By
Nowadays, people don't just go to a store and purchase something they want; they conduct intensive research that alters their decision to make any purchase. Their research mainly revolves around checking what other customers like. This is when user-generated content campaigns come in!
Utilizing every review, photo, video, or piece of user-generated content that comes your way to influence the decision of your potential customer should be a priority in every eCommerce business marketing effort. To help you jumpstart your UGC campaign, we gathered for you the best 9 user-generated content campaigns out there.
Table of Contents:
- What is user-generated content?
- Top 9 eCommerce user-generated content campaigns
- Tips on creating the best UGC campaigns
What is User Generated Content?
User-generated content (UGC) comes in many forms and types, including reviews, photos, ratings, gifs, videos, audio, and blog posts. This type of content brings to your brand a certain level of authenticity that you can never match with your own content.
As a result, people will trust your brand more, you will have a loyal customer base, and your sales will increase. Keeping in mind that this is the end goal, there are many things that user-generated content can help you with before reaching your end goal. For instance, UGC helps you in reducing costs, drive conversions, increase reach, and brand awareness.
User-generated content campaigns are when you, as a marketer, come in. By making an effort to obtain user-generated content (like creating a challenge or giving discounts), then showcasing the best pieces of UGC that come your way on your website, social media accounts, and emails, you have created a user-generated content campaign! Yes, it's that simple.
Now that you learned what a user-generated content campaign is and its importance let’s take a look at some of the best user-generated content campaigns ever created!
Top 9 Ecommerce User Generated Content Campaigns Examples
Countless companies have started using user-generated content campaigns to improve their social media presence, engage their customers, and increase sales and revenues. However, not all companies succeed in achieving these goals, but the following ones sure did!
1- Wayfair
Wayfair is an online furniture store that relies on UGC in many of its campaigns. In this example, through their special hashtag #WayfairAtHome, customers post their house setups that include Wayfair products. The company then uses these photos on its own social media accounts and adds a shopping link without pushing too much and losing the authenticity of UGC.
2- Camping With Dogs
The pet lifestyle brand, Camping With Dogs, motivates their followers to share photos of their dogs wearing their products with their hashtag, #campingwithdogs. Then the company reposts high-quality photos so that they get free marketing material and have a more intimate relationship with their customers.
3- BodyForm
BodyForm is a women’s health brand that utilized user-generated content to become an educational resource instead of just selling hygiene products. The company created a hashtag on Instagram, #meandmyperiod, which their customers used to share their pain points and how to overcome them. This is a perfect example of how user-generated content campaigns can get your brand an authentic voice and make you stand out from competitors.
4- Chobani
In the following example, the Yogurt company, Chobani, created a TikTok challenge to get momentum for its new product, Chobani Flip. The challenge was kickstarted with some influencer marketing, but it quickly caught on, and UGC videos started pooling in. As a matter of fact, the hashtag #SwitchTheChobaniFlip got over 1.7 billion views! It is also worth noting that the company awarded 25 lucky TikTokers a case of a special yogurt product.
5- CoffeeForLess
The online coffee service, CoffeeForLess, wanted to focus on increasing its organic traffic. Through extensive research, the company realized that UGC is one of the best ways to drastically improve its SEO. Accordingly, CoffeeForLess added new features for readers to easily leave and read reviews. In a couple of years, the company managed to get over 6,000 comments and increase conversions by a whopping 125%.
6- Klook
Klook, an Asian online concierge, had a two-day event to collect authentic high-quality photos for their website. In the “travel pawn shop” event, customers traded their photos for free activities all over Asia. The photos collected were later used on the company’s website, articles, and social media accounts.
7- Expedia
Another online travel company, Expedia, turned to user-generated content to increase brand awareness and sales. The company launched the hashtag #EyeWanderWin and customers were encouraged to share images and videos of them on their travels for the chance of winning a free vacation. The contest received over 4350 UGC in the span of three weeks. As a result of this successful campaign, website traffic increased by 50%.
8- Paintbox Nails
Paintbox Nails is using UGC on Instagram in an innovative way to boost sales. The company permits customers to tag Paintbox Nails products in their posts. This allows anyone who sees the posts to just click on them and make a purchase!
9- Shein
Last but not least, the eCommerce giant, Shein, is well-known for “clothing hauls”. Basically, videos and images of customers trying on and reviewing Shein’s products, which the company then reposts on its social media accounts, especially Youtube and Instagram. Shein has been running this campaign for years as it proved its success, and the company now has a strong global presence.
After reading about all of these successful eCommerce UGC campaigns, you are ready for the next step, creating your own campaign! Let’s take a look at some tips and tricks to help you create a UGC campaign that gets you featured in our next top campaigns article!
Best practices For Creating The Best UGC Campaigns
The real challenge in creating a UGC campaign is obtaining the right content from your consumers without being too pushy and losing them. Here are some tips to help you kickstart a successful UGC campaign for your eCommerce store
- Ensure that it is easy for everyone to create. You can’t ask customers to do a complex process that requires a certain talent and expect thousands of pieces of content to come your way.
- Make it worth their while ; in other words, the incentive has to be set according to the type of content you are asking of them and how much time or effort they need to put in. Simply, if you are asking for too much, you have to offer too much.
- Look at the half glass-generations full. Every once in a while, you will get a bad review or a negative piece of content. Don’t overlook this type of content, instead use it to your advantage and create a campaign to reverse the negatives into positives. It is also worth mentioning that you can sometimes take the high road and apologize for your mistakes. In fact, that can go a long way with your customers and helps humanize your brand.
- Get some influencers to join your campaign, and influencer marketing is a great way to kick off any user generated campaign. As it helps you reach a large audience in a short period.
- Add UGC everywhere. Customers tend to trust other customers a lot more than they trust brands, so by constantly adding UGC, whether they are reviews, images, videos, etc., you are building a rapport with potential customers.
- Help your customers out by providing helpful tools and showing your customers how to participate in your campaign.
- Focus on the experience more than the product. Hundreds of brands ask their customers to share photos of their products. To truly stand out with your campaign, you need to focus on the whole experience your brand offers.
How Can Marketing Automation Help You Send the Best User Generated Campaigns?
Creating campaigns manually is a thing of the past, now all smart marketers use marketing automation systems to fast-track the process, save time, resources, and effort. Using a marketing automation system like ConvertedIn can help you with:
- Automating ads for your campaign
- Retarget customers with user-generated content
- Sending out email marketing campaigns
There are many more things a marketing automation system can help you in, so you are able to create the best user-generated marketing campaign for your eCommerce business. Request a demo now, and our experts will help you grow your business!
