A huge part of a copywriter’s job is helping their clients raise brand awareness. As most business owners are well aware, positive word of mouth, encouraging repeat business and working with brand ambassadors are great ways to raise visibility and brand awareness. What many fail to realise, however, is just how integral your copywriter is (or, rather, can be) in helping you ensure these three elements are working for your business.
If you’re looking to incorporate brand ambassadors and repeat business (or superfans) into your business plan, here’s all you need to know about doing it.
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What Are Brand Ambassadors?
Brand ambassadors believe in your brand and actively promote it to others. That may mean social media influencers who are paid to promote your products and services or offered free products and services in exchange for their endorsement. Or it may mean members of an affiliate program who receive a percentage or fixed amount for every new customer they send your way. Equally, a brand ambassador may receive no incentive from you but be part of another program that benefits them as they promote your brand.
For example, affiliate marketing is a highly effective business model that many bloggers use to monetise their sites. It’s also an extra string to add to any existing business website’s bow to add passive income to other income streams. Affiliate marketing programs like Amazon mean that you may have brand ambassadors sharing your Amazon products and boosting your sales, who receive a kickback from Amazon rather than you.
From their perspective, they gain income from sharing useful or cool products their audience will love. Amazon gains traffic and sales from the arrangement, while influencers promote your product with established audiences without costing you a penny.
What Are Superfans
Repeat business is always the name of the game in business. When customers or clients have a positive experience with your brand, they naturally return for more. That may mean buying more of your products or hiring you to do additional work. By nurturing your relationship with your clients well past the point of that first sale, you create relationships with them that ensure they always come back for more.
Super fans are the easy sells. They’ve already bought into your brand and have a favourable view of you and the benefits they will receive from buying from you or working with you. When you send out a newsletter showcasing products, they’re the ones who always click through for a look. When you launch something new, they’re the first to sign up for information about it. The super fan will read all your newsletters, like all your social media posts, and happily send their hard-earned money your way again and again.
The Difference Between Brand Ambassadors And Superfans
The brand ambassador generally has some influence over others while receiving a reward from promoting your brand. Super fans, on the other hand, benefit your business by personally buying from you repeatedly. They may tell others about your products or services and benefit you through positive word of mouth, but they don’t actively work to send new customers your way.
You may find that some of your brand ambassadors are also super fans, while super fans can easily become ambassadors if they have a platform to promote you. It’s highly beneficial to you if there is a crossover, as the best ambassadors genuinely love your brand.
Using Brand Ambassadors To Supercharge Your Sales
Why bother with brand ambassadors? Two reasons. Firstly, you’re either adding an additional avenue for sales generation to your revenue stream or completely removing the need to generate sales yourself. Ambassadors have established audiences and the authority to convince them to buy what they recommend. As long as those audiences align with your ideal client, the more ambassadors you have, the wider your reach and influence will grow, and the impetus for that growth comes entirely from outside your marketing efforts.
You’re not having to attract those leads, run ads, or do anything other than creating relationships with your ambassadors. It’s a far more efficient way of marketing.
When you have a product or service you’re looking to promote, having ambassadors ready and waiting to help is incredibly powerful. All you need to do is put together an info pack of content on your offer, and leave it to your ambassadors to disseminate it to their audiences.
Offering your ambassadors a personal discount code is also a great way to maximise the results you get from them. They can provide their code to their audiences, who are incentivised to buy more from you. You can track precisely how much each of your ambassadors is making, allowing you to offer greater rewards to those bringing in more business. This is a great KPI to measure the success of your ambassador programme. You can also showcase your most successful ambassadors and use them to create content that compels others to become ambassadors.
Leveraging Super Fans For Maximum Profits
When you expend so much time, energy and resources making sales, it is counterintuitive to only make one sale per customer. The lifetime value of each of your clients can be far greater than any one sale. Whether it’s a single project, an ongoing service, or multiple short-term or on-off services, every business has the potential to gain repeat revenue from every sale you make.
The more sales turn into repeat revenue, the greater your ROI on the resources expended to land the sale in the first place. As you generate new sales from new customers, your existing clients continue to buy from you. Over time the number of existing clients grows, and the amount of recurring revenue generated without the expenditure of additional resources increases.
The more you invest in transforming your customers into super fans, the more profitable your business will become.
To do this, you first need to understand that the sale is not the endpoint for your business. Many businesses are so sales-focused that they become a little complacent once that sale is made and the client is gained. Yes, they deliver everything promised, but they don’t do more than that.
Why should they? They’ve fulfilled their sales promises; more isn’t expected. But when you exceed expectations and deliver a stellar experience, you create brand loyalty. You create a superfan. And you ensure that they will be back to buy from you again.
Nurture that relationship, then put another offer in front of them. Cross-sell your other products and services.
Once you have a pack of raving super fans at your disposal, you have the ability to create rapid growth in your business with relative ease. Launch a new product or service that solves a problem all those super fans share.
Watch how fast they snap it up.
This is how businesses are creating multi-million-pound launches. They’re no trying to sell to ew people. They’ve nurtured an audience of existing people who adore them and then launched something new explicitly designed for them.
You’re Underestimating Your Copywriter’s Role In Brand Awareness
Many companies, entrepreneurs and business owners are unaware of the connection between strong copywriting and creating brand ambassadors and super fans. They view copy as a necessity and feel that having a well-written website and a regularly updated blog is where their need for a copywriter begins and ends. Copy is needed for content; content is essential to ranking in SERPs and having a visible presence online.
These are the dots that are easily connected, and, understandably, many of you don’t go further and understand how your content – and your copywriter – can help you raise brand awareness beyond the value of the content itself. After all, SEO boosts your brand awareness, and having content to share on social makes you more visible…what more can a copywriter do to improve awareness of your brand?
To answer that, you must consider the type of copywriter you’re working with. Many copywriters do not look further than the brief they are given. They write a page or a blog, optimise it for the keywords they are given, and consider their job done. And they’re correct to do so; that is, after all, the role they were hired for. Yet many copywriters – myself included – have spent so much time in the business sphere and so long specialising in crafting brand stories and brand voices that we see a bigger picture.
And because we have that more expansive view, we can put your copy to work in other ways beyond SEO and social media fodder.
The Role Of Your Copywriter In Building Relationships With Ambassadors And Superfans
So, how can a great copywriter help you raise your brand awareness? One way is to ensure your brand voice is spot on and consistent across all your content. Another is crafting a compelling brand story that seduces your audience. The result of a good job done on both these fronts is that you will find other people are happy to promote your brand for you.
Take a look at your website. Where’s your story? What is your story? You’re in trouble if it’s a few paragraphs on your About page. A powerful brand story is far more than a quick blurb explaining how your company started or your ethos.
True brand storytelling means infusing every word, page, and blog with at least some element of your story. That doesn’t mean constantly harping on about yourself or pushing an agenda. Instead, it’s about flavouring your copy with the essence of your brand story. An integral element of your story is your voice. Having a consistent voice across all your content means your story is carried through everything, even when you’re not actively telling it.
For example, you may write a blog post that references your expertise in a specific field, includes an anecdote about a successful project, or incorporates a customer’s positive feedback. You might explain a concept using an analogy or metaphor that ties into your brand ethos or make pop culture references that align with your brand. These are all ways to tie your brand story into your content creation.
And yet, you can’t make all your content a perpetual callback to your brand story. And when you have a strong voice, you don’t need to. Your audience should experience your content as a conversation with a living, breathing person. Whether the same person writes every word or you have a team of writers and content creators on staff, it doesn’t matter.
Your Brand Needs To Connect And Converse With Your Audience
As far as your audience is concerned, your brand should be one person speaking with one voice, and that voice should stand out. It shouldn’t sound like every other company in your niche. It shouldn’t be generic or forgettable. It should be distinct and memorable.
Appealing.
The trick to gaining both ambassadors and super fans is a brand that is powerful enough, charismatic enough, and compelling enough to befriend people. To give your audience a sense of personal connection through small and subtle elements that compound over time without them even realising it.
A distinct brand story and voice can speak to your audience, befriend them, and convince them that your brand is better than any other. From a psychological perspective, there’s a huge difference between interacting with generic content and content that feels almost like a living, breathing person.
This is why having a ‘face’ for your brand works so effectively and how gurus become as successful as they are. The likes of Gary Vaynerchuk, Marie Forleo, Richard Branson, Seth Godin, Denise Duffield Thomas, and Simon Sinek have all built multi-million-pound empires off the back of their personalities.
Whether they are solo operators or not.
Voice.
Connection.
Story.
These are the things people can connect with. Connection is the only way to build relationships that turn people into super fans and ambassadors.
The Content That Will Create Brand Ambassadors
Working with your copywriter to attract brand ambassadors will open new avenues for you. Many businesses make the mistake of attempting ambassador programmes without having bespoke content created expressly for that purpose. If you’re looking to attract ambassadors, you need to do more than simply tell them to become an ambassador.
You need to convince them it’s the best thing for them to do.
Almost like making sales, converting ambassadors take work. However, if you have the right content and the right system setup, it doesn’t need to take much work. Creating case studies of your existing ambassadors that are enticing to others is a must. This means presenting your ambassadors in the best possible light, in a way they will find valuable, rather than focusing on the value you will gain from it.
That might mean a dedicated page on your website that showcases each ambassador, including backlinks to their website (highly valuable for their SEO and yours), content from their social platforms, and even links to their own products and services if they have them. The more you big them up, the more others will want to work with you so they too can receive that treatment.
Beyond that you can use this content to demonstrate the money ambassadors can make by working with you. Highlight the mutual benefits of the relationship.
The Copy That Will Create Super Fans
Nurture sequences are highly effective ways of converting sales, yet many businesses end their nurturing efforts once the sale is made. Sure, they may send out the occasional newsletter, but how is that really nurturing your customers? At best, it provides them with regular ways to buy from them again. At worst, it results in them unsubscribing from future updates because they hear from you so infrequently they’ve forgotten who you are or no longer care.
Copy can become a powerful weapon for transforming mere customers into super fans. We’ve discussed the importance of story and voice in making those all-important connections, but beyond that, the little things make the difference. The extra details on your invoices remind your customers why they connected with you in the first place. The tiny details on your products or packaging that gives them a sense of connection. The personalised content that’s sent to them based on their previous interactions with your brand. Feedback requests that allow them to have a voice. And social media campaigns that encourage them to share user-generated content and become part of something bigger.
Consider your packaging or invoicing. What does it include that encourages customers or clients to share their experiences with you on social? Because a simple directive to snap a selfie and use a bespoke hashtag goes a really long way. Not only do you gain extra content to promote your brand, but you also give all your customers a sense of community.
Ready To Boost Your Brand Awareness?
If you feel your website or content could be doing more to raise your brand awareness and attract ambassadors and super fans, get in touch. I specialise in crafting powerful brand stories, voices and content plans that go far beyond simply representing your brand. They’re made to build lasting relationships that maximise your visibility and profitability.