How Becoming a Brand Ambassador Can Help Your Career
Published: Aug 01, 2016
In today’s digital age, nothing can promote or sink a company more than the public’s opinion of your brand showing up on a well-known app for the world to see. Whether it’s a 5-star review on Amazon, a 1-star critique on Yelp or a simple tip on Foursquare, everyday people have become better at highlighting a company’s image than that company’s own marketing team. And on that note, companies are finding it more important than ever to create a Brand Ambassador program.
Vault.com recently launched its Brand Ambassador program and it made perfect sense. With its Vault Campus subscription service being a popular choice of colleges and universities across the nation, students are the most logical choice to promote its benefits. Since Vault can’t get out to every school in the U.S. (not that we don’t try), Brand Ambassadors are important when it comes to promoting the value of Vault’s products and services to classmates at campuses that subscribe to Vault and to colleges and universities that are missing out on getting our career intelligence to its student-base.
But whether it’s Vault.com or Dunkin Donuts benefitting from the peer-to-peer marketing, what’s actually in it for the Brand Ambassadors? How do they benefit from promoting another company? In a nutshell, Brand Ambassador programs are very much like internships at a company and the benefits of the role can have a significant impact on participants and their potential careers. Here’s how:
Gain Valuable Experience…The Brand Ambassador's role is to promote a company’s image. Companies want you to create successful initiatives that promote their brand and those initiatives could be anything from clever social media posts to the simple grassroots initiative of handing out fliers. They could also include the creation of fun campus activities or parties that attract an audience who serve as potential customers for your company’s services. When you have to come up with innovative promotional ideas, it leads to outside-the-box thinking, which can sharpen your creative juices. When you are successful in this role, you make yourself attractive to employers looking for someone who specializes in marketing, branding, event planning, social media and entrepreneurship.
It’s Good For Your Resume…When you become a Brand Ambassador, it means you are passionate about the company you are promoting, and this role offers several benefits for your resume. You are responsible for driving brand awareness, increasing the number of customers and engaging users on social media and these skills are highly quantifiable.Human resource professionals and recruiters look for quantifiable data in a resume. They want to see something along the lines of “Developed marketing strategies XYZ that led to $1M in new revenue”; or “Developed content that increased social media engagement rates by 75%.” A Brand Awareness program has the ability to enhance your resume with these highly saught after types of stats.
They Create Networking Opportunities…As a Brand Ambassador, your role is to promote a company, and in doing so, you’re going to come across some interesting people. If you’re a Brand Ambassador at your school, you are going to come across highly influential professors; on-campus organizations with a lot of contacts in the professional realm; and executives at the company you are helping to promote. Impressing these well-connected sources is tantamount to advancing your career, especially if you were successful enough to earn a letter of recommendation upon the conclusion of your role.
It Creates Exposure…At Vault, our Brand Ambassador program allows participants an opportunity to write blogs, craft social media posts and take photos for inclusion on such social media platforms as Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest. Other companies provide similar opportunities. These are great opportunities to be noticed by different audiences. It allows you to grow your social and professional network while also providing you with examples of your work you can show potential employers during your next job search.
They Offer Perks…There are a lot of benefits that go beyond just employment benefits. Being a brand ambassador can be fun. Companies may take their Brand Ambassadors out on trips and also offer them discounts on products, free samples and even free swag. Some companies even provide money based on how successful your initiatives were in promoting their brand. At Vault, we provide our Brand Ambassadors with free membership to Vault Gold, allowing them unlimited access to such premium content as full company profiles, which are essential to a job seeker researching companies in their chosen industry as they prepare for a job search or, better yet, an interview at a firm.
For more information on Vault’s Brand Ambassador program, click here…
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