The Customer Voice Is Powerful
If your friend has cute jeans, you want them too. If your favorite influencer is raving about a new flavor of soda, there’s a high chance you’ll be on the lookout for it during your next grocery run.
Recommendations and real opinions have a powerful effect on our purchasing choices. Whether it’s word-of-mouth or hearing from fellow consumers, personal experiences build trust like nothing else.
The same goes for all of the customers, and that’s what makes user-generated content (UGC) so powerful. Instead of just curating messages to target customers, marketers have the opportunity to amplify consumer voices that already have a high level of credibility and authority — 86% of brands and retailers believe that more authentic UGC in their paid and owned media would improve the performance of their ads and content
This is why it’s crucial to master how we implement UGC within campaigns. Whether it’s upping efficiency or nailing down the right tech partners, now is the time to embrace tactics that drive truly customer-centric marketing.
Maximize User Data
Every customer’s brand experience can be boiled down to their data. From the items they purchase and browse to the devices they prefer to shop with, data is the window into understanding what customers want to see from other consumers. This critical information can power strategic UGC campaigns that put customers in the spotlight.
In this example from My Jewellery, their newsletter poll asks customers about their preferred styles. Once customers participate, My Jewellery follows up with retargeted messages based on each individual’s personalized needs.
The same data that powers the re-targeted messages, can be re-used to direct what UGC is served to the customer in the future. If the customer voted for the “Statement & Colour” option, for example, the brand knows to loop in bright, fun outfits when sending UGC to this particular customer. By incentivizing and using zero-party data with gamified tactics, marketers can hit the ground running with their next UGC send.
Automate Your UGC
Just like any other marketing task, making the most of UGC hinges on automation. Whether it’s adding in parameters to ensure brand guidelines are met or piping in your social media feed for an easy omni-channel win, automation is a must-have.
Social Proofing
There are two basic types of UGC. Their words, such as social proofs, and their actions—pictures of customers with your products in real life. Both are crucial to instilling the trustworthiness and quality of your brand.
Here, Inkredible Retail displays a recent review. Using automation, the brand is able to ensure that the review highlights a similar product to what the customer has been recently browsing. As an added guardrail, Inkredible Retail also has rules in place to ensure that only 4-star reviews and above are sent to customers.
If marketers want to take their social proofing to the next level, they can leverage AI powered personalization in their product reviews, encouraging further discovery.
In this email, Inkredible Retail uses AI to decide which product review to display. To optimize UGC, AI is used to display both the product and review that is predicted to resonate the most with that customer.
Through the AI’s increased understanding of the customer over time, the email is similar to when a friend recommends a great item. Friends don’t only share how good the product is, they also emphasize the features of the product that would be most useful to you since they understand your needs, creating a much more compelling case for purchasing.
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One of the easiest and most effective approaches to automating UGC is by displaying your social feed. It’s a powerful way to show real customers with your products and provides further inspo for browsing customers.
In this example, the brand uses a module that displays their latest trending content. Using automation to auto-refresh the content, marketers can ensure that their latest and greatest UGC is always at the forefront of their messaging.
Partner With the Best Tech in Town
Just like perfecting your martech stack, having the right line-up of partners is critical to the success of any and every campaign.
To maximize the power of UGC, a seamless process will enable you to quickly serve up relevant customer-led content.
That’s where the Movable Ink and Bazaarvoice integration can give marketers a leg up on producing efficient UGC campaigns. Not only does it minimize production time through automation, the combination of the Bazaarvoice API and Movable Ink’s AI powered personalization creates a more tailored shopping experience that influences future purchases.
With partners and tools like these, marketers can ensure that their content is ever-relevant and lets valuable customers take center stage, creating the perfect environment for growing loyalty.
Share Your Consumers' Voices
84% of consumers are more likely to trust a brand’s marketing campaign if it features user-generated content. So give credit to your most valuable asset on hand—your customers’ thoughts and opinions—and build lasting trust with them through UGC. And if you want to create those campaigns smoothly and efficiently, The Movable Ink and Bazaarvoice partnership is a key way to make it happen.
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