The Problem With Content Marketing & How To Solve It With Powerful UGC

Is the king dead?

We all know content is king and can boost your SEO and help your brand reach new customers.

But content is time-consuming and expensive to create at scale.

It means even if the king isn't dead, he's ailing.

Why?

Consumers are smart...

They know companies will tell them what they want to hear to make a sale even if it is a relatively soft sale that comes wrapped in a blanket of valuable content.

So how do you persuade consumers who are increasingly skeptical of content marketing?

Here's a hint; content is still king but the old one has been dethroned.

Meet the New King

The new king is often more persuasive...

He's also able to easily scale as you grow and can even generate greater ROI than the old king.

Meet the new king of content marketing; user generated content (UGC).

UGC is any type of media; written reviews, unboxing videos, or product images that users create themselves after purchasing from you:

Image via: Danish Skin Care

The beautiful thing about UGC is that it is authentic, scalable and well just different than the standard content brands tend to create themselves. It is more trustworthy and captures real emotion from real people.

Your job is to leverage this trust...

How to Market Your UGC

It's like having a giant sales force that works for free...

Customers who love your brand and its offerings and tell the world about you via their UGC are the secret ingredients to the marketing nirvana we're all striving for; automated & highly persuasive.

Getting customers to continually engage with your brand is the golden nugget to helping automate your content marketing. As each customer experience is unique the content they write will also often be unique.

This allows you to segment your customers in new ways.

For instance, you can now segment UGC creators by sentiment. Once you know how a specific segment feel about your offering you can start to optimize your existing marketing initiatives by making them ultra-personalized.

What if you could do all this automatically? How might generating UGC and distributing it seamlessly across the web in an instant influence your target market? It's now possible to do all this and more thanks to Yotpo, which provides software designed to help merchants get 9X more reviews, leverage the customer's voice, and turn trust into sales.

Image via: Yotpo

Interested in setting up Yotpo a bit differently or more dramatically? Contact Our UGC Experts Today

Where Do Customers Engage With Your Brand?

Communities don't always grow on their own...

You can have an Instagram account, install the best reviews solution, and even write amazing blog posts.

But that doesn't mean anyone will post your images, write or read your reviews, or visit your blog.

Before we share tips on how to turn persuasive types of UGC like reviews into conversions, let's discuss where potential customers engage with your brand and how curating content across social can result in some very effective campaigns.

On & Off Site Communities

Every business has two kinds of online communities: on-site and off-site. Each of these communities are equally important, but need to be approached differently.

On-site engagement includes:

• Reviews
• Q&A
• Photos & Videos
• Social Curation

These types of engagements are down the funnel conversations that immediately increase conversions.

Off-site engagement includes:

• Influencers

BONUS: Be sure to check out our post on how to use influencer marketing to drive sales

• Social Media
• Inbound
• Organic SEO
• Paid Acquisition

These types of engagements are top of the funnel conversations that have unlimited potential reach.

One of the best things about off-site engagement is that conversations can be seen by people you may not otherwise reach. With the rise of 'commerce everywhere' off-site engagement is driving more sales than ever before. Ever heard of Shoppable Pins? That is a great example of an off-site community.

Image via: Yotpo

As you can imagine, on-site and off-site communities depend on one another.

Your UGC marketing strategy should cover them both as off-site conversations have the power to vastly expand your community. The best way to understand the power of UGC marketing is by showing an example of how you can bring off-site conversions on-site.

How To Influence With Social Curation

Your ears burning?

They should be- because people are talking about you and your brand.

No matter how great of a job you do at engaging your community on-site, people will still be having conversations off-site as well.

The basic idea of social curation is that you "listen" to all conversations, wherever they are happening.

When you "hear" something relevant, you ask for permission to use it on-site, and then you do just that.

Social curation works best on Instagram with visual content.

Visual content is also a great way to add content to your site when you launch; or use it to add content to products that may not have generated many reviews.

Visual Curation opens up opportunities for you to run campaigns on Instagram and encourage users to generate their own content about your brand. There are many ways to encourage users to upload content. Here are a couple interesting ideas from previous successful campaigns:

The Nike #PHOTOiD campaign lets users design, share, and buy custom shoes inspired by customers' very own Instagram photos. Customers can upload their favourite Instagram photos and then design shoes that complement the photo.

The #CastMeMarc competition was for the chance to be a Marc by Marc Jacobs model and asked their Instagram followers to submit selfies with the hashtag #CastMeMarc in order to participate in a digital casting call. The results? 8 selfies/min for the first 24 hours.

Ready To Learn How To Turn Reviews Into Conversions? Click Here