Kyle Fraugton is a passionate dude. Get him talking about good trail running gear or well-built software and look out. He’s an instant ambassador.
The interesting thing is that you have Kyle’s in your customer list right now. People who are passionate about what you sell and who you are as a brand. And the cool thing is that with a little encouragement, structure and incentive from you - they can become super ambassadors.
The right Ambassador Programs have a few great benefits:
- Increased word of mouth. We all know this is the most effective form of advertising. It’s just slow. But yo can speed it up.
- Better ad content. With the right Ambassador program you’ll have an endless content flywheel.
- More purchases from Ambassadors. While the point of an ambassador program is to get them to advocate for your brand. You’ll also get them to buy more in the process.
Here’s a look at some other key points Kyle and I discuss:
- How to identify the ideal customers for your Ambassador program.
- Why you want to be picky, but not too picky
- How Ambassador programs lose momentum and how to avoid it
- How to track programs and make them work
- Why Authenticity was the word of the year last year by Merriam Webster and how that applies here
- Is UGC really dead?
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Chapters
(00:00) Introduction
(02:40) Kyle’s Background
(03:53) Authentic - The Word of the Year
(05:55) Is UGC Dead?
(10:51) The Digital Age Version of Word of Mouth
(13:32) Strategies To Facilitate Word of Mouth
(15:26) What Does A Good Ambassador Program Do?
(16:16) Influencer Program vs. Ambassador Program
(26:08) How To Set Up An Ambassador Program
(34:50) Ambassadors and Ads
(38:41) More About Get Roster
(43:06) Outro
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Show Notes:
- Kyle Fraughton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylefraughton/
- Roster: https://www.getroster.com/
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Connect With Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
- Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, and more.
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Other episodes you might enjoy:
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Transcript:
Brett :
It's time for another Spicy Curry Hot Take the part of the show when I get just a little bit spicy, I've heard several people say recently, UGC user generated content is dead finished, done over. And I would say to that, not a chance bad UGC in authentic UGC was always dead. And so maybe the days when just UGC all by itself was a hack and you could just do it and it would work. I would agree those days are over, but authentic stories from real customers will always work. I've been in this marketing game a long time. I used to do TV and radio back in the early two thousands, and I remember running into people, I had clients that were doing direct response type advertising and I'd hear people say, ah, testimonials, get rid of it. People don't believe them anymore. Don't do testimonials. And I'm like, really? The best infomercials use testimonials. They always have. They always will. And so the key here is be authentic. There's no shortcuts. Getting good UGC from real customers saying real powerful things will always work. So you got to put in the work. You got to be picky then about what UGC you use, but my friends UGC is not dead.
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking about ambassador programs. UGC, is it dead? Is it not dead? Is it still effective? We're talking word of mouth and we're talking about how to leverage all of that for continued growth for your brand. My guest today is the CEO of Get Roster. Kyle, he was introduced to me by Desiree, used to be at Shopify. She's one of the most connected people in e-commerce that I know. And so she connected us and I'm like, Hey, this is going to be a great topic. And so wanted to have Kyle on the show. So with that, Kyle, welcome and how's it going, man?
Kyle:
Thank you. It's going great. Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.
Brett :
Really excited to talk about this. I love this topic. And it's so interesting. It's been all the rave to look at UGC and influencer and ambassador programs. Oddly enough, it's getting a little bit of backlash right now. It's getting the opposite of love from a few people. We'll talk about that in a minute, but lots of good things to unpack here and really excited to get your perspective on a number of key areas. Before we do that though, Kyle, what's your 32nd background and how did you get into starting and developing get roster?
Kyle:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I've been in software startups for most of my career and help grow them, sell them off as they've gotten bigger. And I've always been super passionate about sharing things that I love with other people. In fact, my wife would always get mad at me after we'd be at a party or something and I'd be there super long talking about a certain product. She's like, why do you have to push this so hard? I'm like, I love it and I want other people to enjoy it. And so
Brett :
You're a natural ambassador.
Kyle:
I'm I'm a 100% natural ambassador and I think a lot of people are actually, a ton of people are. And yeah, a few years ago we started roster and we kind started in more of the influencer space, but it evolved into something a little bit more authentic with ambassadors, actual users of the product. And we developed software to help brands engage with their customers and turn them into ambassadors.
Brett :
Love that approach. And you mentioned a word a second ago, you even said this could be the word of the year, and so we're going to talk about this a little bit, but authentic. Why would you say that could potentially be the word of the year, especially related to this topic? Why is that so important?
Kyle:
I mean, I think it's incredibly important, and not only could it potentially be the word of the year, but it actually was the 2023 word of the year from Merriam Webster. Was it really? Yeah, hundred percent.
Brett :
When you sent that note over, I just assumed it meant it was your word of the year, Miriam Webster's word of the year. Yeah,
Kyle:
This is legit. I'm just not making stuff up. It's 100% accurate, but I think it's huge. We live in this world where artificial intelligence and deep fakes blur the lines of reality. And it's just people want authenticity these days. We don't even know what's real, but we recognize it when we see it, when we see something authentic that you always know if something's not real, it's like, well, maybe it could be. You try to figure it out. You just instantly know when something is real and authentic. And I think it's important, especially when it comes to building a brand, when it comes to advertising, when it comes to any type of way that you're trying to interact with a consumer, authenticity is absolutely critical.
Brett :
And I just finished a book by Malcolm Gladwell, one of my favorite authors called Blink, and it's called Thinking Without Thinking, the ways we can make snap judgements and often be very right. And you got to read the whole book obviously some ways that our initial impressions can be very, very wrong. And so it's not just to say I instantly know everything when I see it, but we think we know what's authentic or not. And sometimes we can't explain it, but we can feel it. I can feel it when I see a testimonial. Is that a real user? Is that not a real user? Usually we can just tell, and I kind of tease this as doing the intro of the show, but I've had even some close friends of mine who've been in the game for a while saying, I think UGC is dead.
I think it's dead. I'm like, come on bro. U C's not dead. But I've been in this game a long time and I did some TV back in the day, had several clients that ran infomercials, and every now and then you'd hear people say, yeah, don't do testimonials. Don't get real customers on camera because nobody believes those anymore. And this was in 2002 or something. And I'm like, yeah, no, that's actually not true. That's almost like saying, yeah, don't give personal recommendations to anyone anymore because no one trusts them anymore. But it comes down to authenticity. Is it a real story? Does it ring true? Is it a powerful UGC and a powerful testimony? If it is, then people are all ears.
Kyle:
I think that's absolutely true, and we can see it anytime that someone's, if you see any kind of an advertisement, and UGC is a form of advertising for sure, but it's like if people are actual users of the product or not pick anything. If you're an outdoor sports person, maybe you run outdoors, you do trail running and stuff like that, you can recognize people who are authentic trail runners who actually use the products that they're talking about. And so I think it's dead in the fact that I think people who say it's dead have never experienced true authentic UGC. It's like they found or paid influencers to create what they're calling UGC. But I think there's a difference between a macro big influencer who you're paying tons of money to create content to versus someone who is offering their content to you almost for free.
Maybe it's completely free because of a love of the product. You see people post about this stuff all the time and their environment and the areas that they love, and they'll mention the brands that they're using. I'm super into the outdoors and into trail running, so I'm using that as an example. But when I see people post or my friends or peers post about that kind of stuff, they're in their element and they'll talk about the gear they use to get them there because they love it. And that is very authentic. And I can tell, in fact, I'll even see that. I'm like, oh my gosh, I've got to try that. I've had my own for a long time and now all of a sudden that's what puts me over the
Brett :
Edge. And you can tell when someone's not in their element. I was working with this brand and doing some consulting and we're helping with Google ads and stuff, and I won't mention the celebrity or the brand because I don't want to embarrass anybody, but they were showing me this video of a pretty well-known celebrity that was in the kitchen cutting fruit and doing stuff to tee up this product. And you could tell this celebrity did not spend much time in the kitchen. It was almost like they were holding the knife backwards. I'm like, this feels so staged and inauthentic. Now someone may pay attention a celebrity, but it's like, nah, this is not their element. This was probably not the right pick.
Kyle:
Yeah, I think that's what it is, is you have to find people who are in their element. So I think it's super important for brands these days to find their actual users, like their customers, the people who utilize the product on a regular basis and engage with them. They will give you the most authentic content you could ever possibly have. And our eyes are trained for that sort of stuff. I mean, we know that more and more eyeballs are on social media than ever. We're not typically out reading blogs anymore about the top bikes of 2024, finding this stuff on social. And if you're anything like me, if I'm scrolling social media, my eyes have now been trained to skip over inauthentic content. If I'm just scrolling really fast and all of a sudden I see a post from a friend and it might not be talking about any kind of product at all, it's just a post about their family.
I'm able to stop because the picture looks different. I'm not reading the names, I'm not seeing that stuff. It just looks real. And so I stop and I pause and I'll go back. And so when you get that kind of stuff happening and people are talking about your brands become super, super powerful for a brand. And so I firmly believe that every brands need to be adding this to their arsenal. It needs to become a pillar in your go-to-market tools. And that is utilizing nano or micro influencers, the small people, the ones with hardly any followers in comparison to the millions of followers that you have to be able to utilize those people in order to help spread word of mouth marketing and get that authentic content.
Brett :
Love it. And so let's actually talk about word of mouth for a minute because if you go and talk to local business owner, local retail shop, local service provider, and you ask, Hey, what's your most effective form of advertising? My guess is they'll say word of mouth. Word of mouth is like that. That's tried and true. That's how great businesses grow. That's also kind of enough. You got a good product, you got a good thing going as if there's word of mouth. But how do we create that same effect? How do we stimulate word of mouth through ambassador programs and things like that because word of mouth is powerful, but word of mouth can also be kind of slow. And so how do we stimulate that?
Kyle:
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think if you look at word of mouth, the example you gave is fantastic, and it's always been something that I think a lot of businesses have said is super powerful form like, oh, that's my best form of advertising, or they at least say I want it to be my top four of advertising. Everyone aspires to have that be their number one, but there's no way to track it. There's no way to really understand how powerful it is. As we've evolved as a society, and this is actually kind of sad I guess, but people communicate now any kind of word of mouth on social, right? Totally. I think my kids, my teenage kids and the majority of their interactions are all on Snapchat
Brett :
Digital or on
Kyle:
Some kind of social media. They don't just talk face to face all that often unless they're at school. They find ways to do it through technology, and we have to be able to adapt to that as brands, we have to be able to do the exact same thing. And so there are people out there right now talking about your brand, any brand that has already established some product market fit and you've got a handful of customers, you will have customers that are absolutely passionate about your product. And even if there's lots of competitors in the space, I think of how many different athletic shorts are out there right now, different brands. They have very passionate customers, every single one of 'em. All thousand different companies have these passionate customers, and you've got to be able to find those people and you want them to start spreading the word of mouth, especially on social because that's where people are. That's where the eyeballs are now. That's where people are connecting and learning more about their friends and what their friends do and what their friends use and then what they want to start using. And so I think you have to be able to utilize social media to spread word of mouth in today's economy. I think it's absolutely critical.
Brett :
What are some strategies or some approaches to help facilitate that? Yeah,
Kyle:
I think the biggest thing is as a brand, you've got to be able to find out who are your most loyal and passionate customers, and that's super simple. You can pull reports from your e-commerce site and you can see who's buying the most frequently, who's buying the most often or the most product. Yeah,
Brett :
Kind of your RFM reports, right? Your recency frequency and monetary value. So who's bought most recently, who buys the most and who buys the most often or who buys the most quantity.
Kyle:
Both of those things are super important and engage with those people, and oftentimes you'll reach out to them and one, they're honored that they'd reach out to you because they're clearly a fan of your product. And just like anyone else, these people want connection and they want to feel like they're a part of your brand. I mean, put yourself in their shoes. If you have a brand that you love and they reach out and you're not some big mega influencer and they're like, I would love to be able to get your help in spreading the gospel of insert your brand here, right?
Brett :
Yeah, it's a big deal, man.
Kyle:
It's huge.
Brett :
That feels like I'm a real VIP, not just like you're sending me a VIP email, you want me to buy more. I feel like pretty important.
Kyle:
That's exactly right. In fact, so much so that if you look, and I'm not knocking on influencers because I think that's an important strategy for people to have. They should have a complete influencer strategy, but when you look at ambassadors, they're very, very different in that they're super proud to be an ambassador of your brand. They'll even post in their social bio that they are an ambassador for your brand. They're so excited about it, and they'll look for opportunities to post and mention and tag your brand and use whatever hashtags you have. But what you do is there's these people, like I said, they're out talking about your brand anyways, what an ambassador program is going to help your brand do is take control of the narrative of what they're saying. It's like I have lots of brands that I love and I'm talking about them constantly and I'm doing it in my own way, which is totally fine, but if someone gave me a little guidance, you're like, Hey, focus on some of these areas over here. We've got this new line out and you've been using the other one, we would love for you to talk about the new line that we have. I'm more than happy to talk about it, especially if I'm a user of it. But I think that's the key is as a brand, you have to be able take control of the narrative in today's conversations that are happening across social, and it's really easy to do and it's really easy to keep track of as well and to see what kind of impacts it's having on your sales.
Brett :
And so talk about that just a little bit. Influencer program versus the ambassador program. I'm assuming the difference, the way you guys define it is influencers could be people that are outside your brand and you're reaching out to them hoping that they'll want to talk about it. Ambassadors, those are your best customers that you're turning into micro or nano influencers.
Kyle:
Yeah, that's really what it is. And the lines can be kind of blurred, right? Sure. When you think about, we've got affiliates and we've got ambassadors and we've got professional athletes or just professionals in general, and then we've got influencers. This is what creates your community. These are all ambassadors to a certain extent, but each one of these areas is starting to become more and more defined. And the way that I've always defined an ambassador is just that it's someone who is already a customer of yours. You're not reaching out to them and product seeding, sending 'em some free product in hopes that they'll make a post or you're not signing a contract with them upfront saying, I'm going to pay you $10,000. I want you to post about this. You're going to send me your content and then I'm going to approve it. Once I approve it, then you can go ahead and post it.
That to me, that's more of the traditional influencer. An ambassador is someone who you say, great. I think that you have a great deal of influence amongst your sphere of friends, and if you look at it a nano or a micro influencer, their engagement rates are significantly higher than what an influencer would be. And that makes a lot of sense. You can't have someone who has millions of followers get millions of likes and millions of comments and millions of says all that sort of stuff. But if I have, I'll just use myself as an example of this. I have like 500 followers on Instagram. If I saw any one of my followers at the grocery store, I would go up and say hi to 'em and we'd have a conversation because we actually all know each other for the most part. And there's a huge difference there because I have a ton of pool and influence with them.
Most of the people for a person like me, and there are millions of us out there, my friends are in the same demographic as me, we have the same types of interests. And so with those things, I have a lot of pull and say and influence on what my friends will actually buy, especially if they're in the market. We share things all of the time with each other and it leads to purchases. Absolutely. So that's the type of thing that you need for your brand, I think, in order to grow, especially in today's current marketplace. And it's nice because rather than trying, when I talk to brands who are trying to find an influencer, there's a lot of angst over am I choosing the right one because this is a really big investment and if we get it wrong, it's going to cost us a ton of money and it can be off brand, and then we got to find someone else and we're going to commit for a certain amount of time.
Ambassadors is different in that you're trying to get as many of them as you can. If you have hundreds, wonderful. If you have thousands, that's great. And then it becomes kind of that VIP club, as you'd mentioned before for your brand where we have, or I know of brands that have tens of thousands of people lining up trying to become an official ambassador because it does make them part of a very exclusive club and they don't care how many followers they have. They just care about, are you going to make the social posts that we're asking of you? Are you going to do all of the other asks that we have a lot of things that are valuable to a brand beyond just a social post. Maybe there's some social swarming that you want to have happen. Maybe there's some support for the stuff that your brand is.
Brett :
Talk about social swarming. What do you mean?
Kyle:
So maybe there's a post that, let's say there's an ambassador that makes a post and you as a brand think it's awesome, you love it, and you can see that it's getting a lot of traction. You could reach out to your ambassadors at that point and say, Hey, we would love for you to go and comment on this post. Yeah, totally makes sense. And because your ambassadors love you, they love your brand, they want to feel connected to you, and maybe you're going to give them as an ambassador, you're going to give 'em a certain discount or they can earn some rewards. They're very, very happy to go out and do that sort of stuff. And so now you can kind of impact that algorithm where all of a sudden it goes from, Hey, this is getting a few thousand likes to now this is getting tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of likes because all of your ambassadors are liking or commenting or sharing
Brett :
That helps fuel the fire
Kyle:
Stories, whatever it may be. It just starts taking off and then all of their friends start to see it. And so it's really just the whole strength and numbers concept. You can have one person, but you're putting a lot on that one person or maybe the very few macro influencers that you're engaging with. Or you can say, I'm going to spread this across everything. I'm going to diversify my investment, which we all know is a good thing to do and say, I'm going to have hundreds or thousands of people doing this stuff for me. And then you get the same results. You get the same kind of reach as a single macro influencer would have, but it's across all sorts of different people and you've got a completely different demographic and a much higher engagement. And what I would argue is a much deeper pool from an influence standpoint.
Brett :
And really I think that the approach you just outlined, I think that's the way to approach influencer marketing if you want to go down that route, which I think is very valid. And if you want to look at ambassadors, so I did an interview recently with my buddy Cody Whittick from Kinship. He and Taylor run that agency and they focus on micro influencers. We're not looking for one or two, we're looking for a whole bunch and we don't know which ones are going to take off and which ones aren't, but we're seeding and we're getting a lot of influencers. Kind of the same with ambassadors. And what's cool is the way you described it where you've got friends and people that look to you for recommendations, it's kind of fun. I think you and I are similar in that regard. I've got several close friends that know what I do for a living.
Obviously they know that I'm talking to brands and I'm trying products because we're going to do some advertising on YouTube or Google or Amazon or whatever. So they're always like, Hey, what have you tried that's new? What do you like? What do you like? And I'm always very honest, obviously because behind closed doors, but I'll be like, yeah, I tried this product. I didn't like it, but someone else on my team did. I tried this project. It was awesome. You got to give it a go. But you as a brand, you have people like that that are part of your customer list where if you just encourage them and help them and gave them tools and gave them the ability and incentivize it a little bit, they would become an ambassador. And it could be you do that enough times and it's a game changer
Kyle:
And it will absolutely take off. But I think that every brand has established brands have thousands of these people that are just like you and me who want to share. I view it as, I always talk to my kids about this, a big piece of chocolate cake. I can go into my room and eat a piece of chocolate cake by myself and not share it with anybody, but that's just not very fun. It's not nearly as enjoyable. That's
Brett :
Not what you do with cake, right? Cake you share. It's
Kyle:
Meant to be shared. So you sit down and you enjoy it with someone. You talk about how great it tastes, you get that little sugar dopamine hit and everyone feels really happy together. I think it's the same way about your products. You love to share the things that you truly enjoy with other people. It's just a matter of finding them and then asking them for help, and then they are going to feel so much more connected to you. The other thing that I think is super intriguing about this topic is that when someone becomes an ambassador of a brand, their purchases of your product increased for sure, because all of a sudden they're going, oh my gosh, yeah, I'm kind of part of the team here. I'm not an employee, but I'm part of this brand now I feel actually connected to this brand. And then if you look at all of the other things that go along with that, when a ambassador or anybody for that matter recommends your product, the person that they recommend your product to will purchase, and this is an actual statistic, will purchase 200 times or excuse me, 200% more than what they would otherwise just coming in through any other method.
And you think about it, it's because there's instant trust. If we're trying a brand for the very first time, I'm this way anyways, I'm a little hesitant to just go all in because I'm like, I don't know much about it other than it looks really cool and interesting, but if I have a friend that's told me about that brand, I'm like, it's good. It's totally good. I know I'm going to get it. That's a huge thing now too, right? I'm going to actually receive my product. It's going to be good quality, and so I'm willing to buy three or four items as opposed to just one on that initial purchase. And then the people that you recommend not only will buy more upfront, but their lifetime value increases significantly as well. They'll come back time after time.
Brett :
They'll be more likely to refer as well.
Kyle:
Yes, those people are more likely to become ambassadors for your brand as well. All of that stuff is amazing for you as a brand. That's the stuff that every brand dreams of having, and it's right there at your fingertips. It's just a matter of knowing and understanding how to engage with these people and knowing what to ask them to do so that it is beneficial.
Brett :
Cool. So let's talk about that. What are some of the things we should do? How do we ask someone to become an ambassador? Do we equip them and make it easy for them to be effective as an ambassador? What are some tips there?
Kyle:
And I think every brand's going to approach this stuff differently. And I'll just share with you examples that I've seen over my career. And some people try to make it a super exclusive program. I personally feel like if someone approaches your brand and says, I would like to work with you, you don't want to turn 'em away. You don't want to say no because all of a sudden they're going to sour on your brand just a little bit. Whereas like, God, I got rejected by them and maybe someone else will say yes to me. So I always recommend to brands to kind have what I would call a farm league type of a program where it's like, look, anyone can get into this. It's a tryout. You're going to come in, we're going to ask you to do certain things if you perform well and do all the asks, then you can get elevated.
If you're good enough, you can get into a more exclusive, I guess, ambassador program. But what we see brands do all the time is they'll obviously post about it on their website and on their socials. That's the easiest thing. And then as part of their post-purchase landing page, they'll announce, we've got an ambassador program, would you like to join it? And they'll talk about the different perks that come from it. And the other thing too that I'd like to just mention is the perks don't have to be crazy. You don't have to give away a ton of free product. You don't have to give stupid discounts. Some of the things that people like the very most speaking of authenticity is like, Hey, you're going to get an opportunity to product test some of the new things that we have coming out. You're going to have an opportunity to meet with some of our product managers so that you can give input into future things that we're coming out with and your say matters. That kind of stuff makes people feel incredibly important. And surprisingly, they'll do even more for that type of a reward, which costs you nothing as a brand. In fact, it's only beneficial
Brett :
In fact. Yeah, in fact, you're getting good feedback, but people want to be valued and people want to be heard. And so just giving them a voice and just saying, I want to hear from you, you're important. That says more than a little freebie.
Kyle:
Yeah, exactly. And so that's a post-purchase landing page, and then always have on the bottom of your website down on the footers, become an ambassador, have something about that where they can click and they can become, learn more about your ambassador program, that sort of stuff. You can put inserts into all of your packages. You can put stuff on the labels about joining your ambassador program, the little QR code that will take 'em right there. There's a lot of ways to engage with those people. And then the other ways is if you're targeting, we mentioned this stuff earlier, if you're looking through your reports and finding who's buying the most, who's buying the most frequently, then the outreach to them specifically. And if a brand is out doing outreach to their customers, their customers are usually super stoked. Response rates are really, really high for those things. So I think there's a lot of different ways. It's pretty simple, but I'd say the easiest thing that anyone can do is just figure out what you want your ambassador program to look like. What would, and that's really important, if I can just tangent on this for a second. Absolutely. One thing that I've seen too is that brands don't really put themselves in their customer's shoes. What would get you motivated to be an ambassador for a brand?
Brett :
Not what makes the ambassador program valuable for you as a brand, but what makes the shopper feel valued and what makes them likely to actually do something?
Kyle:
Yes. I mean, it's crazy to me. I see, and we all know this, you can go to just about any e-commerce site right now, and if I put my email address in, I'm going to get a 15% 20% discount. It's nothing, right? But some of those very same brands will say, there's no way I'm going to give my ambassadors a 20% discount. It's like, why would you not do that? Because it can be so just you have to be able to look at your program and say, I would be super excited if someone made this offer to me. And if that's the case, chances are that they're going to be very excited to join your program and you figure out what you want to do for your program. And from there, just put a footer in your website and say, join our program. Get people to start engaging with you because engagement is key in all of this. And you have to be able to continually give your customers your ambassadors things to do,
Brett :
And who does this really well? Who should we go pay attention to? Maybe get on their email list to see how they're running their ambassador program.
Kyle:
There are so many brands I think that do this well a lot, and they do it for different reasons and for different motivations. And so you'll find different things when you look at some of these different brands, meaning there are some brands that their sole purpose of an ambassador program is going to be to drive sales and revenue. Ultimately, that's always a goal of everyone, but they're meticulously tracking it. They're trying to find out, great, who's using referral codes? Who's using discount codes? What do the revenues actually look like? There's other brands that their number one goal is just, we want to be able to generate a lot of UGC. We need that user generated content for our own marketing purposes, and they're going to run a program in a very different manner than someone who's trying to drive revenue as their primary goal. And then there's others that are just trying to create general awareness like, look, we just need people posting.
We want to look at our reach on social. And so all three of those scenarios, they're all ambassador programs, but depending on what the goal is, they're going to have something different out of every single one of those. But there's, all of the big brands are doing this now, and they have teams that are dedicated to it as well. Because I will say this, an ambassador program is not, it requires work. It's not something that you can just say, cool, I started an ambassador program and now it's just going to take off. You have to put in a ton of effort on your end. I mean multiple hours every week where you're coming up with, okay, what do I want my ambassadors to do for the month? At least you have to have a plan in place just like you'd have a marketing calendar you need to have, and it's even better if it aligns with your marketing calendar, an ambassador calendar where it's like, here's all of the different types of actions I want people to do.
And it can be simple things too, where you take all the different technologies that are out there and you say, cool. I want my ambassadors to be leaving me reviews. I want them liking and commenting on my brand's social posts. I want them liking and commenting or sharing some of my ambassador's posts. I want them posting at least once a month. And you can give them ideas of things to post about, and they make it authentic because it's usually just throughout what they would normally doing in their regular life. So if you can take the time to create a good ambassador program, it will pay huge dividends for you, and it just supports everything else that you're doing.
Brett :
Totally makes sense. And what's interesting is even if you look at this like, Hey, even in the beginning, this may be more of a loyalty program. We're getting our ambassadors to buy more, and then everything else, it's all going to grow as you go. But I think there's a few things that work there. If I'm an ambassador and I'm not talking about your brand and I'm talking about why I like it and I'm posting and I'm liking stuff, the first person that I'm selling on that is me. I'm reaffirming to myself why I love this brand, which means I'm probably going to buy more. Also, there's this law of consistency. If we say we're into something, if we say this is important, we want our actions to line up with that. And so I think that leads more purchases also. Hey, Luke got a little justification, right? It's easy to say to our spouse like, Hey, I'm an ambassador now. I've got to fulfill my duty. I got to buy these yoga pants or whatever to make this work. And so really interesting.
Kyle:
Yeah, and it's funny that you said that about loyalty because I think that there are some similarities. I was just thinking about it the other day. When I say lines are blurred ambassadors, it's almost like a loyalty program, but rather than asking your ambassadors to just keep buying more and then they're going to get more credit, it's just we want you to talk about our brand more and we'll give you more credit. You don't even have to buy it more. Just start talking about it more, but naturally.
Brett :
Naturally. Yeah. Love it. Love it. Let's talk about ambassadors and ads. So how do those two work together to make your ads better? Well,
Kyle:
I think the biggest thing is you can't talk about those two things without recognizing the importance of user generated content and all of that stuff. And you'll see there's more and more brands. In fact, there was an article that came out not too long ago about Yeti specifically going away from their traditional stock images and photography and using solely user generated content. Awesome. And I think that is really cool for all the reasons we talked about before with just how authentic that stuff actually is. But you utilize your ambassadors, like I just said, to align with your marketing calendar and you say, okay, here are the different themes that we're focused on this month, or maybe it's this quarter and get as much UGC as you can possibly get. And then you as a brand, you either boost that UGC, you use it for your own post.
Because the other thing too is that if you have a legitimate ambassador program, you as a brand actually own. If someone signs the contract becomes an ambassador with you, you say, Hey, I'm going to give you this in exchange for it. Maybe it's a discount. For example, you own all of that UGC, whatever they posted, it's yours. You're able to utilize it however you want, and you just get much better engagement. To the point that I've seen many brands that have got so much more traction from utilizing their ambassador's content as a social post, again, because people are scrolling through and they recognize that, Hey, here's a real photo. This isn't some advertisement, I guess. And they'll stop and they'll look at it and they'll engage with it. And so the engagement rates are significantly higher. In fact, we see that on average they'll raise by 25 to 30% just by utilizing your ambassador's content,
Brett :
It really becomes a content flywheel, right? You'll just constantly have new content to test and use. And I know, especially the social platforms, meta and Instagram and certainly TikTok, they're content hungry and you got to feed the beast really hungry, more content, YouTube less, but we still need new stuff on YouTube and we look at UGC Mashups or UGC to help highlight a point within a broader video. And so all kinds of use cases there. Big believer in that. Let's talk about, go ahead J. No,
Kyle:
I was going to one last thing. The other thing is you think of your marketing team, and no matter the size of your brand, you might have a one person marketing team, you might have a 10 person marketing team, but if you have someone who's focused on this area, there's only one, let's call it one to 10 minds, thinking about all of the different ways that you could advertise or market your product and you engage with your ambassador team to do this sort of stuff, you now get hundreds of different ideas, thousands of different ideas, because they're going to think of it very differently if it's like, Hey, here's our theme. This is the overall arching topic that we're trying to discuss. You'll get so many different unique ideas that it's absolutely amazing. And we all know this too, that everyone's become a photographer. So even if you're talking about the nano or the micro influencer, the contents, the U GC is pretty good. I'm not can ever say it's influencer quality, but it's really good. And like I said before, there's brands out there that are opting for a less quality product in terms of the setup because it is authentic. And that gets people to stop in their tracks.
Brett :
Yeah, love that so much. So let's pivot a little bit here as we're kind of wrapping up. How does get roster work? How do you facilitate ambassador programs? How do you identify? How do you manage? How do you make the whole process easier?
Kyle:
Yeah, so we've got an awesome piece of software that makes life super, super simple. We're custom built for ambassador programs and we allow people to run everything. Your affiliates, your ambassadors, your professionals, influencers, everything through our platform. But at the heart of what we do is we really try to automate the engagement process as much as possible. One thing to start an ambassador program, it's another thing to keep those people continually doing something for you. The goal is to have your ambassadors doing something at least monthly for your brand. They need to be doing something of value for your brand, the very least monthly. And sometimes people get excited about it and they come out of the gates and they're gung ho and they're doing everything you want 'em to do. And after a month or two, you kind of stop coming up with ideas and you weren't reaching them as much because it's human nature, it's what we do.
Brett :
It takes work to keep that momentum, otherwise it's just going to lose
Kyle:
Steam. And so we have a lot of stuff in place that allows you to continually have, reach out to your ambassadors, continually giving them things to do. We have tons of different templates where you can almost put this in autopilot, not completely. I mean, you still have to do some things, but it's like there's all the different ideas of things that you can do from an actions perspective, from a post perspective in order to keep them going. And then we just keep track of everything on the backend so that you don't have to figure out who do I need to send product to and who do I need to send a discount to or a coupon code to or any of those things. And so we provide you with referral links or affiliate links. We provide you with the discount codes, we integrate with all of the different shopping carts out there and just automate it as much as we possibly can.
So it makes it super simple for brands to be able to run their ambassador programs. And what we'll find is that someone who's tried to do this manually in spreadsheets, a lot of people will come to us having done it in spreadsheets. We will save people 30, 40 hours a week. I mean, we can essentially give someone their life back and their job back so that they can focus on all of these other things because they can now automate it through software. It's just software that's custom built for this sort of stuff. Everything that we just talked about from an ambassador, stuff you can do through the platform. And we've seen so many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of brands do this and have amazing success through running their ambassador programs. And so many of them even said, look, we were built on word of mouth and for the first time, we were able to take control of the narrative and measure it as a result of roster. So
Brett :
Talk a little bit about, before we talk about how people can check it out and stuff like that, how do you measure it? Because an important piece, how are we measuring the impact of this?
Kyle:
Yeah, so there's a couple of different ways that we do that. One is just from a brand awareness or from an earned media value perspective, what does the reach look like across the board? How many likes, comments, shares, that sort of stuff are you getting from a social perspective? And then we utilize the same thing that this is not new at all. It's discount codes, it's referral links or affiliate links to be able to see how often those are shared, how often they're clicked, how much revenue's coming through that particular link. So if I'm an ambassador and I say, Hey, yeah, you should check this brand out, I can share my link and I can get credit for anything that happens through there. So I would say those are the two primary ways that we're tracking all of that information is through that
Brett :
Makes sense for those who want to check it out and learn more, how can they do that?
Kyle:
Just check out our website, get roster.com, go there. Tons of really good content on there, give us a call. We're happy to give people a demo. And at the end of the day, it's not a high pressure situation. We love helping brands grow their businesses. It's what we're passionate about. And you'll find that we'll share information with you. Sometimes it's like, Hey, this might not be best for you. Maybe you're not ready for it. It's super low pressure. We're just, we're low pressure people overall and we just want to help brands
Brett :
Grow getting that vibe for sure. And so, hey, this is something I'm all fired up now, fired up for ambassador programs and I see it all working together, right? Ambassador program, influencer marketing, your standard social advertising and search advertising and all of it can work together. And man, that's really what it takes. Yeah, that's the key to D two c e-commerce, right? You're not going to just find one thing that you can do to grow to your e-commerce brand and to sustain growth. It's going to be the combination of a lot of little things executed well. And so get roster will help you do that. Kyle fr. And ladies and gentlemen, Kyle, thanks for the time, man. Super fun and best wishes to you guys, and excited to see you guys grow.
Kyle:
Okay. Sounds good, man. Thanks. We'll talk
Brett :
Soon. Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? Give us some ideas. Also, if you've not left that review on iTunes or wherever you consume the podcast, please do that. It makes my day, but also helps other people find the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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