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What are the most challenging parts of running successful ambassador programs? We repeatedly hear these two top complaints: 1) finding influencers to participate and 2) managing contracts and deadlines.
In this article, we will introduce you to the best software to manage brand ambassador relationships and what they can do to help your brand loyalty take flight!
This is a quick comparison of the choices we have come across:
Software Name | Key Features | Pricing | Our P2P Rating |
SocialLadder |
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Refersion |
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LeadDyno |
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AdvocateHub by Influitive |
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Referral Candy |
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Referral Factory |
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Referral Rock |
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Viral Loops |
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OpinionPod |
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Keep scrolling for the full reviews below!
Many software and platforms offer similar features and operate within the same space, whether they call themselves ambassador marketing platforms, referral marketing software, or word-of-mouth marketing tools.
At times, affiliate marketing software and influencer marketing platforms can help achieve similar goals if you have a long-standing relationship with your affiliates and influencers and pay them a commission. If your brand ambassadors are customers or employees, you could use your existing employee advocacy platform or customer loyalty program to communicate your marketing messages and extend incentives. However, ambassador marketing software provides clear advantages, being the holistic platform should you have multiple sources of ambassadors.
A good ambassador marketing tool should relieve you of time-consuming work, such as identifying, managing, and tracking potential ambassadors. It should also provide excellent analytics and reports so you can closely monitor how your ambassador campaigns are tracking your business goals.
Look for tools that cover the following:
SocialLadder is an enterprise SaaS solution for creating, engaging, and tracking brand ambassador communities. Consumer-focused brands like Benefit Cosmetics, Kendra Scott, goPuff & Live Nation all use SocialLadder to market through their customers and turn them into growth drivers, activating their community to create user-generated content (ugc) and increase conversions.
SocialLadder’s platform allows you to streamline communication, assign digital and real-world tasks, monitor customer engagement, and reward successful ambassadors for helping to promote your brand. Your ambassadors are set up for success while allowing you to focus on the overall growth strategy rather than spending time managing the day-to-day.
SocialLadder has the tools your brand needs to:
Website: http://www.socialladderapp.com
Price: Request a Demo for a Quotation
Our Rating: 4.5/5
“6% of marketers stated that finding influencers to participate in campaigns and programs is the most challenging”
Refersion is an affiliate marketing management and tracking program with over 589,000 registered affiliates and 16,000 merchants. What’s great about Refersion is that you don’t need any technical knowledge to set up and manage full influencer and affiliate campaigns that integrate with your online store.
Reversion integrates with top shopping cart platforms such as Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Stripe, and BigCommerce, among others, and it offers custom integrations on request.
The basic tool starts at $89 per month with the following features included:
Try their free 14-day trial to take it for a spin!
Website: refersion.com
Price: free trial: 14 days; pro: From$99/m; enterprise: Custom
Our Rating: 4.5/5
LeadDyno is a brand ambassador marketing software that offers influencer, ambassador, and affiliate marketing solutions. The platform integrates with online stores such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Amazon Seller Central.
A useful feature on this advocate marketing tool is the ability to create and track a variety of advertising activities for ambassadors in the program. These activities can include blog posts, social media content creation, product reviews, or custom activities to suit your campaign.
The basic plan is $49 per month and offers the following features (for websites with up to 3000 unique visitors a month):
Website: leaddyno.com
Price: free trial: 30 days; starter: $49/m; biz Builder: $59/m; accelerator: $79/m
Our Rating: 4.5/5
AdvocateHub by Influitive is a leading engagement and advocacy tool that offers “on-demand” advocates. If you’re looking for personalized, gamified programs to turn customers into advocates, Advocate Hub should definitely be on your list.
You can create interactive games and challenges that keep brand advocates busy and engaged, recognize and reward them, track and monitor performance, and create in-depth reports all on one platform. They have really mastered the community experience with features like single sign-on, mobile apps, and instant gratification.
AdvocateHub integrates with leading marketing automation software such as Salesforce, Eloqua, and Hubspot, as well as all major social media platforms and product review sites.
Pricing for their plans is available on request, but you can expect the following features:
Website: influitive.com
Price: Customer Advocacy: from $1999/m; digital Community: from $3499/m
Our Rating: 4/5
Referral Candy is very easy to set up and navigate afterward.
The idea behind Referral Candy is to help online stores increase their revenues. This is achieved by starting a variety of rewards campaigns that attract new customers. Moreover, integrating Referral Candy to major shopping platforms such as Amazon or shopify is very easy.
The software contains pre-made email templates that you can easily set up. You will have all of your contacts, rewards, and statistics displayed on the dashboard.
Perhaps one of the biggest advantages of Referral Candy is its reasonable price compared to similar software on the market.
Key features include:
Website: referralcandy.com
Price: starts at $49 per month
Our Rating: 4.5/5
Referral Factory is one of the few tools that allow marketers to set up complete referral channels with just a few clicks.
The tool is particularly helpful for marketers just starting out in referral marketing. It provides over a thousand templates to start with. You can pick a template that works for you, edit it, and make the campaign live.
The software makes it easy to set rewards. These may include virtual rewards such as discount codes, coupons, or even cash.
The data can be viewed and accessed in real-time to keep track of all the rewards. Everything is easily accessible from the dashboard, allowing the data to be exported in a CSV file. This way, you can keep a close eye on the growth of your referral program.
The software also has a strong suite of communication tools. To encourage users to keep going, you can set email triggers that notify them when they successfully refer someone.
Key features include:
Website: referral-factory.com
Price: Free Trial – 15 Days. Starts at $75/month (Get a 60-day free trial here).
Our Rating: 4.5/5
Referral Rock enables you to completely automate the ambassador marketing process. You can do so by setting up personalized campaigns that increase customer touchpoints in social media sharing, dual-side rewards and many more.
This software is suitable for any type of business, especially the ones that are just getting started.
If you want to track your performance, you will be able to access Google Analytics, which contains all of the important statistics.
Key features include:
Website: referralrock.com
Price: starts at $200 for a basic plan
Our Rating: 4.5/5
Inspired by major referral marketing ideas and campaigns such as Amazon or Dropbox, Viral Loops offers a variety of templates to help you promote your business.
The design of the templates is very modern. You can use these to start competitions, referral campaigns, or social media management.
There are various ways of integrating your campaigns into any platform in minutes.
If you’re looking for a simple, time-saving, yet highly effective referral marketing tool, this may be your choice.
Key features are:
Website: viralloops.com
Price: $49 per month
Our Rating: 4.5/5
If you’re looking for a way to collect positive feedback, OpinionPod can be a useful tool. It enables fully automatic campaigns that invite customers to rate your business and recommend it to friends.
The fact that it takes just one click to leave feedback is probably a reason why people respond very well to it. There are no complicated tasks and multiple steps to take. You can have your recommendations in a matter of seconds.
Keep in mind that this is very specific software that won’t allow you much versatility in campaigns. However, it can bring you great ratings results.
Key features:
Website: OpinionPod.com
Price: $240 per year/user
Our Rating: 5/5
As marketers, we know that word-of-mouth marketing is incredibly valuable and rewarding – particularly for long-term brand advocacy. A brand ambassador marketing program creates a pipeline of loyal customers and influencers who could be nurtured into becoming true ambassadors through profiling, engaging, tracking and rewarding their online and offline activity in a structured and measurable manner.
But, managing all of this can become a time-consuming and convoluted process if done manually (we’ve all started with a spreadsheet!). Not to mention inaccurate over time. This is why brand ambassador marketing tools are so important to the sustainability of your program.
Our advice when it comes to choosing the right tool is to:
Brand ambassadors are people who represent the brand in a positive light and help increase brand awareness by doing so. They can be your loyal customers, employee voices, communities you engage with, social influencers, or celebrity endorsers.
A good ambassador program software should relieve you of time-consuming work, such as identifying, managing, and tracking ambassadors while giving you excellent analytics and reports.
It is a advertising campaign that puts the brand's message in the hands of ambassadors with a certain goal in mind, such as improving your sales, brand recall or recognition. It is sometimes also called a brand advocacy program.
Steps include defining your objectives and budget, identifying your target audience, creating an Incentives or rewards structure based on your budget, reaching out to influencers, your employees, and customers, providing guidelines and marketing materials, tracking results, and continuing to optimize. For more details, please refer to Best Brand Ambassador Programs and How to Simply Create Yours.
To each their own! Companies have long had success finding celebrities whose characteristics, charisma, image, or what they stand for, closely align with the brand identity. Meanwhile, marketers have also had success with specific communities, their own employees, loyal customers, etc. Marketers should start with their marketing strategy, target audience, brand positioning, and budget to identify their best brand ambassadors. Brand ambassadors should also genuinely love the brand, as it is easy to spot a disingenuous relationship when ambassadors have many opportunities to interact with customers on various social media platforms.
For celebrities, Michael Jordan for Nike was one of the longest-running and most successful ambassador relationships. For communities, Lululemon gave away free products to yoga instructors and fitness trainers who advocate healthy lifestyles and well-being and embody the brand's messaging. Their clientele, the target audience, flocked to the store to purchase their own wear.
Ambassadors are real people, whether celebrities, employees, customers, or influencers, instead of models and actors in commercials. They create authentic and trustworthy connections with end customers. Employee or community ambassador programs can also be much more cost-effective. The user-generated content from these ambassadors is often more impactful than branded content.
Everyone! It is a good idea to turn your loyal customers and employees into ambassadors, often with very little financial incentive, since they already love your brand and are probably already telling everyone about you. For those with more resources, it is a good idea to consider how ambassador marketing fits into your overall marketing strategy and use platforms to track and optimize program outcomes.
It depends. Incentives can range from coupons, gift cards, and free products to paid influencers and celebrity endorsers.
You probably already are whenever you recommend a product to friends and family. You can join any platform mentioned and apply to be a brand ambassador.
You can print a referral coupon on the receipts or communicate incentives to your loyal customers through email, SMS, push notifications, etc. It is a good idea to start with your customer loyalty database, identify your best customers, and contact them. This way, they are more likely to say good things about you!
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