After a customer makes a purchase on your website, you have a new marketing opportunity. The customer chose to buy something from your brand, so this gives you the opportunity to turn that customer into a brand ambassador. You can ask the customer to promote their experience with your brand. These tips can help you turn customers into ambassadors.

What is a Brand Ambassador?

There are two types of brand ambassadors: one is hired by a company to represent their brand and help boost sales and brand awareness. The other is people who talk about your products and brand even though you are not paying them. These are your customers, and in sharing their experiences with your brand, they are increasing brand awareness.

Brand ambassadors talk about your brand both on and offline, in a positive way. Making your customers into brand ambassadors is much more authentic than hiring them. By having your actual customers be your ambassadors, you can help increase the trust people have in your business.

Brand Ambassadors vs. Influencers

While it might sound like brand ambassadors are the same thing as influencers, there is a difference between the two. An ambassador talks about your brand and products, but an influencer promotes your products by showing people how to use them. Organizations also tend to have shorter relationships with influencers, but since their brand ambassadors are their customers, their relationship is usually long-term.

Reviews

Once your customer receives their product, reach out to them and ask them to write a review or testimonial. People tend to trust reviews over ads, so having reviews on your site from your customers can be a huge help for you.

Encouraging customers to leave reviews can be difficult sometimes. Many companies will offer a discount or even a small $5 gift card if you leave a review, especially if it is a review on a site other than yours.

Review Sites

You will want to branch out to get reviews on sites besides your own as well. The more places people can see positive reviews of your products, the better. When you reach out to a customer after they have purchased one of your products, in addition to asking them to leave reviews on your site, you can ask them to leave them on other sites as well.

Some of the best review sites you can ask them to leave reviews on are:

• Amazon, if they purchased your product through there
• Yelp
• Trip Advisor, for the food and travel industry
• Better Business Bureau
• Yellowpages
• Manta
• Angie’s List, for service-related businesses
• Foursquare
• Goodreads, for books

Facebook and Google Reviews

When someone looks up a company, Facebook and Google reviews are usually the first ones that pop up, so these are just as important as reviews on your website. Your Google reviews will show up alongside your listing in searches and maps, so having Google reviews is vital to your business.

Your Facebook reviews will also show up easily in searches on both Google and Facebook itself.

Social Media

Social media is, of course, a vital part of any business these days, and it can be used to help you turn customers into ambassadors in a few different ways.

The first way is to add sharing buttons to your confirmation or thank you page after a customer completes a purchase. For example, if they click on the Twitter option, a box will open that has a link to your site and some predetermined text about the product: “I just bought [product] from [@yourcompany]. It’s awesome!” It will only take them two clicks to share the tweet and lead to them becoming a brand ambassador. You can then retweet their post, showing other prospective customers this real tweet about your company and product.

You can also add sharing buttons to each product on your page, with a similar prewritten prompt, so your customers can share your products with their friends more easily. If there is a blog on your site, include sharing buttons on each blog too. This can also help boost your brand awareness with your customer base.

Show Your Customers You Appreciate Them

Even though you are not seeing your customers in person, they still like to see that you appreciate them. Give them a free gift every once in a while, a special discount for them, or even early access to a big sale. Taking these extra steps can help you keep customers loyal.

Keeping in touch with your customers is a good idea as well; you do not want customers to forget about you. While the first thing that may come to mind is responding to them on social media, there are other ways you can keep in touch with your customer base. For example, if you are a bath and beauty company, when someone buys a new body wash from you, send them a discount in a few months to encourage them to buy a new bottle. A customer who purchased an at-home facial kit might enjoy a video tutorial on using the product.

Little things like this can make the difference and turn your customers into brand ambassadors.

Conclusion

At Bellevue Public Relations, we know that branding is a vital part of any company, and our branding experts can help you build your online brand into something extraordinary. Our expert team can help with any aspect of branding, including encouraging customers to become brand ambassadors. Contact Bellevue Public Relations today to get started!