Andres Muñoz September 15, 2021 Recruiting student ambassadors is a crucial step for the success of your ambassador program. After all, you don’t want to spend unnecessary amounts of time and resources on a process that doesn’t get you the ambassadors that you want.
It’s very important to plan this process out because if you don’t, you will end up with a candidate list of students that don’t actually represent your brand or that don’t care too much about participating.
But with the right system in place, you should be able to continuously recruit student ambassadors to your program successfully.
In this guide you will learn exactly how to recruit student ambassadors that will give you results.
Let’s take a look at how you can do just that.
The steps we will be covering are:
1. Create an ideal student ambassador profile
2. Find student ambassadors
3. Reach out to student ambassadors
3.1 Student ambassador recruiting software
4. Train and onboard your student ambassadors
1. Create an ideal student ambassador profile
Just as if you were trying to recruit someone for a position in your company, you first need to think about the characteristics you’d like.
Then, you can compare this profile with the candidates that you get. Hopefully, most of them fit these requirements.
The first thing you should be looking for in students is a connection with your brand. Meaning that they are already customers and they really like your products. This aspect is important to include in your ideal campus rep profile because that’s what makes ambassador marketing work.
The main point is that you are marketing through people who actually love your products after having positive experiences with them. People trust other people with brand recommendations because of this. So recruiting any student you find won’t help much.
However, if you are planning to expand your brand somewhere that it’s not well known yet, then you need to build this connection first. You can do this by communicating what your brand is all about and sending some products.
What other characteristics should you be looking for when recruiting student ambassadors?
These are a couple of things that you should consider:
- Well connected and involved on campus
- Prior experience with marketing or interest in growing their marketing skills
- An established online presence whether it’s high engagement and/or followers
- Good at creating content that aligns with the brand
- Shows interest and alignment in your brand’s purpose and values
As a note, don’t be discouraged by small follower counts. Micro-influencers (campus reps) with a couple of thousand followers or even hundreds, are still valuable to your marketing strategy since they have a closer relationship with their network. Meaning their branded content will be more trusted and will connect with more people.
2. Find student ambassadors
Create an application page
Most brands with an ambassador program create a page on their site with all the information about the program and an application form.
The application form would only be available when you decide it’s a good time to recruit student ambassadors, in case there are periods in which you don’t need to add more campus reps.
Having this page will allow people to know about the program and it will also make it easier for you to receive the information you need from candidates.
People who love your brand will search on Google if you have an ambassador program. So by just having the page, you are gathering ideal candidates who like your brand automatically.
However, you will still need to vet all the applications to recruit just the right campus ambassadors. Sometimes, you will be receiving thousands of applications, so it can be time consuming.
This is not the only way to find ideal candidates, but it’s great to have an application page.
Look for candidates in social media
In most ambassador programs, campus reps will create social media content, so it makes sense to look for them there. First, think about the social media platforms you are interested in the most. It could be Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, etc.
Then, you will need to do some digging. Here are a couple of ways you can find candidates on social media:
- Look at your followers
- Look at the followers of influencers related to your industry
- Search college-related hashtags
- Browse locations
- Look at the followers of college’s profiles
- Browse Linkedin for students interested in brands, marketing, etc.
Looking for candidates on social media is useful when you aren’t receiving qualified applications through your website and want to find candidates yourself. It also allows you to invite people who aren’t actively looking to become brand ambassadors but are open to it since they love your brand.
Consider searching for candidates yourself when you want to have better control of who joins.
Another effective option you can try is posting on job boards that you are interested in hiring a brand ambassador.
3. Reach out to student ambassadors
If you have an application form on your website you only have to vet the list, select the ideal candidates, and email them with further instructions.
Since they already showed interest in joining the program, your communication should only be about the next steps. Which are training and onboarding.
You can also message your email list to find more candidates. This way you are directly telling your customers that you are recruiting student ambassadors. Then, you can redirect them to your application form or continue the conversation through email. Although we recommend using the page on your website to have a better organization of the applications.
You can email your list every time you are open to receiving applications. This way, the people who didn’t get a chance to apply will get notified.
Social media
It’s okay to send direct messages through social media. But make sure you first follow the candidates. Also, try not to use spammy language or using automated messages. The more authentic you sound the better.
Another very effective way to reach out to student ambassadors is through their comment section. Many times, DMs get lost, so it’s more likely they check the comments on their pictures.
Comment on the people you are trying to recruit with a short and polite message saying you’d love to collaborate. Once you get their attention, you can continue the conversation in the DMs.
Then, follow up a couple of times if you don’t get any response but without being spammy or annoying. Just follow up to make sure they got your message.
4. Train and onboard your student ambassadors
Once your candidates have accepted joining the program, you just need to provide them with the same documentation to help them understand their role.
This is also a very important step because you want everyone to have the same guidelines in order for the content to be on-brand and consistent.
For this part of the process, we recommend you create an ‘ambassador handbook’ with all the information your campus reps will need to do a great job.
Final thoughts on recruiting student ambassadors
Student ambassadors are the best tool to reach target demographics in an authentic, trustworthy way. But in order to reach their full potential, you need to recruit the right student ambassadors and train them consistently.
Some of the benefits of optimizing your recruiting process include:
- Improved ROI in marketing campaigns
- Higher brand awareness in target markets
- Increased word of mouth (referrals)
- Great user generated content
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