💬 It's one thing to recruit ambassadors and micro-influencers for your brand, but it's another thing when it comes to truly activating them to become really effective as a revenue channel source for your store.
To make ambassadors/micro-influencers work as an initiative for the business, you need to properly integrate them into key marketing campaigns - whether that be competitions on socials, seasonal sales, content collabs for promotion, and more.
It's all about driving co-distribution with revenue/sales as the goal - it even helps both parties grow audiences and reach.
💬 These are some activation, tactic and campaign areas I've seen work effectively to really engage micro-influencers and ambassadors to scale reach/eyeballs, whilst ensuring that ROI and revenue is in mind.
UGC competitions are an effective strategy to really help build up follower/audiences, and are great to also help sales.
To make them really work through, you do need distribution (whether smaller or a larger brand). Collaborating with those with audiences is a great way to get more eyeballs.
Whilst you don't need to do branded content ads on Meta (FB/IG) and just do normal influencer-type ads, I like this format as it shows off more proof of a partnership (highlights more legitimacy), and helps with eyeballs with the creator's followers.
The goal here is to gain greater awareness to relevant followers of the ambassador/micro-influencer, with the enhanced trust that they're posting it to their audience.
Related to the above, you want to run special offers and campaigns with ambassadors as it helps provide trust/credibility, and overall social proof.
It's worth testing various ads formats/creatives like reviews, product unboxing videos, or any video-type.
Engaging with ambassadors and micro-influencers really helps with proof, and also just 'access' to more relevant audiences.
Another way to engage them that can provide value and new eyeballs is by running webinars/AMAs (i.e. online events).
You can online event content such as talking about product releases, industry trends, and much more. Additionally, you can also consider running special events for top-tier customers.
Work closely with those with high-volume, engaged audiences/followings on socials (and even email newsletters).
Organise 'exclusive' personalised audience offers and campaigns to drive more sales. Ensure to use tracking codes to measure performance (clicks, add to carts, sales, etc).
Another way to incentivise those to really actively promote to their audience is providing some sort of kick-back - just like you would with affiliate marketers.
You can learn more about affiliate optimisations through my other checklist.
A great way to generate buzz/awareness, as well as a new SKU(s) to sell, are limited-edition product collabs - whether specific products or a certain collection.
Aside from "limited edition" collabs, running new product launches and working with micro-influencers and ambassadors is a great way to maximise organic reach.
Whilst sales/revenue is always a key objective, mixing up CTAs and messaging to different audiences to join, say the likes of a community or loyalty/rewards program, is a smart way to provide a lower resistance path for audiences to engage with your brand.
Through initiatives like communities and loyalty/rewards programs, you'll be able to have another engaged touchpoint that can help drive new sales and repeat purchases.
Something I've seen a few brands do in the past few years is run "virtual shopping parties" - they're pretty much like online events/Q&A's where those with influence can share product demonstrations, answer community questions, and more.
I personally like the angle of calling them shopping parties - just another way to call an event to engage audiences/customers.
