User-generated content is no new development, but there are so many ways you can use this to bolster the power of your e-commerce brand.
If you’re not seizing these key opportunities, you’re definitely falling behind the curve. You want to make sales, right?!
This win-win tactic is highly beneficial to brands whilst simultaneously making your customers feel more valued and ingrained in the brand experience.
The audience is doing the heavy lifting for you, whilst engaging with your brand and creating genuine content that is built on real opinions and experiences.
If you’re not sure where to start with using user-generated content for your e-commerce brand, we’ve compiled some ideas to get the ball rolling.
How to’s
Implementing an on-site blog gives you a great place to host your content which details tips and ideas around your product and industry. But some brands effectively utilise this to host user content. This then integrates natively into the shopping experience, in the same way, we would view product description.
These resources can be tagged and aggregated into relevant product pages to support the buying experience through learning. The content doesn’t feel forced or ‘salesy’ because it’s another customer who has created it. It also feels more natural to customers in the same way a peer would recommend a product based on their experiences.
The most visual of all social media platforms, Instagram is a great place for e-commerce brands to make themselves known. From tagging a photo with a brand to featuring user content on your brands feed, buyers are able to see what they are actually buying instead of highly posed and edited product shots. The likes of micro-influencers able to drive massive ROI and sales for brands they love.
The approach of utilising user-generated Instagram content is the capability to be overall more honest with customers as well as offering alternative styling tips or uses, for example, which your official product shots aren’t able to convey.
Video
Video content, similarly to Instagram content, allows you to show your product in motion. Video can encapsulate a number of topics, which could be the product in use, how-to’s, tutorials, demos or any other uses they can think of.
It’s a lot harder to be fooled by video, particularly when it’s user-generated, which means that what they see is what they get. It can also inspire customers to make a purchase based on how the user in the video integrated the product into their lifestyle.
Tutorials
At the point, where a customer now has some products in mind to meet their requirements, you can use tutorials to better nurture the relationships between visitors and brand.
A tutorial is great for demonstrating how to carry out activities using your product and from a customer perspective, with little to no prior knowledge, this demonstrates the usability and what they can expect.
Demos
One of the most well-documented customer experiences on social media at the moment is receiving a product which looks and behaves nothing like how it was portrayed on the website. From clothes to tech, customers are sick of opting for a value option which ends up offering them nothing remotely close to the real thing.
A demo video, created by a customer, is a great way to demonstrate to buyers exactly what they are getting. Whilst pictures and descriptions can tell a buyer a lot of things, a buyer demo video can show them exactly what they can expect outside of the photography studio.
Product copy
Who knows your product better than the people who use it every day?! Team this approach with humour and you could land yourself some seriously captivating product description, written by real people, about real experiences.
A bit of creativity can add excitement and intrigue to otherwise dull and functional product descriptions. Use quotes from customers to inject realism and use notes from customer service feedback to make your copy more relatable, human and captivating.
User-generated content for my e-commerce brand
If you’re still not sure of how to get started with user-generated content or you can’t figure out quite how to align it with your brand activity, get in touch with us today. We’ll work closely with your e-commerce brand to decipher the best way to integrate this creative and cost-effective marketing tactic into your current strategy.
Also published on Medium.
