Brand Ambassador Staffing Agency – How We Find Event Staff

Power Direct’s brand ambassador campaigns enable you to interact with consumers, prospects, and clients face to face. Our brand ambassadors can blanket neighborhoods, enliven community gatherings and local events, draw crowds at sports events, concerts, and trade shows, and perform a variety of other tasks that engage guests, attendees, and customers with your brand in positive and engaging ways.

We offer nationwide staffing services and teams for all sorts of interactive marketing campaigns:

Interactive activities
Street teams and guerilla marketing
Live events and in-store promotions
Experiential marketing
Conferences and trade shows
Grand openings and product launches
Door-to-door data collection and customer engagement

As more and more brands recognize Power Direct as a trusted leader and provider of live retail activations, we’re being inundated with questions about our hiring process. Just how do we pull off such exceptional staffing services in such a challenging market environment?

Let’s find out.

Who uses event staffing services?

For brands that want to benefit from having a local presence in cities across the United States, one of the best strategies is to show up at big events.

These can be local or regional, such as parades, festivals, sporting events, trade shows, conferences, and community service gatherings. You can also run door-to-door campaigns, conducting prospect research, delivering surveys, capturing leads, and introducing potential customers in new service areas.

Local stores can also use brand ambassadors and event staff for product launches and off-site nearby events.

Professional enthusiasm is the most important qualification for promotions like these, followed closely by strong communications skills, high energy, and the ability to connect with consumers about products and services

Why do companies struggle with brand ambassadors staffing?

When you conduct a brand ambassador campaign, it will usually take place in a particular city or region. Sometimes it happens at a specific location or event where your target audience will be.

If your business is like most of the clients we work with, you probably don’t have a huge contingent of qualified candidates in that location ready to support this type of marketing.

And since these are often one-time events or seasonal campaigns, you don’t want full-time employees for this. The more cost-efficient approach is to use a staffing agency to employ brand ambassadors as contract workers. Of course, they need to be reliable professionals led by a skilled account manager — not unprepared support workers who fail to serve or promote your brand’s business and marketing goals.

There are several reasons businesses simply can’t perform the task of staffing brand ambassadors:

Marketing managers are too busy

Passionate about growth, most marketing managers already take on more opportunities than they probably should. They simply don’t have time to scour local staffing resources to find the team members you need to pull off a project like this. Even finding just a dozen good brand ambassadors requires a whole swath of staffing processes and logistics. You need a staffing partner.

Experiential marketing programs need to be nimble

With on-site campaigns like community events and trade shows, you have to be able to adapt and adjust as expectations change. That could mean adding additional team members if your campaign spreads to multiple locations. You might have dozens of simultaneous events during the summer and few, if any, during the coldest winter months. Most brands can’t adjust for sudden changes in on-the-ground conditions.

Hiring contractors for this work is an HR nightmare

Your event staff workers might only be employed for one week. Maybe even just a few days. You don’t want to hassle with all the paperwork and legal requirements of employing people who will work for such a short time.

Lack of experience

Most companies simply don’t know where to look to find good brand ambassadors. They have no procedures in place for sourcing, training, or managing this type of sales expertise. This means needless delays and lots of potential mistakes. Unless your company has monopoly money to play with and very patient stakeholders, this kind of situation isn’t ideal.

How does brand ambassador staffing work through Power Direct?

As a brand ambassador company, Power Direct has all of the tools, expertise, technology, and processes in place for hiring and training brand ambassadors for interactive marketing activities. Here’s how our process works:

Identify client objectives

Sometimes our clients approach us with a binder full of program objectives and events for their brand ambassadors. More often than not, they understand the importance of delivering live customer experiences and want help identifying opportunities to maximize their results within a pre-approved budget.

If you’re just starting this process, think about your campaign. What are your business and marketing goals? Here’s a small sample of possible experiential marketing goals:

Lead generation
Surveys and data collection
Gauging interest
Brand awareness
Product sampling for market analysis

Choose locations

Will this be a singular event, or perhaps a sequence?

For example — you could plan a promotion that will be implemented at the home football games in a particular city. That would mean you’d need event staff on Sundays for eight or nine weeks of the year.

In other scenarios, you’d choose a neighborhood, particular zip codes, or particular streets in a region.

Plan the logistics

Next, we take the goals and event ideas and create a game plan for the logistics of that campaign. We’ll study the feasibility of the effort and provide additional suggestions for events, engagement opportunities, and creative planning.

Determine event staff quantities

Last, we’ll create an outline for the staffing and management needs that will enable your plan to succeed. How many brand ambassadors will you need at each location? If you need ambassadors with particular talents or abilities — such as a loud voice or strong customer service skills — those will get incorporated into our hiring process.

What does a campaign cost?

Get a custom-built sample campaign with real targeting data, ad creative, cost estimates, and distribution plans.

Use the Project Estimator

How does Power Direct source and train your team?

To find on-site event staff, we utilize a national network of employee-led recruiters who have deep community connections.

We work with them using our detailed, streamlined training program and real-time management software to ensure your street team will accurately, enthusiastically, and positively represent your brand and support your sales and marketing goals. We also conduct background checks and the typical HR procedures you’d expect from a top promotional event staffing agency.

Common challenges of brand ambassador staffing

When planned poorly, here are some challenges you can encounter when working with brand ambassadors and street teams:

Not showing up
Not staying for the entire program
Not being motivated to serve or engage consumers or do their full job
Not upholding the brand’s reputation
Not being properly coached regarding the client’s product
Not being able to travel

How to overcome these challenges

Power Direct is usually able to solve these sorts of problems by sticking to our proven system.

If promotional staff don’t show up or stay for the entire event, this is often the result of them not quite “feeling it.” Do they really feel prepared and able to do what is required of them? If they don’t, it’s a lot easier to just not show up.

A good training program instills confidence and generates excitement about the job.

The next key to success is knowing what to look for in effective brand representatives. These jobs are best for someone you would describe as a “people-person.” Extroverts. People who enjoy life, like to talk, and aren’t nervous or shy about meeting strangers.

When you know what to look for, have a good talent pool to work with, and have an effective preparation process, you can ward off most of the staffing challenges listed above.

What happens after the event?

The details here, of course, depend on your goals.

Any data that gets collected by your street team can be sent to you in real-time by syncing your system with ours through an API. This way, you’ll have access to data and actionable tasks as soon as they get acquired and recorded.

We’ll analyze your data to determine the effectiveness of the campaign and provide feedback on how each aspect of the event performed, including the brand ambassadors.

You’ll be able to look at familiar data points such as:

Conversations/engagements
Conversions
Completed surveys
Requested samples or trial periods
Quality of customer feedback
Successfully completed outcomes
Leads generated
Signups
Sales

Why use Power Direct for brand ambassador staffing

Simply put — we know how to do what few others do.

With our technologically advanced staffing process, you can quickly scale up your experiential marketing efforts using talented teams of ambassadors you can trust to enthusiastically and accurately align with your brand.

You’ll avoid hours of HR hassles and paperwork because when you partner with us, our managers take care of all that planning and logistics.

What happens when you avoid mistakes while enjoying better results at your next event? More revenue. More engagement. More conversions. Better results. And, you get it using a more efficient, cost-effective marketing program you can brag about in your next meeting.

Want to find out more?

Use this form to submit your brand ambassador campaign idea or ask more questions that aren’t listed below in the FAQ

Brand Ambassador FAQ

How does Power Direct find top quality employees for these temporary projects?

Our staffing agency uses a national network of Power Direct employee recruiters and a proprietary process to identify, recruit, coach, and retain the country’s most professional brand ambassadors, in any location.

What do you look for in professional brand ambassadors?

We look for people who are well-spoken and project enthusiasm, professionalism, an engaging personality, a willingness to serve, and a flexible attitude. Our process also evaluates their ability to learn and talk about the products, services, and offers they’ll be presenting. A good smile never hurts, either.

How do you filter out the wrong people?

Our agency staffing process involves background checks, interviews, and an in-depth analysis of previous work and sales experience. Sometimes, we also use test projects, role play, or supervised trial periods to ensure even higher levels of success and quality service. It quickly becomes clear which brand ambassadors will be the best fit for our industry-leading event staff teams.

Who leads brand ambassador teams?

Brand ambassador teams are led by experienced, trusted, and veteran W2 employee managers from Power Direct. Some clients also like to send their own managers to assist, but in most cases this isn’t necessary.

How do you prepare brand ambassadors to represent their assigned brand?

We provide talent with training programs that develop professionalism and expertise specific to each job. This includes in-the-field learning, brand guidebooks, team zoom meetings, familiarization with any required technology, and more. As your agency staffing partner, we are happy to let you observe or assist in the preparation process.

How large is a typical team?

This varies dramatically depending on the marketing plan and the brand we’re working with. At singular events such as trade shows, corporate events, or product demonstrations, you might require just 5-10 workers. For events spanning cities, states, or larger regions and for campaigns spanning several days or weeks, you would need a larger team.

How are you able to run brand ambassador campaigns regardless of location?

Our in-house staffing agency assembles teams that are able and willing to travel as necessary. And with the national staffing network we use to provide talent, most event staff don’t have to travel very far to fulfill their commitment.