It’s been called lots of things - ambassador marketing, micro-influencer marketing, social media partnerships and collaborations - but they all mean essentially the same thing: using the influence and reach of someone else to capture a new audience and make more money! 

When you find a local ‘celebrity’ on Instagram, or someone with a very large following, they will often work with brands and businesses as an ambassador. Basically this means that there’s an agreement between the business and the influencer that the influencer will share content about the business and its products in return for discounts for the influencer. 

Whether you’re a nail technician, esthetician, hair stylist, or run a mobile spray tan studio, you can use the power of influencers to get butts in your chair. 

A recent poll discovered that 87% of people use social media to help them make a decision about buying a product or service. And who is helping people to make those decisions? Influencers, of course! 

Brittney Bennett owns the premiere sunless tanning salon in LA, Be Bronze Studio, and she is the perfect case study for how well ambassador marketing and partnerships can work for your business in the social media world. 

Before this life, Brittney was in sales in the hospitality business. She hit a point we’re all familiar with: realizing that she needed to get creative about how to make money. 

She’d gotten plenty of spray tans in the past, but had previously never considered being the one to provide spray tans. She realized that there was the potential to make a lot of money in that space. 

She took a dive and a risk, and bought a sunless tanning spray machine. She began to practice on friends, family, and acquaintances, and word started to spread about what she could do. 

Brittney’s risk paid off quickly. Before long, she was serving celebrity clients, and she was able to open a prestigious storefront location. 

Brittney is really, really good at reaching out and getting people interested in her business and in working with her. She uses a lot of different marketing techniques to do this, but working with influencers has been one of her most successful ventures. 

As a result of years of hustling hard and picking fruitful ambassador partnerships, Brittney has sprayed the likes of Lisa Vanderpump (and all of the cast of Vanderpump Rules), world-class Olympians, Sports Illustrated and Playboy models, and tons of Instagram stars - and her Instagram feed is full of people tagging her salon and her work every day. 

Brittney shares the valuable lessons she’s learned about how to do influencer marketing right, and how to know when it’s time to try a different approach, as well as some refreshing business tips to jazz up your hustle in 2021. 

How to get influencers and celebrities interested in representing your beauty business 

Brittney built her business from scratch, the right way: she started off by providing really great spray tans to her community, and the word began to spread. She worked on perfecting her craft and expanding her reach, and influencers began to come to her. 

So how do you get your name out there and build your influence, so that you have influencers and celebrities reaching out to you for your services? 

Brittney has a few very clever tips for us in this department. 

“Pinterest is a beast,” she states. Brittney uses Pinterest to optimize her backend SEO and finds it really attracts a lot of traffic to her site. 

She also says not to underestimate the timeless ‘walk-in say-hi’ approach when it comes to becoming known in your neighborhood. “Don’t underestimate the power of just walking into a place with flyers,”  she says. 

As well, she did a lot of reaching out to other local beauty businesses and offering spray tan services to the estheticians and hair stylists that worked there, offering discounts when they recommended her services to their clients. 

But Brittney makes it clear that when it comes to celebrities, “you don’t find them - they find you.” 

She explains that while networking in her area, she gave her number to a celebrity hairstylist, and provided her spray tans for a year. She built up trust and a reputation with her hairstylist client, and then one day received a text that asked, “Hey can you go spray tan Lisa Vanderpump?” 

“When people see you’re doing well, they’ll reach out.”

Reach out to micro-influencers in your own area 

Brittney says to keep in mind that influencers in your local area might look different than the typical ‘Insta famous’ model that we think of. In fact, they’re probably not ‘famous’ at all. But they have the ability to reach and possibly influence a lot of people, because they’re heavily engaged in their community. 

“I want [beauty business owners] to keep in the back of their head, ‘who is my local celebrity?’ Is it the PTA mom? Is it the woman who owns all the restaurants and has her hand in all the communities? Then you can be the ‘It Girl’ for spray tanning all the PTA moms.” 

She recommends searching local hashtags in your area like “high school”, “PTA mom”, or “mommy blogger” to begin to find local nano and micro influencers in your area. Reach out to the people you discover in your search, and offer to work together. Most times, they’ll love the chance to represent you and provide discounts to their friends and families. 

“I worked with a mommy blogger - she came in and she blew me up on [social media]. I didn't realize how big she was in the mommy blogger world. And then next thing you know, so many people came in and told me about her. So I reached out to her and I said, ’Hey, would you like a code? A lot of people are coming in.’ She's like, ‘Oh my gosh, I would love that.’”

Finding the best partnership in an ambassador or influencer 

Brittney isn’t interested in just getting anyone to be an ambassador for her business - she wants to know what they can offer her. 

When considering who to partner with or choose as an ambassador, you need to make sure that their target audience aligns with your target audience, or it’s just not going to be worth it for you. 

“Ask them for their insights. Okay, great. You have 50,000 followers. Awesome. You have 80% men. That's not going to work for me,” Brittney explains. 

As well, you need to make sure that the influencer you choose is going to play by your rules. At some point, you will have people paying to be your ambassador, but up until that time in your career, you’ll need to make a trade. And the trade should be fair, and beneficial to your business. 

“Put your terms up front. ‘You’re allowed one free spray tan a month. You have to like me on Facebook, follow my Instagram. Every time you come in, you put up two Instagram stories. If your friends mention me, they get a certain amount off their tans.’ If those are your terms, those are your terms!”  

Brittney says it’s important to know when a partnership or ambassador is not working out, and when it’s time to call it quits. 

“I was working with two girls from USC, and I had to fire one of them. I just said, ‘thank you so much, but this just isn’t working. You’re just not giving me what I need.’ And that was that. So don’t feel bad to do that, if the person’s not living up to your terms.”  

Tracking your influencer’s reach and improvement in your sales 

A common tactic for tracking whether your ambassador is having success in bringing people into your salon is to give a referral code to your influencer. They’ll give this code to their audience when they promote your product, saying that each user of the code will get a small discount for your services. 

By tracking how often this code is used in your salon, you’ll be able to calculate whether your partnership with your chosen influencer is worth the discounts you’re providing. 

“I gave a code to a girl from USC, and in the first month 15 people used the code. So that’s 15 chances to do a really good job to get more business.” 

As well, try to be the one on your salon floor providing the service to your clients as often as possible when you start a new partnership, in order to be able to ask clients firsthand how they heard about you. This will give you a sense of where your marketing is strong, and where it could use some improvement. 

Be patient, and continue to do your best work in your beauty business 

While Brittney has had a great deal of success working with influencers and building strong partnerships, she understands that the real key to her success has been her ability to really push through her fears and try new things to market her business. 

“Focus on what you’re good at. I started this just like everybody else. I didn’t come up with a Rolodex of connections. I out-hustled a lot of people. You have to keep working, keep working, and focus on what you’re good at.” 

“It takes time and work.” 

As you reach out to your local influencers, you are bound to be told ‘no’ or asked to send products for free ‘for exposure’. Don’t be disheartened, and don’t take it personally. 

Brittney has some great advice for keeping your head up and your heart full of optimism: 

“Of course it kind of stings, but you just have to get over it and keep going. Successful people didn't stop at the first ‘no’. You just have to keep going. The next one will say yes.” 

For more information on influencer marketing and how to do it right, check out my Ultimate Salon Influencer Guide.

Xo, 

Stephanie

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