What is user generated content? You are already making use of user-generated content if your company encourages customers to share pictures of its products with the hashtag that is associated with your company. User generated content, or UGC, it’s a strategy that helps you increase customer engagement with your brand on social media.
WHAT IS USER GENERATED CONTENT
User-generated content (or consumer-generated content) is the content that customers or social media users have shared based on their experiences, opinions, and decisions, mainly about brands or its products/services.
Images, videos, ratings, reviews, gifs, audio, and other types of content that users have shared make up the user-generated content. The most trustworthy, authentic, realistic, and insightful content that is driven by the customer experience is known as user-generated content (UGC). As a result, it demonstrates the actual worth and experiences of a brand’s customers. This is what ecommerce brands need from their content – Trust, Information, and authenticity.
So, the integration of user-generated content on ecommerce platforms is the best marketing strategy for ecommerce brands to turn their struggles into success.
WHY IS USER GENERATED CONTENT IMPORTANT
User-Generated Content (UGC) is 5x more effective in driving conversions than professionally created content. It’s a powerful tool for engaging with your customers and encouraging genuine connections.
By gathering content shared by your customers on social media and integrating it into your website, eCommerce pages, and marketing initiatives through a UGC platform, you can create a dynamic social shopping experience that engages both loyal and potential customers.
Unlike traditional advertising, showcasing content from a community of devoted customers around your brand gives it a human touch that feels more genuine. This also helps potential customers see real people using your products, building trust and social proof in your store. They might even attach a picture or video to their new product, which will start a positive engagement cycle.
WHY DO YOU NEED UGC FOR YOUR ONLINE STORE
Explore a few of the many reasons why user-generated content is so valuable and must be integrated into your online store. UGC helps you achieve all of your ecommerce marketing objectives. Here’s how:
Increase e-commerce conversion
The superpower of users’ content is that it can be integrated anywhere in the ecommerce sales funnel – be it at the awareness stage, consideration stage, or decisions stage. UGC creates a complete journey to drive users towards a successful conversion.
One of the major reasons UGC is so highly influential on ecommerce conversions is that it is the most trustworthy, reliable, and authentic content in the marketing ecosystem.
Consumers look for trust signals while making online purchases, and UGC provides that perfectly with real information from real customers about the products/services. Consumers featuring user-generated content, be it reviews or visuals, can help consumers understand your brand’s credibility and explore customer experiences. If you share user-generated content that talks positively about your brand, you can turn it into an inspiration for driving sales. You can even turn your UGC into a shoppable UGC gallery and allow customers to “shop the look” as seen in the UGC gallery.
9 out of 10 people surveyed found consumer-generated content influential when they intend to make an online purchase. UGC has an immense influence on the buying decisions of customers. Be it any form of user-generated content like reviews, ratings, images, or videos – all of it can attract and influence the ecommerce audience to buy products.
Enhance customer shopping experience
Consumers highly value their shopping experience – be it an online experience or the offline real-life shopping experience. Any shortcomings or negative experiences can lead to a loss of potential customers.
However, delivering a seamless and exciting digital shopping experience is a huge challenge because, unlike offline experiences, consumer emotions cannot be studied. A great way to create a one-of-a-kind digital shopping experience is through user-generated content. On your e-commerce site, customer reviews provide potential customers with a comprehensive and measurable quality metric. Will displaying UGC galleries on ecommerce work as inspiration for consumers who want to explore how the product would look in real life? How are other customers using it? Possibilities of that product, etc. In addition, making UGC shoppable will assist in converting users’ inspiration into sales.
Builds content in your library
Content is a key component of an ecommerce platform as this will engage and convert the leads into customers. The content on your ecommerce platform needs to be planned and created for the consumers and not your marketing purposes.
Creating content is a tremendous task that requires regular investments into research, resources, time, and content creators. Moreover, content creation is a consistent process requiring consistent expenses.
The best alternative to branded content is – user-generated content. Social media is a hub of users’ content.
Having UGC at your disposal helps you reduce content creation costs like product images and videos for your ecommerce platform.
You can create a UGC hub for your campaigns by collecting all of your valuable content. The best part is UGC campaigns work like a chain reaction where they help in generating more user-generated content for your brand.
Inspires brand loyalty
Aggregating the relevant and qualitative UGC from various social networks is termed social proof. It is credibility provided by the consumers about a brand’s authenticity, reliability, and trustworthiness.
Social proof, such as user-uploaded product images, videos, testimonials, and selfies, is an effective marketing strategy for expanding your audience. People will follow the customer’s feedback and not branded content. Also, it develops the trustworthiness of the brand in the new users and retains loyal customers.
Brand loyalty is priceless in this competitive ecommerce ecosystem. User-generated content gains even more value as a result of this. Customers who publicly post content that is favorable to your brand are your brand’s fans. These people are more likely to make repeat purchases with your brand.
The content shared by loyal fans can include product reviews, testimonials, satisfying customer experiences, product images or videos that showcase your brand’s premium quality, value for money, and happy customers.
This type of content attracts new customers and creates a desire to be associated with your brand. Building initial brand image and delivering satisfying experiences leads to fostering brand loyalty, community-creation, and maximum customer lifetime value.
Promoting user-generated content also highlights the transparency and confidence of a brand in its customers. This way, UGC inspires brand loyalty by showing how highly you value your customers.
Customers’ mental models of shopping are influenced by all forms of user-generated content. This presents an immense opportunity for ecommerce brands to leverage UGC to enhance their ROI, growth, and shopping experience.
It is the perfect time to get started with UGC campaigns for your ecommerce brand. Build your ecommerce UGC campaign by drawing inspiration from the examples, thinking about the advantages you can achieve, and so on.