- Helped his business boom.
- You don't have to be a major celebrity.
- It's native advertising, it's word of mouth.
- Welcome to The Journey.
I'm Nealey.
- And I'm Emma.
- And today we're talking about
how a brand ambassador can grow your business.
Can you give us the inside scoop
of what a brand ambassador really is?
- Yeah, and they're closer than you think.
It could be an employee,
(laughs) where, here?
It could be someone that already works for you.
It could be just a huge fan of yours, a customer.
It could also just be someone in your community
that has a huge influence.
- Perfect.
So with brand ambassadors, I've heard this term
called influencer marketing, what is that,
and how can we leverage that with our brand ambassadors?
- Yeah, so there's a ton of creative ways to do that.
Once you do find that brand ambassador,
what you can do is you can encourage them
to post about you, but on their personal account.
And why would you do that?
Of course-- - Why would you do that?
- Grow your following, because then you reach out
and you have this customer.
Actually, let me give you a really cool example
that happened to me last year.
My buddy, Kyle, he owns a grip tape company,
Cloud 9 Griptape over back in the Midwest,
and he wanted to leverage brand ambassadors
to do influencer marketing.
So what he did is he sent some free grip tape
out to friends of his that have a good Instagram following,
and just, you know, gently encouraged them,
hey, once you grip your deck and go out and skate,
I'd love it if you could tag Cloud 9 Griptape.
And it helped his business boom
because he got in front of a targeted audience.
Obviously, if you're sending grip tape
to people on Instagram who have a skateboard vibe,
they're gonna have the audience you want to get in front of.
- Right, so if maybe you're a clothing artist,
or whatever your business is,
find people in your niche that has a decent following.
They don't have to be a major celebrity,
they're little micro-influencers, right,
couple thousand followers, sometimes even higher,
and reach out to them and say, hey,
I've got this free product,
or I have X ad that I want you to run,
and see if you can make some type of arrangement to--
- Yeah. - Get your name out there,
because we trust social reviews, and people talking about
another business pretty darn highly.
- Yeah, brand authenticity is another big reason to do it
because again, you might be pushing your product.
Like, I was at a trade show, a big food show in L.A.,
and I came across this brand called Field Roast,
and as a vegan, they're one of my favorite brands out there
when it comes to alternative meats.
And they sent a package of, like, a t-shirt
and some free products to try.
Do I have a huge following?
No, but I went and I posted about it 'cause I was stoked.
I cooked with it, I took videos, and I tagged them,
and that helped them to get in front of a larger audience.
And then I felt so valuable, I went and bragged about them
to all my meat-eating friends, and kinda converted them
a little bit actually, now that I think back.
- What is it, like, 25% of, like, positive interactions,
those people go tell 10 of their friends?
- Yeah, so it doesn't hurt even if that person
doesn't have this huge following.
But make it fun, make it into kind of a game of, like,
what could you send me that's related to your business,
or your customers or Nealey?
He loves free stuff.
And encourage them to do something,
and then tag you (laughs).
Yeah.
And another thing, 'cause I'm thinking about
what I get asked all the time
from local heroes like yourself is,
okay, where is the return on investment here?
What's super rad is you can have a discount code,
or a coupon, that then you hook it up
with your brand ambassador,
encourage them to go spread the love to their friends.
- Okay.
- And then it's easy to track, you know,
how many people did actually come
into your store or your shop,
and spend money based on
or because of that brand ambassador?
Easy to link it back.
- Yep, so everyone gets their own unique coupon code.
So Emma, you get a code, I get a different code,
so you can see, cool, Emma did a lot better than I did,
so probably gonna focus my attention
to give Emma a little bit more content to promote,
and me, not so much.
- So why this is also really effective,
and why you want to definitely get out there,
start thinking about who would be a great brand ambassador
for you, get on board the influencer marketing,
is because it's native advertising,
it's word of mouth, right?
So, like, back to my buddy, Kyle,
shout out to Kyle, Cloud 9 Griptape,
if he is sending out this cool grip,
and all these people, tons of people in California,
in Indiana, in New York, they're putting his grip tape
on their boards and they're out there shredding,
that is telling the world that this grip tape
is high quality, so I'm gonna get on board
with Cloud 9 Griptape because it's not Kyle
pushing it in front of your face on his Instagram.
- Yeah.
- It's actually his customers
because they're so stoked on the brand.
- Yeah. - Word of mouth marketing.
- And it doesn't come off as salesy or pushy,
it's just, hey, this person thought this was pretty cool,
I might think that's pretty cool
'cause I'm just like them.
- I'm just like, exactly, very organic and very true.
Hey, it hooked me (laughs).
All right, that's a wrap.
Thanks for tuning in.
You learned all about brand ambassadors,
what they are, who they are,
and why you should go and get one.
- Perfect.
So make sure you comment below your favorite tip from today.
Like this video if you did, subscribe to the channel,
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That's all we have on today's episode of The Journey.
Thanks for watching.