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.

What is employee-generated content?

Employee-generated content is a photo, video, social post, or article shared by a current, former, or prospective employee about a brand or its company culture.

You can learn more about employee-generated content in our comprehensive guide.

How can we get employee-generated content if our employees do not use social or are hesitant to share company content on their personal accounts?

Aversion to social media or hesitancy to use their personal accounts is not a major obstacle to getting amazing employee-generated content. You should always provide multiple channels for employees to contribute. This could be “off-network” like email, SMS, Slack channels, internal message (BBS) boards, or even a shared folder on a communal drive.

Once you have a collection process in place, you can start trying to understand the reason people are not on social or do not like sharing company content. It could be generational issues. It could be a work-life balance concern. It could simply be fear of posting the wrong thing and getting reprimanded.  

Taking the time to diagnose the cultural concerns will show your teams that the employee advocacy initiative is not just about content creation and distribution. It is part of an effort to be inclusive, innovative, and provide opportunities for all staff to contribute their voice to the brand narrative. 

What is the best way to collect employee-generated content?

The first question you should ask yourself is, “what am I trying to accomplish with these employee experiences?”  The answer to this question will help guide the collection channels for your employee-generated content. 

Often, the easiest way to collect content is by creating a dedicated email, slack channel, SMS number, or microsite where employees can submit content. Many organizations have found that deploying a tool, like TINT, significantly helps with the collection, organization, and reuse of content. 

Sometimes, the best employee-generated content lives off-site. This could be company reviews from current or past employees on job sites like Glassdoor.

Be specific when asking for content to ensure that it aligns with your needs. Then leave enough room for employees to be creative. 

What is your best tip to get employees on board with advocating for their company?

The best way to get employee buy-in is to make the contribution meaningful. Help employees understand why they are advocating for the company and how their contributions are being used.  The best employee advocacy initiatives are strongly rooted in company culture.  Those brands and organizations with a strong culture will find the easiest path forward. 

If there is not a cultural component to lean on, then share specific outcomes that are expected from the employee advocacy program. Some staff will always prefer the hard numbers to fluffy cultural pieces.  How much time will it take? What is expected of people? How will it help with recruitment, retention, sales, or branding?  How will success be measured?

Beyond that, make the process easy. People will immediately lose enthusiasm if it is difficult to participate. Tools like Hootsuite Amplify make it easy for employees to safely share your content and extend your reach. 

What are some of the reward ideas for employees who become ambassadors?

Start with simple and easy rewards. Give shoutouts and public accolades to employees who consistently share. Gift cards and branded swag is often an effective incentive.  Then, as you develop champions across departments, get their feedback on what would be good big-ticket rewards. These could be things like technology (airpods, microphones, or speakers), experiences (meals, travel), or opportunities (conferences, other professional events).  

Harvard Business Review shares that “a little recognition can provide a big morale boost”.  There are plenty of effective non-monetary motivators that can be implemented as part of your rewards system. 

How can the organization maintain a unified voice with multiple content publishers not in the marketing or communications department?

Employee-generated content is a content creation and brand-building tool. It does not mean that all employee content gets automatically distributed to all channels all the time.  As content comes in, marketing and communications still play an important role in the distribution process. Rather than spending time creating content, these professionals get to spend (less) time selecting the best pieces of content, essentially passing them through the lens of the brand before the content goes public. 

As more and more employee-generated content, and other externally-generated content, is produced, it is the role of the marketing team to deploy technology that will expedite the process.  TINT Attention Score gives you a look behind the eyes of your audience to ensure that your content is attention-grabbing before it is published. 

Do you ever worry about UGC or EGC posts being on-brand (appropriate and high quality)? 

It is okay for UGC or EGC to be less than perfect quality. If anything, that shows that the content is authentic. The TINT State of User-Generated Content Report 2022 and Hootsuite Social Trends 2022 report shows that consumers are increasingly skeptical of marketing content. They do not trust overly photoshopped or manipulated photos.  

Consumers want to see the rough edges. They want to know what the real experience is buying, engaging, and working with a specific brand. That gives you permission to have a photo that isn’t perfectly centered or has a slightly soft focus.  

That doesn’t mean sloppy is permitted. It means authenticity should take priority over polish, and incorporating non-brand voices should become a cornerstone of your marketing efforts.

How do you recommend small businesses promote employee-generated content, given that there are so many fewer voices to be shared?

Launching an employee-generated content initiative may actually be easier in a small business. There is less bureaucracy and organizational inertia, allowing you to move quickly and iterate as necessary. 

Don’t overcomplicate it. If you have a small team or are working in a small business, then lean on the technology that is available. It is likely that everyone has a mobile phone. Let employees text photos of interesting happenings to a dedicated number. Give specific guidelines for the types of content you’re looking for.

Having fewer voices also means that your customers can build connections with you and your staff in ways that would be much more difficult at a larger company. Spotlight the bartender who is mixing drinks this week or the chef who created the special. Share the people who make the business possible and give a peek behind the scenes. You’ll quickly discover what content works, then you can provide additional guidance to source more of that type of material.

How do employee advocacy and employee-generated content fit into governmental, municipal, or civic marketing and communications?

First, always think about the outcomes you’re seeking. Governmental employee-advocacy typically falls into two broad categories: amplifying messaging and sourcing content.  

Amplifying messaging can be a little tricky, particularly as many public information officers have started to use personal social accounts to echo the messages they’re disseminating to public channels.  This is where a tool like Hootsuite Amplify is likely going to provide enough guardrails to ensure that staff messaging is accurate and appropriate 

Sourcing content is an exciting opportunity that governmental agencies are starting to awaken to.  You have a massive community to collect content from; not just employees but citizens.

Finding the right hashtags and geotags for your community is a useful first step. You can also run contests or other social gamification to drive content creation. Then, start sharing this community-created content across your social channels. 

Request a demo to see how TINT can help governmental and civic organizations source employee and citizen content safely, responsibly, and legally. 

Can employee-generated content be created in an entirely virtual workspace or work from home model?

Yes. The lack of a physical office doesn’t mean that your team can’t be part of a social conversation. If anything, encouraging them to create content can strengthen their connection to the company and showcase the value of remote work culture.  

A great example is Cisco. While employees transition to work from home, their social team created new content opportunities using #WeAreCisco. Their content shifted from highlighting the happenings of their global offices to showcasing how their technology empowered people to work from anywhere.  This content strategy drove a 28% increase in blog views and a 42% increase in new visitors to the #WeAreCisco blog. 

Learn more about how Cisco used employee-generated content to create storytelling through the voice of their employees.

How Cisco uses EGC to amplify culture narrative, engage employees, & attract new talent

How do you let associates and frontline employees know it is okay to share or create content as part of their job? 

Content empowerment comes from the top down. Start with encouraging content from leadership. Then find champions who will be shining examples of internal creators. There is always a little inertia to starting the employee content engine. But that will fall away as frontline staff start to see others in similar roles celebrated for their contributions.

How do I encourage content creation in a multigenerational workplace where people have strong preferences on social platforms (or lack of social)?

With the vanguard of Gen Z graduating college and entering the workforce many companies may have four generations present in the workplace. This may lead to disagreements or frustration around what platform to emphasize for your employee advocacy and employee-generated content initiatives.

The best solution is to provide multiple channels to submit and distribute content. Text messaging, SMS, and email are effective content submission channels for the socially averse. Branded hashtags and lists are available for the socially active. 

TINT helps organizations collect employee-generated content to enhance recruitment, retention, and engagement. See why internal communications and HR teams choose TINT.

What’s the best way to facilitate an intern or junior staffer social media takeover? 

Intern or staff takeovers of social platforms can be great ways to give authenticity to your social presence and provide a look inside of a company. 

First, be sure to spend time promoting the takeover. Build excitement and anticipation for the takeover. This should be at least a week of advance lead time. 

Then, spend time planning what the takeover will look like. The best takeovers have the feel of spontaneity, but there should be enough structure to the day that the narrative of the takeover make sense. It should not be overly scheduled, but there should be “milestones” like speaking to certain staff, going to lunch, an office tour, AMA, and a happy hour. 

Finally, cross-pollinate the content. The live can go out through Instagram, TikTok, or other platforms. Was there a great talk about your product? That could be a clip that you reuse elsewhere.  Did they interview the CEO or a company leader? That could also be repurposed.  Think about different ways that the takeover can be used to create content that contributes beyond the single day. 

Who are the best people to have on an “employee social council” or other employee advocacy group?

It is best to start with two or three key stakeholders. In larger organizations, this will often be representatives from marketing, human resources, and internal communications. Once the structural members are in place, you can begin adding departmental champions to the committee.  

Keep the committee small for the first few iterations of your employee advocacy program. Sometimes, too many voices can “committee” the initiative to death. Start with the smallest possible group that is able to make meaningful progress, then grow organically as the program develops. 

Do you believe employee-generated content is applicable to any demographic and industry?

Yes. Regardless of industry, marketing and communications teams are expected to service more channels with more content, often with less staff. Brands are focusing on omnichannel marketing, and that requires a significant investment in content.  

Outsourcing content creation can be expensive and requires extensive guides so that the content received aligns with brand voice and perspective. Instead, consider looking inward to the people who are most familiar with your brand; the folks who work there. With the proper motivation and incentivization, there will be a wellspring of ideas and content. 

Brands using employee-generated content currently include telecommunications, energy, nonprofit, governmental, professional, culinary, creative, and more. There is a high possibility that a brand in your industry or space is already running some sort of employee advocacy or EGC initiative.  Check out our case studies for some creative examples from many industries.

What is the best way to streamline how employees submit content for social? 

The best way to streamline the employee content submission process is to implement a technology solution that will help collect content from multiple sources, curate that content, make it easy to sort and display, and analyze content quality.  TINT makes employee-generated content easy with multiple tools and integrations designed with marketing and communications teams in mind.  Logging of submissions and terms of service opt-ins will keep your human resources team happy too.

Sign up for a demo of TINT to learn how the world’s top brands are incorporating EGC into their brand building, and how you can, too.

The post You Ask, TINT Answers: Employee-Generated Content FAQs appeared first on TINT.

“The Great Resignation” became a household term defining this employment shift. More people than ever have begun to question if their jobs, and careers, are worth the sacrifices they used to make without a second thought. Commutes, bad managers, lack of benefits, and other employee hardships are weighed against the opportunities the Great Resignation has created.

The increase in job openings has put the power into the employee’s hands. People are pickier about which company they choose to work with and how that impacts their lifestyle and mental health. They’re walking into job interviews expecting answers to questions like:

1. How does your company prioritize mental health for your employees?
2. What extra benefits do you offer employees to set them up for long-term success?
3. How realistic are your workloads and conditions?

And they don’t necessarily need the company to answer these questions for them.

Our 2022 State of User-Generated Content revealed that 52% of communications and HR teams regularly use employee-generated content (EGC), a form of user-generated content (UGC), across communications channels. They’re using UGC to show the talent pool that their company is the best option and the proof is in their employee sentiment. 

Just like when you’re marketing products and services, you don’t only want your brand to tell people how great you are. You also want your customers, or in this case, employees, to share their positive experiences, inspire each other to build a sense of pride,and attract more talented professionals just like them.

There’s only one way to do this—with employee-generated content.

What is Employee-Generated Content?

Employee-generated content is content, such as photos, videos, social media posts, or reviews, created by a current, former, or prospective employee about a brand or its company culture. EGC increases brand awareness, receives more engagement than brand-created content, and highlights the experience of working for your company. 

For example, a LinkedIn post with a photo of someone’s first day at your office is EGC. Or, EGC could be a GIF created from your team’s Zoom meeting. Here’s an example of employee-generated content that Alicia Raeburn posted when she proudly joined the Asana SEO content team.

The Great Resignation and increased job openings prove that people aren’t willing to settle in their jobs or careers like they were previously. Today, employee-generated content is more than a nice-to-have.

It’s a must-have. Here’s why.

Why is Employee-Generated Content so Important?

Employee-generated content is more important than ever because it sees 10x more followers than brand accounts and 8x more engagement. Consumers trust content created by people more than brand-created content. With EGC, brands can build trust with customers and prospective employees.

Cisco uses employee-generated content campaigns that highlight the experience of working at Cisco and inspire prospective talent through unique stories from existing employees. Here’s what their Brand & Social Media Lead had to say about EGC:

“Employee-generated content is what has put the @WeAreCisco team on its path to success, with the metrics to prove its value.” 

Their campaign results highlight the power of focusing on employee-generated content moving forward:

In the 2022 State of User-Generated Content Report, we discovered 3 reasons why EGC is so important, based on the latest consumer trends.

#1: People want to form connections with brands and share their brand moments

Fifty percent of people surveyed wished that brands would tell them what type of content to create and share. By sharing employee-generated content across marketing channels, brands show employees the type of content they’re looking to post. Their audience, fans, and customers can get inspiration and start creating content the brand can repurpose using TINT’s UGC Studio.

Condé Nast posted this EGC from an employee impressed by their lunch while visiting the office. This EGC shows Condé Nast’s Instagram audience the type of content they want to post, essentially giving their following a brand guideline that leads to getting their photos published to the Condé Nast Instagram account.

#2: Employee-generated content gets more engagement and followers on social media

People are 3x more likely to engage with a brand’s social media content over any other type of media they create. That number becomes supercharged when employees post content. Employee social profiles see 10x more followers than brand accounts and 8x the engagement. More engagement cultivates brand relationships while driving brand awareness for recruitment and products.

#3: EGC is more trustworthy than brand created content

People trust user-generated content more than brand-created content—and the stats show it. With EGC, brands see more engagement and followers leading to increased brand awareness and stronger relationships with their audience, fans, and leads. Employee advocacy programs with at least 1,000 active participants can generate $1.9 million in advertising value and new job applicants consider current employees to be the most trustworthy when considering a potential employer.

Kristina shares her excitement to join The Bar Method team and have her first day in the books. In place of brand-created content from The Bar Method talking about how they train each of their instructors in a 6-month certification, this EGC post is more authentic showcasing a real person experiencing their program and loving the experience.

Employee-generated content clearly can have a major impact. But, what’s the right kind of EGC to collect and publish?

What Can Employee-Generated Content be Used For?

Employee-generated content, like user-generated content, has various use cases based on your company’s goals. For example, if you’re experiencing hypergrowth and looking for as much talent as possible—employee-generated content is part of your hiring strategy. But recruitment isn’t the only use case for EGC.

Here’s what companies use employee-generated content for.

Brand Advocacy:

Employees can advocate about the experience of working at your company, the quality of your products, and the integrity of your brand. Instead of your brand talking about how great you are—with EGC, your team acts as brand ambassadors sharing your work culture, products, and brand message with their friends, families, peers, and followers.

“EGC works well with social selling as it requires a high level of authenticity and trust, and employee-generated content provides that necessary confidence. EGC reduces costs and increases sales while creating more motivated and engaged employees.”

– Agnieszka Goulin, Head of People at Spacelift

Check out how Andrew Nusca, former Digital Editor of Fortune Magazine, advocates for how much he believes in the future of Morning Brew in these tweets that announce his new position as Executive Editor at the Millennial-focused media company.

Employee Engagement and Retention:

When employee-generated content is shared and celebrated around the office, it makes the team feel like a team. And when people feel like they’re on a team they’re more motivated. Even if they’re facing big challenges, the psychology behind knowing you’re doing it with others drives action. EGC on screens around the workplace, in LinkedIn updates from colleagues, or simply on a Slack channel reminds employees they’re part of a team with a mission and it inspires engagement and retention. In the age of the Great Resignation, if people feel disconnected from their team members or like they don’t have a shared goal—they’ll leave.

Akshay Kothari shares a new feature that his team at Notion was working on, and ensures his team members are tagged in the exciting news. This comradery around reaching goals is exactly what drives team engagement and retention.

Recruitment: 

Just like user-generated content outperforms brand-created content, when employees vouch for the positive experience of working at your company it speaks volumes in comparison to your recruitment promotions. Employees can act as recruiters connecting your company to an aligned talent pool.

“Focusing on content created by existing employees gives a real insight into your culture and what working at your organization will be like and acts as a great showcase for promoting you as a destination employer that people want to work for. At a time when recruitment is increasingly challenging, it is an excellent way to attract top talent to your brand.”

 – Wendy Makinson, HR Manager of Joloda Hydraroll

After working at Stir for a few weeks, Eli Badgio was already helping recruit new talent to the team by sharing this Twitter post.

Types of Employee-Generated Content

Employee-generated content takes many forms. It can be an exciting social media post from a new employee talking about how excited they are to work for your company or it could be an internal newsletter with company updates. 

Different types of employee-generated content include:

• Social media posts
• Reviews
• Articles
• Blog posts
• Photos
• Internal training videos
• Knowledge share programs
• Internal newsletters
• Bulletin boards
• Case studies
• Recruitment videos

For example, Dell Blue, a creative agency for Dell, shares a team video on their About page to showcase what it’s like to work at the agency and introduce their Dell Blue Crew. This video is great for recruitment to show company culture and attract talent to their team.

Michael Alexis, CEO of TeamBuilding, creates EGC of employee case studies. Here’s his suggestion:

 “Work with employees to create case studies about their roles and careers, or testimonials about their experience with the organization. The reason materials like these are so effective is that it shows readers ‘someone like you trusted us and had an experience like this.’ These materials can help you attract more candidates that are better qualified, as well as successfully hire and retain talent.”

Examples of Employee-Generated Content

Employees are happy to make content because they’re also looking to share their brand experiences online. When leadership buys into EGC and creates a safe environment where employees aren’t fearful of posting about their experiences, employees spread brand awareness, generate engagement, and help recruit talented team members. 

Google Canada hosted a Google Photo day with fun props to inspire employees to share EGC across their social channels.

Some more examples of employee-generated content would include:

• Tweets from employees about a work event they attended
• LinkedIn articles by company leadership explaining an emerging topic in their industry
• Instagram stories showing behind-the-scenes of a workday
• Reviews on Glassdoor that describe the interview process
• Photos submitted to a contest and shared on office signage or newsletters
• Social media comments talking about positive employee experiences at your company

Employee-generated content can reach every channel in your company (from internal to external!). And it should. EGC is meant to showcase brand advocacy, increase employee engagement, and help with recruitment—so the more EGC you can get the better. But where does all this employee-generated content come from? ANd how do you get more of it?

How Do You Get Employee-Generated Content?

If your employees aren’t creating EGC organically—it’s not because they don’t want to. Chances are, they’re not sure if they’re allowed to or what requirements their EGC needs to meet. Getting employees to create employee-generated content won’t come from a quick Slack message requesting it. It’s important to show what you’re looking for while not appearing too stringent on quality expectations.

Morning Brew co-founder Alex Lieberman shows leadership buy-in to employee-generated content by simply retweeting employee-generated content from a new employee. His retweet also sets clear expectations of the kind of content he wants to see from his employees online making it easier for the Morning Brew team to know what to post.

Like Alex has figured out, you need to strategically get your employees on board to post EGC.

“Identify employees that are highly engaged and eager to share their experiences with the public to get started with employee-generated content. Give them guidance and pointers to assist them in producing the ideal content that is accurate and honest. Consider sending out a company-wide outreach inviting others to contribute if they desire to encourage more employees to participate. Allow them to choose a topic that truly resonates with them so that the content they create is an accurate expression of their true feelings,”

– David Bitton, co-founder and CMO at Doorloop

There are 4 ways to get employee-generated content:

1. Create a brand-specific hashtag (or multiple).

   No, hashtags aren’t dead. With hashtags, your employees can find other EGC, get inspiration for their posts, and feel comfortable hitting publish for the first time. To organize EGC and make it easier for your employees to find what they’re looking for, create multiple hashtags. For example, you could have a hashtag for marketing content and another for posts related to culture.

2. Set clear expectations of the kind of content you want to see.

   Publish and re-share UGC and EGC that you like. What you post is a direct signal to your employees as to the EGC you hope to get more of. Think of your feed as a Brand Guideline that’s exemplifying exactly what you’re looking for  in terms of content from your audience.

3. Show leadership buy-in.

   If leadership isn’t posting EGC, your employees will feel hesitant to push the publish button. Leadership has to show their buy-in to EGC by creating their own and engaging with their employee’s content internally and externally. Leadership buy-in sets the example and shows transparency and relatability of the brand’s leadership.

4. Host a contest.

   This is a great option to create EGC if some employees don’t want to post to their own social channels. With a contest, you can ask employees to send their photos, videos, and testimonials directly to your contest page. Organize it with TINT and easily republish relevant EGC across marketing channels.

The key to employee-generated content is not letting it sit idly on the sidelines. With your employee-generated content library filling up, it’s time to repost it across your internal and external marketing channels to get all the benefits. Here’s where it could go.

Where to Share Employee-Generated Content?

Once you have employee-generated content, you want to make sure it gets seen. Just like user-generated content, you want to have a place like TINT to collect it, organize it based on product, team, or event, and repurpose it for future marketing campaigns.

Jen Burns, social media manager at Cisco knows how challenging it can be to collect EGC:

“Maintaining an employee-generated content (EGC) repository can be difficult without the right platform in place to ensure proper permissions, tagging, and overall organization. With TINT, we don’t have to worry. We can quickly aggregate and leverage employee content to tell the story of what it’s like to work at Cisco.”

TINT has features like dynamic search, visual search, and object recognition to make it easy to organize UGC and EGC.

Once you receive employee-generated content from the various channels listed above, you can reshare it onto:

1. External emails
2. Internal emails
3. Digital signage
4. Brand social media accounts
5. Brand blogs
6. Ads or job postings
7. Events
8. Recruiting efforts
9. Job fairs
10. Career pages
11. Screens in the workplace

Employee-generated content is meant for sharing. Don’t let it get posted once and make its way down into the depths of the newsfeed. Collect all EGC and continue to use it for brand advocacy, engagement, and recruitment. You can even continue using the same content for years. By keeping your EGC organized, you can hop in and grab what you need depending on campaigns, recruitment, and company announcements.

That leads us to our next point. Now that you know what EGC is, where it comes from, and where you can share it, how can you actually use it? 

How to Include Employee-Generated Content In Your Marketing

As you know by now, employee-generated content is used for brand advocacy, employee engagement and retention, and recruitment. It can be shared on digital signage, emails, and a number of other channels. But how do you connect those two dots? How can you put it in action and use it seamlessly as part of your marketing or internal communications strategy?

If you’re stuck on how to use employee-generated content, here are a few ways to include it in your marketing:

1. Highlight employee knowledge. Choose a day of the week or month to dedicate to sharing content from an employee explaining something they have expertise in. This might be an internal knowledge share Zoom call, a LinkedIn article, or a video that they post to their own account and you re-share on the brand account. This can be used either for brand advocacy, boosting employee engagement, or helping with recruitment.
2. Replace the internal newsletter. Instead of asking for announcements via email and compiling them into a newsletter, create a space where employees can post their own announcements, funny videos, updates, and requests, and display them for the office to see. This might be on digital signage, like Condé Nast uses, or simply on a Slack channel. This can be used for employee engagement.
3. Broadcast your culture online. When employees share photos to your contests or with your brand hashtag, make sure to reshare them on your brand social media channels. If you have great reviews on Glassdoor, don’t be afraid to screenshot them and post them on Twitter, LinkedIn, or career pages, or quote them in job listings. This is a great way to show off your company culture and support your employees, and is great for engagement and recruitment.
4. Leverage your employees for amplification on LinkedIn. Let’s say your company launches a new podcast. You could simply post about the new podcast on brand channels, or you can add posts to something like Hootsuite Amplify, so that every employee can easily reshare the post onto their own social media accounts. This would increase your reach exponentially. TINT even has an integration with Hootsuite Amplify so that marketers can gain legal rights to employee social content and then in turn create Amplify posts directly within the TINT platform. This is great for brand advocacy.

Employee-generated content is everywhere these days. And the biggest companies in the world know it’s an integral part of their marketing strategy moving forward.

Employee-Generated Content Your Marketing Strategy 

People are creating user-generated content and employee-generated content every day. After decades of brand-created content, people want to relate to the customers, fans, audiences, and employees of brands that showcase their experience with a brand. This relationship to people-created content drives engagement, following, and conversions. While this is great for brand advocacy and recruitment, it’s just one side to employee-generated content.

During the era of The Great Resignation, EGC is more than just for advocacy and recruitment, but also for retention. When employees have options, it’s up to corporations to show people why their company is the best place to work. If they don’t create the comradery and collective mission, people will start looking elsewhere. 

Employee-generated content is shaping marketing as we know it. But, it’s only one of seven trends we discovered in our 2022 State of User-Generated Content Report changing the marketing landscape.

You can read the other 6 trends shaping UGC and marketing here.

The post Guide to Employee-Generated Content: What Is It, Why You Need It, and How To Do It appeared first on TINT.

In 2021, however, there’s a new key performance indicator (KPI) rising in importance. When we asked marketers what KPI is the most important to their role, for the first time, engagement was nearly tied with return on investment (ROI) for the top spot. Engagement won by only 1%, as reported in our State of User-Generated Content report. Take a look at the results, below.

Marketers know that engagement is key, but ROI is now just as important. So how do engagement and ROI relate to each other, and what are some action items you can take to increase both?

With the right strategy, you can boost both of your top KPIs.

The Path From Engagement to ROI

Engagement creates a return on investment, but not by nature. As Maggie Lower, CMO of Hootsuite, explains:

“Engagement provides insights that help determine whether people are paying attention. Much of that engagement then paves the way to trust, from there it’s a clear path to the conversion side which ROI is well-positioned to track.”

Only when engagement is increased *the right* way does it create the return on investment all marketers seek. So, what’s the “right way”?

It’s what your audience and customers are asking of you. In the State of User-Generated Content report, we narrowed down 5 consumer trends that will directly impact marketing in 2022. The report centers around these trends because listening to and learning from your audience allows you to form better connections, amplify their voices and experiences, and nurture a long-term relationship.

Here’s how you can leverage 3 of the trends to boost your top KPIs.

How to Increase Engagement And ROI Based on 3 Consumer Trends

If you’re a marketer, then the answers you’re looking for are found in your audience. They’ve told us loud and clear what they want to see.

Consumer Trend #1: People Want to Connect With the Brands They Love

In 2022, marketing is required to be a two-way street. Brands can’t think that a billboard with brand-written copy talking about their features will be the reason they reach their KPIs, stand out in their industry, and get a billion impressions. Brands need to weave the power of user-generated content (UGC) into their narrative in order to better connect with their audience. Consumers even want to interact with brands, both online and offline.

What is UGC and why is it important?

Unboxing videos, a reply to your tweet, sharing your Instagram post on their story, taking a photo of their hotel room, and posting to Facebook—customers are constantly giving brands opportunities to engage with them. Each time a happy audience member or customer posts user-generated content, it’s up to the brand to return the high five.

Brands that leave user-generated content floating around aimlessly on the web, hoping it leads to referrals and sales are optimistic.

We prefer the strategic approach: if people love creating brand-related content, let’s make it a positive experience each time they hit publish.

How to Take Action: 

When followers and customers provide opportunities to connect—do it. Return the high five they initiated (because nobody likes to be left hanging), and interact with their experience.

• Are they loving their hotel room? Reply to their Instagram post and let them know how dreamy their room is.
• Did they share a photo of their empty burrito bowl, captioned “so delicious—forgot to take a pic before I ate lol”? Let them know you’re launching an upcoming contest to win a year of free burritos and to keep an eye on your socials to partake.
• Is someone sharing their excitement about arriving at your hybrid event? Reply by letting them know where they can meet the other attendees.

Brand connection surpasses a quick like on their content. Real brand connection, which leads to an increase in social media engagement and an ROI, continues the conversation your audience or customer initiated. Here’s a great example from the Levels team where their brand account tagged their cofounder to answer a question from a curious customer on Twitter.

Instead of just liking the original tweet, or even replying with a quick, unthoughtful response, Levels cofounder Josh Mohrer connected with this happy customer and gave them insight into Level’s thoughts on crypto in the future.

Where can you level up the interactions your audience and customers are having with your brand?

Consumer Trend #2: People Expect Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

For the past few years, we’ve seen people ask for more and more diversity across brand images and videos. At the same time, we’ve also seen people more than happy to create user-generated content and be more than willing to let brands use their images, videos, and feedback across their marketing channels (because they want to be connected with the brands they love!). 

65% of consumers agree it’s important to them to see brands channeling diversity.

The 2022 State of User-Generated Content (SOUGC) report found that 65% of consumers agree it’s important to them to see brands channeling diversity because consumers want to buy from brands that reflect their own values and worldviews. Consumer sentiment has become an increasingly important part of marketing strategies.

And it’s best highlighted through the diverse voices of your customers. With user-generated content, brands can focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion through organic and paid user-generated content that gives their platform to their customers and marketing partners. 

How to Take Action:

Seventy-two percent of consumers believe reviews and testimonials submitted by customers are more credible than the brand talking about their products (Source: SOUGC). With a diverse array of user-generated content, customers can see people that look like them using and loving your products—growing the trust and relatability of your brand.

For example, user-generated content lets retail brands showcase their clothing on models of all shapes, colors, and sizes. With UGC, your customers become your models. They’re the ones saying, “I love this product enough to share my experience with it.” And that’s powerful. 

Consumers love seeing what a product looks like on someone of their skin color or body type, and it shows that they’re included.

Brands like Target are well aware their loyal customers (and fanbase) are posting user-generated content constantly. To help capture this UGC, Target asks their customers to “Share what you got” with the hashtag #TargetStyle and a @Target tag in their Instagram captions. Then, they display the photos throughout their website and product pages.

Using TINT’s UGC Studio, you can search through the UGC photos and videos from your customers to filter for specific products. You can also automate asking your customers if it’s okay to republish their content across your social channels with TINT’s Rights Management. That way, you can repurpose a cute Instagram post that you know gets engagement onto your emails and product pages.

How can you amplify diverse voices and images to make your audience feel seen and included?

Consumer Trend #3: People Prefer Social Media to Engage with Brands

Consumers are nearly 3x more likely to engage with a brand’s social media content than any other type of media they create. As marketers, this is our blinking neon sign telling us that social media is the right path to be on.

As we talked about in the past two consumer trends, with user-generated content, social media doesn’t have to dry up your resources or eat up the entirety of your team’s time. With UGC and EGC strategically repurposed across marketing channels, you can create a pipeline of content that comes from the diverse voices of your audience.

But what if you’re struggling to get engagement, UGC, and EGC in the first place?

That’s when it becomes time to get creative through proven marketing strategies like contests. Contests and social media work incredibly well together to boost brand engagement, ROI, and UGC (and EGC if applicable).

Brands like Canon have increased their engagement and UGC through contests set up on TINT’s Experience Builder. It lets brands create easy-to-enter contests both on social media and off. If you follow our tips in the first trend, you’ll connect with each entry. More relationships with your ideal customer? Yes, please.

How to Take Action:

Create contests, particularly social media contests, that spark your audience to make user-generated content your fans will engage with and that you can republish across your channels. This means contests not only help you gain a plethora of UGC that can be organized in your UGC Studio, but it’s also helping your content and products show up in your fan’s newsfeeds.

Here’s a genius example.

The My First Million podcast recently launched a TikTok contest, giving a prize away to a few participants who clipped their video podcast and turned their content into TikToks. Not only did the My First Million Podcast incentive their podcast listeners to interact with them on social media (which means they got them to move from interacting with them on one podcast platform to a social media platform too!), they also created hundreds of UGC videos they can repost to promote their past episodes…

… on top of getting impressions, views, and engagement on the TikTok videos their audience posted. The two hashtags used for the campaign, #mfmclip and #mfmclips have a cumulative 31.3 million TikTok views.

What creative social media contest can you run that asks your audience to interact with your brand, create user-generated content, and promote your products?

The Right Strategy Will Boost Both of Your Top KPIs

If you’re one of the majority of marketers asking how you can increase engagement and ROI in 2022—you’ll need the right strategy. We’d argue that the right strategy IS consumer trends. The most impactful marketing strategies are built around giving your audience and customers what they want, and this year we have very clear requests:

1. Reply to your customers through thoughtful responses that nurture your brand-to-customer relationship.
2. Highlight your customer’s voices to ensure diversity, inclusion, and equity across your marketing channels. Your customers care what your other customers and employees have to say more than what your brand-created content says.
3. Get your customers involved with your content by incentivizing UGC that sparks an initial interaction with your brand, creates UGC, and promotes your products.

Consumers want genuine, authentic, and trustworthy content. When you give them what they want, they will not only engage, they will convert. They won’t only convert, they will become brand champions.

This battle between engagement vs. ROI 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 strategy tips, download the report.

The post How to Increase Engagement and Boost ROI in 2022 appeared first on TINT.

These 300 event professionals create programming attended by millions, representing hundreds of millions of dollars in economic impact. The State Fair of Texas alone had over 2.2 million attendees in 2021. But even smaller events like the Edinburg Los Muertos Bailan Festival, Lubbock Arts Festival, and the Great Texas Mosquito Festival (Clute, TX) represent cultural touchstones in their communities in addition to being revenue generators for small businesses, large companies, and municipalities.

After almost two years of turmoil, event organizers of all stripes are preparing for 2022. The greater hospitality and tourism industry will likely take years to rebuild, but community-driven events will be the first to bounce back. The optimism shared by these event organizers was tempered with the knowledge that this would be a challenging climb. 

Here are some takeaways from the 2021 Texas Festivals and Events Association Annual Conference.

Things Have Changed

Every represented Texas festival and event experienced similar challenges. COVID forced event organizers to think outside the box. Some organizations moved quickly to take their events virtual. Some postponed activations and bunkered down to weather the storm. Others turned their logistical expertise to help their communities keep people healthy, fed, and warm. 

Many groups were faced with staffing changes, logistical challenges, and adapting to the “next normal” of producing events while working remotely. 

Virtual and Hybrid Programming

A common thread in the conversation was the move to virtual and hybrid programming. People, stuck at home, were desperate for the annual events that they held dear. This created the opportunity for event organizations to experiment with creating digital content. 

Concerts were live-streamed from home offices and back yards. Featured presentations were produced via zoom. The production standard ran the gamut from a simple ring-light with an iPhone to full studio lighting and HD cameras.

People were happy to reconnect with their favorite events however they could.

 TINT helps organizations create engaging virtual events supercharged with social media. Learn more about TINT Experience Builder.  

Things Have Stayed the Same

Despite all these changes, some things stay the same. It was reassuring to hear people commiserating and discussing the same challenges that have faced event organizers for years. 

Sponsorship continues to be one of those challenges. Businesses have tightened budgets in the face of uncertain economic times. This has pushed many creative industries to chase the same “big money”.  Businesses are also expecting more reporting and specific performance metrics than ever before. In a world where digital marketing can produce pages of measurements, traditional field activations are now challenged to compete on similar grounds. 

Creative event organizers are turning to previously untapped sources. Rather than focus solely on several large sponsors, these professionals are looking to small donors, small businesses, donations-in-kind, and even planned giving to fund the future of their events. Not only has this created new revenue streams, but it also builds connections to the local community and creates event advocates that will organically support marketing and communication efforts.

People expect safety, from natural and manmade disasters

It would be impossible to host a festivals and events conference without discussing the two elephants in the room. COVID was the obvious conversation since it had impacted events for the past 18 months, but with the then-recent events of the Astroworld concert, safety from both natural and manmade occurrences were hot topics.

COVID and Future Event Planning

COVID has been the ultimate test of event professionals. It has forced the industry to adopt new standards, learn new technology, and increase costs across the board for everything from food and beverage to speakers. As more and more data indicate that COVID will likely be an ongoing, annual phenomenon, similar to the flu, events have begun to restart their engines in anticipation of a strong 2022. 

Events that have returned have shared that their overall attendance is down, but those who do attend are spending record amounts.

With the increase in vaccinations, the availability of boosters, and the increasing ease to deploy health passports or testing systems, it is simply a matter of time before COVID protocols are just another check to make on an event planning list. 

The Shadow of Astroworld and Travis Scott

The tragedy of the Astroworld Travis Scott concert was a stark reminder that COVID isn’t the only risk to be managed. After the concert disaster in Houston, countless people came forward to express opinions on what could have been done better. Rather than listening to random talking heads, the Texas Festivals and Events Association Conference had actual subject matter experts that were able to share legal and insurance perspectives on who was truly liable. 

People, attendees, and performers alike have been away from events for almost two years. Many seem to have forgotten the social norms of behavior at large gatherings. With this in mind, two questions should always be asked by event organizers as they reflect on the events of the Travis Scott concert.

• Are you vetting the reputation, habits, and history of your performers?
• Do your safety plans include what to do if a crowd rushes the gates? If they rush the stage? If they become aggressive, belligerent, or otherwise unsafe?

Check On Your People

While organizers and attendees have been champing at the bit to return to events, organizations should take time to check on their volunteers, exhibitors, and staff. 

People dealt with the pandemic in a variety of ways. Some took to baking sourdough breads, others binged garbage television, and even more adopted odd hobbies to pass the time.

For many people, events are how they mark the passage of the year. They know that a certain festival or conference always takes place on Labor Day. They plan their time off, vacation, and volunteerism around an event organization that they feel an affinity for

With the absence of events, many people suddenly found themselves without that support and community that is inherent in these groups. Before sending out solicitations for volunteers and staffing, event organizations should check on their people. 

A lot can change in two years and events are inherently stressful. Make sure that your community of stakeholders is ready and prepared to be part of future activations. Be sure that there is a plan in place to ease people back into events, train them on new protocols and processes, and get them prepared for some of the new challenges that will face them.

Lean On Your Stakeholders for Social Proof

At the time of this writing, the COVID Delta variant is still wreaking havoc across North America while Omicron is starting to climb in prevalence. Though many are eager to get back to events, even more are still skittish about returning to large-scale gatherings.

This is an opportunity to lean on your stakeholders to provide proof that your, and other, events are safe and responsibly planned. Event organizers can yell until they’re blue in the face but people are always more willing to listen to a “real” person.

Have your volunteers and staff record messages explaining safety protocols and expressing their excitement about returning to the event. Get your vendors and exhibitors to share their wares while also sharing how they’re keeping their booths or popups sanitized. As attendees start to arrive, empower them to share their first steps into the event space on social media.

This collaborative, democratizing of social messaging may require a shift in communications strategy. But what you may lose in control, you’ll make up in connection and awareness.

Events are about bringing people together. Social media has the same goal. Use them in tandem to find success.

Look Towards the Future

The future is bright for Texas Festivals and Events. The Texas Event Management Institute runs concurrently with the TFEA conference and this year’s graduating class was the largest on record. A new cohort of event managers, planners, and logisticians left the conference prepared to create the next generation of events.

As the 2021 Texas Festivals and Events Association Conference drew to a close, the attendees returned to their homes with an even stronger hope for the future. They face a difficult road to bring back large-scale events, but with the help of their communities and technology, the road will be easier to traverse.

TINT empowers event organizations around the world to create engaging social experiences, deploy social walls, and use the authentic voice of their stakeholders to supercharge their marketing. See TINT in action today. 

The post Texas Festivals and Events face a bright future and a challenging climb appeared first on TINT.

Visual Content is a large part of life, and it’s about to become even larger especially with the announcement of Facebook’s name change to ‘Meta’, to encompass their larger mission to make all of the content consumed in our lives a reality. Virtual reality that is. With content (no matter how you interpret it) visuals help us attract and engage new and existing users to our brands, platforms, and products. 

According to HubSpot, “Content brings in 3X as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less” now combine this type of content with visual assets, and you have 65% more people likely to remember the information. 

So, how exactly can we create content (we aren’t talking about boring infographics either) that is visually appealing and can form a relationship with the intended audience? 

Engaging Visual Content needs Creative Structure

When creating visual content, you should always take the basic principles of graphic design into consideration to craft visually appealing and effective content. According to Canva’s, 25 graphic design tips for non-designers and beginners, they say that “the application of graphic design is vast and versatile”.  Making a big difference for even the smallest of details.

Here are some basics to remember when creating visual assets that appeal to your users across traditional channels and social media platforms 

Brand Consistency 

Your visual content marketing strategy should directly reflect your overall brand. Having brand consistency ensures that you are always delivering messages aligned with your core brand values and tone. This can be simple things like using your branded logo or keeping the same color palette throughout your visual elements. 

With consistency, it can lead to higher visibility and recognition when consumers start to think of your brand as soon as they have a need.

Loews Hotels solved this challenge in a fun and engaging way by incorporating lots of Guest-Generated content. Loews even ran award-winning campaigns like #TravelForReal resulting in thousands of pieces of engaging content that their marketing team repurposes in magazines, advertising, on social, online, and on booking pages. 

The use of User-generated content in Loews Hotels’ marketing campaign led to…

• 62% increase in social engagement
• 85% increase time spent on booking pages on website
• 4X increase in revenue from brand-site bookings

Loews reveals that it’s marketing success isn’t just due to their ability to scale content, but to use content that celebrates their guests and creates an emotional attachment to the brand. This not only makes for organic and engaging marketing assets, but shows other guests that they also have a chance to be celebrated, and that Loews cares about them.

Picking your Typeface

It’s important to know that when selecting your typeface or font, it needs to stay consistent with your brand to boost content marketing efforts. The human brain processes visuals with calculation, so it’s important to always use simple, easy to read text if you already don’t have a branded text. 

Whitespace is everything for Image Optimization 

A graphic that is overfilled with clutter can make it hard to follow for your audience to get the overall ‘picture’. This can decrease your overall internet traffic as search engines are now using visual content as another form of SEO to determine if your images are “visual search” worthy for visitors on social media and websites.  

According to Search Engine Journal, it’s recommended to do the following to make sure your image is high-quality, and that will improve your chances of getting on the image search results pages for Google and Instagram. 

• Use a descriptive image file name.
• Add alt text – this is a relevant “factor” and is also for usability.
• Add captions.
• Supply image description (recommended for Images Galleries).
• Create images XML Sitemaps (required).
• The content surrounding the images must be consistent with the image itself and not overcrowded. 

With all this said, incorporating UGC into your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is a sure fire way to win it all in terms of gaining domain authority. As your content is shown as useful (low bounce and high engagement) your content will naturally rank higher. This higher ranking content is more likely to be linked or referenced by other content. 

Unlocking Originality: UGC is the Key

User-Generated Content (UGC) is a pillar for enhancing many steps of your buyer’s journey.

1. When a consumer first learns about a product or service
2. When a consumer compares the product or service to others
3. When a customer orders their product or service
4. When a customer receives their product or service
5. When a customer gets the benefit/result of their product
6. When a customer engages and shares their experience with the product or service

In fact, consumers want real content and can often decipher this from stock photo-type material. For your visual marketing strategy, UGC is more important than ever, as viewers look for others just like them who have bought or used services they are looking into. 

Picking your Graphic Design Platform

Whether you are a professional-level user or just getting started, Canva is great for creating quick mockups and social graphics. But, did you know that even with Canva’s many free, customizable templates you don’t have to sacrifice your creative edge? 

For effective visual storytelling, simply use the TINT integration on Canva. Here you can upload your UGC straight to the Canva Editor to start incorporating trusted, authentic visuals into your designs to humanize and strengthen user attention. 

With social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram we can make the connection that no matter the type of visual content (video content, ebooks, memes, gifs, etc) it can be just as important on these media channels as traditional mediums like white papers, landing pages, and blog posts. But, one thing’s for sure is that incorporating User-Generated Content within your curated graphics can be the key to ultimate optimization to maximize reach, engagement, and clicks. 

Start creating engaging visual content with UGC, talk to a visual content expert now.

The post How to Create Engaging Visual Content Using UGC appeared first on TINT.

In 2018, Shopify saw $1.5 billion in sales during the Thanksgiving shopping period from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. One year later, they broke that record with $2.9 billion in worldwide sales in 2019 during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In 2020, COVID-19 became a global issue, and online sales gained even more momentum.

Shopify’s revenue doubled from $362 million Q1 in 2020 to $714.3 million Q2—and that was without the help of any deal-saving holidays. As Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach, only bold brands would be willing to bypass their online presence in the hope of incredible in-person shopping experience. The consumers have spoken, and they’re asking to buy their products online.

Let’s be clear though, this online commerce trend isn’t just for online stores. Online commerce is for mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar stores as much as it is for superstores like Wal-Mart. While the purchase might be made online, the brick-and-mortar stores can act as fulfillment centers. While Salesforce predicts that up to 30% of retail sales will be made through digital channels, they also predict that there will be a 90% increase in digital sales for businesses offering in-person pickup compared to past holiday seasons.

An online experience is becoming an integral part of the buying experience. Its convenience is obvious, but what isn’t is the ability for online stores to move the buyer closer to conversion using customer feedback. Unlike an in-person shopping experience where product reviews are non-existent, product reviews online can come by the tens of thousands.

Sixty-four percent of consumers strongly consider online reviews and actively seek them out before making a final purchasing decision. Through an online store, brands can place those online reviews directly on their product pages.

These product reviews are just one type of user-generated content available for brands to use in their Black Friday and Cyber Monday online strategy. User-generated content (UGC) is a photo, video, review, testimonial, or comment created by a customer about a specific product.

Each review left on the Love Hair website is user-generated content, and it has a lot of impact. Millennial consumers believe that user-generated content is 35% more memorable than other media and 84% of Generation Z is more likely to trust a company if it uses actual customers in its advertising.

Generally, user-generated content is created by customers at the 3 most exciting stages of the buying journey:

1. Right after purchasing the product or service
2. When they receive the product or service
3. After they get the benefit of the product or service

In Love Hair’s case, their UGC customer testimonials come during the last exciting stage of the buying journey, when a happy customer gets the benefit of using the product or service (organic hair care products).

Customers organically create UGC when they share a photo of their purchase, take a video of themselves unboxing their new products, leave a testimonial on the website, or leave a comment on a social platform. In addition, by using micro-influencers and nano-influencers, brands can tap into a highly engaged niche audience who have more leverage with their audience than someone with a larger audience.

Using both organic customer feedback and influencer marketing, brands can create high-converting campaigns for their Black Friday ecommerce strategies, with a sustainable, remote content creation strategy. Let’s take a look at different marketing strategies to succeed on Black Friday this year.

Black Friday eCommerce Strategies

We’re going to outline several strategies you can use in your Black Friday sales this year, but before we hop in we want to put a quick disclaimer. You don’t need to rush your team into getting all of this done by November. Focus on the strategies that will move the needle the most for you this holiday season.

#1: Start Early

Thanks to Amazon Prime Day, the holiday season started earlier this year than ever before. While holiday shopping has been known to increase tremendously due to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, 2020’s October Prime Day meant the holidays were on consumers’ minds much earlier.

Start creating holiday-specific content for your products, showcasing who it is the perfect present for or how someone can add it to their wishlist.

With user-generated content, you can find customers talking about how they got your product for a loved one in the past. If you’re having trouble collecting and organizing your UGC to find such specific content, it’s important to get the right platform for manual tagging and automated AI tagging to manage UGC about your products from all websites and social platforms.

#2: UGC Customer and Community Content

Seventy percent of consumers trust online peer reviews and recommendations more than professional content and copy, which means customer and community content is one of the top Black Friday eCommerce tips.

For example, Hello Klean uses influencer UGC from The Sunday Times in their Facebook ad copy and has minimal copy to support it. The rest of their copy explains what Hello Klean is (a shower filter) and shows their tagline, “Don’t just shower, get KLEAN.” The rest of the focus of the ad is on what the product looks like and what customers have to say about it.

If you want to motivate customers to create user-generated content, the most important thing to do is ask. Fifty-percent of consumers wish brands would tell them what type of content to create and share. Send customers a follow-up email after receiving their product asking them to tag you in their Instagram stories with a review, include a pamphlet in your product box asking customers to take a photo of themselves using your product and tag you, or create a campaign that gives customers a chance to win a prize if they tag you with your product.

#3: Optimize your website

Two of the most essential Black Friday best practices are your website speed and how well your website works on mobile. According to Search Engine Journal, your website should load in 3 seconds or less—on both desktop and mobile. Slow website load times cause higher bounce rates and lower conversions. If somebody is excited to learn more about your product after seeing an ad for it and find themselves waiting for your website to load—the excitement starts to wear off.

The ideal website keeps the momentum going by continuing to keep them excited with minuscule wait time (if any). You can test your website’s loading on Page Insights by Google. To keep the buying excitement going, you also need your website to work on the device somebody saw your ad on. For example, if you have a great Facebook ad—you can assume that your customer avatar is going to see that ad on their mobile device (unless you’ve directly set that ad to only display on Desktop).

Your website needs to be responsive so it looks good on any device (mobile, desktop, tablet, etc.) Mobile retail revenue is predicted to hit $339.03 billion in 2020. A responsive website will keep images, copy, buttons, and other page elements exactly where they should be. A non-responsive website will create a bad mobile experience where you’ll lose hot leads frustrated with your website interface.

#4: Run social media contests

One of the best ways to get the word out about your products is to ask your customers to do it for you, in return for a prize. Running contests on social media increases brand awareness by turning your customers into brand ambassadors who don’t require ad dollars to distribute the word about your brand. Instead, these customers happily share your brand with their friends, family, and audience in return for the chance to win a prize.

Here are a few ways to run a social media contest:

• Create sweepstakes that generate awareness and grow your database by having website visitors enter their email and/or phone number
• Launch a countdown that generates excitement and urgency for upcoming launches and announcements and encourage customer avatars to create community content around the launch
• Create a custom poll to drive interaction by asking customers about their favorite brand, product, photo, etc.
• Host a collaboration with an influencer (or influencers) and give them their own page on your website, collecting high-quality and high-resolution UGC of your products
• Use a contest to incentivize your audience to submit their UGC and display examples from your community as inspiration

Social media contests are a creative game that starts with your customer avatar. Depending on your audience, there will be contests that are the best option for you. For example, GoPro has asked its customers to submit their best photos for years to win free gear. This works perfectly for their audience of camera savvy, adventurous creatives. A fashion brand can use a launch countdown to get their audience excited for a new collection, asking them to share what pieces they want on their Instagram story and tag the brand.

Grab more ideas for social media contests here

#5: Create comparison guides

Comparison guides will help customers compare your product to the competitions. By hosting this comparison guide on your website, you’ll be able to grab organic traffic looking to compare the two products and retarget these customers with paid ads or incentivize them to sign up for your email list with a discount offer.

For example, SkinCarisma creates comparison guides for similar skincare products. While the comparison guide is SkinCarisma’s product, your brand could compare specific competitors to your brand. You can run these comparison guides as blog posts and paid ads that showcase why your brand is the better gift or product.

Your comparison guide needs to compare the parts of the product that your customer has the most questions about. For example, they’ll want to know how your pricing compares to the competitions, ingredients (for skincare or food products), reviews, and more. Comparison guides are a great place to put UGC since anyone looking at the comparison guide is a hot lead. Show them happy customers leaving reviews on your products or creating other forms of UGC about it so they can see that people with similar pain points have found success using your product.

#6: Update content to reflect the season

As Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach, as well as the December holidays—updating your content to reflect this season is going to show your customers that you’ve got special deals for them during this time of the year. Your content shouldn’t bypass the holidays and continue as it was before the holiday season.

Social media content, website content, and email content should all talk about the use of your products as gifts or make it easy for somebody who wants the product gifted to themselves to send out a link requesting for that gift.

The key is to show your customers exactly who these products could be gifted to or how to get it gifted for themselves in the most seamless way possible. You can send out an email talking about how your product is the best gift for new dads, how it’s the perfect fit for a busy mom, etc.

#7: Create shoppable UGC homepages and landing pages and social proof on product pages

Using user-generated content on your product pages can increase website conversions by twenty-nine percent. It can also lower cart abandonment. Your homepage and landing pages might be following the social norm of high-quality product photos created by your team, but this isn’t what consumers are asking for.

They’re asking for real-time content of happy customers using your products. Find high-quality UGC online using a platform like TINT, which helps you find the best UGC, get the legal rights to it, organize it, repurpose it, and distribute it across the social platforms of your choosing. Make that content shoppable by linking out to product pages directly from the UGC content.

On your product pages, you can add UGC reviews and testimonials, as well as more UGC photos and videos (as you want). On-site consumer reviews can increase conversions by seventy-four percent, so adding this UGC can have a huge impact on your revenue.

The foundation of these Black Friday strategies for online retailers comes down to promotion, which we’ll go over in the next section.

How Can You Sell More on Black Friday?

Selling more on Black Friday and Cyber Monday is rooted in promotion. There are a lot of ways available for you to promote your brand this season. We’ve put together a few for you to steal if they seem like a good fit for your brand.

#1: Black Friday Cyber Monday Emails

It might seem obvious to you that Black Friday and Cyber Monday apply to your products, but your customers aren’t so involved in your business. Your marketing strategy needs to remind your subscribers of what’s coming this holiday season for your products. Let them know ahead of time that they can expect discounts and to make sure to keep up with your emails as you’ll be announcing when those discounts are live.

#2: Be active on social media sharing promotions and highlights deals

Your social media profiles were created to help you sell more products, and this is a great time to put that social media marketing strategy to use. Use a curated social strategy that promotes your deals and discounts this holiday season. If you’re having trouble keeping up with your social media content or putting together a converting strategy, consider hiring a Social Commerce Specialist to help you get set up with product tags and checkout.

#3: Create curated gift guides

Just like you, your customers want help figuring out what to get their friends and family. By putting together gift guides for them, you can help them be the hero of their gift-giving story. Highlight your products in these gift guides created for your customer avatar. For example, you can create a Gift Guide for Dad’s Over 50 or Gift Guide For Women Who Love Sailing.

#4: Upsell and sell more with Shop The Look features

Use every opportunity to increase the average order value for each visitor. A “Shop The Look” feature on your website can show how customers are using several of your products at the same time. For example, an eCommerce fashion boutique can show how another user paired their leather pants with their sunglasses. By shopping the look, website visitors can add the sunglasses to their cart as well. Cha-ching! A BBQ grill brand can upsell their website visitors by showing happy customers grilling and using their collection of grill tools.

#5: Personalize content

Once you know a website visitor is interested in a specific product, you can use personalized landing pages and homepages to keep showing them that content specifically. Using cookies, you’ll be able to create landing pages with copy specifically for the product they were interested in (and showed you by visiting that product’s website page or clicking that product’s ad). You can also use this in your email marketing strategy, to engage users with the specific products they are interested in.

With Black Friday eCommerce strategy for retailers, the marketing doesn’t stop there. Once you’ve gained new customers, you know it’s time to put them into a loyalty campaign that keeps them buying past the holiday shopping season. This is when your social eCommerce strategy is going to keep them in your virtual world, continuing to collect UGC from customers as they create it and promoting new products and deals in the future.

We’re here to help with your eCommerce strategy. Request a demo to see how we can help you with high converting campaigns and increased sales.

The post Black Friday eCommerce Strategies For Retail appeared first on TINT.

Move over, Amazon. New doors have been opened in the eCommerce space as social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more realized that their platforms were the perfect place to let brands meet their potential customers. Met with a plethora of data and analytics, merchants found their new home and they’ve been living here for quite a while.

Since Facebook’s launch of their ad platform on November 6th, 2007 they’ve made billions in revenue, showing their advertisers that they weren’t just a platform to market on… they were a platform to get conversions on too.

Social channels Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok aren’t left out — they have their own advertising revenue that makes brands around the world think, “How do I do social shopping right?”.

In the age of social commerce, there are two ways to do social media shopping “right”. The first is by marketing to a customer using social media, having them click on a link that brings them to a webpage, and then having them check out on that page. This is Off-Network Commerce, or using social to drive sales on your website. The other way to sell via social media is more recent (hint: Facebook x Shopify). On-Network Commerce is where brands will market to a social media user, have that user click on their post to see the product tags and then go through the entire checkout process on social media – selling directly on social.

Let’s take a deeper look at defining both of these approaches.

How to Drive More eCommerce Sales Using Social Commerce (off-network)

Off-network is social commerce that’s been around for a few years. It’s the customer journey that starts through organic or paid social media marketing that motivates a user to want to learn more. Generally, this brings a user to a website where they can purchase a product or (if they’re not ready to purchase) subscribe to the brand’s newsletter.

The newsletter will be used to nurture the relationship, while retargeted ads keep the product top-of-mind.

One very successful off-network social commerce strategy is to take social media content and use it as marketing content on the brand’s website. For example, if a happy customer posts a photo of themselves with their new grill set, the grill set brand will post that customer on their website and relevant product pages. With this user-generated content, they’ll use the content to create native media that converts better than company-made content. This same UGC can be used in abandoned cart emails and other touch points to continue to provide social proof that leads to an eventual purchase.

How to Sell Directly on Social with On-Network Social Commerce

While social media networks initially created the bridge between brand and customer so brands could market to them, it’s now revamping that bridge. Websites are still core to an overall social strategy and on-network social commerce offers another channel for the sales process.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the other social media giants have created what will soon become the new normal. They’ve made it possible for shoppers to buy products directly on their platforms. For example, a user can find a jacket on an Instagram account, tap the picture to see the product tag, click on the product, choose their size, and check out.

Pinpointed marketing is growing to take advantage of consumer behaviors.

To Sell Directly on Social or On Website?

The key to choosing which commerce style works best for a brand is understanding that it’s not a decision of one over the other, it’s figuring out how to use both to drive awareness and conversions.

Social feeds can be used to drive product discovery and websites allow full control of the buying experience. Using an omni-channel approach, brands can look beyond individual networks and create a strategy that has a 5-star customer experience regardless of the path the customer chooses to take to conversion.

Each social media platform allows for on-network and off-network strategies for this reason. Both have their perks and using them is an essential part of creating the cohesive social ecommerce strategy that leads to raving reviews, amazing customer experience, and *fingers crossed* great user-generated content that you can use to drive more conversions in the future.

The Important Role of UGC in Social Commerce

User-generated content (UGC) is the content created by customers when they order a new product, unbox their package, start using their product, and when they see the results of the product. For example, skincare brand Drunk Elephant highlights UGC on their Instagram feed by reposting content from their happy customers, like Carla.

This is a purposeful marketing strategy with the results to back up its use.

• Forty-eight percent of customers say user-generated content helps them discover new products
• UGC drives a 73% increase in email click-through-rates
• Seventy percent of consumers consider UGC reviews or ratings before buying a product

This puts UGC at the forefront of social commerce trends, as marketers find that UGC can be used on social to create on-network and off-network conversions.

How Social Commerce Works on Social Media Platforms

Facebook

Social commerce on Facebook started back in 2007 when Facebook took a chance on the advertising model. This is the Facebook users are most familiar with—see an ad, click the ad, go the website, and purchase a product.

On May 19th, 2020 Facebook rolled out Facebook Shops, their upgrade to the current social commerce model. While keeping their original website-conversion based model, they introduced the ability for commerce business owners to skip the website and convert directly on the Facebook platform.

Instagram

Instagram runs the same advertising model as Facebook, its parent company, allowing brands to market on their platform and then take the sale off of the platform on the brand’s website. A few months before announcing Facebook Shops, Instagram launched Instagram Checkout turning the platform from just a marketing channel into part of the entire customer journey from awareness to conversion.

Fashion brand Barbour has seen a 42% increase in sales since implementing the Facebook Shop tool and a 98% increase in website traffic.

Twitter

Social Commerce on Twitter focuses on the website-conversion. Twitter tried a Buy button on paid media in 2014 which it rolled out in partnership with Stripe, Gumroad, Musictoday, and Fancy. In 2017, they rolled back their on-network strategy and removed the “Buy” button, announcing they’d be focused on action-based marketing and off-network conversions.

For now, Twitter is still focused on website conversions using paid media and sponsored tweets to bring interested consumers to interact with the brand’s sales or product page where the rest of the purchase is made.

Snapchat

Like Twitter, Snapchat has tried different buying options in the past as well. They’ve allowed a select few brands to have access to a swipe-up feature that allows users to purchase directly through the app in the past, but currently, their model is focused on mobile off-network conversions.

When a Snapchat user clicks a product link from a paid ad, they can access that brand’s website while still inside the Snapchat app and continue through checkout while on the brand’s website, but still in the Snapchat platform. Users can also choose to open the website page in their web browser. Although it looks like Snapchat may start using its AR filters to help users try on products before buying…

TikTok

TikTok, the youngest addition to the league of social media giants quickly hopped onto the advertising model. TikTok’s commerce model is an off-network strategy, advertising products to users that complete the purchase on a mobile device.

With its massive user base and esteemed algorithm, TikTok is working to create an on-network advertising model in the future.

Websites

Social commerce extends far beyond social networks. Marketers are realizing that using social media content on their websites has the potential for big returns. Brands saw a 29% increase in web conversions when they featured user-generated content. By taking social media content and making it shoppable by adding “Shop Now” or “Purchase” text, interested website visitors can click-through the social content to get to the purchase page for a product.

Websites are using user-generated content in their social commerce strategy to drive bigger results and drive down production costs. Since visual content is created by happy customers taking photos and videos of products, brands can collect all of these images and videos and use these customer reviews in their marketing strategy avoiding production costs and creating a better relationship with their customer base. Websites that feature user content have a 20% increase in return visitors and a 90% increase in time spent on the website.

User-generated content is proving to have a huge role in the social commerce world.

Trends in Social Commerce

As social commerce continues to dominate the online marketing space through strategic social ads and placements, some new trends have emerged. These trends wouldn’t have been possible without the rise in social media technology, like Instagram’s Checkout feature, live streaming, and messenger marketing.

Let’s take a look at 3 of the social commerce trends that marketers are using in their campaigns:

1. Shoppable UGC
2. Shoppable Livestreams
3. Messenger Marketing

Shoppable UGC

Like the Drunk Elephant example above, brands are able to take UGC and turn it into shoppable posts. They can repost the UGC to their feed after looking for the best UGC for specific products and add tags directly on to the post so users can check out on-site or off-site (depending on the platform).

For example, women’s fashion boutique HelloMolly used UGC from their customer @StyledbyMckenz to create a shoppable post. This is an example of off-site social commerce since the post leads a user to the product page for this dress in three steps.

Swimwear boutique Monday Swimwear uses shoppable UGC in an on-network commerce strategy. Using UGC from @BarbaraBrigido, they reposted her photo to their feed, added the product tag, and created a seamless way for their audience to buy the same bathing suit.

Shoppable Livestreams

Shoppable live streams are like an upgrade from the traditional webinar model. Instead of asking for users to click one link, a shoppable live stream allows for several links to pop up on the screen as the host showcases new products.

For example, Clinique hosted actress Emilia Clarke for a shoppable live stream on their website. The live stream showed Clarke’s skin and beauty routine. Each time Clarke showed a product, the product link showed up on the screen so the audience could purchase while still watching the live stream.

Messenger Marketing

Facebook ran a poll and found that 63% of their participants said they’d messaged brands more often on messaging apps than the years before. As messaging brands on social media becomes increasingly more normal, using visual content in messages that is known to have high conversion rates is an obvious bet.

For example, clothing company prAna uses messenger marketing to showcase their products while helping customers through the buying journey. The entire messaging process is automated, with the user talking to a chatbot to find the clothing selection they’re looking for.

Companies like prAna can showcase UGC on their website and as their product images.

Here’s an example of what that conversation looks like, thanks to AdEspresso.

Social commerce is a huge part of the marketing world today causing a wave of new trends as users have less friction in buying their favorite products and new ways for businesses to benefit.

Examples of Successful Social Commerce Campaigns

Effective social leads to conversions—but what does it look like? Let’s take a look at two examples that can show what social shopping can look like today. First, we’ll take a look at how Burberry used 360-degree videos on Facebook to promote their products in a new way. Then, we’ll take a look at Levi’s recent TikTok campaign that was able to double the average TikTok watch time on their campaign videos.

Burberry

Burberry’s social team realized that the entire shopping experience online was much more two-dimensional than it was in store. Customers that came into their store could look at the product from more than just a front, back, and side angle. They could touch it and see what it looked like at all angles. As a luxury fashion brand, Burberry understood their customer avatar. Their customers didn’t want to just buy any bag—they wanted a bag that suited their style and represented them through the Burberry brand.

To give their ads an in-person shopping feel Burberry used 360-degree videos to showcase their new products. The videos were posted to their Facebook feed where interested customers could see what the product looked like from more than just the usual two-dimensional view. This was the experience Burberry customers were looking for from their online shopping experience.

Facebook users spend twice as long on a brand page if there are videos than if there aren’t. Using this strategy, Burberry was able to create a more interactive online shopping experience that kept their customer avatar interested in a way that the usual online shopping experience can’t always.

Levi’s

Levi was one of the first companies to use TikTok’s new “Shop Now” feature in TikTok’s social commerce strategy. TikTok users could click on the “Shop Now” button and be directed to a product and checkout page on Levi’s site. To get users to click on the “Shop Now” button, Levi’s hired 4 influencers to customize their own jeans using Levi’s Future Finish 3-D technology and then put ad-spend behind the influencer’s videos. They also had the influencers put the product link in their bio.

Utilizing TikTok’s “Shop Now” button and paid ads in collaboration with influencers, Levi was able to get double the average view time of an average TikTok video on their campaign videos and more than double the page views of each of the related products.

Business Benefits of Social Commerce For Your Brand

Thanks to these advances on social media platforms, using social commerce in your marketing strategy is becoming easier and easier. These content marketing strategies have started to build trust and loyalty among customers. When an influencer launches their own brand, they have the loyalty of their fanbase behind it. Actress Shay Mitchell used her platform to launch a travel essentials brand Beis that Forbes reported made $20 million in profitable revenue.

Merchants using social commerce can see the engagement from their customers and fans by seeing which posts do well over others. For example, if a clothing brand can see that every time they post about a particular blue bathing suit their engagement skyrockets—it might be time to run a campaign around that blue bathing suit.

This is giving brands more power than they ever had in the past. Before Facebook decided to take a chance on the advertising model as its revenue source, social platforms couldn’t reduce the friction between someone learning about a product and getting them online and to the website to buy before the excitement wore off.

Now, social commerce is reducing the friction of the customer experience and is already making a more seamless experience in its Facebook Shop and Instagram Checkout features. Using social content known to convert, like user-generated content, brands have a platform to influence consumer purchasing decisions.

For example, Lays used a user-generated content campaign to drive 22 million visits to their Facebook page and saw sales increase 12% that year. Brands without the pull of a huge brand like Lays can use comments and online reviews in their social content since 71% of consumers state that online reviews are important when considering buying electronics, appliances, home decor, and more.

Social commerce tools aren’t just helping to sway customers to purchase, they’re proven to convert. Using user-generated content in their content marketing strategy, brands saw that ads based on UGC received 4x higher click-through rates and a 50% drop in cost-per-click compared to average ads.

As social media continues to grow its user base as more generations become old enough to utilize the platform, it’s becoming harder and harder to say that social commerce isn’t the future.

What is the Future of Social Commerce?

The future of social commerce is in the brands that use it to connect with their online shoppers in a way that the audience wants.

Like we saw with Levi’s, by using TikTok influencers they were able to get the views on their campaign that they might not have been able to through traditional marketing strategies. This gives us a look at the future of social commerce—continuing to find ways to personalize the buying experience. In Levi’s case, they personalized the experience by placing user faces on the campaign. Followers of the users would stop scrolling to see them talking about Levi’s new technology.

Having the budget that Levi’s, Burberry, or Lays has isn’t a requirement to see this type of success. To understand social proof and consumer trust, a brand just needs to find the users that their buyers trust. We’re seeing this now in the rise of nano and micro-influencers, who can have higher engagement and conversion rates.

This is just the start of the personalized buying journey. We’ve gotten a taste of this through Facebook’s mega-farm of data and the specificity of the ads being shown to us but the future looks much more personalized than this. Eighty percent of consumers are more likely to make a purchase if the brand offers a personalized experience—which means markers are going to follow suit. Marketers can even personalize the content of the emails that different subscribers in the same list are seeing.

The personalization of marketing is going to focus on giving customers what they were looking for (not your entire product catalog), making sure it’s delivered at the right time (while they’re still excited about the potential purchase), and building a relationship with them before asking them to make a purchase.

This new marketing future has even created a brand new role on the marketing team: the Social Commerce Specialist.

How To Get Started with Social Commerce

Social Commerce Specialists are experts in the on-site and off-site commerce marketing funnels. The’ll be a part of the eCommerce team and highly focused on specific growth metrics like followers, engagement, click-through rate, and conversion rates. See the full Social Commerce Specialist position description here.

If you’re not looking to hire for the role just yet, you can get started on your social commerce strategy by:

1. Creating a feed of curated customer product shows by searching brand-specific hashtags, handles, and keywords (you can use a platform like TINT to collect all of this automatically)
2. Secure the rights to use the user-generated content so you can repurpose UGC legally and safely
3. Make your user-generated content shoppable on your website and social media (through Facebook Shop and Instagram Checkout)

Once you have your content ready to go, you’ll start to use proven techniques for improving your sales. You can use strategies like placing social testimonials on your checkout page, making sure you have strong call to actions to specific products based on what the UGC image or video is showing, and running hashtag contests to generate conversations and leads to your website.

Starting your social commerce strategy as soon as possible is going to help you adapt to the inevitably changing landscape that social commerce will go through in the upcoming years. As more technology gets added to the commerce journey (like Snapchat’s AR try-on technology) as always, it’ll be the brand’s that stay focused on creating the ad content their customers want that will continue to build trust and in the end—create loyal, happy customers.

Ready to level up your strategy with the most advanced social commerce platform? We’re here to help. Schedule a time to speak with our experts.

The post Social Commerce – The Definitive Guide to Selling More Online with Social appeared first on TINT.

In a world of many marketing tools and models for creating winning strategies, it’s not a secret that social media paid advertising can be highly effective. But the path to success is not always exactly clear.

Using the best practices, imagery, and tracking past ad performance still may not be enough to guarantee a winner with your next campaign. In fact, creating high-converting ads to get even the minimum ROI takes time, testing, and a LOT of strategy. Fortunately, we’ve included several secrets to success in this article to drive higher conversion and engagement rates by analyzing key insights within your content.

Get to know your target audience

The importance of knowing your audience is the very foundation that makes for a successful paid campaign. But, as more business begins to saturate the paid advertisement space, a rise in cost-per-clicks is making marketing teams’ overall conversion goals harder to achieve.

With a little bit of research and guidance, you can quickly hone in on producing a winning ad that will resonate well with your selected audience. In your beginning discovery phase, start by brainstorming traits of buyer personas who will more than likely complete a conversion with your offer. Find out usage patterns with what devices they use. Are they mostly on desktop or mobile devices? This will be important when mapping out the placement and sizing proportions of your ads. Then, develop a lookalike audience composed of website visitors and/or of your existing book of business. Create a list of niche specifics when purchases are made through your brand or competitors. Check into their demographics and what social platforms they may spend most of their time on (this is where you will find the platform that makes the most sense to advertise your product or service on). 

Let’s take Instagram as an example, the biggest visual content and social commerce channel used by over 1 billion people per month. According to Hootsuite’s 44 Instagram Stats that Matter to Marketers in 2021 report, Instagram is the 4th largest mobile app on with an estimated 81% of people using the social media platform to research products and services. With this information, we can make the correlation it may be wise to run a paid brand awareness campaign on the picture sharing now turned eCommerce app to gain the most exposure to your product and build brand loyalty. 

Finally, with these insights in mind, you can start strategizing attention-grabbing content that will resonate well with custom audiences.

Create attention-grabbing visual content pieces for your paid advertisements

Ever heard the saying, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover?’ While this can be true in many cases, what you don’t want is for this to speak truth to the product or service you are promoting within a paid ad campaign! Your image content needs to shine to gather interest from your audience and deliver the value proposition. The use of User-Generated Content will help greatly in this effort by offering a look into actual customer experiences with your product. When other users view your product being handled by another ‘human’, a real person, it helps create a sense of trust and authenticity and doesn’t come off too salesy.  

Attention is an increasingly scarce resource. In visual content, placement of images, logos, and text can influence the attention and decision-making process of the intended audience. As digital channels become more saturated, the need to make scroll-stopping content that people actually view continues to rise. To gain a comprehensive outlook on how your content will visually appeal to the targeted user, use TINT’s Attention Score to analyze several pieces of content to identify key attention points. This will help you hone in on visual content that may perform the best because of the amount of focal attention it will receive from your prospect. 

The more you are aware of how your content is perceived by your targeted audience before you publish, the more it will help with your overall ad spend and delivery. 

Copywriting that will make your targeted users want your product

Strong visuals within your ad are important, but without strong copy, your advertisement can become irrelevant fairly quickly. 

To write compelling ad copy that will lead your prospect to initiate an action with your ad, you will need to first have an idea of the type of language that will resonate well with your ideal customer, this will be found in the discovery phase of getting to know your audience. What action words resonate well with them? Use this type of wording and tone within the headline and copy to begin a relationship with the viewers. Once you have this, the next step is to add persuasion points to the ‘why’. Why does your customer need your product or service? What value will this bring to them? Defining your product within your copy not only peaks the users’ interest but begins to create a thought within their mind about your company. Maybe they aren’t keen on purchasing at that moment, but with the right wording (and frequency caps on your advertisement), you can create a brand awareness that will stick in their minds. 

Go big on the Call to Action

Once you’ve identified the appropriate engagement graphics, ad targeting, copy and perfect prospect it’s time to get them to complete an action to boost conversion rates. Let’s circle back to the previous feature we used to rate and identify attention points in your content. With Attention Score, scan the image to identify specific visual assets that highlight, where your users’ attention will focus. This can help to achieve the ideal platform for your call-to-action to drive urgency and gain the most clicks. 

Successful lead generation or purchase actions depend heavily on the best user experience, meaning your CTAs must be clear and point to a clean destination or landing page for viewers to complete the intended conversions.

Converting paid ad traffic requires the right mix of art and science. Remember, optimizing ad conversions starts with the right people with the right visual content and ad copy that matches your product or service solutions to their problem. No matter if you’re deploying ads on Instagram, Facebook, or any other platform, you can optimize visual content for higher conversions with Attention Score. 

To learn more about the conversion-driving power of UGC and Attention Score, request a demo of TINT today.

The post Paid Advertisement Hacks: How to Make a Winning Campaign appeared first on TINT.

The lockdowns and remote working forced corporate event planners to re-evaluate how to proceed with meetings and activities. People quickly realized that there are virtual conferencing tools available today that can host any meetings or team-building activities online. 

But now the question is: where do we go from here? Will we stick to online meetings, or is there a chance for everything to go back to in-person and physical events? What will corporate meetings look like in the future?

The answer is hybrid corporate events. In fact, 62% of event planners believe that hybrid events are the future and plan to continue catering to a virtual audience in tandem with a live one. 

Keep reading to find out 7 strategies to prepare for virtual corporate meetings of the future.

1. Get the Right Team

Most of us have gotten used to conducting meetings online. However, with the shift to hybrid events, we’ll need to continue to learn and grow. The virtual events industry is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of more than 23% between 2020 and 2027. Since much of the space is still uncharted territory, the first thing you need to do is get the right team to navigate it. 

Regardless of how much automation you introduce, it’s up to the human team to make it a success or failure. You need to have the right team consisting of trained and highly skilled personnel.

A possible team could include:

• A digital event strategist who is experienced at conducting digital events and is familiar with the costs, physical requirements, and overall management of the event.
• A tools expert who is trained at handling the software and all the technical aspects.
• A moderator who knows how to handle a live audience and virtual attendees together at the same time.
• A content manager who will be responsible for creating all the virtual and physical content for the event.

2. Choose the Right Platform

We might be familiar with certain online meeting platforms, like Zoom, that we use for daily continuity of business. However, there is no guarantee that these platforms will work effectively for hybrid events. Hybrid corporate events will require a unique platform that allows the virtual attendees, as well as the in-person audience, to interact seamlessly. 

Depending on the type of event or corporate meeting, the platform will need to have additional features as well, such as private rooms, customization, flexible resource sharing options, etc. Choosing the right platform can make a big difference in how the meeting goes and how successful you are in accomplishing the objectives of the meeting. 

Fortunately, as virtual and hybrid events gain more traction, companies are working hard to develop advanced online software that meets the demands of hybrid events today. There are many great options out there such as Bizzabo, ON24, Hopin, SwapCard, 6Connex, and more. 

3. Adapt Your Content

A corporate event planner or events agency will need to work on adapting the content to the new kind of corporate meeting. A few years ago, you could get by with a simple presentation with photocopies for everyone, then everyone expected a PDF, then attendees wanted hyperlinked and media-rich versions of all presented content. 

Things are different now. You can change the content to better satisfy your audience’s wants and needs. With hybrid events, people tend to have a shorter attention span, so the content will have to be engaging yet concise. 

Likewise, the content will have to be adapted according to the physical audience, too, so that the message or key takeaways from the meeting can be relayed properly. Include more Q&A sessions to get the audience involved or even include short physical activities to get everyone moving and break the inertia. 

4. Send Out Agendas in Advance

Hybrid events are still something very new for many people out there. If event planners want the virtual corporate meetings to be a success, they need to ensure that the audience knows what to expect.  Otherwise, they will just spend the whole meeting in confusion.

Sending out an agenda outlining the whole event and its objectives for everyone will help the attendees get familiar with the event pattern as well as the expectations. 

5. Engage Everyone

Event agencies will also have to think outside the box and come up with different strategies to keep all participants engaged, whether they are online or present in person. They can break the meeting into several parts to keep everyone focused and prevent them from zoning out. In those breaks, they could hold polls or surveys on different topics to get the audience’s opinion and keep them engaged. 

Similarly, the organizers can hold Q&A sessions where the online speakers and live audience can interact directly and ask each other questions or direct the questions to the speaker. 

6. Use Event Insights to Perform Better Next Time

One of the great things about online events is that it offers a lot of opportunities to track and gather data about the event. Even the most rudimentary video chat tool can capture basic metrics. More advanced software can score things like screen time, attention to content, downloads, and unique engagement criteria.

Insights to consider tracking:

• Which sessions or speakers in the meeting attracted the most audience or had the highest engagement?
• Which demographic had what kind of behavior throughout the event?
• When did people start clicking away?
• When did people change tabs or navigate away from a session?
• When did users ask the most questions?

Using this data to draw meaningful insights and then applying them to future virtual corporate meetings can help make them more successful. 

7. Amplify Event Content

Events are places where industry experts share ideas, trends, and research. Even when creating a hybrid event, there will be people who want to see the content but are unable to attend in-person or virtually. Work to capture top-tier event content and promote it through brand channels.  You could turn them into webinars, make video clips for social media, or use them as lead magnets by gating them in your CRM.  Don’t let great event content die at the show.

Final Thoughts

Whether it’s team-building events or corporate meetings, there’s no doubt that the norms and best practices are constantly changing. As a result, if event planners and businesses want to remain effective and efficient in their online events, they need to strategize and prepare for these changes beforehand.  Think about hybrid corporate events as your plan your field and web marketing strategies.

Whether your event is online, in person, or both, TINT creates tools that engage and delight attendees. Start with vibrant social walls, then move into the TINT Experience Builder to create social media-driven activations that will keep your attendees engaged- wherever they’re participating.  Learn more and chat with our events team today. 

Author Bio
Sarah Hill is a content writer at Seven Events Ltd, a leading event organizer offering virtual event solutions and venue finding services in the UK. She started her career in the events industry almost a decade ago as time progressed she became an avid event blogger sharing her insight on corporate event planning.

The post 7 Strategies to Prepare for Hybrid Corporate Events of the Future appeared first on TINT.