When it comes to promoting a brand and its products, having a trusted, credible spokesperson can make all the difference. This is where brand ambassadors come in – they help companies reach their ideal customers in a more relatable, engaging way.
However, the key to a successful brand ambassador program lies in authenticity.
In this article, we’ll discuss how authenticity plays a crucial role in building trust with customers and driving sales for a brand.
What Is a Brand Ambassador?
A brand ambassador is a person who represents a brand and its products or services in a positive light. They use their personal and professional networks to promote the brand to their followers, friends, and family. Traditionally, brand ambassadors were third parties – often celebrities – who would use their independent status and personal reputation to give credence to the brand in question.
Today, the term ‘brand ambassador’ describes any person – internal or external – who helps promote a brand and its message to the market. Other terms for a brand ambassador include ‘brand representative’, ‘brand advocate’, and ‘brand evangelist’.
At Aguzzo Group, our brand ambassadors combine visual merchandising and product demonstrations with strong brand advocacy, creating credible experiences for customers in-store.
Why Authenticity Matters for Brand Ambassadors
Authenticity is key when it comes to the role of a brand ambassador. Customers are savvy and can quickly spot when someone is not being genuine or truthful. If a brand ambassador is seen as inauthentic, it can lead to a loss of credibility and trust in a brand. On the other hand, when a brand ambassador is genuine and authentic in their promotions, it can have a significant impact on the brand’s reputation and sales.
Authenticity builds trust with customers. When customers see a brand ambassador using and promoting a product or service, they are more likely to trust the brand because they are seeing the product in a real-life setting. This creates a sense of reliability and helps customers feel more confident in their purchase decision.
Moreover, authenticity drives sales because it creates a personal connection between the brand and the customer. When customers interact with a brand ambassador they respect, they are more likely to be influenced by their recommendations. This creates a sense of loyalty and encourages customers to make a purchase, as they feel that they are supporting someone they trust.
Three Tactics to Build Authenticity
Nurturing a strong team of internal brand ambassadors can be difficult and time-consuming. Here are three tactics you can use to speed up the process.
Understand the Brand
Before your brand ambassadors can go out into the market and talk to people about what you do, they need to understand your brand. What’s your reason for existing? How are you radically transforming the worlds of your ideal customers? What makes you different from competitor brands with similar offerings? What’s your brand’s story?
Your brand ambassadors should understand your brand at the same depth as your C-suite. They need to be able to talk about you in a way that feels effortless and genuine, and that starts with an executive-level mindset. Ambassadors won’t necessarily have the advantage of being immersed in your company for years, so you’ll need to find workarounds, such as:
- Get a senior executive (for example, your head of sales) to pitch your company to your ambassadors, in the same way you’d pitch a new customer or a roomful of VCs. Record the meeting and then give it to your ambassadors to draw inspiration from.
- Get each of your ambassadors to shadow someone from sales, marketing, product, or CS for a day. Let them feel your organisation in action.
- Give your ambassadors easy-to-understand collateral like pitch decks and battle cards. The goal is to get them bought into your brand – you can focus on the specifics of individual offerings later.
Believe in the Offering
Once your ambassadors understand who you are, it’s time to educate them about what you do. What problem does your product or service solve? Why does it solve that problem better than other, similar offerings? What scenarios or use cases is it best for? How does it exceed buyer expectations?
There’s a saying: the best marketing strategy is a good product. If your brand ambassadors genuinely believe in whatever you sell, they’ll become educators, sharing a great solution that the market genuinely needs – instead of old-school salespeople desperately trying to pawn something that they don’t understand.
It’s also critical to get your ambassadors familiar with the nuances of the product in question. Buyers are intelligent. They can see when someone is a genuine expert – it’s the same trait that makes top salespeople and CS officers excellent. Here are three ways you can quickly promote offering expertise in your ambassadors.
- Get them to listen to sales and CS calls. If you’re recording with software like Gong, you can filter calls by product-specific keywords.
- Put aside half a day for every ambassador to simply use the product or service. If required, give them technical documentation and access to CS staff so they can quickly work through any usage challenges.
- Bring in a power user to show your ambassadors some surprising or unusual use cases or features. Power users should be internal staff who use the product extensively themselves – often, they’ll be in product development or CS. The goal is to give your ambassadors the ability to delight and surprise potential buyers when they’re conducting product demonstrations.
Communicate Like a Human
Communicating like a human is in some ways the most difficult aspect of creating authentic brand ambassadors, because it can’t easily be taught.
Brand ambassadors aren’t salespeople. They’re emissaries from your brand to the market, so they shouldn’t seem like entry-level SDRs reading from a script – everything should feel natural, unforced, a flowing two-way conversation between ambassador and buyer that’s focused on building brand affinity, not closing a sale.
If you’ve properly educated your ambassadors about your brand and your offering, you’re already 80% of the way there. True understanding breeds fluency in communication. The remaining 20% is standard sales tactics: ask questions about buyers’ needs instead of pitching, be honest about strengths and weaknesses, and focus on being a ‘solutions consultant’ who helps the buyer walk away happy.
Summary
Building trust with your ideal customers is never easy, but a strong brand ambassador program can be incredibly effective. You can build that program internally using the approaches we’ve covered in this blog, or you can outsource its delivery to experiential marketing specialists – vendors who understand the fine line between advocacy and sales that needs to be walked by brand ambassadors.
At Aguzzo Group, we know how to successfully execute brand ambassador programs. We’ve done it for market leaders like De’Longhi and Smeg. And we’ve done it for challenger brands who needed to quickly drive sales and establish brand awareness. Regardless of the client, our ambassador training always focuses on those three pillars: deep brand understanding, strong product knowledge, and human communication.
So, if you’re aiming for authenticity, try implementing our approach with your own ambassadors. Alternatively, get in touch with us to find out more about how we help product brands create amazing experiences.
