C2C marketing to increase engagement, loyalty, and sales is a proven strategy. But understanding which brand ambassador platform is best takes way too much time—plus it’s confusing and frustrating.
You have to compare specializations, top features, and core benefits while factoring in scalability, user experience, and integration capabilities. On top of that, many of the user reviews out there are contradictory and out of date—the software changes, new features are added, the offering pivots, and some platforms get bought out and even change their names.
So, here’s the breakdown of GRIN vs Zuberance you need. I’ve studied the platforms, researched the help centers, and trawled through the user reviews.
You’ll find an honest appraisal of each, a summary of the key features, and an explanation of how they work to drive engagement.
🌟 Then, you can explore the alternative: Spitche’s full-service team manages the entire process of ambassador acquisition, activation, and monetization for you. Spitche will find you gold-standard brand ambassadors, drive UGC through gamification, and handle your programs, tracking, and reporting. 🌟
GRIN
GRIN is an influencer marketing platform that helps you identify, recruit, and manage your relationships with influencers. Its standout feature is the ‘discovery suite,’ which includes a database of content creators that you can filter for specific criteria like audience demographics or content style.
Once you’ve found potential influencers, GRIN has tools to help you enlist them, including customized landing pages, which you can use to collect, store, and review their applications. Working in tandem with the influencer database are the platform’s social listening tools, which allow you to monitor for brand mentions so you can track down brand ambassadors.
And user reviews mainly speak well of these discovery tools, which, along with GRIN’s consolidated messaging feature and creator payments tools, help you effectively scale your influencer campaigns.
Another area where GRIN streamlines influencer management is its influencer gifting platform, which consolidates your e-commerce stores, allows your creators to pick from a range of curated products, and then lets you use its product fulfillment feature to handle the shipping and tracking.
However, bear in mind that some recent user reviews highlight usability issues within some areas of the platform (“Authenticating influencers onto Grin for impressions and reporting purposes is quite difficult and strenuous”) and scaling limitations (“A lot of the creator content does not load [once over 250 creators] and overall data will randomly be lost in the system”).
Top features
- Influencer database
- Social listening
- Creator payments
- Creator gifts
- Product fulfillment
Zuberance
Zuberance, which was acquired by the influencer marketing brand IZEA in late 2023, is a customer-based marketing platform with tools for review management and sharing, affiliate marketing, customer referrals, and user feedback, which you can use for your UGC and brand advocacy campaigns.
With ‘Zuberance Challenges,’ you can ask followers to complete specific tasks or interactions, like posting a video review of a new product range on Instagram or encouraging them to add their testimonials to other key digital channels and platforms, like Amazon or BestBuy. You can also use Challenges to garner referrals or provide feedback for internal use, with polls and surveys.
Then, you can reward your advocates via the platform’s integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, or its “expansive gift card selection.”
Understanding Zuberance is itself quite a challenge, though—the website gives little away about the actual mechanics of its solutions. Plus there’s very little in the way of user reviews online—the most recent I could track down, from 2022 (pre-acquisition), highlighted Zuberance’s custom reporting, SEO reporting, and 24/7 support as strengths.
Meanwhile, the IZEA acquisition suggests Zuberance could be about to expand its brand advocacy tools. How long it takes for these enhanced features to fully develop and integrate, though, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Top features
- Review management
- Customer referral tools
- Social sharing
- Challenges and rewards
- Real-time engagement and performance tracking
👀 Spitche: We’ll manage your entire brand ambassador program from acquisition to activation to monetization
So you’ve grown a community, but you’re struggling to further engage users, monetize them, or tap into their potential for growing your business.
Whether this is because you lack the in-house expertise or you simply don’t have the bandwidth, you’re unable to:
- Look at the data
- Make strategic choices
- Create tailored programs
- Nurture their development
- Track and report on your results
So you need a solution that can do all of the above.
Spitche runs your entire brand ambassador program, from opt-in, to engagement, to monetization. We identify your most engaged consumers on Instagram, Facebook, and TitTok, and incentivize them to promote your brand and purchase higher quantities.
With a Spitche program, you grow your social media presence and drive UGC. Plus, you have a whole team behind you to manage your ambassador program—so you and your team don’t have to develop a new set of skills.
Spitche has software and account managers to help you set it up and maintain it with you, advising you on how to make the most of the platform. Plus, there’s customer support for your ambassadors, too.
🔧 Here’s how it works:
- Create a brand ambassador program with your Spitche team. This gamifies social media interactions with your brand using points, goals, and rewards.
- The Spitche team creates all your assets, from the landing page to the ads and emails.
- The Spitche team works with you to set up rewards, tiers, and points to get the highest engagement possible.
- Spitche invites your biggest fans to the program. Your future brand ambassadors register their social media accounts with you, and you receive opt-ins and first-party data. Your ambassadors now start amplifying content and creating UGC. This increases your organic reach, followers, and social media engagement.
- Spitch collects brand ambassador data to increase conversion rates. For example, you’ll be able to see their favorite teams or sports stars, which you can use to optimize your content.
- Review clear, easy-to-manage reporting on your campaigns. Get fast, transparent reports on engagement rates, reach, and ROI.
Our team helps you get authentic UGC about your brand, so you have the content of genuine brand lovers to supercharge your social media campaigns.
And, you can use data from your programs to track social media interactions, event participation, and product interest. Setting KPIs and analyzing metrics in Spitche is simple and will help you hone your strategy to boost audience engagement.
🎩 Top benefits
- Fully managed, gamified brand ambassador program—30% month-over-month growth of social media engagement
- Deep social media API
- Advanced UGC management
- Data gathering for integrated CRM and marketing optimization
- User-friendly interface with quick & simple program launch
- Exclusive integration with Primsell for NFT campaigns
🤩 The social-proof bit
“After 6 months, 70% of our fan base were new contacts, our social ads targeting performed above our average performance and our Index also grew. Mission accomplished!”
Laurent Dubois, L’Oréal
“Spitche has finally cracked the code for getting our consumers to talk about our brand on social media. Because of Spitche, our country market has the highest organic engagement in the entire company, and we reached a double-digit share of voice on Facebook. I’ve managed to cut back our ad spend without hurting reach or engagement—it’s a tool I wish I had started using a long time ago.”
Lulia Dirzu, Bioderma
Make more of your best customers
If there are people who love what you do, give them a reason to share it with the world—so you can tap into their communities, inspire UGC, and promote your brand in a way that resonates with your target audience.
Our dedicated team sets up your brand ambassador programs, identifies your best customers, and invites them along for the ride. Then we’ll make sure you get the most out of your campaigns, track performance, and learn more about your followers.
🐝 By turning your loyal customers into your strongest marketing asset, you can create a buzz for your brand and start driving stunning engagement metrics and ROI.