What Does User-Generated Content (UGC) Mean?

What does UGC stand for? User-generated content can be content of any type and usually comes in the form of images, videos, social media posts, reviews, or testimonials. 

When Coca-Cola brought out their personalized coke bottles, the world went crazy for them. Dubbed the “Share a Coke” campaign, this personalization craze took off all over the world with bottles named after people in every different destination.

To keep the momentum going, customers were asked to share pictures of themselves enjoying a drink with their personalized coke bottle on social media channels. The result? Coca-Cola’s customers stepped into the role of the advertiser.

This wasn’t just a one-off campaign or a fancy fluke.

Instead, it is one of the thousands of UGC campaigns that brought the business it promoted millions of revenue and a whole new image.

“The next wave of the Web is going to be user-generated content.” –
John Doerr, Venture Capitalist.

But what is UGC (User-Generated Content)?

User-Generated Content is defined as any type of content that has been created and put out there by contributors, users, visitors, guests, customers, brand fans, even creators. UGC can refer to pictures, videos, reviews,  testimonials, tweets, blog posts, and everything in between and is the act of users promoting a brand rather than the brand itself.

So, UGC sounds like another one of those marketing buzzwords, right? In fact, it isn’t a fad at all. It’s been burning brightly for a while (well, a while for the fast-paced world of the internet).

Let’s take it back a few years for a moment to Burberry’s Art of the Trench UGC campaign. At that point, brands were adopting the idea of their fans promoting their business – because word-of-mouth referrals are the best kind of referrals, even in the digital age.

Burberry asked its loyal fans to upload pictures of themselves and their friends wearing the brand’s iconic trench coat. All Burberry had to do was curate the best submissions, which they showcased on a dedicated microsite and their Facebook page.

When you consider that 86% of millennials  (Trend), and 68% of social media users between the ages of 18 and 24 take into account information shared on social media when they make a purchasing decision (eMarketer), it’s easy to see why UGC is so powerful.

What makes User-Generated Content Successful (and Why You Shouldn’t Ignore it)

Obviously, UGC campaigns have been a constant player in the marketing world because they are so successful (see Share a Coke campaign).

But why are they so successful? Why are brands turning to their audiences to share their products instead of crafting their own ads?

UGC Puts Customers Front and Center

Customer-orientated businesses are on the rise because companies constantly have to keep up with the changing trends of their audiences. In this fast-paced, digitally-run world, attention spans can be snapped away with the click of a finger. If brands aren’t catering solely to their customers, their customers will simply find another brand that is.

Online users are becoming increasingly savvy in knowing which companies are using slimy marketing tactics, and which ones are being authentic and transparent.

People Don’t Trust Marketers, They Trust Real People

This brings us to the next point. In the past ten years, the idea of the sleazy marketer has risen to unprecedented heights. The average Joe in the street is no longer impressed by pushy sales tactics.

Instead, they crave stories, they crave connection, and they crave interaction with other humans, with real people (a byproduct, perhaps, of the increasing amount of time we spend in front of a computer screen?).

In reality, we’ve been buying into UGC for centuries, but there are now social media platforms to make it more accessible across the globe. And, when you discover that a whopping 92% of people are more likely to trust a recommendation from another person over branded content, it’s clear to see how far the trust between people and marketers has stretched.

User-Generated Content is Authentic

In a study run by Cohn & Wolfe, 63% of consumers said they would rather buy from a company they consider to be authentic over a competitor.

Authenticity is so important in today’s online world. Customers are no longer passive consumers led by TV commercials and billboards. Instead, they’re active choosers of their own fate and want a say in who they do and don’t buy from, even ambassadors for marketing brands they care about.

But how do they choose who to buy from? They opt for brands that have the same values as them, brands that they can connect with on a human level, and brands that “get them.”

UGC Creates Community

UGC brings audiences together. Instead of it being an “us” against “them” situation, where brands are constantly trying to win consumers over, UGC brings everyone together in one big happy family.

People like to feel a part of something. In a 1986 theory penned by MacMillan and Chavis, there were four things that encouraged people to feel like part of a community.

1. Membership
2. Influence
3. Integration and fulfillment of needs
4. Shared emotional connection

Points 2 and 4 are of particular interest to UGC. Influence has to work both ways – members also have to feel like they have influence over the community, an element that UGC puts on the table.

Shared emotional connection is pushed through UGC, too. MacMillan and Chavis stated that healthy communities have a story, and this is what brings them together.

UGC is Cost Effective

UGC is all about the users creating content. In most cases, they’re unpaid and do it for a number of reasons, whether it’s to share their experience, build a connection with like-minded people, or have a chance of winning something.

This, obviously, is considerably cheaper than forking out thousands – or even millions – for prime-time TV commercials and Times Square billboards.

The beauty of UGC is that the users run the show, while marketers don’t have to empty their pockets on campaigns that may or may not perform well.

UGC ROI is High

According to ComScore, brand engagements rise by 28% when consumers are exposed to a mixture of professional marketing content and user-generated content.

Take the Starbucks’ White Cup Contest as an example. Customers were encouraged to doodle all over their white Starbucks cups and post their images as entries for a competition to find a template for a limited edition Starbucks cup.

Nearly 4,000 customers submitted entries in just three weeks, showing that people were ready and willing to engage with the brand.

Where Does User-Generated Content (UGC) Come From?

Knowing that user-generated content can be used from the very start of your marketing strategy to the end (even after your highest tier conversion), the question becomes: where and how do I get UGC?

Since UGC comes from your fans and customers, it’s a matter of finding their promotional content and organizing it to find the best content based on what you need it for. You can either find UGC (usually using social media) or create a direct submission where customers can send content to your brand during contests and campaigns.

TINT’s User-generated content platform can collect, organize, and find the highest quality UGC to use in your upcoming campaigns. Discover all the UGC available and  easily find quality content to use in certain parts of your marketing funnel or differing campaigns. Without a platform like TINT, finding UGC can take hours and your cyberstalking for customer content isn’t promised to end in results. You might be able to find some content based on brand-wide hashtags, but you’ll end up leaving a lot of UGC on the table that isn’t explicitly tagged with your branding.

Three ways to get customers to create user-generated content:

1. Motivate customers to create UGC during certain parts of the buying journey
2. Create beautiful experiences, physical spaces, and unboxing events that people are more likely to share
3. Ask customers to create UGC in return for a prize

Let’s take a look at these to understand when to use them.

Motivate Customers To Create UGC, or “Customer Generated Content”

Think of customer generated content as the part of your marketing strategy that you always want to be turned on. You always want customers to promote your products as they receive them and use them. The key is making sure that you’re helping your customers create UGC.

More than half of consumers (50%) wish that brands would tell them what type of content to create and share. Take a look at the most exciting parts of the buying journey and create a call to action for your customers to take UGC. Here’s where to start:

1. Immediately after purchase
2. When they receive their product/service
3. After they get the results from their product/service

Motivate customers to create UGC by giving them an easy tweet on Instagram Story to share after they’ve made a purchase. For eCommerce brands, add a note with the shipped product that tells customers to share their unboxing experience – and send them an email a few days (or weeks) after receiving their product asking them to share their feedback on social.

These are just some examples of how you can get customers to create UGC, but depending on your brand you can come up with the specific strategies that work best for your customer persona.

TINT can help you find and request rights to content your users and customers are creating about your brand.

Ask Customers To Create UGC In Return for a Prize

This is an important part of your UGC marketing strategy. When you run UGC contests, you’ll be in full swing asking customers to share their content in a specific way with the hopes of winning a special prize from your brand.

For example, Chipotle created a UGC campaign on Tiktok with a prize of 1 year of free Chipotle. They asked their audience to participate by making a TikTok video explaining why they should win the free year of Chipotle with the hashtag #ChipotleSponsorMe.

This isn’t a campaign that runs every day—this is the type of campaign to run a few times a year to increase brand awareness through the UGC created by campaign participants. You can run prize campaigns simultaneously alongside your ongoing UGC strategy.

Where Does User-Generated Content (UGC) Fit Into Your Marketing Strategy?

UGC is truly omnichannel and can be used from top-of-funnel to bottom-of-funnel content. Brands use UGC to increase brand awareness and sales because it’s one of the few marketing materials that work well at each stage of the customer journey.

Forty-eight percent of customers claim user-generated content is a great method for them to discover new products and there’s a 29% increase in web conversions when websites featured user-generated content.

It’s these statistics that motivate brands like Coca-Cola, Burberry, and Starbucks to focus on user-generated content campaigns—the more they can get their customers to do the promoting for them, the higher their sales. Better yet, the less time and money they have to spend on advertising campaigns.

When you have customers creating content for you (that you can use in your content marketing strategy, social media strategy, email strategy, etc.), you don’t have to pay for huge product shoots and campaigns, and the teams necessary to help them run smoothly. Campaign costs take a steep downward turn and brands can allocate those resources towards getting their UGC seen by a larger audience that wouldn’t have been available if they’d had to spend more than half of their marketing budget on campaign shoots and teams.

What about content generated by employees?

User-generated content isn’t just for B2C brands—B2B brands also see success with UGC in their marketing strategies. We can see this in the personal brand revolution that has taken over content marketing. Employee-shared content gets 8 times more engagement than content shared by brands.

Employees may get up to 10 times more followers than a brand’s corporate account and get more organic social engagement. These are the numbers that turn B2B marketers’ heads—customers want to see the faces behind the brand, including customers or employees.

What about content generated by UGC creators?

Aside from improving brand awareness, engagement, and sales, user-generated content also fits in post-conversion. After a happy customer has made their purchase, getting featured on a brand’s Instagram feed or retweeted builds the post-purchase relationship between the brand and the customer. It’s this interaction that furthers future customer loyalty, as they get to interact with the brands they love so much (instead of admiring them from afar).

When you open up your Instagram feed to UGC photos or see brands retweeting their customer’s tweets—it’s not an accident. It’s a strategic move to increase brand awareness, trust, and sales while decreasing how much money needs to be spent on content creation.

After all, everyone is an influencer.

How User-Generated Content (UGC) Changes Influencer Marketing

UGC utilizes influencer marketing to create micro-awareness moments for your brand that compound to increase conversions. When we say “influencer marketing,” we don’t mean spending your entire marketing budget on getting a Kardashian to promote your brand. The focus isn’t necessarily on huge mega-stars—it’s on the nano and micro-influencers that have engaged audiences. These are the average people deemed more trustworthy than celebrities turned brand ambassadors.

A nano-influencer can be a student with 1,000 Instagram followers that are only their friends, family, and acquaintances. When this student applies to a university and gets in, they become an influencer when they post an Instagram story holding their acceptance letter.

That Instagram story is user-generated content. All influencers technically create UGC and everyone that creates UGC is technically an influencer. With seventy percent of consumers trusting online peer reviews and recommendations more than professional content and copy—the use of influencer marketing is becoming less of an option and more of a necessity.

For example, when Delta promotes a happy customer’s tweets talking about their new safety regulations while flying during COVID-19, consumers are keener to see the customer talk about it than Delta itself.

You can also use professional influencers to promote your products. These are people with influence in a specific niche and a highly engaged audience (7% engagement minimum). 

A micro-influencer has 10,000 to 100,000 followers and has most likely worked with brands before. The benefit of working with these influencers is their expertise in the space. They’ve built an engaged audience and they’re able to leverage their social platforms as a channel for advertising. It’s their job to showcase new, relevant products to their audience that they would be interested in too. Using micro-influencers, you can create more brand awareness for your products, conversions, and user-generated content from the influencer that you can continue to use in marketing materials in the future.

A nano-influencer has 10,000 followers or less. They’re generally a tastemaker, a community expert, or a social butterfly, and that’s what has garnered them an audience. The pro of working with nano-influencers is that they might not consider themselves an influencer. They might just feel like a normal person who happens to have grown a decent social media following, and this means their profile is less of a channel for advertisement and more of a channel for entertainment. With nano-influencers, even though their following might not be that high, they tend to have higher engagement than micro-influencers or mega-influencers—which can result in more conversions.

It’s these influencers that brands can use, getting the influencer to review their products instead of creating a fancy promotional video that does it themselves. Seventy percent of consumers trust online peer reviews and recommendations more than professional content and copy.

Types of User-Generated Content (UGC)

With an understanding of where UGC fits into your marketing strategy and where it comes from—it’s time to look at the types of UGC available. There are three types of content that you want to focus on as you increase brand awareness and sales:

1. Visual UGC (Photos and Videos)
2. Testimonials and Comments
3. Reviews

Let’s take a look at these three types of UGC.

Visual UGC (Photos and Videos)

Visual content is the most common type of UGC and also the most engaging. For example, when Chipotle asked their customers to create TikTok videos explaining why their customers should be sponsored by them, they created a lot of engagement and a lot of visual content.

When a customer shares a photo or video of their new product on social channels, they’re creating visual UGC. Similarly, when a guest takes a photo of the sunset from the pool at the hotel they’re staying at, that’s visual content, visual UGC.

With TINT, brands are able to collect all of the UGC created by happy customers and use it in the future as needed.

Testimonials and Comments UGC

Testimonials and comments are generally going to come post-purchase when the user has received their product or the benefits of the product. For example, a class or program is going to want to get as many UGC videos of their happy students as possible so they can continue to promote their program.

Users with happy customers on comment-friendly platforms (like Twitter or Facebook), can use customer comments in their marketing materials. The key to using testimonials and comments is to ensure that you’re sourcing the most helpful for your future and potential  customers.

Reviews UGC

Reviews are left on product pages or business pages and are a huge part of product success. Seventy percent of consumers will consider UGC reviews or ratings before making a purchasing decision. Reviews are best left below products on their product page, where somebody at the bottom of the funnel can read the review so they can feel knowledgeable and ready to make the purchase.

You can also use reviews in your top-of-funnel strategies to create awareness for the quality of your products or services, but ensure all relevant reviews make their way as close to the buy button as possible.

So what’s the best type of UGC to ask your users for?

The answer is all three. You always want an incoming stream of new user-generated content that can be used in future marketing materials. Since those materials will require different types of UGC—having plenty of options for each type of UGC will be massively beneficial to all future campaigns.

User-Generated Content (UGC) Best Practices

Just like having all three types of UGC on hand is best practice, there are a few more best practices to be aware of as you start your UGC strategy.

Choose the most effective social network for your brand

Brands don’t need to create content on every single platform available to them. Instead, they need to focus on the platforms where their customers can be found. 

For example, a clothing boutique doesn’t necessarily need to put its time and resources towards having a Twitter presence—that time is better allocated towards Instagram. 

You don’t need to be everywhere. The best practice for choosing the best channels for your brand is to go with the obvious channel first and prioritize it. Then, add in other channels as your time and resources are able to prioritize secondary channels. Give each channel set metrics it needs to pass to be deemed successful. If it passes them, then continue growing on that channel. If it doesn’t, then look for other channels to test your content on.

Use different types of UGC on specific channels

Each type of UGC is going to serve a purpose in specific parts of your marketing strategy. For example, a UGC photo of a customer enjoying their stay at your hotel is going to work great on your Instagram and website pages, but a review is going to be ideal under your booking or product pages.

The key to a successful UGC strategy is figuring out what platform each type of UGC is going to work best on. Generally, you can assume that the platform the UGC came from is a good platform to continue to use. For example, if you get an Instagram video from a happy customer—with the right legal permission you can use that video on your Instagram feed.

With that said, the highest use case for UGC is to incorporate beyond the original platform and use it on your website, screens, email, other social media platforms, and even in print. UGC works well because it’s not company created, so as your marketing team works with UGC and adapts it to other platforms (email, websites, screens, events, etc.), they can leverage that same authenticity that made it work so well in the first place. 

Use UGC in content marketing campaigns

While UGC can be used across all of your marketing campaigns (traditional and digital), there’s a big opportunity to leverage it in your content marketing campaigns. This is because UGC is content. All you need to do is keep repurposing it so that it can be seen by a larger audience and increase your brand awareness.

This is where TINT becomes really useful. Instead of having to find UGC and sift through to find the highest quality—you can use TINT to have all of that work done for you. As you, or your marketing team, pull UGC to use in your content marketing campaigns you’ll be able to find exactly what you need.

When you use UGC in your content marketing strategy, don’t forget that each piece of UGC can be used for a different purpose. One customer might have done a great job of creating UGC that’s perfect for top-of-funnel awareness, while another customer has the perfect video for bottom-of-funnel conversions. Figure out what pieces of UGC fit into specific parts of your funnel so you can make sure to use them at the right time.

User-Generated Content Marketing vs Traditional Marketing

Consumers are considerably less passive than they used to be when it comes to advertising. They’re now more active in the decisions they make, who they “social listen” to, and who they choose to buy from and engage with.

These days, buying traditional ads both on external media and online is a competitive game (and, even if you pull out the big bucks, you still might not catch the attention of your customers).

Add that to the fact that consumers are actively choosing to bypass ads (take pay-to-play streaming platforms like Netflix and the rise of ad blockers) and are more likely to click through to a site if they see a friend recommend it, and you have a solid argument for UGC to augment traditional marketing efforts.

UGC works as social proof, too. One study shows that 79% of consumers admitted to trusting online reviews as much as in-person recommendations. That’s a huge metric.

Think for a moment about the ALS Association Ice Bucket Challenge. The charity challenge went viral for a few months, increasing awareness of the ALS Association (which not many people knew about beforehand) and bagging the company $100 million in donations. No small feat.

However, it’s also important to acknowledge the risks of UGC marketing. The most critical of which is properly managing the legal rights to photos. A couple of high-profile cases demonstrate the potential damage that mismanagement of UGC can cause to both the bottom line and to a brand’s image.

The Best User-Generated Content Examples from Brands

Let’s pull this all together by diving into some brilliant UGC campaigns.

Lululemon #thesweatlife UGC Campaign

Yoga clothing brand Lululemon wanted to bring their audience together and create a community around their business. They came up with #thesweatlife campaign, which encouraged their customers to post pictures of themselves in Lululemon gear on Instagram.

“We created the program as a way to connect with our guests and showcase how they are authentically sweating in our product offline,” says Lululemon brand manager Lesia Dallimore. “We see it as a unique way to bring their offline experiences into our online community.”

In the first couple of months, the brand notched up over 7,000 photos of its customers (or “brand ambassadors”) on Instagram and Twitter, and the unique #sweatlife gallery which was created especially for the campaign received more than 40,000 unique visitors.

Chipotle Cultivate Festival UGC Social Wall

Chipotle’s branded festival used UGC to bring its crowds together and promote the different elements of the brand and the festival.

They pulled together social shares, images, and videos onto a single page, where visitors to the festival could scroll through and relive their memories after the festival had ended.

Throughout the weekend of the Chipotle Cultivate Festival, which took place in San Francisco, the brand racked up more than 1,200 social posts and a whopping 3 million impressions. What’s more, over 37.5% of the visitors scrolled through the TINT social wall to load more content from the weekend.

Belkin Lego iPhone Cases UGC Campaign

Belkin ran a UGC marketing campaign that included people’s favorite gadget – the iPhone. Partnering up with Lego, they asked customers to create cases for their phones using customizable Lego blocks.

They then posted the images onto Instagram using the hashtag #LEGOxBelkin. This is the perfect example of customers doing the selling for the brand because this simple but effective marketing method showed potential buyers just how cool, diverse, and trendy Belkin cases could be in an organic and authentic way.

NASDAQ Omnichannel UGC

NASDAQ is a strong supporter of UGC content, using it across many of its brands including Virgin America, ETSY, Zebra, and Biogen. They use it to accumulate and bring together social content at social events and other important calendar dates.

NASDAQ uses TINT across a number of different channels when they’re running a big event, meaning the social shares get seen on large screens in Times Square and TV monitors all over the world.

“What makes TINT the best is it allows us to easily approve content on the go from the app,” says the Director of Integrated Marketing at NASDAQ, Joshua Machiz.

And that’s another reason UGC is so important. In such a fast-paced, constantly changing online landscape, content needs to be quick and on-trend. Instead of spending months and millions coming up with an advertising campaign that might be out of date by the time it finally airs, UGC marketing allows brands to stay on the ball and stay current with their customers.

Brands can constantly be in touch with their audience, which means they stay at the forefront of their minds.

The power of UGC is easy to see, and there’s no doubt that we’ll be seeing much, much more of it in the coming years as brands tap into the power of their audiences and take a step back from pushy sales tactics.

Want to learn more about how to maximize your ROI with user-generated content? Get a free strategy session with our team here.

The post What is User-Generated Content: Complete Guide to UGC appeared first on TINT.

Celebrity endorsement was once the “it” thing.  Brands like Coca-Cola thrived off these partnerships, and they worked. Actors, musicians, athletes, and celebrities of all stripes fought to get those brand deals. Fans were quick to consume cereal, beverages, and content that featured their favorite star.

When social became part of our everyday lives, a new type of influencer endorsement emerged. These newfound social media influencers had 100,000+ followers and a newsfeed with perfectly placed products—and it worked.

But then, we saw the rise in another new type of influencer that doesn’t have a six-figure following. These influencers are people with hundreds or thousands of followers who likely don’t even consider themselves ‘influencers.’

Marketers used to agree, but this year, they’re no longer thinking that way. In our 2022 State of User-Generated Content Report, we surveyed boutique to enterprise businesses to see how their marketing did in 2021 and their plans for 2022.

Marketers are happy to work with mega-influencers who have the engagement to back up their following—but they’re also focusing in on the influencers that used to get passed by for brand deals.

Here are the 3 types of influencers to leverage in 2022.

3 Types of Influencers That Can Promote Your Brand

“Brands are realizing that overproduced content is always going to perform less than content that feels more organic, natural, and human-centered. That’s why you see platforms like TikTok working so well – because on TikTok, you might see an ad and not even know it’s an ad.”

 

Jayde Powell, Head of Social, Sunwink

Customers

Mega-influencers with 100,000+ followers can make a great video about your product (after signing a contract with your brand). The problem is consumers trust content created by people more than brands: 72% of consumers believe that reviews and testimonials submitted by customers are more credible than the brand talking about their products (SOUGC)

As soon as a viewer sees #ad or realizes this influencer was sponsored to talk about this product, the content becomes branded. 

When happy customers create organic content because they’re excited about their product—there’s no brand involved. When someone sits down to eat at their favorite restaurant and takes a photo of a volcanic dessert, unboxes their new king-size mattress from a deceivingly small box, or shows the backend of their new software tool, they create user-generated content. This UGC leads to higher engagement and conversions and is exactly the content marketers are seeing consumers trust over branded content.

Nano-Influencers

Nano-influencers have 1,000-10,000 followers and used to be looked over for brand deals. Brands focused on the more glamorous types of influencers: big-name celebrities or mega-influencers touting 100,000+ person followings. In 2021, we’re seeing leading brands realize the power of the nano-influencer. 

Seventy-five percent of marketers are currently working with small (less than 1,000 followers), nano- (1,000-10,000 followers), and micro-influencers (10,000 to 25,000 followers).

Not only are nano-influencers more cost-effective than celebrities and high-profile influencers, but marketers are finding they have a stronger connection with their audience. Nano-influencers can get more engagement (by percent) on a post than an influencer with 10x the following. These influencers have more pull with their audience and, because they have more of a niche following, can connect with brands they know their followers are interested in.

Employees

In recent years, we’ve seen a few brands start to place their employees as influencers for their brand. More companies began to talk about who was behind-the-scenes, even giving their employees time to shine through company-generated content. Our 2022 State of User-Generated Content Report finds that 52% of communications + HR teams regularly use employee-generated content (EGC) in communications channels.

EGC is re-shared up to 24 times more when distributed by employees instead of a brand and can get 8 times more engagement than brand shared content. We’re finding that employees can get up to 10 times more followers than a brand’s corporate account and get more organic social engagement. Employees can establish more marketing channels and touchpoints for consumers to connect with brands they love.

Check out Guide to Employee-Generated Content for more.

Guide to Employee-Generated Content: What Is It, Why You Need It, and How To Do It

These are the 3 types of influencers brands can leverage in 2021 to increase engagement and conversions. Nano-influencers can get paid to create content for your brand and you can ask your employees to create behind-the-scenes content or to share your content across their social platforms. How do you get customers to create content for your brand?

How To Get Customers To Create Content You Can Repurpose

Tell Your Customers, Fans, and Employees What To Create

More than half of consumers wish that brands would tell them what type of content to create and share. Brands that clearly define what content to create, when to create it, and how to share it can turn their customers into genuine brand advocates.

Encourage customers to create UGC by asking them to post on Instagram as they unbox their product, to share their new purchase as a Tweet, or show themselves using your product and, of course, use your custom hashtag strategy to tag it. 

Incentivize Customers To Create UGC

Another way teams can obtain more UGC is by running campaigns and contests that reward fans and customers for creating and sharing their best content.

If you’re just starting and don’t have any UGC examples to show them, create your own so your customers know exactly what you’re looking for. By featuring UGC across your marketing channels, you’ll inspire more of the user-generated content you’re looking for by modeling the exact sort of behavior you’re looking for.

Influencer marketing in 2022 is changing. Celebrities and mega-influencers are not the only influencers, and sometimes they’re not even the best fit for your products. By using customers, nano-influencers, and employees as influencers for your brand—our State of User-Generated Content Report shows that you’ll be increasing content engagement and conversions.

The State of User-Generated Content report cross references survey results from both marketers and consumers. Get the need-to-know insights on your audience to improve your marketing strategy. Download here.

If you don’t have a way to find, collect, organize, and redistribute UGC and organic influencer content across your digital and in-person marketing channels, schedule a demo with a TINT team member today.

The post Influencer Marketing in 2022: 3 Types of Influencers To Focus On appeared first on TINT.

So, it’s no surprise that even more marketers plan to use UGC in their marketing strategy in 2022. But many brands count themselves out of UGC, thinking their audience and customers aren’t posting about their brand or it’s too large of an ask from their users. If only they knew the untapped potential they’re missing out on and the impact user-generated content can have.

If you aren’t yet sold on the significance of UGC, here are 4 concrete ways user-generated content impacts businesses in 2022.

What Are 4 Ways User-Generated Content Impacts Businesses?

As a little recap, user-generated content is a photo, video, testimonial, post, or comment your audience or customers create about your brand and products. It’s the happy unboxing video they share to their Instagram Story when their package arrives, the tweet that says they’re so excited to be accepted to their dream university, and the TikTok of their burrito order at Chipotle.

It is created every single day, as people (you included!) share your life online with your friends, family, and followers. Instead of letting that UGC float around aimlessly on the web, you can capture it and use it to market your products and services.

The best part? UGC has many tangible business impacts. It helps get more engagement than brand-created content, is more likely to get people to hit the buy button, saves time and resources, and increases the likelihood of more UGC so you can see even bigger and better results.

1. UGC Engages Your Audience
2. UGC Makes Consumers More Likely To Purchase
3. UGC Saves your Marketing Team’s Time, Budget, and Bandwidth
4. UGC Increases the Likelihood of *More* UGC

#1: UGC Engages Your Audience

While your colleagues may not always agree that getting engagement should be a key objective, marketers know all too well the business impact that engagement has. It indicates if your content is resonating with your audience and whether or not it’s pushing them further down the funnel. It can also be an indicator of whether or not your audience trusts your content. As we discussed in How to Increase Engagement and Boost ROI in 2022, the pathway from engagement to ROI usually includes trust, connection, and relatability. Those three elements can be the difference between an attention-grabbing ad that a consumer looks at but scrolls past, and a scroll-stopping ad that actually gets clicks.

In our 2022 State of User-Generated Content report, 60% of marketers said their audience engages more with user-generated content than brand-created content. Why? Perhaps it’s because their audience finds it more credible and trustworthy. 72% of consumers believe that reviews and testimonials submitted by customers are more credible than the brand talking about their products.

UGC is more trusted by consumers than brand-created content, which represents a huge potential for improving the sought-after engagement that brands want. So, how can your brand cash in on this untapped potential of high engagement? Here’s one way.

Get Your Audience to Engage by Making Them Feel Included By Your Brand

One way to engage your audience is to make them feel included, and one way to make them feel included is to showcase people that they relate to. People want to hear real stories from company leadership, happy users, and diverse voices to feel that they can connect with brands. Consumers want to buy from brands that reflect their own values and worldviews. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are incredibly important to today’s consumers.

Take Chipotle for example. Chipotle recently won a Shorty Industry Award for Best Overall TikTok Presence. Here’s the thing—their TikTok strategy is centered around sharing user-generated content. By making their audience feel included in their brand, by resharing customer TikTok’s to Chipotle’s account, they’ve garnered 1.7 million followers and 34.9 million likes on TikTok.

#2: UGC Makes Consumers More Likely to Purchase

Of course, the Key Performance Indicator that your leaders care most about is revenue. Engagement is great, and user-generated content is great, but does it actually bring in revenue and close sales? Thankfully, the research indicates “yes”!

When consumers engage with content they trust and find credible, they’re more likely to purchase:

• Consumers are actually 62% more likely to click on customer content rather than branded content.
• 76% percent of consumers have purchased a product because of someone else’s recommendation (even a stranger’s!).
• 77% of shoppers are more likely to buy from brands that personalize their shopping experience (which UGC does!).

People trust…people. When somebody they relate to, either through age, demographics, ethnicity, job title, etc. recommends a product or brand, that testimonial feels more believable than a brand-created commercial with the little words, “paid actor.” 

Consumers are looking for shopping experiences that signal that this product works for *them*. Personalized shopping is becoming a bigger part of the customer journey—and with UGC it doesn’t require complex CRMs.

Related article:

Social Commerce – The Definitive Guide to Selling More Online with Social

How can your brand cash in on this untapped potential of more purchases?

Personalize The Shopping Experience with UGC

Personalized shopping experiences don’t have to come with a stack of data about every single one of your prospects and customers. With UGC, you can personalize the shopping experience by showing your audience, prospects, and repeat customers how other customers have liked your products. Kora Organics links customer reviews to their product pages to create a personalized shopping experience.

With this review, an online shopper with ‘combination skin’ will know this product works for their skin type. That’s personalized shopping…without the need for an intricate CRM platform.

#3: UGC Saves your Marketing Team’s Time, Budget, and Bandwidth

Making your own content takes time, money, and team resources. Instead of planning a product shoot, spending tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) on deliverables, and spending weeks editing them for publishing—you can grab the content your customers are already creating. Better yet, this content gets more engagement and conversions than brand-created content!

With UGC, you’re saving the time it takes to plan, shoot, and edit your own content, 5+ figures of your budget, and giving your team more time to focus on their compounding to-do lists. From buying a new grill to seeing blue whales on a tour, UGC for your brand exists. It’s a matter of tracking down that content, organizing it, and repurposing it across your marketing channels as needed. How can your brand cash in on saving time and bandwidth?

Use Content From Contests to Fill Your Social Calendar

To get the ball rolling with UGC, launch a contest asking your audience and customers to take photos and videos for your products and brands (69% of consumers report that they have participated in a brand contest or giveaway). Be clear about what you’re looking for, tell them exactly how to submit their UGC, and add a prize to sweeten the deal. GoPro has been running social contests for years, asking their customers to share their photos and videos with hashtags and submissions to win money, gear, and exposure on their marketing channels.

Seventy-three percent of consumers agree they wish more brands would run contests or giveaways. With TINT’s Experience Builder, you can launch social contests and campaigns within minutes.

#4: UGC Increases the Likelihood of *More* UGC

By now, we’ve learned that UGC increases engagement, makes consumers more likely to purchase, and opens up your team’s time, budget, and bandwidth for other projects. With more and more UGC, these results increase. Thankfully, UGC leads to more UGC.

Sixty-four percent of consumers agree when brands they like re-share content by customers, they are more likely to share content about the brand or its products. UGC is a flywheel—ask for UGC, post-UGC, get more UGC. We can see this from the rise of micro and nano-influencers, who will happily share their favorite products and brands with their small audiences (and even have higher conversion rates than mega and macro-influencers!).

Remember Nathan Apodaca, the micro-influencer who took a video of his commute to work on his skateboard drinking Ocean Spray? His video went on to garner 84.4 million views, get promoted by Ocean Spray, and spark a trend of replicated TikToks. There’s an influx of UGC as content creation has opened up to the masses and more people feel comfortable sharing their experiences with companies. By publishing moderated, on-brand UGC, you’re telling your audience exactly what you’re looking for—just like Ocean Spray did with Nathan’s TikTok (feeding into the viral trend of copying his video and adding a twist). How can your brand cash in on the untapped potential of more UGC?

Ask Your Audience and Customers For The UGC You Want

All user-generated content isn’t created equal. Some UGC comes with too many typos to reshare on your brand accounts or the lighting just doesn’t suit your Instagram feed. Show your audience and customers what UGC you consider “brand-worthy” by publishing the kind of photos and videos you’ll proudly put on your platforms. If you’re struggling to find brand-worthy UGC, tap into the power of TINT’s UGC Studio to do the hard work for you.

TINT helped TechCrunch’s Disrupt event marketers inspire UGC from their attendees through digital signage that shared their tweets on large screens. By showing attendees what other attendees were tweeting, TechCrunch showed their audience exactly what they were looking for from UGC that could make it on the big screens.

TINT’s Digital Signage also strategically promoted how people were tweeting about the event, inspiring TechCrunch’s Disrupt attendees to make their own UGC sharing their experience. 

How is User-Generated Content Impacting Businesses in 2022?

It has been impacting businesses for several years. The only difference between the past and present is the amount of UGC brands have available and how well aligned UGC is with consumer trends. Consumers are asking for:

1. Personalized shopping experiences
2. Deeper connections with brands that share their values
3. Testimonials from customers over brand-created content
4. Diversity, equity, and inclusion
5. Social media to spark their brand relationships

UGC is the perfect way to personalize the experience, deepen connections, share testimonials, embrace DEI, and spark relationships. Meanwhile, your business will be getting more engagement and purchases while freeing up your marketing team’s time, budget, and bandwidth. All the while, it will inspire even more UGC, creating a continuous cycle of positive business impact and a happy audience.

We covered these 5 consumer trends of 2022 and the 7 marketing themes that will impact every marketing strategy (from retail to digital) in our Annual State of User-Generated Content Report.

Download the report here to learn what’s on the marketing horizon for 2022.

The post 4 Ways User-Generated Content Impacts Businesses in 2022 appeared first on TINT.

In 2020, the biggest challenges for marketers were time and team size, likely due to COVID-related layoffs. Now that companies have recovered and marketing teams have grown, here are the biggest challenges faced by marketers today in 2022, according to the State of User-Generated Content report:

1. Lack of an ideal budget
2. Publishing high-quality content consistently
3. Getting engagement from their audience
4. A never-ending time crunch.

Every year, as more content channels come onto the horizon, marketers add more and more to an already full plate, and 2021 was no exception. Unfortunately, most teams don’t have the time or budget to keep up with content quality and engagement.

So, what’s the solution?

Let’s take a closer look at the top challenges faced by marketers today and ways to solve them.

Challenges Faced by Marketers Today

In the midst of the pandemic, marketers struggled with time and team size. Talented marketers lost their jobs and the ones that kept working felt the pressure of a smaller team, yet an increased focus on more content, engagement, and larger ROI.

Since then, many companies have recovered from COVID-related budget cuts and nearly half of the marketers we surveyed increased their teams in 2021. For others, the problem is: they can’t hire fast enough. With 20 million people leaving their jobs during the Great Resignation of 2021 and unemployment at an all-time low, hiring is difficult, competitive, and slow. But it is happening. 

Meanwhile, now that teams are bulking up and there’s slightly more time on marketers’ hands, their top challenges are budget, content quality, engagement, and time.

1. Budget

55% of those we surveyed said their organization’s marketing budget did not increase in 2021. They’re having to navigate the challenges of getting more engagement and more ROI, on more platforms, using new media, without more money. This is their biggest challenge.

2. Quality of Content

The second biggest struggle is publishing high-quality content consistently. 60% of marketers take the time to format content for all screen sizes and social media platforms. If it’s not optimized, they’d rather not even post.

3. Engagement

60% of marketers feel pressured to continually produce greater amounts of content at a high frequency. This could be to keep their engagement rates high and stay relevant to their audience.

4. Time

47% of marketers agree that it takes their team too long to create content. This lack of time to do everything that they need to do is their fourth-biggest challenge.

Despite shifting challenges over recent years—UGC remains the constant. It’s what continues to solve the biggest challenges faced by marketers today.

3 Consumer Trends That Help Solve Marketers’ Biggest Challenges

In our State of User-Generated Content Report, we asked consumers how they engage with brands and discovered 5 consumer trends. We found 3 places where marketers’ challenges and consumer trends align, relieving you and helping make your job easier. 

Here’s what can help solve three of the biggest challenges faced by marketers today, while providing consumers with what they want most.

(Looking for how to increase engagement based on consumer trends? Check out “How to Increase Engagement and Boost ROI”)

No Budget? No Problem. People Want Personalized Shopping Experiences

Consumers want personalized shopping experiences. 

We know what you’re thinking. That sounds like a lot of work, which is the last thing a maxed-out budget can handle.

But wait a second. When your audience asks for personalized shopping experiences, what they mean is photos and videos of your products ‘in the wild’, and a chance to see what prior customers have to say about your brand. It’s personalized because it’ll show how people just like them interact with your product or how it looks on bodies like theirs, in environments they’re familiar with, with real lighting.

All of this is available to marketers, without the need for a massive budget or CRM platform keeping track of each customer’s interests and purchases.

The Solution:

You can create a personalized shopping experience through user-generated content. With UGC, your customers can share their experiences with your brand and products, and you can highlight their voice across your platforms. When a happy customer leaves a review on a pair of jeans they loved—you can show that review to prospective customers interested in the same product.

With UGC, your brand isn’t spending money on expensive photoshoots. You’re just gathering the content your customers were happy to make for you—and repurposing it on specific channels to create a personalized shopping experience.

How to Take Action:

Send follow-up surveys and requests to leave reviews on products. Your chances of getting a response are strong: seven out of ten customers are likely to post on social media after having a positive experience with a brand. 

Read more on how you can incentivize your customers to send over UGC.

Example:

Abercrombie & Fitch personalizes their shopping experience by sharing UGC reviews on product pages. As customers online shop, they can read through reviews to find UGC from somebody with a similar height, weight, and waist size that can attest to how well these jeans fit. How much more personalized can online shopping get?

Need More High-Quality Content? Great! People Want to Connect More with Your Brand

Consumers want opportunities to engage with brands they love. In fact, 60% of consumers wish that more brands would tell their fans and customers what type of content they want them to create.

The more that brands ask for UGC, the more that consumers will provide it. 

The more that consumers see brands sharing UGC, the more likely they are to share something themselves.

Does it take time to find and engage with this content? Sure. But it results in thousands of pieces of UGC that you can use to fill content calendars on the various channels that they already exist on, which saves you from having to create the content yourself later on.

“But they’re not high-quality,” you say. It may be time to rethink the meaning of quality. Quality does not need to mean high-definition photos from a professional photographer. Quality means what will help you build trust, grow engagement, and increase sales. And that’s UGC. Videos taken on a smartphone still garner more engagement than a $100,000 branded product shoot.

The Solution:

Photos, videos, testimonials, comments, and feedback are all over the web regarding your products. Use them. Consumers want to create connections with brands they love, and with Rights Management, you can automate asking customers for rights to their content so you can use it on your own channels. (We told you, each of these consumer trends removes tasks from your to-do list). Not sure where to start with implementing all the UGC you have? We can help! Book a demo with us.

How to Take Action:

Take social content from your community and embed it in your own channels. Find a platform where you can see all the content created about your brand in one place, make sure they suit your branding, and automatically repurpose them across your marketing channels. 

Example:

New York Times Bestselling author Ramit Sethi strategically posts user-generated content reviews of his book I Will Teach You To Be Rich. His strategy of amplifying his happy customer’s voices has garnered his brand 211,800 followers on Twitter.

More content, with less work—it’s like we can hear you breathing a sigh of relief.

No Time to Produce Ads? Great. “The Informed Consumer” Doesn’t Want to See It, Anyway.

The informed consumer isn’t sure if they trust paid ads and influencers. At this point in advertising, most people know when a brand is trying to sell them something. Six out of ten people feel neutral or don’t trust paid ads and 78% of consumers feel that they can tell when a brand is advertising to them.

This sounds like bad news for marketers. It means you have to work *way* harder to get your audience to trust you, right? 

That’s certainly an available strategy, but it’s guaranteed to eat up your budget and have you working late nights. Instead, we suggest looking at what consumers are really saying. It’s something along the lines of, 

“We don’t trust your paid ads. We want to see real people talking about your brand and products.”

The Solution:

Let your customers build trust and ad content for you. User-generated content saves you the time spent researching and writing copy, reformatting graphics for various platforms, and the budget of not paying for staged content shoots, and it’s far more likely to convert than your brand-created content.

How to Take Action:

 If you haven’t already created a snowball effect of UGC coming your brand’s way, use incentives to get your audience to make content about your brand and products. Once you have the rights to it, you can use it in paid ads in addition to organic content.

Related: How to Get More UGC From Instagram

Example:

Chipotle built their entire TikTok presence on repurposed UGC. The food chain currently has 1.7 million followers and has even won two Shorty awards (which honor ”the best of social media and digital”): the Shorty Industry Award for Best Overall TikTok Presence and the Shorty Industry Award for Best Consumer Brand. And all they do is repurpose their customer’s content. 

Bonus Example:

Canon Europe, a subsidiary of Canon Inc. used TINT’s Experience Builder to run a contest to engage “a younger generation of storytellers that mainly used their phones to share stories on social platforms.” Canon’s goal was to promote their products to Millennials and Gen Z with the hope of showing them how to tell stories with cameras, instead of just smartphones. Through the contest, the Canon team was able to get:

• 67% of entrants under the age of 30.
• 43% of entrants opted-in to future marketing from Canon
• 22,000+ page views on the entries featuring Canon products and information.

All while collecting 20,000 UGC photos that can be repurposed across their marketing channels indefinitely.

“TINT has made it really easy for our Social Media Managers to curate locally relevant UGC. This means they use their own language for the outreach and include country-specific T&Cs. Not only does this help Canon with governance and GDPR compliance, but it also protects the users’ rights and privacy.”

— Thessa Heijmans, European Social and Media Relations Specialist, Corporate Communication & Marketing Services, Canon

Solve Your Biggest Marketing Challenges With UGC

Marketers are struggling. Thankfully, there’s a way to fix the biggest challenges faced by marketers today.

Better yet, there’s a way to ease marketers’ job obligations and align with consumer trends to create a win-win scenario. The photos and videos your audience and customers are taking garner more engagement than the brand-created content that took 10x the amount of time, effort, and budget to put together. And it’s what consumers prefer to see.

The challenges that marketing teams are facing is one topic that we cover in The State of User-Generated Content 2022 report. To see even more consumer trends, marketing themes, predictions for 2022, and tips on how to use UGC, download the report.

The post What Can Solve the Biggest Challenges Faced by Marketers Today? appeared first on TINT.

Direct-to-consumer marketing initially seemed to go against the laws of buying decisions. People would always want to lay on a mattress before buying it, right? A safe assumption has turned into a completely wrong perspective. It turns out people are more than happy to buy a mattress on the internet (as long as there’s a refund policy involved) and the proof is in the profit.

Casper used social media, paid ads, and user-generated content to take their 2014 founded startup to $100 million in sales in less than two years. It’s one of the hundreds of thousands of DTC brands, like Allbirds, Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, and Bonobos, that have shaken up retail, taking what was once a heavily offline retailer experience into an online customer journey.

The direct-to-consumer trend wasn’t a rocket that took off in one moment. It was the hare that used consumer sentiment and current events to edge its way into a competition for retail brands and eventually became an essential part of their business model. Social commerce has further accelerated the trend.

Why Should Retail Brands Care About Direct-to-Consumer?

Direct-to-consumer eCommerce sales reached $129 billion in 2021, up from $111.5 billion in 2020.

Apparel brands like Nike are “…doubling down on our approach with Nike Digital and our owned stores, as well as a smaller number of strategic partners who share our vision to create a consistent, connected, and modern shopping experience.”

Legacy brands like Nestlé are looking at direct-to-consumer as added shelf space.” Nestle’s North America Executive VP and CMO Antonio Sciuto explained to Think Google, “We need to think about search with the same obsession that we think about our store shelving. It’s exactly the same.” Their DTC marketing strategy has shaped into subscriptions for their products like Nestea and San Pellegrino.

As established consumer brands turn to digital, it’ll continue to push customer expectations towards online retailers. Two out of every five Americans have already purchased directly from a brand or manufacturer online, and e-commerce customers will  reach a new high of 103 million by 2022.

Shopify Plus covers Molson Coors Beverage Company’s shift to direct-to-consumer (sparked by the COVID-19 2020 pandemic). Their D2C strategy ended up growing sales by 188% month of month.

Without the need for brick-and-mortar rent, in-person employees, and the necessary technology and equipment to run a store, the profit margins for D2C are higher than that of in-person shopping experiences. Add a subscription model and retail brands can see a higher customer lifetime value and potentially more frequent orders as customers lean into the convenience of at-home delivery (while getting customer insights they never had access to before).

Direct-to-consumer is becoming the obvious choice for retail brands, but the question is: are you ready to make the shift?

Checklist: Should You Go Direct-to-Consumer?

Going direct-to-consumer is more complex than setting up a website and hitting publish. Backend fulfillment and technology have to get situated before you can confidently take a brick-and-mortar retail business online.

#1: Is your goal to increase sales, customer lifetime value, and order frequency?

With DTC, you’ll be able to manufacture and ship your products directly to your buyers, increasing profit margins and customer lifetime value (thanks to marketing strategies we’ll outline later). The DTC model creates more touch points that lead to brand loyalty (and more customer data!).

Retailers are adding online stores to their mix and going direct-to-consumer faster than ever before.

#2: Do you have a supply chain and fulfillment process that can handle online orders?

Your fulfillment process will have to integrate with your brick-and-mortar store and your online store. If both stores use the same inventory, your brick-and-mortar store needs to notify your online store of quantities for different SKUs.

Figuring out this process ahead of time is crucial to ensuring your online store gets a good reputation. If the customer experience involves sending “Oops, we’re actually out of stock!” emails after they’ve purchased, you’ll lose their trust, which is a huge part of the online shopping experience.

Only go direct-to-consumer when your fulfillment process can handle both your brick-and-mortar store and your online store—or suffer the logistical and brand damaging consequences.

#3: Can you set up an online store?

Setting up an online store for D2C can be easy thanks to marketplace platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce. But, it’s still a question of whether retailers should outsource, build on a marketplace, or take on the entire project. By outsourcing, you can get your online store set up and work through the kinks faster than trying to figure it out yourself, but this is only the start of the journey and there are thousands of variables to take into consideration.

Depending on the products you sell, you also might need to bring in another fulfillment center. You can work with a local wholesaler or look on marketplace sites for the products you’re looking to sell. (Your online store can sell far more SKUs than your consumer retail brick and mortar stores could ever hold in inventory.) Walmart started doing this years ago.

Set up your online store to be secure, fast, easy to navigate, and trustworthy.

#4: Are you ready to hire expert DTC marketing help?

Your DTC marketing strategy needs to be constantly improving, there are always areas that can be optimized. To get more eyes on your store through SEO, content, and paid ads, and drive higher conversions you’ll need the help of a team of experienced digital marketers. One important element of a high impact DTC marketing strategy is UGC. Adding user-generated content across your website and product pages to make your site more trustworthy. UGC in emails such as abandoned cart notifications can turn an “almost sale” into a converted sale. And UGC in organic and paid social ads can attract new customers while rewarding and recognizing your repeat customers.

The goal of marketing your online store is to bring more awareness to your brand, traffic to your website, and conversions. It’ll also help establish customer loyalty, as your content adds more touch points to your customer experience. Unless you have a large, loyal audience—getting your online store off the ground might take some time.  One way to accelerate this is to work with a team of digital marketing experts that have experience in driving results for online consumer retail stores. Regardless, social commerce and paid social ads should be at the top of your list as you invest in marketing.

Here are a few specifics you’ll want to consider when marketing your online retail store.

How Do Direct-to-Consumer Companies Approach Marketing?

Just like Casper, Nestle, and Nike, your approach to marketing your online store is based on the successful strategies of the DTC brands that paved the path before you. Their strategies have brought in billions of dollars in consumer purchases, showing exactly what a brand needs to make an online sale.

Strategy #1: Use micro-influencers to spread awareness

DTC’s and traditional retailers alike are tapping into the power of micro-influencers to share their message. A micro-influencer has less than 100,000 followers, high engagement, and a niche audience. They have more pull with their followers than influencers with a million-person audience (even A-list celebs!) with a 7x increase in engagement compared to mega influencers. Eighty percent of social media Livestream viewers say they’re likely to buy a product as a result of the endorsement of their favorite influencers.

Glossier has been using micro-influencers for years to grow its Instagram following and to sell more products. What initially started as a beauty blog has turned into an established online beauty commerce business that is now adding brick-and-mortar stores to its portfolio. Founder and CEO Emily Weiss explained to Entrepreneur that “70% of online sales and traffic comes through peer-to-peer referrals.” Glossier continues to add micro-influencer content to their social media and product pages to increase engagement and conversions.

Strategy #2: Ask customers to make content

If you have any amount of customers, user-generated content about your brand is being created every day. Choosing to leverage it in your marketing strategy or to let it expire on social media is a marketing choice (make wise choices!). UGC can be repurposed across marketing channels to drive greater results.

• Ads based on user-generated content receive 4 times higher click-through rates and a 50% drop in cost-per-click compared to average ads.
• One-quarter of search results (25%) for the world’s biggest brands are links to user-generated content.
• Forty-eight percent of shoppers claim that user-generated content is a great method for them to discover new products.

CBInsights shows the comparison of responses on social media to BarkBox and their established competitors like PETCO, PetSmart, and Pet Supplies Plus. Their favorites and replies far surpass those of any of their competitors.

Successful DTC brands like BarkBox brilliantly repurpose this user-generated content into content for their social channels. CBInsights compares BarkBox’s content to PETCO’s below, showing how UGC can drastically improve content quality (while reducing content production costs).

Strategy #3: Measure the right DTC metrics

Direct-to-consumer metrics and retail metrics aren’t the same. DTC success isn’t quantified in the same way that retail success is (although you’re aiming for revenue in both cases). While retail metrics look more like daily sales, with DTC you can create more predictability around how many people will visit your online store each day. Based on your content marketing, search engine optimization, and paid ads, you can figure out how many site visitors you need per day to get your average order volume.

That’s the beauty of a D2C model. While attaining that predictability will require the help of a marketing professional, you can turn an unpredictable offline retail store into a predictable online D2C store—while continuing to work in-store.

BigCommerce shares four metrics for eCommerce brands to focus on:

• Purchases
• Repeat purchases
• Average order value
• Lifetime value of revenue

With TINT, brands increase on-site purchases by adding user-generated content to their marketing funnels and use Attention Score to ensure that they are using the very best visual content.

What Happens if D2C marketing is Just a Trend?

Direct-to-consumer saw a huge spike thanks to COVID-19, a spike that led to 10 years of eCommerce growth in only 90 days. As Shopify Plus’ Global Director of Marketing, Hana Abaza explains, “During the pandemic, direct-to-consumer brands with thriving ecommerce experiences were able to very quickly and easily pivot their marketing and messaging, their energy. They didn’t have to fundamentally rethink their business model. They could focus on very different things because they were at a significant advantage.”

But does that mean direct-to-consumer is around to stay? Or will brands use time and resources to create online stores that will become irrelevant in a few years?

Technology will continue to shift the online shopping experience. Online shopping has yet to decrease in growth in the past five years, so it would take an opposite-of-COVID-19 Black Swan event to change consumer habits. What we may see in the future is a lack of websites in direct-to-consumer. As Facebook and TikTok create in-app shoppable experiences, retail brands might not need to pay their annual website subscription service to make sales. While this could reduce friction, it could also develop data problems in the future—as apps control the data you have over your customers.

We’ll have to wait to see how commerce plays out, but until then, we know what’s working today. And that is UGC.

Schedule a TINT demo today to learn how to drive DTC marketing results.

The post Should Your Retail Brand Go DTC? appeared first on TINT.

Smartphones and social media have further accelerated this journey, placing purchasing decisions and consumer resources at the fingertips of shoppers… literally. This democratization of marketing strategy has put user-generated content front and center.

Now, marketing campaigns are about turning the customer journey into a new experience. It is no longer about who has the prettiest advertisements. It is about brand awareness, using the voice of fans who drive this content strategy through their contribution of user generated content like product reviews and visual content that add authenticity to the experience.

This customer journey is a slight deviation from the marketing and sales funnels taught in Business 101. Now, a consumer goes from brand awareness to buying from that brand in record time. Social commerce takes place both on- and off-network. Potential buyers gauge popularity through the lens of customer trust and the connections they make with relevant content creators.

Marketers can now spend less time stuffing keywords (*pro tip: don’t keyword stuff) and instead activate brand advocates whose loyalty should be showcased across social media platforms and content campaigns.

Users and Customers Are Telling Your Brand Story

A marketer’s role used to be figuring out how to tell a brand’s story in a way that perfectly resonated with their ideal customer. They did this with owned content creation like TV ads, magazine ads, billboards, and product placement in movies and tv shows. Social media gave brands the chance to have a new owned channel. With this channel, the brand could post what they wanted when they wanted, without paying a massive premium to get it seen by their ideal audience.

Add in Facebook’s decision to monetize through ads, and these brands suddenly had access to consumers in the place they spent most of their time. Online.

This was when the story started to move out of the marketers’ hands and into the consumers’ hands. The voice of a company doesn’t have to be an overly-curated brand voice developed in a marketing bullpen. It can shift into the voice of your actual customers.

With user-generated content, brands can post their customers’ experience during the buying journey and let those customers tell other ideal customers why this brand is perfect for them.

User-generated content (UGC) is a photo, video, testimonial, feedback, or comment that customers create during the buying journey. It can be a photo of their confirmation email with text saying, “Can’t WAIT for this to arrive!”, a video of themselves unboxing their new package, or a 5-star review on the product page about how happy they are with their purchase.

The user-generated content customer journey is the brand story, told from the customer’s perspective. And, it’s proving to produce oversized ROI.

How To Use User-Generated Content in the Customer Journey

There are three steps along the buying journey that are generally the most exciting for a customer:

1. When the customer first purchases a product or service
2. When the customer receives their product or service
3. When the customer experiences the benefit of using the product or service

These steps are the most shareable experiences in the buying journey because they’re the most exciting. Customers are more excited when they first purchase than three days later while they’re waiting for the purchase to arrive at their doorstep. As a marketer, it’s important to focus on how to amplify and share the excitement across these 3 critical steps of the customer journey with UGC.

Fifty percent of consumers want brands to tell them what type of content to create and share. With customers telling the brand story, the marketer’s role has shifted from developing content to curating and highlighting that narrative.

When the customer first buys a product or service

As soon as a customer purchases a product, you want to make this moment as easily shareable for them as possible. You can do this by adding plugins and widgets to your after-purchase thank you pages that let customers share their new purchases with the click of a button.

This button opens up their social media profile populates their Facebook post or tweet with content to share. Medium has this feature, making it easy for their readers to share content to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Take a look at how they pre-populate a tweet so it’s ready to share, without the user having to do any heavy lifting.

Content is the name of the game as your users share their purchases on social media. Collect it, tag it, and keep it organized in your UGC Studio to redistribute when you’re ready. Be sure to ask the user permission to share their content and have them agree to your terms and conditions.

Now that you’re collecting a stream of content from excited customers you can use this as content in your own customer journey. You’ll show this content to cold leads and warm leads to use social proof to transition them into hot leads.

Coca Cola, UGC, and the Customer Journey

Before UGC rose to prominence, the most accelerated customer journey was created by brands using viral marketing techniques to try to get their prospect’s attention. They wanted their customers to know who they were, what they did it for, and what the benefit was; quickly and in flashy ways.

For example, Coca-Cola’s iconic celebrity endorsements from Britney Spears, Lebron James, and Penelope Cruz used to have to do the selling for them. Coke’s goal was to show their ideal customers that all the cool kids were drinking their soda, so they definitely wanted to drink it too.

The ad campaigns were curated by marketers who told the story of coke in a way that used to work really well. Today, we’re seeing a shift in consumer buying behavior. Seventy percent of consumers trust online peer reviews and recommendations more than professional content and copy.

They don’t need a Super Bowl-style ad to convince them to buy a product. They need a customer or influencer to tell them why they should care about this product.

Here are a few places you can use UGC a customer creates right after purchasing a product:

• Paid social ads
• Organic social media posts curated to nurture your audience
• Engagement email campaigns
• Nurture email campaigns

When the customer receives their product

Once a customer has received their product, the customer journey shifts. They’re no longer wondering what it would be like to experience having this physical or digital product. They’re living through the experience, and they’re excited about it.

This is another perfect opportunity to ask your customers to share their perspectives. For physical products, you can ask them to make unboxing videos or take photos when using it for the first time. For digital products, you can ask customers to share their feedback after reading the first chapter of your digital book, create a video after watching the first module of a workshop, or tag you in a tweet during a virtual event.

The key is to be specific about what you’re looking for. Just like the customer journey, you want the UGC creation experience to be as frictionless as possible. If you make it easy for your customers to create UGC for you, they’ll happily oblige.

Casper and UGC Unboxing Magic

Casper asked micro, nano, and mega influencers to help them share their brand’s story. The story is simple: order a mattress, have it delivered to your doorstep, unfold it, and get a great night’s sleep.

People were given discount codes to share with their audience and Casper asked them to share videos of themselves unboxing their Casper mattress. Here are 3 unboxing videos (of many) with 59,000 views, 140,000 views, and 75,000 views.

Here are a few places you can use UGC a customer creates when they get their product:

• Paid social ads, especially retargeting
• Website landing page
• Email campaigns promoting offers
• Organic social posts with direct call-to-action to buy

When the customer experiences the benefit of the product or service

The last exciting moment of the customer journey is when someone benefits from the product they bought. We say “last” loosely, as there are more exciting moments to come (like upgrading or becoming a loyal customer for years to come). For now, we’ll stick to the simplest version of the customer journey: the excitement that comes from purchasing, receiving, and experiencing the benefits.

This is a crucial part of the customer journey to document. At this point, you’ll want to be asking your customers to send direct feedback about their experience with their purchase.

This could be by asking them to leave a review for the specific products they bought, incentivizing them to share a video testimonial, creating a content series that promotes sharing themselves using their product, etc.

Harry Dry from Marketing Examples reached out to his Twitter audience, asking them to leave feedback about his marketing newsletter as a reply to his tweet. This is a great example of asking for UGC: Harry created a simple, seamless way to create UGC that didn’t require a ton of effort on the user’s side.

yo! mind doing me a favour?

I’m trying to fill my new newsletter sign up with real quotes

If you find Marketing Examples (@GoodMarketingHQ) useful mind commenting a few words below

thank you for any help pic.twitter.com/yXkp49JSMq

— Harry Dry (@harrydry) July 27, 2020

Harry uses these testimonials on the landing page for his email newsletter:

Even though results are created at the end of the buying journey, you can use this UGC with cold leads, warm leads, and hot leads. The key is to find the results-based UGC that fits the current stage in the customer journey of a cold lead, another set of UGC that fits warm leads, and another that fits hot leads. With TINT UGC Studio, it’s easy to organize the UGC that you’ve collected to deploy on exactly the right channel and exact step of the customer journey to make the most impact.

Here are a few places you can use UGC created by a customer at the time when they experience the benefits of their purchase:

• Paid social media ads
• Product pages
• Emails
• Organic social posts

A Quick Summary: The Role of UGC in the Customer Journey

We’ve covered three critical steps for user generated content in the customer journey. Learn more strategies to incorporate UGC into all aspects of the purchase lifecycle and the important role of social care in our webinar with Hootsuite.

The user-generated content customer journey lets your customers’ voice do the selling for you. While elaborate advertising used to drive massive conversion, customers have stopped looking towards highly productized content to decide if they want to buy a product. Instead, they’re focusing on product page reviews and other content that drives authenticity.

Thanks to social media, brands can use customer photos, videos, testimonials, feedback, and comments to drive real results:

• Ninety-two percent of consumers trust recommendations from other people, even if it’s people they don’t know
• Forty-eight percent claim that user-generated content is a great method for them to discover new products
• Ads based on user-generated content receive 4 times higher click-through rates and a 50% drop in cost-per-click compared to average ads

The user-generated content customer journey is all about accelerating buyer intent, increasing discoverability, and creating influential brand advocates everywhere. Learn about incorporating UGC into your buyer’s journey, talk to our content experts today.

The post User-Generated Content and the Customer Journey appeared first on TINT.

Strategically using social commerce is critical to ensuring that your brand can attract and retain customers. More and more people are shopping online and nearly every social media platform has made online shopping features available.

What is social commerce? 

Social commerce considers the entire customer lifecycle as it happens on your social media channels. People can discover your brand, explore products, and even purchase directly on the app – no need to redirect them to your website to buy.

It’s no secret that making your customers’ purchasing experience as easy as possible leads to more sales. If a potential customer needs to go through too many steps to purchase, they might give up on the whole idea and not buy.

That’s what makes social commerce so convenient. Customers go through minimal steps, experience minimal friction, and still discover and purchase from your brand. 

Why should you care about social commerce? 

Social Commerce is here to stay. The world has shifted and eCommerce now accounts for almost a trillion dollars in annual spending in the U.S. alone. Combine that with a major increase in the expansion and usage of social media in the aftermath of 2020.  While your website is part of the shopping experience, social commerce gives you another platform to convert customers. Websites and social commerce go hand-in-hand in creating a five-star experience for your audience.

An omnichannel approach, including social media, websites, and maybe even hosting a webinar or creating a video, will help you reach all of your audiences’ shopping personalities – from the impulse buyers watching an Instagram video to the analytical shoppers that need to study every detail on your website before they purchase a product.

Nearly every social media platform has a way to include commerce as part of your marketing strategy. From Facebook Shops to Instagram Checkout, the possibilities are almost endless on how you can use social media to promote your brand.

Let’s not forget that an active and engaged community on social media can lead to customer loyalty. After all, 53% of Americans who follow brands on social media are more loyal to those brands.

Don’t underestimate the power of customer loyalty. Ensuring a strong relationship between you and your customers on your social media channels can lead to more revenue for you. 65% of your company’s business comes from existing customers, so it’s not a relationship you can afford to lose.

How can you make new customers into lifelong fans using social commerce? 

While social commerce can be used for awareness, consideration, and conversion stages of the customer lifecycle, it can also be used to retain customers (and turn customers into raving fans). 

Let’s take a look at 2 different strategies you can use to boost customer loyalty.

1. Encourage UGC

User-generated content (UGC) is key to recognizing your customer’s experience and providing social proof to your audience that your product is well-liked by people like them. 93% of marketers agree that consumers trust content created by customers more than content created by brands. People trust people. 

UGC can expand your audience to new people. When someone posts about your product on their Instagram story, there’s an opportunity to reach potential customers. Now that a new audience is aware that you exist, the next step in their journey would be to check out your brand’s Instagram profile. But that might only happen if the original sharer tagged you in their Instagram Story in the first place. So how can you encourage people to tag you?

Re-sharing UGC on your profile can encourage your customers to tag you in their posts. When customers constantly see that you interact with your audience and share their content, they will be inspired to join in on the fun.

You could also promote a specific branded hashtag and ask followers to use it. This can make it easier for you to find posts that contain your brand and interact with your existing customers.

Let’s take a look at ModCloth, an online clothing retailer. The brand’s Instagram account asks followers to put the branded hashtag #MyModCloth on their social media posts. This strategy encourages people to take Insta-worthy photos of themselves in ModCloth clothing. In return, ModCloth features these UGC photos on their Instagram story.

2. Implement a loyalty program

Social Commerce Specialists know it’s not enough to get new customers. They need a plan to earn more revenue through their existing customers. These strategies usually include repeat purchases, upsells, and cross-sells. But there’s one strategy that stands out because not only does a business get more revenue, but it leaves your existing customers feeling appreciated.

Enter the customer loyalty program. Implementing a loyalty program amongst your existing customers encourages them to return to your business. This often forgotten piece of a marketing program is a phenomenal way to use social commerce to boost loyalty.

A customer loyalty program rewards customers for purchases or engaging with your brand. One popular option is for customers to earn points which can then be redeemed for discounts, free gifts, or exclusive access to new products. 

To automate this process, you could use different social media tools, which also help with data and analytics tracking to make sure your social commerce campaigns are actually working – or adjust accordingly. Here’s an example by one of the most well-known examples by Starbucks.

Starbucks has one of the most popular loyalty programs. The coffee company makes sure that their customers are using it though. It implemented “Star Days” for a whole week and every day had a new reward for customers using the Starbucks loyalty program.

Star Days built on the current relationship with their customers – whether or not they were participants in the loyalty program. Notice how the social media post had two call-to-actions; the first is asking existing customers in the loyalty program to check out the app, and the second is encouraging people not in the loyalty program to join.

The strategy was to continue to build relationships with their customers and encourage them to participate in the loyalty program. It’s fair to say that Starbucks has many happy and returning customers.

Final thoughts 

Attracting new customers is important, but you could earn far more revenue by using social commerce to boost loyalty among your audience with a unique ability to blend building relationships while selling products at the same time.

You can use these strategies to reward your audience with recognition, five-star customer service, and loyalty program benefits. They will pay you back in kind with glowing reviews, user-generated content, and lifelong loyalty. Request a demo today to learn more

About the Guest Author
Raul Galera is the Partner Manager at ReferralCandy and CandyBar, two tools helping small and medium businesses run customer referral and loyalty programs. He’s been working in the tech sector for the past seven years and regularly writes about marketing, eCommerce and tech.

The post Using Social Commerce to Boost Customer Loyalty appeared first on TINT.

It started with master marketers like Joe Ades in the street using storytelling and visuals to paint the picture of what life would be like if you owned his potato peeler. Now, it’s a bit more sophisticated—but it is built on the same foundation.

What is Visual Content Marketing?

Visual content marketing uses images and videos to show consumers what a product can do for them. Thanks to social media even the smallest brands have a way to amplify their voice and message.

Social has driven visual marketing through the roof. There are 95 million Instagram photos posted every day. If it took you 30-seconds to read up until this point in this article, more than 30,000 Instagram photos just got posted while you were reading.

And that’s only one platform. With Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, TikTok, and Pinterest garnering their audiences of hundreds of millions of users—visual content marketing is growing by the second.

The question is, how do you create visual content that stands out in a loud, chaotic social media environment?

Visual Content Trends

Visual content marketing has been around for years. You may remember the old L.L. Bean catalogs that used to show up at our doorsteps, Marlboro’s Marlboro Man, and any number of automotive posters that are now yellow with age. These have been replaced by social feed.

There are a few differences between what used to work well in visual content marketing and what works well now. 

#1: Company-created content vs. User-generated content

Back in the day, highly produced visual content by companies used to be the only way to create visual content. Nickelodeon created scripted ads of kids using their toys, and Coca-Cola brought in A-list celebrities to take a perfectly timed sip of their soda. Got Milk anyone?

Today, company-created content doesn’t work the way it used to. Visual content created by happy customers is getting much more attention from consumers. 

• One-quarter of search results for the world’s largest brands are linked to user-generated content
• Ads based on user-generated content get 4 times higher click-through rates
• There’s an increase of 29% in web conversions when websites feature user-generated content

Modern-day visual content marketing has democratized the content creation process. The most authentic, and meaningful, content is created by the customer.

#2: High-quality content vs. Averagely-produced content

Those Coke commercials used to catch everyone’s attention, but today users care less about huge product budgets and more about what the product can do for them. Consumers are overwhelmed and bombarded by highly-produced advertising.

But, brands don’t need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on expensive locations and product shoots.

There are million-dollar companies that just use an iPhone to capture their product photos and other companies that heavily emphasize user-generated content in their marketing channels. High-quality content used to make consumers feel like they could trust a brand, but today 70% of consumers trust online peer reviews and recommendations more than professional content and copy.

These are the foundational trends that the data shows us, but there are also timely trends that can be seen in visual content marketing. For example, bars and restaurants promoted their businesses with the visual content of their packed bars and dining room. Post COVID-19, this is no longer a working content marketing strategy.

Consumers don’t want to see a packed bar. They want to see how they’ll be kept safe if they were to come in for dinner or a drink. Where lots of people used to be the best way to show how loved your restaurant was, showing customers the distance between their table and other tables is much better suited.

As with all marketing, it’s essential to know your audience and relentlessly keep up with their values, goals, and pain points. Part of this is knowing where to post your visual content.

Where To Use Visual Content

Visual content marketing goes far past Instagram. Visual content has to be one of the longest-standing marketing strategies to exist. It’s close to impossible for visual content just to stop working because humans are so visual.

When we scroll Instagram, images and videos make their way to our minds. We decide if we want to keep scrolling or stop and watch more.

When we walk into a hotel, we immediately look around the lobby to get familiar with our new surroundings.

When we drive on the highway, our eyes are drawn to the large images on the billboards around us.

As humans, we love visuals. As marketers, we have to remember this.

You can use visual content on:

• Social Media
• Website
• Screens
• Print
• Etc.

The list is endless. As long as you know your customer and what they want to see, you can use visual content to help them learn more about your company, buy your products, and share their experience.

Let’s take a look at visual content examples to get an idea of how you can bring more visual content into your marketing strategy.

Examples of Visual Content

Loews Hotel

Loews Hotel used visual content to get a 62% increase in social engagement, an 85% increase in time spent on their bookings page, and a 4x increase in revenue from brand-site bookings.

Their strategy was to use user-generated content throughout the customer buying journey to do the selling for them. They used UGC on their social media platforms to generate awareness, on their website during consideration, and on their booking pages to make the sale.

 Loews uses TINT to collect, organize, and tag incoming UGC so they can easily use it as needed in their marketing channels. Learn more here.

Once the sale was made, Loews didn’t stop there. They placed screens that displayed UGC in their lobbies of happy customers enjoying their stay at other Loews locations. They also gave customers a chance to be featured on their website and those lobby screens by submitting their photos.

Marie Forleo

Marie Forleo dedicates an entire page on her website, called Success Stories, to customer testimonials. The content is entirely visual, with photos of each happy student and their testimonial written next to them. This content marketing fits perfectly with what consumers have been asking for: show us happy customers and what they have to say about the product.

Visualize Value

Visualize Value on Twitter has taken visual content marketing to the next level. Created by Jack Butcher, the account only posts black and white graphics with simple explanations. He knew his customer avatar, and he made the content they wanted to see. Visualize Value has 115,000 Twitter followers and 170,000 Instagram followers.

“Day by day, what you do is who you become.” — Heraclitus pic.twitter.com/1veCA7FsUA

— Visualize Value (@visualizevalue) November 30, 2020

Alfred Coffee

Alfred Coffee, a well-known coffee shop in Los Angeles famous for collaborating with brands like Nike and Kylie Cosmetics, has built its entire brand around visual content. They want to stand out as being shareable, so they design their cafes and coffee cups and sleeves to fit that. If you go into an Alfred coffee shop, you’re bound to see someone take a photo of their tagline, “But first, coffee,” written somewhere on their walls.

Wrapping Up

Visual content is being posted by the thousands every second, and it’s a marketer’s job to keep up with it. By adding more visual content to your marketing strategy, you’re going to be able to show your customers what to expect from you instead of just telling them.

Joe Ades nailed this down as he sold his potato peelers in the street. If you can put visual content (him peeling potatoes) with a great story that shows a customer what their life is like with their problem and what it could be like without it—you’ve got a winning formula.

The key is to create an endless stream of images and videos from customers you can repurpose across your marketing channels. You can use these strategies to get your customers to create user-generated content and then have TINT help you get the rights to that content so you can use it freely in your marketing strategy moving forward.

Use our Visual Search feature to use machine learning to find the visual content of your brand or products, even if you weren’t tagged in it. You can collect all of that content in your UGC Studio and automatically tag it, so it gets organized based on products, type of visual content, or the part of the buying journey it was created in.

Don’t worry. We won’t mess up your workflow. We integrate with your current marketing tool stack, so adding TINT to your workflow doesn’t disrupt your efficiency.

Ready to start posting visual content proven to get conversions? Schedule a demo with one of our content experts and start your visual content marketing journey today. 

The post Visual Content Marketing: How To Drive Conversions appeared first on TINT.

EGC and employee-powered marketing are new territories for many marketing and communications professionals. Let’s dig into some frequently asked questions about the strategy. 

What is Employee-Powered Marketing?

Employee-Powered Marketing is a strategy where every member of a company’s staff is empowered to create, distribute, and contribute to marketing efforts. 

Marketing and communication teams are exponentially outnumbered in most businesses. This strategy embraces that and encourages all employees to create content and share branded messaging. This content is formally known as employee-generated content.

Democratizing marketing in this way can have amazing results. Our research shows that messaging is reshared 24 times more when distributed by employees instead of brand accounts. Furthermore, that content also experiences 8 times the engagement of brand-shared content.  

Additional research has found that 33% of employees are already posting messages, pictures, or videos about their employer without any encouragement from their company. The implementation of an employee advocacy program focuses that energy and increases participation to 50%.

How do I start an employee advocacy program?

A well-implemented employee advocacy program starts with the “WHY”. Spend time thinking about specific goals that you’re hoping to achieve with this program. The three main types of employee advocacy goals focus on Human Resources and Recruitment, Marketing and Communications, or Sales Acceleration.

Next, leadership buy-in at all levels of the organization can make or break these programs. Company leaders should not just buy-in, but actively participate to model the behavior. 

Finally, show results and help employees understand how they contribute to organizational goals. People want to know that they’re helping. Showcasing content, celebrating contributors, and sharing data are fantastic ways to keep people interested in the program. 

For a step-by-step guide, visit our blog on launching an Employee Advocacy Program powered by Social Media.

Who “owns” the employee advocacy program, Marketing or Human Resources?

Simply put, both. An employee-powered marketing program is best activated as a collaboration between departments. Marketing and Communications departments will have a clear understanding of the type of content a campaign should produce, the channels it should be distributed on, and likely the microsites or hashtags that will support the effort. Human Resources often has a clearer understanding of the culture of an organization, what would incentivize participation, and the implementation of policies support an overall culture of employee-driven marketing.

The best practice is always to start with marketing and human resources. As the program grows and the goals diversify, additional departments should be brought into the fold. A sales leader can suggest what content drives sales acceleration. A diversity and inclusion specialist can recommend strategies to support recruiting efforts. 

Regardless, start the planning committee small. Many employee advocacy programs have died in committee. Start small, grow organically, then sensibly add people to the project’s steering team. We talk more about this in the Employee Advocacy webinar.

How you do keep employees motivated to create content?

Motivation comes from a variety of fronts. Based on experience, there are four main drivers of participation and motivation: leadership, culture, incentive, and regulation. 

Leadership

Look to leaders to drive participation. Meaningful participation by managers of all levels is a great place to start. You should also look beyond official leadership. Find people of influence within departments or teams. This could be the person with the longest tenure in their role, known by the team as the local expert. It could be the new staff member who is excited to contribute and shares that infectious enthusiasm. 

Find someone to be your champion in every department and on every team. Show your appreciation for them and give them the tools to rally their co-workers. 

Culture

A strong, connected culture makes everything easier. You’re asking employees to open up and share their perspectives on the company. They will not do this if it runs counter to your culture. The best employee-generated content is created organically. It often showcases normal experiences like coworkers sharing lunch, celebrating holidays, and participating in -often mundane- daily activities. Some corporate cultures are more conducive to the practice and require less effort to start. Other cultures, particularly those who are more siloed due to department or geography, may require the establishment of new cultural norms before employees are ready to share. 

Incentive

Before discussing specifics, we should break down the difference between incentivization and gamification. Both are possible, reward-driven ways, to drive the staff side of employee-powered marketing. Bravon has a simple breakdown:

Incentives

Incentives are transactional. They motivate employees to perform a specific action in exchange for a payout. For example; if you share one piece of content, you’ll get one widget as a reward. 

Gamification

Gamification is a continuous process built on a series of challenges. It seems to drive internal (intrinsic) motivation. Rather than driving motivation to reach a specific outcome (the prize), it focuses on the activity or series of activities that an employee (gamer) must take to achieve that outcome.  

Incentives vs Gaming

Simply put, incentives drive the completion of a specific task. Gamification drives the adoption, and maintenance, of a specific behavior. Both are effective motivators, and a review of company culture will help guide the decision to use either, both, or neither option.

Whether using incentivization or gaming, the best practice is to make the rewards meaningful. Find items, swag, or rewards that your employees want to get. Cheap items or low-impact rewards like the “Corporate Pizza Party” can often be seen as patronizing, infantilizing, or disingenuous. 

Regulation

The fastest and easiest way to start an employee-powered marketing campaign is to add an expectation for contribution to a staffer’s job description. But just because it is fast and easy doesn’t mean that it is the right way. Beware leaning too heavily on regulation. This leads to campaign fatigue and encourages a more lethargic form of participation with employees only contributing to check the box.

The best way to use “regulation” as a driver of employee motivation is to add content creation or contribution to existing processes. For example, if you have field staff that are conducting events, add a photo list to their process. Ask for specific shots like the team in action, the booth or set-up, and post-event team dinner. This way, the content request is less intrusive. 

What are the legalities with using Employee-Generated Content? Do they need to sign a waiver, ask permission, or more?

This is often one of the earliest questions you’ll encounter from leadership as you launch an employee-powered marketing campaign. There are several different perspectives on this, but the main thing to keep in mind is Respect. You should always respect your contributors, ask permission, and use online content mindfully. 

We have a primer on Understanding UGC User Rights.

Content Ownership – Creative Roles

Content ownership should be the most straightforward part of the conversation. Typically, copyright law says that once a piece of intellectual property is put into a permanent form it is owned by the creator. This could be written words like a tweet or status update. This could be rich media like an Instagram post or TikTok.  When your employees create content, they generally own it. 

Things can get tricky when content is created “on the clock”. Some professions, like designers and copywriters, may find that their work is owned in-part or entirely by the company. Things that are created as part of a job function generally are owned, and/or licensed, by the company paying that person’s salary. 

That said, it is still a matter of respect and decorum to let the person know if you’re using their content. It also doesn’t automatically extend to all their social channels and other media pieces. As mentioned above, the worst way to obtain content is through regulation. Ask for permission, even if it is not necessarily a legal requirement. 

Content Ownership – Everyone else

The company may have an interest in the intellectual property of creatives in its employ. What about employee-generated content from someone in non-creative roles like accounting or sales? 

They should be approached the same way that you would ask for permission to use content from a customer or partner. Ask for permission, document acceptance, and use the content respectfully. 

Opt-In Participation

Many savvy marketers are turning to an opt-in participation strategy to avoid the headache, and liabilities, of the two previously mentioned content ownership scenarios. As they design their employee-powered marketing program, they leave budget to launch a microsite. Here, employees of all stripes can share content, opt-in to terms of service, and be part of a larger conversation. This also centralizes the content collection process, making it easier for the project manager to aggregate media. 

You can launch an engaging, branded microsite in minutes using TINT Experience Builder. No developer resources necessary. Give your staff a way to engage. Explore TINT Experience Builder today. 

What about organizations that are worried about off-messaging posts or backlash from bad content? 

Employee-Powered Marketing is built on trust and authenticity. You need to be able to trust your team to share relevant content and stay on message. If you are immediately concerned about the negatives of EGC, then perhaps there is a cultural issue that needs to be addressed before implementing an employee advocacy program. 

That said, it is important to provide guidelines and guardrails. Your staff should, and this could be a big assumption, know the basic rules of your brand. Employee-powered marketing does not sacrifice brand integrity, but rather, builds it.  Encourage staff to share content but emphasize that they shouldn’t necessarily be working towards a final “polished” product. They should share candid photos, interesting articles, and other elements of the business that would look sensible as an organic post on social media. There should not be an expectation for people to design content or add elements like logos and watermarks. That is still something that should be left to the marketing and communications department. 

A popular guardrail is to use an employee advocacy tool to support the “signal boost” element of employee-powered marketing. Tools like Hootsuite Amplify will push relevant, and marketing-approved, content to employees. Employees may then share at their discretion. A favorite element of Amplify is the ability to populate copy, images, and hashtags, taking any guesswork out of the process.  This is also useful for staff who may not be ready to completely buy-in to the process. It is an easier ask to “Click to share” rather than asking for a major lift like designing the post in its entirety. 

How do we punish employees who step out of bounds?

You probably shouldn’t hire employees that you don’t trust on social.

Cultural issues aside, this is the reason why Human Resources is often an important element of the employee advocacy program design process. They should be able to advise on both the carrot and the stick. 

Also, be mindful and flexible when reviewing employee content. Let’s not forget Tony Piloseno, the TikToker fired from Sherwin-Williams for creating content outside the scope of his role. His massively popular account could have been a great asset for the company. Now, he is launching his own paint line with a new paint company based out of Florida.  

After reading all this, where do I begin? 

TINT has been trusted by over 5,000 brands around the world. We’ve worked with top brands across industries to create innovative content programs.  Schedule time with one of our employee-generated content experts and launch your employee advocacy campaign today. 

The post Employee-Powered Marketing appeared first on TINT.

The social platforms consumers have used to keep themselves entertained during months spent on lockdown at home are more than an entertainment tool. eCommerce retailers have emerged as the victors of 2020. People are more comfortable shopping for everything from groceries to clothing to mobile homes, all from the comfort of their own devices. As we move through 2021, social media’s role in online shopping is becoming more and more clear. But first, let’s reflect.

In 2020, eCommerce had its best year yet:

• Black Friday was the second-largest *online* spending day in U.S. history
• Chains that offered curbside, drive-thru and in-store pickup options in the U.S. increased digital sales at a 26% higher rate
• Shopify reported $5.1 billion in Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in 2020 – compared to $2.9 billion in 2019.
• Alibaba made $35 billion within the first *30 minutes* of Singles Day

…and social media executives heard this loud and clear. Social media is responding to the increased adoption of online shopping by becoming more shoppable and more convenient for consumers.

Social is Becoming the Entire Funnel

We’re used to the marketing funnel where top-of-funnel content drives brand awareness and engagement, middle-of-funnel content works past the know, like, and trust marketing factors, and bottom-of-funnel content closed the sale.

Social media plays a huge part in the top-of-funnel content and middle-of-funnel content—but it lacks in being able to close sales. Yes, remarketing can be effective. But, this isn’t because social isn’t getting consumers to make a decision to buy a product, but because products could not always be bought on social.

Previously, every Instagram page linked out to a website where consumers could buy the products they saw on the brand’s feed. Now, Instagram replaced the notifications button with a Shopping tab, Reels are now shoppable, and TikTok is experimenting with live stream shopping – influencing user behavior (and new buying habits). This is just the beginning of a shoppable social experience.

The winter holidays of 2020 have given rise to a new year shopping boom.

As social continues to double down on shopping features, we’re already seeing brands able to close the sale without a user ever having to leave the platform. While websites certainly aren’t obsolete today—it looks like the future of eCommerce can quickly become a one-stop-shop on social media faster than we expect.

What Content is Converting Best on Social Media

Marketers have to absolutely nail their content as social content becomes one of the most important marketing channels for brands.

What content converts best on social media?

In our 2021 State of User-Generated Content Report, we surveyed leading brands to see how they’re looking at their social content.

We found that 93% of marketers agree that consumers trust content created by people more than content created by brands. This makes user-generated content (UGC) key to creating balanced content that your audience will resonate with. Here’s how UGC is impacting the marketing funnel: 

• More than 86% of companies today use user-generated content as part of their marketing strategy
• 34% of TINT users and 45% of marketers agree that user-generated content helps improve social media campaigns
• Ads based on user-generated content receive 4 times higher click-through rates and a 50% drop in cost-per-click compared to average ads
• Almost half of customers (48%) claim that user-generated content is a great method for them to discover new products

Brands turn to UGC to collect feedback, share social proof, and build trust throughout the journey. Expect to see this content more frequently in the near future. Marketing activations will look like curbside pickup site ads, website galleries with real-time social media content, digital out-of-home (DOOH) ads, and promoted content featuring customer reviews and testimonials.

Examples of User-Generated Content

Amazon

Amazon has become a user-generated content machine. Its review section continues to grow more and more robust. Companies use professional photos in tandem with UGC. The professional images are part of the hook. The customer-created content is the social proof that drives conversion. 

For example, this lift-top coffee table has professional photos in its item description:

But also features UGC customer reviews and images:

With 70% of consumers trusting online peer reviews and recommendations more than professional content and copy—these reviews are crucial as bottom-of-funnel content that drives conversions.

Levels

Levels, a continuous glucose monitor, uses UGC on their Instagram feed to showcase their customers and why they care about their glucose levels. This is exactly how brands can leverage their customers’ voices to help them showcase their products and repurpose customer content to save time and money on content production.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Levels Health (@levels)

People prefer to buy from people that look, behave, and act like them. By using UGC in their marketing, Levels creates a sense of unity by delivering content that customers, and prospects, will be sympathetic to. 

New England Patriots

The New England Patriots repurpose UGC by retweeting fans. In this post, they retweet a fan’s photo of their Gilmore jersey and garner 2,700 likes (likes range from 100-1,000 likes on average). In alignment with our past reports, UGC continues to get more engagement than company-created content. 

Dream come true.#ProBowl | @jakebailey___ pic.twitter.com/uJGqDzFtT3

— New England Patriots (@Patriots) January 27, 2021

What happens when a Twitter user can click on these jerseys and order their own, without ever leaving Twitter?

That’s the future of social commerce — and why it’s so important to understand where the trend is heading. As social continues to disrupt the marketing funnel and becomes so integrated that it eventually becomes the entire funnel, brands need to understand how to create highly engaging and converting content.

In Conclusion

In our 2021 State of User-Generated Content Report, we found that social is undeniably taking over the marketing funnel as we know it. We also found out what metric marketers care about most in 2021, how brands are going omnichannel without massive increases in content production, the newest strategy behind influencer marketing, and more. To read the 5 themes we found from surveying leading brands, download the 2021 State of User-Generated Content Report here.

Don’t have enough user-generated content coming your social team’s way? Schedule a call with a TINT team member to learn how to incentivize customers to create more UGC, get the rights to redistribute it, and automate collecting images and videos that feature your products.

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