Building a Brand Support Machine

How to empower and build up your brand ambassadors in high-growth environments

While the sales organisation is waiting for a volume of leads, growing a brand in a hyper-growth environment seems like a defeatist task. That's why today I would like to answer a simple yet important question: "How to build a brand support system in a world led by unit economics?”

“If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together”

Building a brand ambassador system

Defining a brand ambassador

Brand ambassadors are individuals who embody the values and mission of a brand and act as its public face and advocate. Building relationships with their peers can help spread their brand’s message and create a network of loyal followers and customers. These ambassadors are essential to a successful marketing strategy as they ARE the brand's personal touch and create a sense of trust and loyalty. Sometimes I question if there’s a notion of just B2B marketing. Corporate brand engagement is often much lower than the engagement of brand ambassadors with the rest of the market.

Examples of brand pioneers and techniques that make them successful

• Elisheva Marcus : an absolute legend at engagement. She's not just building the Earlybird Venture Capital brand but is actually pioneering it through engaging in conversations around her field of expertise and interests. Her approach:

I use a combined approach: I write articles on Medium about my interests in startups, founders, innovation, communication, art and more. I use Twitter to be of help to others & grow my network of ppl interested in those topics and also interesting new founders building in diverse spaces/industries. This year, I am open to speaking on podcasts to share my international journey and engage with others, since I consume a lot of podcast content.

• Megan Thudium : a person that builds a brand through knowledge democratization. She's not only an absolute boss at sharing all the useful tips on how to win brand space through stronger content strategy but she's also empowering other women to do so by running a community on the side.

I enjoy sharing content around my core interest and expertise — one to help people on their own journey and two to inspire conversation and connection. I don’t think is any right one way to develop a personal brand. Be authentic. Be helpful. Be you. ??

• Meredith Wellard : one that speaks up and knows how to create a stage for her personal brand and the brand she's working with. Meredith's approach celebrates the peers that she works with, the learning environment she is building, and the culture at DHL . Here's an example of how to take space and create a stage for a topic that is personal to you and a personal brand:

?? 327 post reaction and a conversation worth 63 comments. That's a network.

Invest time to increase the value

Investing time in building brand ambassadors pays off in three ways:

• Sales: brand ambassadors help to increase brand awareness and credibility by promoting the brand to their networks. This often leads to building a “stickier” brand = bigger network = more customers = more sales
• Product: brand ambassadors can provide valuable feedback and insights about the brand products or services, which challenge us on improving overall customer and user experiences. Intentional product = intentional business
• Community: brand ambassadors help create a sense of community by building a brand stage that leads not only to repeat customers but long-term growth through creating brand multipliers. Brand ambassadors creating more brand ambassadors = exponential growth in brand reach.

But hyper-growth fails us…

Brands that focus solely on fast customer acquisition tend to forget what’s on the other side - customer loyalty and long-term growth. Therefore, such companies forget their story, ignore their brand - one thing that helps build emotional buy-in - build out a performance marketing team, turn on the lead gen machine and then start “crying in the discotheque” because the leads won’t close or materialize into the meaningful pipeline.

There's a whole education piece that's missing in this piece and I promise to soon share some techniques on how to build a thriving brand team in an organization that is confused about the notion of brand vs. marketing and who owns the bookings for "intro meetings".

But that’s not the worst-case scenario. In hyper-growth, resources are tight and infrastructures are loose, which is a dangerous combination that can easily get out of hand. That’s why it’s important to understand that not everyone can be and will be a brand ambassador and then that even those that can be an evangelist need infrastructure and accountability to create a proof of concept and set an example for those with big networks, little time and healthy skepticism about the existence of such programs.

Brand physio for hyper-growth pains

Before you attempt to build a brand ambassador program ask yourself these questions:

• Do my stakeholders (founders, CxOs) believe in building a brand? (I'm lucky that the people I work with René Janssen , Peter Kuperus , Nick Geurds are excited about all a strong brand can bring)
• Is my brand story clear and would my friend's gran understand our brand purpose and promise?
• What’s your goal for investing in brand building?
• What brand value do you expect to generate over a certain time frame?
• Short-term vs. long-term growth: address this topic by questioning your long-term brand recognition goals and short-term tactics that you need to pursue to get there. Measure both at all times.

Once you have clear, actionable answers to these questions, go and build up your brand ambassador machine.

Brand Machine Playbook

Even though, as brand professionals, we might feel paralyzed by hyper-growth, we should always come back to what we know best - building an experience. Here are some tips on how to build a brand ambassador infrastructure to effectively manage and nurture a group of brand ambassadors:

[ ] Identify potential brand ambassadors:

Start by identifying individuals who are already passionate about your brand, and have a large following on social media or in their networks. These individuals can be existing customers, influencers, industry experts, or employees that see the value in building a personal brand around the corporate one.

I’ve created a tracker in Notion that helps me keep an eye on existing brand ambassadors that are already rolling without any assistance vs. a list of passive ambassadors with big networks.

[ ] Develop a clear program structure:

Create a program structure that outlines the expectations and benefits of becoming a brand ambassadors. Set up workshops for the talent in your company and explain what they’ll get in return: assistance with personal editorial, accountability, support, and in the end higher personal market value. Say whatever you want, but people with personal brands carry a different price tag on the market.

Within the next couple of weeks, we’re running several brand ambassador training that will focus on explaining the benefits and giving people the tools to be powerful brand ambassadors. I’ll share the workshop structure and questions in a few weeks, so you can test it for yourself.

[ ] Create a communication plan:

Set up regular communication channels for brand ambassadors, such as email or a slack channel, to keep them informed about new content, products, and other important brand updates. At Lepaya we have a #commercial -club & #brand slack channels where it’s all about creating a buzz. By joining these channels we commit to being supportive and helping each other win the algorithm game.

[ ] Provide training and resources:

Provide brand ambassadors with training and resources, such as product information and promotional materials, to help them effectively promote the brand. This month at Lepaya we’re kicking off our first-ever monthly 30 min Brand Booster interactive workshop where the Brand team shares all that the commercial team can look forward to with tips on how to use it for social selling and network building.

[ ] Recognize and reward success:

Recognize and reward brand ambassadors for their efforts reward them in whatever keeps them motivated and engaged. Don’t know the answer to these questions? Ask a couple of people with the highest potential what motivates them.

[ ] Keep the program fresh and engaging:

Develop an internal accountability infrastructure that keeps the program fresh and engaging (will share this in my next post).

[ ] Foster a sense of community:

Create a sense of community among the brand ambassadors by encouraging interaction and collaboration among them.

[ ] Monitor and measure success:

Use metrics such as social media reach, website traffic, and sales to measure the success of the brand ambassador program and make adjustments as needed. More and louder ambassadors don’t always mean a ‘stickier’ network. Optimize your monitoring for the ratio of brand ambassador purpose vs. the quality of the network.

Ready to work with a company that cares about the brand? Join Lepaya! I’m hiring:

• Senior Content Marketing Manager based in Amsterdam, Berlin or Munich
• Marketing Programs Manager based in Amsterdam, Berlin or Munich

Brand is not your cup of team? We're hiring across the board

Next week: how to organize a brand ambassador program, incl. assets for the workshop.

Onwards and upwards,

Milda