amplify their online presence rapidly increased.
Some brands choose to do this manually, relying on emails, spreadsheets, and a lot of organisational Twister to keep their ambassador marketing programs running smoothly. But others decided to simplify the process by trying out ambassador program software.
Ambassador software is a stack of software tools that helps companies gain new customers by leveraging the influence and impact of word-of-mouth marketing. It is primarily used for the purpose of ambassador marketing and provides marketers with tools to automate the process of enrolling, activating, rewarding, and managing brand ambassadors.
With the assistance of ambassador software, B2C companies are able to seamlessly launch brand ambassador programs, whereas in the past this form of marketing could only be performed manually.
The retail and fashion industry can especially benefit from the use of ambassador marketing. By finding individuals who already support your brand to promote your products from a place of genuine interest, you can:
Build social buzz
Increase online engagement
Grow reach
Boost awareness
Drive more revenue
Social media platforms are often channels that consumers visit to find inspiration for their personal style, so promoting your fashion brand with brand ambassadors that are active on those same channels allows you to meet your customers where they’re at.
Social commerce is growing every year. Now consumers can make purchases without even leaving their social app of choice. Brands who don’t adapt to this type of eCommerce will find it impossible to compete in the space.
Jewellery brands in particular can gain significant online momentum and sales growth through this form of marketing. Ambassador software ultimately facilitates such growth. Here are 5 reasons your jewellery brand needs ambassador program software.
You can’t run a jewellery brand ambassador program without connecting and regularly communicating with brand ambassadors. If you’re running your program manually, this communication may end up being spread out over a variety of channels.
You may connect with some brand ambassadors through:
TikTok
Text
Other
If brand ambassadors are participating in marketing campaigns across multiple social media platforms, you may end up with double communications - speaking with the same ambassador over on Facebook, then having a separate conversation with them on Instagram.
It quickly becomes chaos. Trying to hunt down submissions and keep track of who has and hasn’t been rewarded for their content takes up valuable time and manpower. And if the ball gets dropped too many times, your brand ambassadors will quickly get frustrated, leave the program, and perhaps publicly advise others to avoid working with you.
Ambassador program software completely takes this issue out of the equation. You communicate with your brand ambassadors through the ambassador marketing platform. Everything is in one place and nothing gets missed.
Using artificial intelligence in retail market to automate communication processes can help to save you a ton of time when communicating with your customers and ambassadors.
Time is one of the most valuable resources we have. And it needs to be protected as much as possible. So why are you throwing away hours of your day doing administrative tasks that - though necessary - could be automated?
Task automation is your best friend. Not only does it save you time, but it prevents tasks from falling through the cracks and building up until everything comes crashing down. Ambassador program software will allow your jewellery brand to literally assign work to do itself.
What can be automated? Typing out long messages to answer your ambassadors’ questions for one. With customisable macros, you can save the answers to frequently asked questions, feedback on ambassador submissions, or anything else you find yourself typing over and over. Simply click the correct macro and the message auto-populates. Now all you have to do is hit send.
Accepting submissions to completed tasks is another. While you’ll want to manually accept any content submissions, certain tasks really don’t need a person to check. For example, if you ask your ambassadors to follow you on Instagram, our software will confirm they’ve done it and automatically approve the submission. There’s no point in sifting through and checking through hundreds of profiles yourself.
One of the most important tasks you can automate is rewards! When an ambassador has successfully completed a campaign, the worst thing you can do is keep them waiting on their reward, or forget to reward them altogether. With brand ambassador software, as soon as the submission is approved, the reward is issued.
After finding the right people to connect with, you may have a team of ambassadors ready to shout about your products online. But how will you know if their endorsements are actually working to bring in new sales?
Ambassador software can provide you with analytics that shows the performance of your ambassadors in terms of sales growth and online engagement. Information that may be collected includes:
Reach
Impressions
Views
Clicks
Likes
Comments
Engagement rate
Sales made
Discount codes used
Top performing ambassadors
Revenue created
Cost
ROI
And more!
Some ambassador software platforms even integrate with eCommerce stores and social media platforms directly to collect this data more efficiently. These integrations will allow you to check the performance of your ambassadors with regard to their impact on your online sales.
Software gives you the added bonus of compiling this data into graphs and reports for you. No need to do any of it yourself.
An interesting metric our ambassador marketing platform gives jewellery brands is Earned Media Value. This places a monetary value on your ambassadors’ contributions. You’ll see how much you would have needed to spend on paid ads to receive the same results as you got from your brand ambassadors. Comparing this to how much you spent on the ambassador campaign allows you to better evaluate your program’s performance.
Along with performance data, ambassador software gives you a detailed look at your community. See important information that can help you refine campaigns and segment your ambassadors. Access demographic information such as ambassador:
Want to learn more about how ambassador marketing impacts ROI? Click here to download our whitepaper: The ROI of Ambassador Marketing – A Comprehensive Guide.
You may have heard about user-generated content (UGC) before, but do you have the means to fully implement the acquisition and use of such content?
User-generated content is crucial for jewellery brands. It’s the most trustworthy type of content according to consumers over brand and influencer content. Showing your most loyal customers wearing your jewellery in their daily lives allows your customers to imagine themselves slipping on your newest bracelet or getting compliments on your most popular set of earrings.
Ambassador software allows jewellery brands to curate unique tasks for their ambassadors. You decide what type of content you want your brand ambassadors to create. Once your ambassadors start producing content that features your products, you’ll be able to collect a library of graphics outside of what your brand produces that you can repost across your social channels.
This is something that will drive organic interest too, especially because ambassador content feels more relatable to consumers than graphics from paid influencer promotions.
By using ambassador program software, you’ll be able to easily organise, rate, and reuse the content your brand ambassadors produce. It’s centralised and because our platform is cloud-based, accessible no matter where you are or what computer you’re working from so long as you have a reliable connection.
This content can be reused anywhere you see fit. Our ambassador software automatically generates a contract that brand ambassadors must accept to participate in your program. It stipulates that any content submitted as a part of a campaign is yours to alter and repurpose. Use community content in social media posts, on your website, and in ad campaigns. Just remember to credit your brand ambassadors to build rapport and a greater sense of community.
To see how jewellery brand Safira is leveraging their ambassador content, click here.
By building a community of ambassadors to advocate for your brand online, you’ll also open a door to honest and constructive feedback from people that are considered ‘outside’ of the company but who are genuinely interested in your brand.
Your ambassadors don't necessarily know the day-to-day operations of how your jewellery is made, but they can tell you how it makes them feel and what the experience is like to wear it. This is important because it doesn’t resonate in the same way anonymous customer feedback does.
Because your brand ambassadors already supported your company before becoming ambassadors, they truly care about the journey of your company’s success. Their feedback will come from a place of wanting you to succeed.
Ambassador software offers a portal for communication where you and your ambassadors can easily converse about their experiences with your products and any constructive feedback they may like to share.
And because getting customer feedback can be like pulling teeth at times, brand ambassador management platforms make it easy to incentivise feedback. After, ultimately contributing to NPS benchmarking and providing valuable insights to improve customer satisfaction. Whether you ask your community to offer their feedback on a particular product for a reward, request they participate in a survey for a gift card, or get their ideas for your next product launch for a chance to win a freebie.
While manually-run ambassador marketing programs allow you to connect with your true fans and collaborate with them on promotions, ambassador program software takes it to the next level.
Rather than having to negotiate each time you want to create a campaign or have new joiners miss out on older campaigns, you give your brand ambassadors a chance to see multiple campaigns running at once. Brand ambassadors can pick and choose which tasks they want to complete, and you can leave certain campaigns running indefinitely so that each person who joins your program can participate at any time. Examples of continuous campaigns you may wish to run include:
Our platform features an app for brand ambassadors to download so they can take part in tasks on the go. Rather than having to log into a desktop to upload submissions and see what tasks are available for them to do, they simply check the mobile app.
And because your ambassadors are joining you through the software, rather than communicating with you through their personal email, they feel like they are becoming a part of your wider community, along with all the other ambassadors in your program. You can even allow ambassadors to see what other members have submitted to campaigns to inspire ideas.
If you’re considering the switch to ambassador program software, you may have a lot of questions. Specifically, if your brand is ready for the jump. While ambassador software has a lot of perks, it does come with a price tag that manually running your program doesn’t (though arguably, you’re trading the costs elsewhere with time and manpower).
To ensure that your brand has a large enough community and the infrastructure to get a positive ROI that makes using ambassador software worth the investment, consider speaking with an expert who can determine if you’re in the right place to make the upgrade to software.
Find out if our platform is right for you. We’ll show you the software, go over your goals, take a look at your current community, and let you know what your next steps should be. And if you’re not ready for software just yet, we’ll help you find the tools and resources you need to get there.