How to turn your brand ambassadors into social media influencers

How to turn your brand ambassadors into social media influencers

We all know what social media influencers are, as well as brand ambassadors, but did you know you could turn your brand ambassadors into influencers fairly easily?  They're already promoting your products and not getting anything in return, so if you were to approach them with your pitch, they might jump on board and help you push your business on social media platforms more than they are already   Sure, they could already be publishing your content or sharing your images across their social media platforms, but they might not dedicate themselves to your business and only your business, which means they could be sending traffic to your competitors. 

In order to figure out the best brand ambassadors to approach and ask if they wanted to help with your influencer marketing, you need to do a few things such as identify who is already sharing your content and images, understand what rates current influencers in your industry are asking for a single post and how much they charge for monthly agreements of XX posts.  After you figure out those simple things, you will have a better understanding of what needs to be done when you're trying to turn your brand ambassadors into influence marketers.

In this discussion, I'll be going over the top 4 things you need to go through before you can see success with your brand ambassadors publishing content on their social media profiles, blogs, and websites. 


Figuring out which customers are already sharing
When you're trying to get your brand ambassadors publish content to their social media profiles, blogs, and websites you'll need to look up where your business name or website has been mentioned.  An easy way to do this is to set up a simple Google alert to notify you whenever someone is talking about your business or website.  If you don't know know what a Google alert is, it's a simple little tool provided by Google that allows you to set up alerts to notify you when specific keywords or phrases are indexed for the first time.  This means if you set up an alert for your business name, domain name, etc. you will get an alert whenever someone talks about it. 

Take your domain name, for example, if someone posts "The website example.com is amazing and helped me out so much!" you will get a notification if your alert was for example.com.  Now, you'll want to set up multiple alerts for each domain or business name, because people could post it in several different ways, such as example.com, example, www.example.com, https://www.example.com.  It gets even more diverse if you have more than one word in your domain or business name, so try to think of all the variations of your business name and add them to your alerts.

After you find out who is talking to you, by getting some Google alerts, you will be able to narrow down the people who are already ambassadors that will likely partner up with you for some influencer marketing

Offer your best customers incentives for posting
If you have a service based website or a product that needs to be purchased many times throughout the year, you will be able to figure out quickly who loves your product more than others.  If you haven't figured it out yet, the best brand ambassadors will likely be the ones that would be more willing to help you in the influencer marketing department

A person who is purchasing from you already will likely post on their social media campaigns as long as they're getting something in return.  If they're purchasing multiple times, you can actually offer them a free service or product for a post on their profiles, which they'll likely take you up on.

Email your customer list notifying them what you're looking for
If you have a lot of customers and you don't really want to get down and dirty looking for the best influencers, you can always send out a newsletter stating you're looking for new social media influencers and you're willing to "partner" with a few people who fit the industry.  I'm sure there will be a lot of applicants since they probably know they'll be getting something out of it, and this is why you'll need to filter out the ones that aren't dedicated.

To filter out the less dedicated ones, you'll need to have requirements, which can be literally anything but the main thing needs to be the language you target.  If your website is only in English, you won't benefit as much from an influencer posting in German, because their followers likely won't understand English. 

A few filters to weed out some people from applying

• Must publish 10 posts a month about our website/business
• Must speak English (or whatever language you're targeting)
• Must have XXX followers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever platform you're targeting
• Must LOVE out product or service!

Pay them per post or a one-time monthly payment
When you start to find the right people to publish content for you online, you need to first figure out how they want to be paid, and work on from there.  Obviously, you won't want to start out with a monthly payment right away, because they could just take your money and never talk to you again.  However, after a few weeks or months of posting for you, you could move them over to a bi-weekly or monthly payment schedule if they prefer.  You have to be careful with this, you could pay them for 1 month in advance and their posting could slip.  You can't take any sort of excuse from them because you already paid them for XX posts per month.  If they say anything like "We will post more next month" it's unacceptable.  They need to do the work when paid for it, or they should be cut off or put on a probationary period.  You can either cut them off or reduce their payments for a certain amount of posts, which could make them drop you or they will get into gear and start posting more.


In conclusion
When it comes to finding the right people to push your products or services on social media platforms, you likely have the best people already, you just need to tap into them   Your current ambassadors or clients will always be as good as big ambassadors in your niche, because they will usually be much cheaper, making it easier to bring on 10x as many people to publish your content, images, and links   If you do it all right, you could have a massive influencer team publishing your content, and over time you will see their accounts growing much bigger than they currently are, and your profits will only increase with their accounts


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Thanks!

Tommy Carey