Words like bland and boring come to mind when talking about vanilla marketing because that’s exactly what a vanilla marketing campaign is: bland. Advertising your products or services is supposed to help your company stand out amongst your competitors. Activating your customers, followers and fans (also known as micro-influencers) is a great way to do this. But if you aren’t seeing any results, your micro-influencer marketing strategy might be a little too vanilla.
Luckily, there are ways to up the ante when it comes to micro-influencer marketing. By using the tools of ambassador software and user-generated content (UGC), you’ll be able to find an exciting route away from the territory of sameness and dull marketing.
6 Ways to Keep Your Campaigns From Being a Bore
1. Create a Community
Have you given your family of ambassadors a name, yet? If not, allow us to tell you why you should.
Assigning a name to your influencer community gives your brand an element of excitement and exclusivity that will make your company feel more real and alluring to outsiders.
It’s like setting up the cool table that everyone wants to sit at, except it’s a table that’s way more inclusive and rewarding because it’s full of customers-turned-influencers that authentically support what you do.
After creating this community, as well as crafting a unique hashtag that every micro-influencer can use across their social media channels when posting about your brand, remember to engage with them too. Customers like to see when the brand actually supports their ambassadors by actively commenting on their posts with uplifting compliments and supportive words.
An ambassador community will create an organic buzz around your brand - something that people will want to tap into and become part of. You’ll notice more interest from customers and fans looking to join your community once you give it a name and make it part of your brand family.
2. Step Up Your Brand Message
In most cases, uninspiring brand missions or messages can prevent a micro-influencer campaign from being successful. If you’re not passionate about what you do, imagine how tricky it must be for your ambassadors to convey authentic passion for the services or products you sell.
Instead of trying to sell a product, sell a brand story that will speak to your target audience’s interests instead. Brand ambassadors have a strong connection with their followers, so if you’re able to provide them with a brand story that will enhance that connection, you’ll likely gain more fans and potential new customers.
The more compelling your brand is via the ambassadors you work with and the content they generate for your brand, the more compelling your products or services will appear to be.
3. Don’t Mute the Bad Stuff
Companies tend to instruct their ambassadors to only ever talk about the pros and to leave out the cons. But this is something that can fall into dull territory very quickly.
Customers value and trust authenticity, so they’d prefer to hear what an ambassador's full experience of a service or product was instead of some disingenuous, polished story. Ultimately, this entails mixing the likes with the dislikes.
We understand this isn’t something that’s comfortable for everybody, but look at it this way: something one ambassador didn’t like about your brand could potentially be something that another ambassador loves. And customers mimic that same difference through their buying choices because not everyone in your target audience absolutely likes and dislikes the same things.
Customers won’t know that they like an element of your product or service that an ambassador didn’t like if they never heard about it in the first place. So give them the chance to learn about it all. It will increase both your customer base and overall consumer trust in your brand.
The best part is that you’ll receive regular feedback on your product or service, for free. If you actively use that feedback to better your brand, customers will love that they played a part in that improvement, only making them more loyal to you.
4. Nail Your Brand Tone
Have you ever spoken to someone about a mutual friend and found yourself thinking “Oh, I can just hear this person saying that!” - that’s the effect you should aspire to have with your brand voice.
Crafting your voice in such a way that makes it recognisable to your followers, fans, and potential customers is a great way of escaping monotonous marketing. More importantly, the brand voice that you develop should resonate with the values and interests of your target audience and micro-influencer community. If you ensure you don’t sound like everybody else in your field, you’ll make it easier for new customers to notice your brand.
Peak Design is a great example of a company with a powerful, recognisable, and consistent brand tone that echoes across all of their marketing strategies. Their B corporation ethos really resonates with their customers and fans, which hugely sustains their consumer appeal.
Developing a strong brand tone will also give your influencers a better frame of reference when creating content about your brand, because they’ll use your brand tone as a launchpad. This will subsequently make repurposing UGC even easier, so it’s a score on all fronts!
Fabletics | @caroline.lena
5. Teaming up with the Wrong Ambassadors
Ideally, you’ll team up with micro-influencers that align with your company values from the start, but sometimes that isn’t the case. And sadly, when teaming up with people that aren’t really passionate about what you do, they won’t deliver passionate work.
Consumers will be more likely to grow interested in your products or services if the influencers they follow display an authentic passion for what you do. Additionally, some ambassadors are better suited to certain brands than others. Not all ambassadors are the same - take lifestyle micro-influencers as an example. Some lifestyle ambassadors focus their content on budget-friendly DIY hacks, while others produce content around more lavish home improvements. They may also be active on different marketing channels.
By using something like an ambassador software platform, you’ll be given the tools to help you recruit ambassadors who will appeal to your target customer base the best. This is super valuable, because if you team up with the wrong brand ambassadors, you risk having a bland ambassador marketing experience, as well as reaching the wrong potential customers.
6. Engagement, Engagement, Engagement…
Often when brands launch a new ambassador marketing campaign, they forget how important it is to assign their ambassadors tasks that will encourage consumer engagement.
As a brand, you shouldn’t shy away from asking your followers what they’d like to see more of or hear about next. You may also ask them to send you pictures that you’d like to reshare where they're using your products. And when you set up tasks for your ambassadors, you should ask them to do the same.
It can be as simple as adding “Comment what your favourite part of your skincare routine is!” to a social media caption. Engagement with your followers, fans, customers, and micro-influencers is a valuable trick to straying away from a mundane marketing campaign.
Our ambassador software helps organisations connect and partner with their customers, followers and fans. Our platform offers a central location through which brands can assign tailored content missions to their micro-influencers, while also measuring the results and ROI of their campaign.
