Gone are the days of sales pitches and company-created marketing content. We live in a digital age where customers want reviews written by other customers and trust the feedback of other buyers. With the explosive growth in social media, the significance of user-generated content has skyrocketed over the past few years. And this is especially true for any business with an online presence.
Reviews, ratings, feedback, peer recommendations and other user-generated content about any business or brand have all taken the front seat. If you are selling cameras, your potential buyer will go read reviews about your company before purchasing your wares. If you are a rental company, the potential customer will seek the opinions of other who have used your service before venturing himself. Such is the power of user-generated content today.
Build Up Your Brand
The goal in leveraging UGC is to turn your business into a brand. It is an arduous process, but if you pull it off successfully, it comes with rich dividends in term of sales and long-term growth. The key factor in building your brand is to develop a community around it.
More than 50% consumers in U.S. aged between 18 and 24 consider reviews on social networks before availing the products or services of any company. This number is expected to rise continually through 2016 as social media becomes a more prevalent part of consumer lifestyle. If you intend to grow your business, leveraging UGC must be an essential part of your growth strategy. More and more users are expected to search online, look for peer reviews and other content when making sales online. And if you already have a solid online presence thanks to UGC, you will have a better shot at attracting these potential customers.
However, leveraging UGC might not be as easy as it looks, especially if you plan on doing the work manually. Doing #hashtag searches on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks might be tedious and cumbersome. Here’s where a dedicated dashboard for UGC will play a big part.
Leverage a Powerful UGC platform
Taking care of comments, reviews, blog posts, ratings and other aspects of your business-related UGC can be tedious if done manually. Yotpo, a UGC-management platform, focuses on turning user-created content into a rich minefield of potential marketing material for your business.
The solution leverages blog posts, reviews, social media posts, and even photos, which can significantly improve engagement with potential customers. These include authentic reviews, which can be integrated with product pages, as well as social media campaigns. By offering all of this at one place, the solution makes the development of UGC a hassle-free and easy process.
Conclusion
Enhancing and enriching the user-generated content surrounding your business is a great way to establish your branding, engage with your customers and build a community around your product. This will be particularly fruitful for you if you have a sales-based business. For a potential customer, choosing between two equally good companies is often based on the customer opinion about the products and service.
Over time, the variety, richness and sheer amount of UGC related to your business will be part of your brand capital. So even if you have the best offering in your niche, you will need to leverage UGC effectively in order to reach and convert – and retain – as many relevant customers as possible.
Photo credit: Caro Sodar
