Brand ambassador programs have become a staple part of every brand’s social media strategy. Why? Because 72% of Gen Z and Millennials follow content creators, like brand ambassadors, for product discovery. As a result, brand ambassadors offer up many benefits like driving sales, spreading brand awareness, and producing reusable content.
Building an engaging and successful program is hard, but maintaining and scaling it is even harder. Best-in-class ambassador programs like Revolve’s, require millions of dollars in investment. LoudCrowd’s ambassador programs deliver the same quality results, for pennies in comparison.
Here are some of the top three brand ambassador program examples, all powered by LoudCrowd.
Dolce Vita: Boosting Gen Z Engagement 11x
To acquire more Gen Z customers with increasingly efficient customer acquisition costs, Dolce Vita decided to roll out an ambassador program that would focus on their existing customer base, while also tapping into the college ambassador space, to incentivize more Instagram and TikTok content.
The goal was to grow this program to a meaningful scale (+3k members) while not adding management costs and building an incentive structure that lowered customer acquisition costs.
Dolce Vita launched a fully automated, high scale ambassador program that would admit thousands of customers and create incentives for Instagram and TikTok content. They kept the rewards and incentives interesting by periodically focusing ambassadors with challenges, and only allowing ambassadors to earn benefits if they created content.
In the first year, the program has generated enormous social lift, resulting in over 2k posts, 11M impressions, and over $350k in EMV. On average, ambassadors generated 11x more content after joining the program.
And these milestones were achieved with minimal management, and a team of 2 managing all 3,000+ members.
Hairstory: Scaling to 1000+ Influencers
To create most organic representation of their brand, Hairstory believes that their most passionate customers should be their sales team. As such, they’ve prioritized building a brand ambassador program as a primary growth strategy.
Hairstory partnered with LoudCrowd to build and manage an ambassador program that was focused on:
- Identifying high value potential ambassadors
- Creating a personalized experience for those ambassadors
- Incentivizing positive ambassador actions
- Creating continuously engaging experiences to maximize the LTV
The goal was to grow this program to a meaningful scale (+1k members) while not adding management costs. They needed to also build an incentive structure that lowered customer acquisition costs.
Hairstory launched a fully automated, high scale ambassador program that would target high value creators to promote the brand. The program began with free product and personalized instructions to leverage the product, and it allowed ambassadors to continuously earn rewards and commissions for creating content and generating sales.
To keep the program interesting and engaging for ambassadors, Hairstory created several workflows for ambassadors:
- Haristory sends out monthly reminder emails to encourage ambassadors to post
- Hairstory runs frequent challenges with ambassadors to give extra incentives to create content and more chances to earn prizes
In the first year, the program has generated enormous social lift, resulting in 1.9k posts, 8.3M impressions, and over $250k in EMV.
The costs to generate those posts were far lower than their influencers. Using the all-in costs of rewards AND the LoudCrowd platform, program members generated content at a CPM of $4.53. That’s roughly a 11x improvement on influencer efficiency, where the average CPM is $50.
And all of these milestones were achieved with little management, and a team of 2 overseeing and managing all +1,000 members of the program.
Bombshell Sportswear: Improving Creator Cost Efficiency 100x
Bombshell’s challenge, like most brands in this environment, was to build brand awareness at a lower cost. With the cost of influencer marketing increasing (and leading to scale challenges), Bombshell was looking for a social growth engine that could scale with the brand.
Instead of competing with countless other brands for fashion influencers, Bombshell looked within and decided to empower and engage its customer base. They partnered with LoudCrowd and invited their customer base to join “Team Bombshell” and energized them with content nudges and incentives.
Bombshell built a program that invited all of its customers to be official creators for the brand. They created several tiers of engagement incentives that called for every customer to create Instagram Stories, Reels, and feed posts. Incentives included Loyalty Points, Discounts and Site Credits.
In total, they were able to get 2,000 members in the first month, and have grown the program to 3,000 members since.
From their 3,000 members, the program has generated enormous social lift, resulting in 22k posts, 70M impressions, and over $1M in EMV.
The costs to generate those posts were nearly non-existent. Using the all-in costs of rewards AND the LoudCrowd platform, program members generated content at a CPM of $.45. That’s roughly a 100x improvement on influencer efficiency, where the average CPM is $50.
And all of these milestones were achieved with just 1 person overseeing the program and managing all 3,000 members.
Koala Eco: Specialized Campaigns
The Koala Eco a natural plant-based and sustainable home and well-being product brand saw a 15% increase in video content from their Ambassadors by running a challenge. They encouraged their Social Club members to post Reels during the month of October and saw a huge success!
Running brand challenges and contests to promote UGC from your ambassadors is a fun incentive to engage your community. Using a dedicated hashtag for challenges is a smart way to organize the UGC when viewing the UGC content library on the LoudCrowd platform.
GoNanas
GoNanas always brings a creative energy that is reflected on their social platforms.
“LoudCrowd – in combination with our marketing efforts – has allowed us to grow our reach 4-5x in just a few months, which has been SO awesome to see.”- Morgan Lerner, GoNanas Co-Founder, and CEO.
On the platform, Morgan can scale social gifting and outreach efforts all in one place versus manually through one-to-one communication. It has freed up their time so they can focus on growing the brand and building out ambassador campaigns, events, and challenges.
boohoo Influencer Programs
boohoo aimed to turn its millions of fashion content oriented customers into representatives of the brand. In particular, boohoo sought out to expand its influence over college campuses through a student creator program.
boohoo also uses its student creator program in an effort to engage its Gen Z audience. They has taken the initiative to invite student influencers to exclusive events to celebrate the launch of new collections. Events give the influencers a space to get to know each other while also generating impactful word-of-mouth marketing and UGC.
PrettyLittleThing Student Ambassadors
As a rapidly growing brand with hundreds of partnership inquiries per day, PrettyLittleThing sought out a technology solution to manage influencer relationships at scale. At the same time, PrettyLittleThing looked to leverage content creators on campuses to solidify their fashion presence among female college students.
The PrettyLittleThing student ambassador program recruits influencers through social media, their website, and in-person bus tours to large college campuses.
PrettyLittleThing offers influencers a $100 site credit in exchange for 2 Instagram and TikTok posts. To keep influencers engaged, they provide bonus incentives for completing challenges and contests like:
- PLT first day of school outfit showcase
- PLT Halloween
- Galentine’s Day
Conclusion: Scalable Brand Ambassador Programs are Possible
If executed successfully, a Brand Ambassador Program or Social Club can revolutionize the perception of your brand online. The brands with the highest engaged communities, like Lululemon, Revolve, and Harley Davidson thrive because they invest in these programs.
As seen in the above brand ambassador program examples, it only takes 1-2 people + a great software solution, to build a program ready for thousands of content creators.
Have an existing ambassador program and want to take it to the next level? Hear more brand ambassador program examples or learn more about our creator-centric eComm products here.