So you’ve put-together a great website, have a solid plan for generating revenue, now all your need is customers. Two of the best ways to get traffic to your brand without spending a fortune in advertising are SEO and Social Media. Ranking well in search engines is absolutely critical to generating a stream of steady visitors to your site. By targeting the keywords that bring your most targeted customer you can build a meaningful business online. The only problem is, you aren’t personally connecting with these visitors and turning some of them into brand ambassadors.
First let’s talk about what I mean by Brand Ambassadors. A Brand Ambassador is someone who loves your brand and tells other people about it. If you’re lucky, you can even find an ambassador that helps to build your brand by adding their own content as well. The most enchanting brands have the most ambassadors and usually acquire these evangelists through the creation of incredible products. Companies like Apple and BMW are talked about consistently across the web from blogs to Tweets to Facebook updates.
In most cases though, you’re not Apple or BMW, instead you are the owner of a new business that most people have never heard of. To find your ambassadors you’ll have to start-out by being proactive and identifying the most influential people in your niche. Twitter is one of the easiest places to get started I’ve put-together a step-by-step guide to finding a great ambassador:
Find Your Brand Ambassadors On Twitter
- Start by doing a simple Twitter search for the hashtag that is the most relevant to your brand
- Now make note of the top five people using this hashtag in a given day
- View the profile of these five people and keep the three with the most number of followers
- Next eliminate anyone who is following more people then are following them
- Still have one left? This is your first potential brand ambassador!
- Follow this person on Twitter and include them in your next #FF
- RT some of your favorite content that this person Tweets
- After doing this for a few weeks send this person an email to introduce yourself
- Get on the phone and get your ambassador passionate about your brand
- Find a way to include your ambassador in your brand
The time this process takes may vary however in the end the goal is to make a real connection with someone on Twitter who is an authority in your space. If they start writing articles for your site and Tweeting them to their followers you could gain more ambassadors right-away. I know this happened with my Kayaking brand (Kayaking.org), we partnered with a very active paddler in Canada who now writes for our blog (read his most recent post) and with him came his fans as well. It’s a great partnership because he loves Kayaking and really enjoys sharing his adventures with the world. He makes great videos and takes some absolutely stunning photographs that really make me want to get up to BC and hop in a Kayak!
If you are building a brand that you’re truly proud of, enchanting your ambassador should be the easy part. Just think about it, if someone very influential in your niche doesn’t like your brand or see the value in it…don’t you think that’s a problem? When you reach-out to this ambassador they should be excited about what you are doing. If not, ask them what they would get excited about and make it happen! One you have one ambassador it’s only a matter of time before more and more people start to discover your brand and talk about it online. Make sure to connect with every single person that helps to promote your brand, and most importantly, keep innovating and making your brand something worth talking about!
