Have a small budget but need to grow your business and increase your visibility online?
Consider using user generated content for your business.
UGC helps businesses grow with their content developing the relationship and improving their SEO.
What's the result? You get maximized conversions and sales opportunities.
Allowing your consumers to engage with others in the same industry can be a huge win.
According to an infographic by Nicho
- 6 billion people are using social media, spending
- 4 hours consuming content from the accounts they follow
Social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, etc are where engagement takes place. Let's have a look at how UGC can lead your business with a successful powered campaign of your own.
Determine Your Goal and Target Audiences
The goal of any decision made from the digital marketing perspective is improving conversion rates. But when digging a bit deeper;
How will a branded website achieve this goal?
Whatever your goals and objectives are, they should align with the needs of your user.
So have a look at who your marketing audience is, followed by their online behaviour. What kind of content will interest them the most? Think, what are the various steps that have to be taken? What will lead your business to success?
Coffee for Less recognized that organic traffic targeted is likely to convert. The company further determined that UGC was one of the best ways they can improve SEO. For all its efforts, the organization received 6000 comments between 2008 & 2011. A study conducted by Marketing Sherpa shows reviews boosted organic traffic from 10 to 125%.
Gaining Valuable Feedback from Consumers
Feedback generated by UGC helps to understand what is good for your product & services, where it requires an improvement and what more can be done to make things better. For example reviews on Trip Advisor have a high level of consistency and it is bit surprising. Whenever there is a problem at a specific location it pops up with many reviews on the website. To get this resolved the team forward bringing a change for their good sharing their opinion. UGC gives brands a clear picture on their products & service page helping them perform better.
Encouraging Social Sharing
Encourage your customers to share their experiences with your products on social media. Begin a campaign with a hashtag, and encourage them to share images of your products in real life. UGC images add life to your product when compared to your own images.
#Madewelleveryday is a good example for this. It encourages their customers to share images with their everyday made well hashtag. They then included their favourites in the gallery section of their website. This enabled them to control featured items encouraging them to share among the networks.
Managing Online Reputation for Your Brand
The Internet has given users a megaphone for both happy and unhappy customers. You need to be proactive managing online reputation. Are there any third party review sites that are relevant to your industry? If yes then make sure you have an eye kept on your reputation. Do you have unhappy customers who have taken their experiences to third party sites?
See what is being done to address their concerns. And how you can move their issue to a private firm. Club W addressed their negative reviews they got from the packaging design change. And instead of changing it back they let everyone know about, it stating their feedback matters.
Community Creation
UGC is one great tool to connect with your marketing audience having similar interests. This creates communities through a website, social media properties which in turn generates engagement. Brands are gaining benefits from Instagram with customers sharing content with their followers. It's thus important for brands to use hashtags on this kind of networks.
Cluse, is a trendy watch brand out in Holland. They utilized Photo Slurp gallery to create a community on Lookbook. Clients were able to add images with #Cluse for images added on Instagram. They ended up on Lookbook linking to the product page of the Product.
Holding Contests
There are many ways contests are implemented. But, it is the brand that needs to decide what goal they want to achieve. Whether it's about introducing a new product, new fans, leads etc. Defining your goal makes it clear and understandable of what exactly it needs to be. Starbucks engaged their fans by creating a stunning white contest. They asked them to paint their white cups, submitting photos to social media using a hashtag. As a result, the brand received good visual content increasing social media reach.
Marketing Trendy Social Issues Evoking User Generated Content
Addressing cultural and social issues is a rewarding tactic for brands to do. When executed well, these topics awake customer emotion encouraging user generated content.
The Clif Bar and Company began with a #MeetTheMomentCampaign. The campaign was on raising awareness about environmental concerns donating to several non-profits through a hash tag. They supported the campaign outdoor adventure making it relevant to users and marketing audiences. It was a huge success. Your campaigns need to remain genuinely focussed on content and issues you are addressing. You need to inspire audiences allowing them to try your brand making them feel part of your picture.
Sharing Real-Time Content from Live Events
Live feeds and social sharing from popular events seems to be a perfect twitter campaign. Instagram is for users having moments from events like concerts, festivals, and live occasions. Go Pro began with #promoting Go Pro at events and highlighting images at the Bonnaroo Music Festival where the fans share images from their cameras. They asked to share experiences from an event republishing content on Instagram and Twitter. Sharing content from events related to business, brands can capitalize on trending topics. Your audience can also relate to your business maximizing your efforts.
Increasing Your Conversions
Any potential customer who sees a common friend on a website is a few clicks away from a buy. This is one primary reason for increased attraction towards user generated content. Fashion Pills, an e-commerce website sees an increase in product page increasing conversion by 4.5x. Since launch, via UGC linked to the product pages through shop this look function.
Social Proof in the Form of User Generated Content
Using UGC social media strategy you are providing customers proof while making a purchase. Consumers are willing to know how your product looks and what benefits they gain from it. People satisfied with the buy are creating content making your brand much more attractive. Studies have shown 50% of social media users search for UGC before they go ahead and buy.
Builds Trust in Your Brand
For most brands, UGC is a way to placate a talkative customer database. Listening and responding to your customers helps brands to improve customer service conversions. Gaining access to consumer opinions gives an opportunity to improve your product or services. This allows for speedy resolution of issues with planning ahead of time. Responding to negative feedback on your website is impactful. This demonstrates that you value each consumer you are dealing with, assuring them that you are willing to go ahead to extra lengths to make things better.
Conclusion
You will have to understand and know about UGC setting things out from the beginning. It is important to understand who owns content created on different forums, posts and so forth. You cannot stay away from it no matter what. If you are using your own content, then don't use others promoting your products and services. The amount of credibility you lose is astonishing. And it continues to happen faster than what you actually think. UGC does have the ability to change everything for your business online marketing.
Photo Credit: Unsplash