Recruitment 101: How to Turn Your Customers and Fans into Ambassadors

Recruitment is the process of engaging your customers, followers, and fans to invite them to join your brand ambassador community. It’s all about turning the people who already love your brand into loyal advocates who help you grow through genuine content creation and social engagement.

Why Should I Recruit?

Recruiting your community is one of the fastest and most effective ways to grow your brand and boost your return on investment. By inviting people who are already engaged with your brand to become ambassadors, you’ll see the benefits:

Highly engaged audience: These people already love your brand and are eager to be involved.
Easy to reach: They’re already following you and are familiar with your content.
Authentic content creators: Ambassadors will produce genuine content that resonates with their audience, spreading organic brand awareness.
Increased visibility: Their posts help create buzz, driving awareness of your brand to new audiences.

How do I Recruit?

There are a variety of ways to activate and recruit ambassadors for your community. Combining multiple methods will ensure you reach a broader audience and drive higher participation rates.

Although there are many exciting ways to recruit, below are some of the most popular and effective forms of recruitment that we have seen from our brand partners, along with tips, AI prompts and templates that you can utilise to ensure your recruitment campaign is successful from the start.

Social Media Recruitment

Social media is one of the most powerful tools to use to recruit your brand’s customers and fans. Here are our top tips to recruit via social media so that you can build a bigger brand community:

Instagram Recruitment

Instagram is perfect for visual storytelling and engaging with your followers.

Here’s how you can recruit your community on Instagram:

Add your community recruitment link directly to your Instagram bio or add it to your Linktree.
Create posts and Reels about your program and invite people to click the link in your bio.
When you’re just starting out, we recommend pinning a recruitment post to your profile to boost sign-ups.
Create Instagram Stories inviting ambassadors to join your community and be sure to create a Story Highlight so it saves to the top of your brand’s profile.

Take a look at Naked and Thriving’s Instagram Reel that shouts out their brand ambassador all-stars for the month and has a call-to-action (CTA) to recruit new ambassadors!

Naked and Thriving's Instragram Reel that highlights their ambassador all-stars for the month. 9 faces are pictured in the thumbnail with their products.

Feeling stuck on where to get started? Read our in-depth article on Instagram recruitment to get more insights, easy-to-edit templates and AI prompts.

TikTok Recruitment

If your ideal brand ambassador is Gen Z, you can’t overlook the power of TikTok in expanding your community. TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms ever, with .5 billion active users.

All of this places TikTok as an ideal place to focus your recruitment efforts.

How to recruit on TikTok:

Add your ambassador recruitment link directly to your brand’s TikTok profile or add it to your Linktree.
Create organic content using trends that invite your followers to join your ambassador program.
Create a hashtag for your ambassador community.

Watch Big Potato Games’ video to get inspired by how you can recruit your customers to join your community using TikTok

Screenshot of Big Potato Games TikTok recruitment video

Read our article on TikTok recruitment to get even more resources on how to grow your community using TikTok.

Physical Recruitment

While social media and online platforms are effective ways to grow your community, find UGC and turn your brand’s fans into ambassadors, physical recruitment or offline campaigns still have a place in engaging with your fans.

How to recruit face-to-face:

Create physical marketing materials like product flyers.
Host brand events using social media to invite influencers in the area.
Sponsor aligned events to bring your brand presence to more people.
Create promotional product bags with QR code flyers to hand out at events outlining steps to become an ambassador and post content on social media.

Lusso Tan printed A5 cards to include in product packages, ensuring that all their customers were aware of their new ambassador program and could join with ease.

Lusso Tan's A5 cards with QR code and title "Join our invite only ambassador program"

Offline recruitment can be a really effective way to connect with your community in a personable way. Read our article on physical recruitment to get more tips and tricks on how to use this recruitment method to your advantage.

Website Recruitment

Your ambassador program needs to have a strong presence on your website. Think pop-ups, footer and header links, and checkout recruitment options.

How to recruit on your brand’s website:

Create a dedicated landing page explaining your ambassador program, including the benefits of joining, how it works and how to sign up.
Add a link to your ambassador page in the footer r of your website.
Implement non-intrusive pop-up banners with a call to action that invites website visitors to join your community.
Integrate checkout page recruitments that come up post-purchase, inviting customers to participate in your program

LYS Beauty built a dedicated page on its website to provide visitors with more information about its ambassador program. They made it easy to sign up with clear CTA buttons. They explain how it works, what their mission is and what attributes ambassadors should embody to be part of the #ConfidenceCrew.

Screenshot of LYS Beauty's ambassador program recruitment website page

Get started on your website recruitment with more tips, editable templates and AI prompts in our website recruitment deep-dive.

Email Recruitment

Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to reach current and potential customers, and enhance brand loyalty. Use emails to turn your customers into ambassadors.

A newsletter blast is the easiest way to gain ambassadors who already love your brand and own your products.

How to recruit using email marketing:

When you send promotional emails highlighting new products, include a small banner in the footer that promotes your ambassador program.
Create a dedicated email that details how your customers can become ambassadors, what the benefits are for them, what you’ll expect them to do.
Send newsletters that highlight ambassadors and the UGC they’ve created for you, and ensure there’s a link for subscribers to join your ambassador program.
Implement banners in post-purchase emails that invite customers to join your community.

PopSockets sent out a newsletter to their email subscribers calling them to join the #PopSquad calling them to “Spread the word” and get rewarded!

Learn more about effective email recruitment strategies in our in-depth article.

The important thing to remember with recruitment is that the sky is the limit. When you are creating any new form of marketing collateral, always ask yourself, 'Will this be effective in growing our community?' and ‘Does this align with our community marketing goals?’

Lastly, recruitment isn’t a once-off campaign and it doesn’t only happen when you launch your community. Recruiting new customers and followers should be a recurring thing to ensure that your new customers and new followers are aware of your ambassador program.

Key Takeaways:

Recruitment grows your community: Leverage social media, your website, emails, and offline events to recruit ambassadors.
Mix of methods: Use online and offline strategies for effective recruitment.
Continuous process: Recruitment should be a recurring part of your marketing efforts

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