Is ambassador marketing different for baby-care brands?
Is ambassador marketing different for baby-care brands?
What goes behind choosing the profiles, creating content, following up and maintaining relationships that allow Béaba® to get the highest ROI possible in their partnerships?
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A few weeks ago, we had the wonderful opportunity to chat with Mélanie from Béaba®.
Béaba® is a baby care brand, founded in 1989. They offer products for children aged 0 to 3 years old, and their idea is to accompany and reassure children, as well as parents, during all stages during this time: pre-pregnancy, pregnancy all the way till birth and then till 3 years of age after that.
Mélanie is the social media and influence manager for all the brands of the Béaba® Group—Béaba®, Red Castle, and recently ChildHome, a furniture and decoration brand for children, that is just starting to be more active on e-commerce and social media in France.
She works between e-commerce and marketing/communication, focusing a lot on driving social traffic to their website, using different levers—influencers, community, partnerships—for acquisition and promotion.
We had a chat about how they recruit influencers and ambassadors, and the unique challenges they face as a children’s brand.
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Béaba®’s influencer marketing strategy
Béaba®’s entire ambassador and influencer marketing strategy is based on product gifting to the right ambassadors and the right prospects.
They primarily just gift products to mothers and their babies — things that they know they need, and then follow up after to understand how things are going, and how they can work together.
Recruiting influencers and ambassadors
Direct contact
A lot of their ambassadors and influencers come to them directly. They are evaluated based on several different KPIs to see if they are actually relevant for the brand to make a partnership with.
Once a match is made, they try and go further by understanding what are the kinds of products that they would like to test, and they further make a selection based on this.
Where it gets interesting for them is that each of their products is made for a specific part of a baby’s journey. And so they have to be strategic about the products they gift and when.
For example, there’s no point in giving something meant for 0-6 months when the baby is 4 months old, because it won’t be relevant for very long.
When Beaba finds a profile that works very well for them, they try and find more profiles that are similar to that one.
Now they are using Ubu to find the right profiles to try and convert to ambassadors.
Engaging these ambassadors
Béaba® functions with the mindset that they want their ambassador relations to be authentic — and in order to do that, it’s important that no one feels pressured to do anything.
The goal for Béaba® in the relationship is simply to guide the influencer — to to motivate them, to inspire them, to remind them not to forget the “technicalities” like when to publish their content, and reminding them when their codes are going to expire.
Nothing at all is imposed on the ambassador, that can “distort” the return. They want them to have a real experience with the product, as they would if they were a customer.
They don’t share any kind of brief — they want ambassadors to give their feedback and create content on their own, without having to follow a pattern.
The only thing they have to do is to share a certain type of content — stories, posts, an article, a promo code, etc.
It’s also the case that most of the ambassadors Béaba® works with already know the brand — and they prioritise their relationships more than anything else. Béaba® benefits from a premium position in the market as well — this definitely helps things!
It’s for this reason that unlike some other brands, Béaba® doesn’t deeply discount any of their products, so as to not give out the feeling of having cheated customers when they purchase full price.
A transparent relationship
Rather than sending out a variety of products, or sending out the products that are the most convenient for the brand, to a large number of profiles and then just hoping that good content comes out, Béaba® takes a more transparent and communicative strategy.
The ambassadors Béaba® works with are all mothers with children. And these mothers all have needs for specific products or solutions that are gonna be helpful for them.
So what Béaba® does is that they understand what are the things that these ambassadors specifically need, and then send them only those products. They want to be participate and support in the entire process of raising their child.
The end result of this is that Béaba® understands much more closely what are the needs of the ambassadors they’re working with — which stage of the child’s evolution they are in, what would they need in the future, what have they already tried in the past.
That’s how they are able to create an even stronger long-term partnership with them.
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ROI and revenue
With the right profiles and the right style of communication, they are able to achieve an extremely high ROI.
Mélanie says that it’s important to follow up and maintain connections with your best ambassadors, without necessarily sending back new products. The more you engage with the same ambassador, the more the ROI increases.
Wrapping up
It’s very interesting to see how different brands across different categories do ambassador marketing — thanks a lot Mélanie for sharing your experiences with Béaba®!
What do you guys think? Are there any specific kinds of brands you want to see on Selling Social in the future? Let me know by sending me an email or commenting down below :)
— Mayank
