Our objective was to build a low cost semi-exclusive evergreen ambassador program, leveraging and empowering real brand advocates to champion our brand and product in their communities with product feedback, brand awareness, and community building in mind.
Our strategy entailed defining who the ideal ambassador is, considering factors like persona, social / digital influence and presence, affinity for the brand, affinity for organics / cooking, and demographics. We qualified and vetted existing advocates that were identified over the past year to participate in the program (approx. pool of 30 advocates). We then defined the ongoing ambassador asks and requirements. This included:
o Co-content creation - content development and publishing (including but not limited to recipes / product / lifestyle content)
o Product testing and feedback (via an online survey)
o Campaign participation
o Social engagement / sharing of brand content
We also determined the ambassador incentives for participation. This included digital / social recognition, product or free coupons, samples, swag or entries into giveaways. We developed an initial plan to operationalize this, part of which was determining how to regularly communicate to the ambassadors, and identify associated tools to manage that process. We developed the channel plan, which mapped out the best social channels to leverage to promote the program.
After launching the ambassador program in January 2018, our eleven Cal-O Creators have created a large volume of content and driven unparalleled reach and engagement. And, the Cal-O creators continue to develop more and more content, showing their willingness to build a strong relationship with our brand as a true ambassador of Cal-Organic produce.
11 CalO Creators
848 Total Posts
502 Total Hashtag Mentions
383K Total Interactions
452 Interactions Per Post
244 Total IG Stories
During the month of March, Cal-O conducted a giveaway both on our own social channels and through six of our Cal-O Creators who leveraged the giveaways on their own feeds.
508 Total Owned Engagements
3.1K Total Owned Impressions
191 Total Added Followers
4.5K Total Earned Engagements
744 Earned Engagements Per Post
All of these results were achieved without dedicating any spend to paying social influencers, but rather by establishing partnerships with existing brand advocates and supplying them with Cal-Organic Farms products regularly to encourage social content creation.
