Word of mouth marketing is exceptionally powerful, and the internet has allowed for this traditional form of marketing to have viral potential. Instead of one raving fan telling a few of their best friends about a product, now they can upload a quick Facebook post, Tweet, or review and literally reach hundreds of users in just a few seconds. This is why brand ambassador programs are so incredibly important.

Brand ambassador programs allow you to identify, create, and encourage brand advocacy. Brand advocacy is an exceptionally authentic type of marketing that relies on UGC coming directly from your most loyal customers. They can, however, be somewhat difficult to maintain on your own, so make sure you check out these 7 essential tools to keep your brand ambassador program growing and thriving.

1. Influitive

Influitive’s Advocate Hub is an incredible tool that was created to help businesses with their advocate marketing. Their product offers several incredible features that all contribute to helping you build an excited community.

This software encourages, collects, and rewards customer referrals. These referrals are transparent, so the customer who sent new leads to you will be able to send better and more relevant leads to you in the future, building your community.

 

You can create customized referral forms you can send to customers to fill out in exchange for rewards.

They also have a discussions feature, which fosters dialogue between your advocates. This fosters the community as well, connecting advocates with each other, as providing valuable feedback that you can use to improve your business.

Facilitating conversion and discussion amongst your brand advocates can result in a more tight-knit community

You can integrate the Advocate Hub with a ton of other solutions, including Salesforce, Hootsuite, Hubspot, and more.

2. Tap Influencer

Influencers marketing is a great way to get your brand ambassador program up and running. Tap Influencer offers an incredible software solution to make influencer marketing easier to manage and monitor, which is an essential part of any brand ambassador program.

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This solution makes it easier than ever to connect with relevant influencers, manage, and monitor influencer campaigns.

Their software identifies high-value, pre-vetted influencers and allows brands to “assign” them campaigns. These influencers will be relevant to you and your business, and you’ll be able to see an estimated reach, proposed rate of payment for the influencers, and when the assignment needs to be completed by.

Tap Influencer is a great way to generate some major short-term buzz and huge visibility, which can help you launch your advocacy program.

3. TINT

Here at TINT, we recognize how essential user generated content is to businesses of all sizes. TINT offers solutions to aid businesses in finding, moderating, and displaying UGC on their sites, in their stores, and at conferences to create and build on their brand ambassador programs.

 

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TINT allows you to display carefully-moderated streams of content created by brand advocates anywhere you can place a screen.

Promoting the UGC (and EGC) that your users have already shared is essential to building and maintaining a community. By placing relevant streams of this content on your site– including on relevant product pages– you’ll be able to capture users at all points of the sales funnel, engaging them at every touchpoint.

4. Hootsuite Amplify

Brand advocacy doesn’t only come in the form of user and consumer generated content; employee generated content (EGC) can also play an important role. This is why Hootsuite Amplify focuses entirely on employee advocacy.

 

Amplify is an effective way to encourage EGC while keeping your employees up-to-date about company news at the same time.

If you want to encourage EGC but also want to help shape the message they’re sharing, Amplify is a great tool to have. You can easily add your employees to the Amplify mobile app. You’ll then send out content from the Hootsuite dashboard, which will be shared with all your employees. Your employees can then share this content on their own social networks, sending your reach skyrocketing and adding credibility and authenticity to the message.

This app gives you just a tad bit more influence over what your employees are saying about your brand, and it gives you great analytics to show you what your employees are sharing.

5. Dynamics Signal

Dynamics Signal also has a fantastic employee advocacy platform that can be used to enhance your brand ambassador program. Theirs is a platform built for employees, and you (as a content curator) can deliver relevant content to them directly through a mobile app. You can distribute content to all employees, or distribute particular posts to certain employees based on their location, role, interests, or seniority.

Employees can easily share your updates with just a single click, or they can customize the message for different platforms if they echoose.

Employees will be kept informed thanks to real-time messaging and push notifications, even if they don’t have a company email address. Your employees are also encouraged to share these updates, with CTA share buttons for platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn attached to every post. They can customize the messages, and choose to share the update to all of their channels, or just a few.

This tool will give you information like readership, actions taken, and more, letting you keep track of your employee advocacy programs. It can also reward employees for engagement and activity taken, resulting in bigger success.

6. Zuberance

No matter how far along you are in your brand ambassador program,Zuberance can help you. They can help you create your “advocate army,” engage them, and monitor activity across social media.

Zuberance facilitates advocate discussion, allowing new consumers to ask questions to real advocates instead of a sales team.

Zuberance encourages a wide variety of UGC, including reviews, testimonials, lead generation, referrals, stories, community building, and more. It does all of this while carrying your branding, and comes with a complete suite of advocate marketing applications.

They also offer amazing features like automated advocate re-engagement, advocate rewards programs, and publishing and social sharing to a huge number of social sites and platforms, including your own site.

7. Fivestars

Fivestars is an incredible solution that allows you to create a custom rewards program that can be used to motivate brand advocacy from your most loyal customers. This can be used on a touch-screen mobile device (like an iPad) in-store to generate more lead or customer information at checkout, leading to higher customer retention.

Fivestars gets essential lead information in-store that can be used to increase customer engagement and retention long after they leave.

This tool can distribute automated promotional materials to customers, including birthday gifts or motivational rewards to encourage long-lost customers to come back. This is a great platform that can be implemented in brick-and-mortar stores without holding up your line, and can be used to lay the groundwork for long term customer engagement.

Final Thoughts

Brand advocacy can take your business to new heights, allowing you to build an engaged, passionate community around your brand that can expand your client base and drive more sales. These 7 tools will allow you to create and promote the brand ambassador program that you need, allowing you to maximize your marketing potential.

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