How to Make User Generated Content Work for Your Brand
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If you have not yet made user generated content part of your marketing strategy, consider these stats.
Not only do 76% of consumers trust the content of fellow consumers more than they do branded content, but 92% trust consumer recommendations -- even those from strangers -- over brand messaging. Given this clear desire among shoppers for authenticity over aspirational advertising, incorporating user generated content has become an essential part of the marketing strategy for fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands.
And yet, the strategy itself is no more than a few years old. Despite social media’s near-constant presence our lives today, 10 years ago Facebook had barely left college campuses. Instagram did not exist at all, and smartphones were still in their infancy. To upload an image in 2008, where you likely shared it via email, you still needed a bona fide digital camera.
In the span of less than a decade, the Internet has evolved from a consumption-only platform to one that thrives on contribution. Nearly 3.8 billion people worldwide upload 44 gigabytes of data everyday, including 67 million images on Instagram alone. Consumers are as likely to find their next purchase on Instagram Stories as they are a brand’s eCommerce site -- and they’re often more likely to get style advice from bloggers than they are professional models or celebrities. The ability for consumers to share inspiration, recommendations, and experiences is what sparked traditional influencer marketing, and now that brands have seen success with the strategy, many are looking to harness the power of user generated content by collaborating with a greater variety of influencers.
Having facilitated collaborations between brands and bloggers since influencer marketing was in its infancy, we have seen first-hand the evolution in mindset from a follower-driven mentality, which valued mega-influencers with 1 million or more followers on Instagram, to one that embraces engagement, reach and authenticity. Brands are looking more and more to collaborate with micro-influencers as part of their recognition that influencer marketing works best when viewed as consumer marketing -- when their content is truly user generated content.
Here’s how you can make influencer generated content work for your own brand.
User-Generated vs. Influencer-Generated Content
First, let’s break down exactly what we mean by user generated content. What is it, and how does it differ from influencer generated content?
If you’re approaching the strategy correctly, these terms should actually be synonymous. Although influencers have the reach of a digital publication, and a contracted collaboration certainly falls under advertising, savvy marketers understand that influencers are indeed also users. When you therefore select influencers for a campaign, you want to choose ones who actually use your product or service, and who can recommend your brand authentically to their followers. This is the kind of engagement that leads to genuine word-of-mouth marketing -- the holy grail for any brand.
The stats above show that consumers want the truth, and user generated content provides that. As you plan your influencer marketing strategy, you’ll want to balance the reach of an influencer with their ability to connect with consumers organically. As you think about how to incorporate user generated content into your overall plan, consider these five ways to make user generated content work for you.
1. Tell a More Authentic Story
Advertising campaigns with professional models and clever taglines certainly help to convey a brand image, but consumers recognize that these images and punchy turns of phrase do not reflect reality. With influencer user generated content, you can show real people using your products or services in real-life situations. Even when influencers disclose that their post is sponsored (something they should always do), we have found that consumers still recognize the content as that of a fellow consumer, and react to it as such. Their trust is reflected in their level of engagement, the comments they make, and their conversions. Influencer content inspires shoppers to act.
Case study: HelloFresh Australia
When Laura Timpson, the blogger behind Stories of a Mum (@storiesofamum), collaborated with grocery delivery service HelloFresh, the Instagram post of her young daughter delighted by the grocery box did not feel like an advert -- it felt like any other snapshot into the life of a busy mum for whom a simple trip to the store with two car seats really is an adventure. Laura is a believable user of HelloFresh, and her enthusiasm (shown in her comment on the post) feels genuine. These are the kinds of collaborations that make user generated content so effective.
2. Strengthen Customer Loyalty
When you cultivate influencers to create user generated content as brand ambassadors, you also strengthen customer loyalty. Brands have long used celebrities and other influential figures as the “face” of their products or services, but influencers allow brands to accomplish that same feeling of recognition and trust, only on a micro level. This can become a boon to brands looking to capitalize on the influence that niche bloggers have on their audiences. Influencers with 1,000 or fewer followers generate 8x the engagement of influencers with more than 1 million followers, and smaller influencers are proven to inspire more sales.
To strengthen customer loyalty through influencer generated content, a long-term mindset is key. Telling an authentic story inspires trust, but it’s seeing the brand relationship grow over time that instills a feeling of loyalty. Shoppers looking to emulate influencer’s style are likely to adopt their favorite brands. This makes long-term brand ambassadorships particularly powerful.
Case Study: Marks & Spencer
Marks & Spencer has had great success cultivating long-term influencer relationships, working with some bloggers over months and even years. The brand has collaborated with Veronica Popoiacu of Bittersweet Colours since 2016, contributing key pieces to Veronica’s signature style:
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3. Spark Genuine Conversations
User generated content also allows you to spark real conversations about your brand online. The more voices you have weighing in on your products and services, the more traction you gain with consumers. Influencers allow you to increase the number of mentions you receive, which can boost your organic search ranking and create “buzz” about your brand. When 10 different bloggers are talking about you all at once, it’s hard not to take notice.
Influencer gifting is a great way to accomplish this. Our Product Seeding collaboration allows you to gift 10 or 50 influencers at once with a single collaboration, setting the stage for multiple conversations about your brand on social media. This collaboration type also includes access to Collaboration Results for three months, allowing you to compare the overall reach, impressions, traffic and sales of each influencer.
Start gifting influencers today for less than $90 per blogger
Case study: Bondi Bather
Swimwear brand Bondi Bather is a great example of a brand that has employed user generated content to spark multiple conversations about its brand at once.
Several influencers, from Jennifer Chong (@jennifer_chong), above, to Milly Bannister (@_millybannister), below, posted about the brand over the Australian summer, keeping the brand top-of-mind -- and in conversation -- all season long.
The ability to reach many niche influencers at once, each reaching a specific target market, makes Product Seeding a particularly powerful tool.
4. Increase Engagement and Sales
User generated content also improves your internal marketing campaigns by converting more followers from brand enthusiasts to actual customers.
A leading international retail brand recently demonstrated the ability of influencers to encourage brand engagement and sales through A/B tests of influencer user generated content against branded content. In every case, influencer content performed better than brand content, leading to higher click-through rates, click-to-order rates and EDM revenues. The brand saw a 21.6% uptick in click-through rates and a 34% uplift in click-to-order rates. More revealingly, revenues were 21% higher with influencer content.
The brand was also able to track a definitive spike in online sales for a product after it was featured by a prominent influencer on Instagram Stories. Traffic to the product’s eCommerce page remained elevated for several days afterward.
These results confirm what we understand about how consumers relate to brands. For decades, brands have used surreal settings and ethereal campaigns to sell fashion, beauty and lifestyle; now, many are finding that what consumers really desire is a genuine interaction.
5. Improve Your SEO
Finally, user generated content allows you to quickly and cost-effectively secure high-quality inbound links from influencers with strong domain authorities. Few brands have the budget or bandwidth to create sponsored content across multiple sites, but the end result -- multiple inbound links to your website -- is exactly what you can achieve with user generated content, your team doesn’t need to create the content! Better yet, when you contract influencers for a paid collaboration through Shopping Links, you have exclusive access to the collaboration imagery for three months and ongoing digital usage. Shopping Links’ blogger profiles also show the Google Analytics of many influencers, allowing you to easily identify bloggers with high domain authorities.
The great impact that user generated content can have on boosting your organic search ranking makes SEO-focused collaborations through blog content and social media one of the most impactful ways that you can utilize this strategy.
Case Study: Kate Somerville
In a recent collaboration with multiple influencers, beauty brand Kate Somerville focused on high-quality blog posts by multiple influencers, including an article on Kate Loves Makeup that was shared 98 times across Pinterest and Facebook. Her post on Instagram received more than 300 likes.
The brand also collaborated with blogger Sharon Litz to create blog and Instagram content, earning more than 500 likes on Instagram and nearly 30 comments.
One of the great advantages of this approach is that you can improve your SEO even if the links are nofollow (as they should be in accordance with disclosure rules). Here’s why this is so: while it’s true that Google’s “spiders,” which crawl the web for inbound links, do not count “nofollow” links, Google does follow every click made by an actual person; so every time a reader clicks on a sponsored link, you receive SEO credit.
These are just a few of the ways that you can make user generated content work for your brand. Additionally, influencers provide invaluable feedback from a customer’s perspective, which can make the relationships you build while collaborating to create influencer content equally important. All of these reasons improve your influencer marketing ROI, making user-generated content one of the most powerful tools that you can utilise.
Shopping Links can help you get more value from user-generated content by making it easier to identify the best influencers for your goals, seamlessly set up a collaboration, and track your results over time. To start benefiting from influencer content, schedule a call or create a free brand account to explore your collaboration options.