Lead Generation with Brand Ambassadors

Brand Ambassadors are a hot topic.  However, where businesses fail with brand ambassadors is much the same reason people fail to generate leads from a website.  Planning.

To generate leads with brand ambassadors, you need to plan out your sales funnel.  Sure, many people that the brand ambassador comes into contact with will not be a valid lead, but some will.  Plan for those that are.

Ask yourself these questions.

1. Where does our company want the brand ambassador to push people?
2. How can we capture more leads from our brand ambassadors?
3. How can we leverage more information created by brand ambassadors to create Inbound Marketing Leads?
4. What can the brand ambassador give away to make people take action?
5. How is the brand ambassador going to build lists where he or she has influence?

I suggest you assume that your brand ambassadors will create some interest – and you map out exactly how that interest gets funneled back to the company.  Brand Ambassador’s can create leads, but not if they do not know what to do with people that do express interest.

Employee Ambassador and Buzzoodle

Employee Ambassador is designed to help groups of employees blog and then optimize that blog posts into lead conversion engines.

Within a short while of launching Employee Ambassador, it became obvious to us that the Employee Ambassador branding was focused on the wrong thing.  Online Lead Generation with Blogs is more important than the issue around who writes.

Now we have refocused our branding and product.  Buzzoodle has become the online lead generation with blogs solution that people are looking for.

We are still very passionate about working with clients that want to use employees as Brand Ambassadors, and this software is still excellent for achieving that.  We also intend to continue these blogs and topics, but if you buy our online lead generation product you will be working with Buzzoodle directly.

Ambassador Programs

Ambassador Programs are programs that encourage people to discuss, write about and link to your brand actively.  Your brand ambassador program will get better results with more people, clear goals and a combination of quick and more involved activities.

What should ambassador programs contain?

• Document detailing goals.
• Instructions on what to do if you find negative comments.
• Examples of great brand ambassador activities.
• Documented great stories to repeat.
• Contests and recognition for people that are making a difference.
• Tools that make promotion easy, such as a employee brand ambassador blog.

Brand Ambassador Programs are a great way to get more out of your employees, customers and the part of the public that is passionate about your product.

20 Brand Ambassador Activities

Here is a list of 20 Brand Ambassador Activities you can ask your brand ambassadors to do to promote your brand.

1. Blog with an Employee Ambassador Blog
2. Build a Squidoo Lens
3. Public Speaking
4. Hubpages Hub
5. Twitter, Twitter, Twitter
6. Gather.com
7. Wordpress.com
8. Delicious.com
9. Stumbleupon.com
10. Digg.com
11. eZineArticles.com
12. Blogger.com
13. Tumblr.com
14. MyBlogLog.com
15. BlogCatalog.com
16. FiendFeed.com
17. FaceBook.com
18. LinkedIn.com
19. Furl.net
20. MyLinkVault.com

A brand ambassador that picks 2-3 things off of this list each week and does something with them will be very valuable at creating brand awareness and website traffic.

Employee Blog Strategy

Brand Ambassador Jobs can often be summed up as employee blogging and social media monitoring.

Employee Blogs are a great strategy for any business to grow its online footprint.

More information on the web means more people find you.

You could hire writers to produce the information or you can use employee bloggers.

Your employee blog strategy should consider the following:

• Only allow blogging for employees that have computer access – you do not want to require employees to go to the public library and blog for you.
• Monitor employee blogs for quality, appropriateness and frequency.
• Give people the option to opt into the program, then reward employees that make an effort and produce good content for you.
• Hold contests to get everyone to think about things they can write.
• Have an annual Academy Awards ceremony for your employee bloggers.
  • Best Employee Blog Post Award
  • Most Popular Employee Blog Post Award
  • Most Employee Blog Posts Award
  • Most Comments on an Employee Blog Post Award
  • Highest Number of Weeks with New Post Award

These are just some ideas for you to consider in your employee blog strategy.

10 Brand Ambassador Activities

What can a Brand Ambassador do to help create visibility for the brand?

1. Write Blog Posts – Blog ROI is great because blog posts are content, indexed by search engines that can keep generating content far into the future.
2. Public Speaking – Any time you get up and give a good, informative presentation about the company you are being a great brand ambassador.
3. Twitter – A Brand Ambassador should both monitor twitter and participate on Twitter.  Just don’t spend all day doing it.
4. LinkedIn - A Brand Ambassador must have a professional profile posted on LinkedIn.
5. Word of Mouth – A good brand ambassador looks for opportunities to tell great stories and jump start word of mouth.
6. Social Bookmarks – A brand ambassador will take the time to use one or more social bookmarking sites to link to good articles in your corporate blog.
7. StumbleUpon – Brand Ambassadors that understand the importance of traffic will use stumbleupon to call attention to the company website, company blog and any positive news about the company.
8. Networking – A good brand ambassador gets the importance of having a strong network for them and for their company.  Brand Ambassadors build their network before they need it.
9. FaceBook – Brand Ambassadors look for opportunities to connect to people.  Facebook is one such opportunity.
10. Follow Up – Great Brand Ambassadors will follow up with people, either via email or phone, to keep the company fresh in the minds of their network.

Wrap these things up into one person, and you will get some good results.  Build a team of brand ambassadors and you will quickly own your space.  Brand Ambassadors can accomplish things that an advertising budget cannot.  Authentic conversations and authentic content.

What is Brand Ambassador?

If you are asking yourself the question, “What is a Brand Ambassador” you are in the right place.

A Brand Ambassador is someone that represents a Brand in a positive way and carries the brand message out to the public.

The Brand Ambassador position has become more common as an official job because of the many outlets where a brand ambassador can promote the brand and where many people can discuss the brand.

What is the difference between a PR Agency and a Brand Ambassador?

A PR Agency usually focuses on the news media, writing official communications and handling a crisis. But certainly many PR agencies have developed the ability to be good brand ambassadors as well.

A Good Brand Ambassador

To be a good brand ambassador, you really need to know the product, the industry and to have the motivation to help other people discover the brand. It is not something that can be done effectively a few hours per month.  A small business is best served by the owner being the brand ambassador.

The Employee Brand Ambassador

The employee brand ambassador is when there is a positive workplace and employees are motivated to create awareness.  This has become easier to do in the last few years with the rise of social media and employee blogs.

Employee blogging can significantly impact the visibility of the company.  We build the Employee Ambassador program to make it easy for employees blogs to be set up and monitored.  Each time and employee blogs, the blog post gets reviewed and then published to their own blog, as well as the proper conversion centers which are keyword specific blogs.

The development focus is simplicity.  A title and a couple of paragraphs is all you need to fill in to post your blog post.  And your corporate blog will rank higher in search with the blog search optimization that happens behind the scenes.

If you are interested in Employee Blogging, request a demo.  You can build a team of Brand Ambassadors in no time.

Brand Ambassador Results

Brand Ambassador Jobs are a fairly new concept.  And if you are lucky enough to have a job as a brand ambassador, you really have to focus on measurable, reportable ROI on your job position.

That means documenting the things you are doing well, writing up great reports that highlight your success and lastly it is great if you have an independent system that will clearly show how at least part of your efforts are paying off in unbiased metrics.

Welcome to  Employee Brand Ambassador

Our company helps you utilize a blog matrix to target people with particular interests on the  web and turn them into leads.  And it all happens via quick articles written by key employees, brand ambassadors and anyone else you invite.  The reports you get back show your progress on targeted search engine ranking and traffic.

Why is this important to your Brand Ambassador Job?

1. If a company cannot point to numbers that say it is working, they could cut the ambassador job at some point.
2. Your own sanity – Sometime chatting all day on twitter seems like a waste to time – and a lot of it probably is.  Do something that has clear goals and measurable results so you can improve the position.
3. Success – When you show numbers that say things are going up and getting a blog ROI, you are going to be a hero and make your boss look like a hero.
4. Low Risk – High Reward Social Media Strategy – Reasonable pricing for Employee Ambassador makes it easy to get in with minimal risk, and with a simple month to month commitment, you are free to cancel any time.  If it does not work, you should cancel it.

Brand Ambassador Jobs are easy and fun to do if you love the brand.  But they are hard to measure and attach dollars to.  Find a way to do it, or any downturn in the company could result in the end of the Brand Ambassador.

Brand Ambassador Jobs

It should come as no surprise that we believe every employee should be a Brand Ambassador.

But what if you work for a business that does not have brand ambassador jobs available?

Well, going out and looking for a Brand Ambassador Job is possible, but that is not necessarily something that many businesses realize they need.  Plus, they may have Brand Ambassador jobs but call them something else, like public relations, social media marketing expert or blog writer.

One option you have is to create Brand Ambassador Jobs where you work.  For example, you could recommend to your boss that you start doing more lead generation on the web, and you are willing to head up the Internet Marketing effort.

Then, make sure you put together a super clear set of goals and a measurable strategy.  You are never going to become a full time Brand Ambassador unless you can show clear social media and blog ROI.

The way to do this is to recommend a tool like Employee Ambassador, which helps you create the clear return on investment blogging strategy and automates blogging for search optimization.

Then you really just need to be doing Employee Blogging and link development.

While this may start out a side project, with some success you very well could develop Brand Ambassador Jobs within your organization and become a valuable web client acquisition specialist.

Old Media Marketing

It is popular to talk about social media, brand ambassadors and Web 2.0. But does that mean the traditional marketing has stopped working?

No.  Actually it means that there are more ways to reach people and you have more options that all may be less effective than in the past when there were less options  with more people condensed into fewer communication channels.

Here are some traditional marketing techniques that still work.

1. Press Release – When it used to be really read by the press, it was appropriate to call it a press release.  Now I would call it a news broadcast.  I do not believe a press release will usually find any major writers but I do think that you are going to get some good exposure and good back links to your business blog or website.  If you focus on a niche or use the more expensive press release services you may still hit some great media outlets.
2. Email Marketing – Way more attention seems to be given to social media than email marketing.  However, email marketing will still generate a lot more money for you when done right.  It is an essential part of your marketing and if you bought the whole Email is Dead line, you jumped in the wrong bandwagon.  I make most of my money from email and Search Engine Optimization from blogs.
3. SEO – Search Engine Optimization is not the new hot thing, but if there is one area that is actually using social media well, it is the people that get how SEO and Social Media are linked together.  The key with SEO is that if you are in a tight target niche with little competition, you can probably pay for a one time project and reap the rewards for a long time.  Blogs make it easy.  If you are in an even slightly competitive market, you need someone that goes to war on your behalf every month to increase ranking and get more pages indexed.  Or you can just use Employee Ambassador and your staff just does some light writing and the whole thing is automatically targeted to keyword conquest.
4. Old Websites – Do you have one of those old websites sitting around that looks like late 90’s and does date back to then?  Don’t touch it without talking to a web professional!  The age of your website is valuable and the page urls should not be changed unless you have someone that can look at your search ranking first.  I updated one of these old sites after some research and got fantastic results within 3 days – I am talking #1 rankings where a lot of other people were fighting for it.  These old sites have great credibility in the eyes of search engines and can be ignited by a good search engine specialist.
5. Directories – Things like directories seem out of date, but getting listed in a good directory still gives you a valuable back-link and can generate a steady (if not big) stream of website or blog traffic.  Some of my favorite are technorati and blogcatalog – but the older directories are still effective if you get into them too.
6. Link Exchanges – These things have a bad name, and anything that automates the process I would stay away from.  However, doing an occasional link exchange with someone else in your industry will help – not hurt – your website.  If link exchanges  hurt websites, most blogs with blog rolls would be thrown out of Google long ago since they often link to one other.  This is one of those things that still works, you just have to be smart about it.
7. Word of Mouth – The oldest of the traditional marketing is the new hot marketing.  Finding ways to get people to talk about you are the best way of cutting through the noise.  But it may just not work for you – you really have to be differentiated.

Most things will still work with good execution and message.  Just be realistic about how people’s attention has scattered.  You need to scatter your message where your niche market is to make sure they can find you.  Especially when they are looking in Google, which is where Employee Ambassador comes in.