Campus brand ambassadorships have gotten mixed reviews from both ambassadors and the college students they’re marketing to. And if you’re a brand that has run campus marketing campaigns, you’ve probably had uneven results and at least a few disappointing experiences with your student brand reps.

But you can rock your next campus marketing campaign if you follow these 7 secret tips. Why are they a secret? Because at Go Commando, we’ve turned campus brand ambassador programs on their head. We’re helping brands go from mediocre results to tremendous success on campus.

Here are the 7 secrets to campus marketing success:

1. Find Quality Students

Most brand ambassador programs don’t have any way of filtering out the best reps from the crowd. Go Commando students are vetted based on traits that are most desirable for a brand ambassador to possess. If you like a particular rep, you can give them a brand badge to hire them again.

2. Pay Brand Ambassadors Quickly

Often, brands don’t pay their reps for weeks or months after a task has been completed. But if you approve your students’ work quickly, you’ll be more likely to build a good long-term rapport with your brand reps, and they’ll be motivated to give you their best efforts. It will also encourage them to tell their friends about you. The Go Commando app makes it possible to approve a rep’s work in real time so you can pay them immediately—and without a middleman bottlenecking the process!

3. Communicate with Your Ambassadors

Refer to students by their first name, and introduce yourself to them. This process is about building a relationship with the students as much as it is about having brand ambassadors complete a task. Don’t hesitate to remind students about tasks that are about to expire—they want to work for you. If a student doesn’t complete the work properly, provide details about what they did wrong and how to fix their work in order to get paid.

4. Use Automatic Reminder Emails

Set up automatic emails that go out 48 hours before a task expires to remind all students who have yet to complete an accepted task. Go Commando has this feature built in. And, after 24 hours of a task being published, students receive an additional email alerting them when the task still has open spots.

5. Don’t View Students as Customers

While it would be wonderful for your brand evangelists to become your customers, this shouldn’t be the ultimate goal of your campus marketing program. Students are looking for work experience and compensation, so stay focused on that.

6. Get Creative

Students see many of the traditional campus marketing tasks as annoying spam. Think bigger than just having students litter their campus with flyers. Try some of our out-of-the-box task ideas:

  • HP conducted market research. The task required students to complete a five-question survey. The first student rep accepted the task within ONLY 15 SECONDS and the first job was submitted within three minutes of the task being posted. All jobs were accepted within 24 hours.
  • Men’s Wearhouse used on-the-ground campus reps to schedule talks in front of relevant student organizations on campus just before career fair events. Compared to previous agencies used by Men’s Wearhouse, Campus Commandos increased sales by 100%.
  • ACDelco used social media engagement and tripled their goals in a third of the time.

7. Start Small

Every brand and product offering is different, so we suggest that you offer tasks to a manageable number of students (5 to 10). This will make it easy to communicate, manage your budget, and pivot, if necessary. Once you get a feel for the kinds of tasks that work well and what doesn’t work as well, start expanding your campaigns, and going bigger and better.

Next Steps

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Who is Campus Commandos?

Our college marketing agency functions to serve two purposes; to provide opportunity for college students, and to market products and services on behalf of brands to students on college campuses and universities across the United States. Contact us to learn more.

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