Authentic ambassadors and meaningful marketing
Anybody with half an eye on consumer behaviours will tell you that the days of celebrity-fronted, glossy aspirational advertising are rapidly becoming a distant memory. The pandemic in particular catapulted an already waning mode of advertising further into oblivion – partly due to budget restraints and social uncertainty, but also because of consumers taking their commercial habits back into their own hands. Since the dawn of social media, influencers have quickly filled the spaces once held for traditional advertising. But is the brand ambassador here to take over that role?
Before diving into the nuances and differences between influencers and ambassadors, it’s worth noting that the two can certainly be utilised simultaneously. Indeed many brands choose to combine the two marketing methods, often to great success. But there is undeniably something of a moment happening with the brand ambassador, and at Fanweave we can see why.
So what exactly is the difference between influencers and brand ambassadors? It may well depend on who you ask, but arguably the key difference is a focus on authenticity. Employing a certain naturalism that perhaps increasingly influencer marketing lacks, brand ambassadors are real people who use a brand’s products and services, raising brand awareness through word of mouth. Ambassadors are more informal spokespeople – and are often free of charge where influencers can be quite costly.
Influencers tend to be in more short-term relationships with companies, whereas brand ambassadors are ongoing, long-term collaborations.
Organic recommendations are key to successful marketing, and Fanweave’s platform is wielding the power of that authenticity;
“Fanweave utilises a common-sense, peer-to-peer marketing philosophy. We believe that your truest ‘influencers’ are not those people that are paid to advertise your brand – they’re the people who love your brand so much that they recommend it (organically) to their friends and followers!”
Many brands have already started to rely heavily on peer-to-peer recommendations over traditional marketing to promote brand loyalty.
Online beauty subscription service Beauty Pie is a great example of this shift. Beauty Pie offers customers personalised boxes of products, made up of their own selections and without the requirement to purchase every month (unlike rival services).
While this model itself is bold and relies heavily on positive customer experience for retention, Beauty Pie goes a step further in that its products are stripped of branding and fancy advertising. The platform has relied solely on the word of mouth of existing customers, and this model has proved highly effective.
Brand ambassadors can be authentically made simply through consistent attention to quality, top customer service and direct communications with consumers.
Making marketing meaningful
While brands and audiences alike are moving away from traditional advertising, one thing that remains undeniable is the power of emotional storytelling in marketing. Adverts of the traditional variety that do break through are those which evoke strong emotions and incite conversations – see the current EE “not her problem” campaign and its response.
But in an already oversaturated, overpopulated space, creating truly meaningful marketing can be challenging. Increasingly audiences’ demand for meaning extends to honesty and transparency, above simply messaging that will tug at the heartstrings.
Brand ambassadors are the perfect tool for hitting this note of meaning, and opening up those all-important communication channels between business and consumer.
“If you’re in the business of anything that’s trying to sell to the public, the thing you want to understand is what people really think and what they want. Most marketing is about trying to anticipate that, or understand where demand possibly is.”
Understanding your ambassador network
Though it’s great to have authentic ambassadors, the information on them is much more useful with the right tracking and context. Knowledge of the ambassadors’ networks and how they are reached is a crucial addition to truly understanding your audience, and indeed your own existing ambassadors.
Let’s look at an example. Suppose you see news of a fantastic event that you think your whole family would be interested in, so you pass it on. It is likely you might use a different method of contact per family member; an email to dad, a WhatsApp to mum, Instagram DM your sibling. You get the idea. All of that information is vital to understanding a network and its influence.
Cross-channel campaigns are already on the rise of course. The average number of social media accounts has doubled in the last six years, meaning that for brands to stay relevant it is essential they are generating tailored content per platform. Key to this is not only engaging ambassadors, but engaging the right kind of ambassadors. Ambassadors who embody a brand’s values and offer genuine opinions.
Younger generations have a savvy eye and are looking for true transparency as consumers. Take a scroll through Reddit threads focused on brands or products, and you’ll see that Gen Z utilise comments sections and forums in much the way previous generations relied on reviews. No longer content with simply trusting sponsored ads on Instagram, direct feedback from like-minded peers can provide the actual information consumers are coming to trust.
The fact that Fanweave provides sharing capacity for multiple different platforms, while still being able to track it, means providing a much clearer and more “real” picture of how people are interacting with a brand, product or content.
Identification of ones’ core customers and audiences is key to successful brand ambassadorship; you must know who you are talking to, in order to supply content for them.
Fanweave founder Martin Heath says;
“What this allows for is an attributed pattern of somebody’s true influence within their peer group and their friends. And for those friends, they get the benefits that our clients pass on to them; whether that’s tickets, discounts, upgraded experiences. The tracking allows those clients to understand who are the people they SHOULD be talking to, who are the most important to their businesses and their activity.”
Fanweave is a perfect example of what can be achieved when successfully utilising true authenticity, and shifting the focus from “influencers” on a grander scale to the true holders of influence; our own networks.
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