 Help his business. Boom. They don't have to be a major celebrity. It's made of advertising. It's word of mouth. Welcome to The Journey. I'm Nealey. And I'm Emma. Today we're talking about how a brand ambassador can grow your business. Can you give us the inside scoop of what a brand ambassador really is? Yeah, and they're closer than you think. It could be an employee who are here. It could be someone that already works for you. It could be just a huge fan of yours, a customer. It could also just be someone in your community that has a huge influence. Perfect. So with brand ambassadors, I've heard this term called influencer marketing. What is that and how can we leverage that with our brand ambassadors? Yeah, so there's a ton of creative ways to do that. Once you do find that brand ambassador, what you can do is you can encourage them to post about you but on their personal account. And why would you do that? Of course. Why would you do that? Girl, you're following. Because then you reach out and you have this customer. Actually, let me be a really cool example that happened to me last year. My buddy Kyle, he owns a grip tape company, Cloud9 Grip Tape over back in the Midwest. And he wanted to leverage brand ambassadors to do influencer marketing. So what he did is he sent some free grip tape out to friends of his that have a good Instagram following and just gently encourage them, hey, once you grip your deck and go out and skate, I'd love it if you could tag Cloud9GripTape. And it helped his business boom because he got in front of a targeted audience. Obviously, if you're sending grip tape to people on Instagram who have a skateboard vibe, they're going to have the audience you want to get in front of. Right. So if maybe you're a clothing artist or whatever your business is, find people in your niche that has a decent following. They don't have to be a major celebrity. They're little micro influencers, right? A couple thousand followers, sometimes even higher and reach out to them and say, hey, I've got this free product or I have X ad that I want you to run and see if you can make some type of arrangement to get your name out there. Because we trust social reviews and people talking about another business pretty darn highly. Yeah, brand authenticity is another big reason to do it. Because again, you might be pushing your product. Like I was at a trade show, a big food show in LA and I came across this brand called Field Roast. And as a vegan, they're one of my favorite brands out there when it comes to my alternative meats. And they gave me, they sent a package of like a t-shirt and some free products to try. Do I have a huge following? No. But I went and I posted about it because I was stoked. I clicked with it. I took videos and I tagged them and that helped them to get in front of a larger audience. And then I felt so valuable. I went and bragged about them to all my meat-eating friends and kind of converted them a little bit actually now that I think back. What is it like 25% of like positive interactions? Those people go tell 10 of their friends? Yeah. So it doesn't hurt even if that person doesn't have this huge following. But make it fun. Make it into kind of a game of like, what could you send me that's related to your business or your customers or nearly, who loves free stuff? And encourage them to do something and then tag you. And another thing, because I'm thinking about what I get asked all the time from local heroes like yourself is, okay, where is the return on investment here? Super rad is you can have a discount code or a coupon that then you hook it up with your brand ambassador. Encourage them to go spread the love to their friends and then it's easy to track. You know, how many people did actually come into your store or your shop and spend money based on or because of that brand ambassador? Easy to link it back. Yep. So everyone gets their own unique coupon code. So Emma, you get a code. I get a different code. So you can see cool. Emma did a lot better than I did. So probably going to focus my attention to give Emma a little bit more for content to promote and me not so much. So why this is also really effective and why you want to definitely get out there, start thinking about who would be a great brand ambassador for you. Get on board the influential marketing is because it's native advertising. It's word of mouth, right? So like back to my buddy Kyle. Shout out to Kyle Cloud9Grip, too. If he's sending out this cool grip and all these people, tons of people in California and Indiana and New York, they're putting his grip tape on their boards and they're out there shredding. That is telling the world that this grip tape is high quality. So I'm going to get on board with Cloud9Grip tape because it's not Kyle pushing it in front of your face on his Instagram. It's actually his customers because they're so stoked on the brand. Word of mouth marketing. And it doesn't come off as salesy or pushy. It's just, hey, this person thought this was pretty cool. I might think that's pretty cool because I'm just like them. I'm just like, exactly. Very organic and very true. That's, hey, it hooked me. All right. That's a wrap. Thanks for tuning in. You learned all about brand ambassadors. What they are, who they are, and why you should go and get one. Perfect. So make sure you comment below your favorite tip from today. Like this video if you did. Subscribe to the channel and ring that bell if you want to see these videos first. That's all we have on today's episode of The Journey. Thanks for watching.