When it comes to marketing, User-generated content remains one of the best.
Think about it. UGCs are free. They can reach and engage more customers. Even better, they give your brand a personal touch, which is the right ingredient to build your credibility and a sense of community among your customers.
In a study conducted by BrightLocal, they found out that people trust and consider online reviews before buying a product or service. Consumers are 88 percent more likely to get converted when they see good reviews about a particular brand.
User-generated content has a profound psychological effect on consumers. We know that actual customers can be trusted. And we should take their recommendation seriously.
Actual users of product or service give their candid opinions. Instead of just providing promotional statements, they offer in-depth insights to prospective customers to make informed buying decisions.
There are several reasons why more and more companies are shifting into this particular type of marketing strategy. Aside from its obvious effect on consumers, UGC also helps them create better content for their platforms.
Rather than creating tons of promotional contents, some businesses prefer painting UGCs on their empty canvass. Some are posting good reviews from their customer. For others, video contents are doing a good job.
According to PRBulls, a content marketing agency, “Everyone is craving for authenticity”. The same principle can be applied to marketing. Customers want to interact with their fellow human. After all, we are social animals. Without UGCs available, customers could get this feeling of doubt about a particular brand. We don’t want to listen to robots or straightforward product descriptions. We want something we can relate with.
In fact, a study from Digital Intelligence Today suggests that 92 percent of consumers will listen to peer recommendations when making purchasing decisions.
It makes a lot of sense. Let’s put it this way. If you want someone to recommend a babysitter, you can’t listen to some text message recommending the best babysitter in the world. You want a babysitter recommended by your friend who actually tried and tested his/her service.
Bottom line: people have trust issues. It just happens that UGC has the power to persuade people, even if the recommendation came from the other side of the planet.
What types of UGC exist?
There are plenty of ways to share how happy your customers are.
You can embed links of review videos inside your copies. Pictures of satisfied customers are also effective to entice prospective customers.
Whether it’s in the form of text, pictures, or videos, the key towards an effective marketing campaign is your creativity. Yes, the UGCs can drive your site’s conversion, but how can you further use them to beat your competitors?
Here are some ideas you can incorporate with your website to maximize user generated contents.
What’s an e-commerce website without a review page? User-generated contents such as customer reviews are always a requirement when you have a retailing business. Make it as human as possible. Let them talk to each other. Putting reply and reaction features will help. Also, don’t forget to communicate once in a while.
Question and Answer section can immediately capture the hearts of your customers. Your sire must give them a sense of security by answering all their queries. It is an essential element in every retail business that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Make it fun and exciting. Let your visitors post videos and pictures on your website. Satisfied customers will want to share their experience with your product or service. This is an instant confidence boost for those who are scanning your site.
The integration of social wall has also been very useful for many websites. A social wall is a website page or section where visitors can view User-generated Contents from different social media platforms. It may also contain activities such as raffle draws, contests, and challenges.
Never forget one of the most effective network marketing tactics in social media sites. People want to feel that they belong to a bigger group. They want to get updated with what’s new. The social wall reinforces this marketing strategy by setting trends inside the website.
When people visit your site, they want to see real customers talking about the brand you are offering. It’s nice to see a lot of people supporting your products. It’s nice to see a lot of people supporting your products — a better way to do that than posting their videos, comments, and pictures inside your website.
Here are other SEO/ internet marketing tips for small business and other e-commerce business that would surely drive your conversion.
1.UGC provides fresh and relevant content
If you want to solve the problems of your consumers, you have to ask them yourself. But how exactly can you do that?
User-generated content allows businesses to target even the most trivial concerns of consumers. It’s also considered an analytic tool that can give you free insights about your customers.
UGC follows the most effective principle in creating contents for websites: relevance and uniqueness. Even better, your customers will do it for you – free of charge.
All you have to do is to use them wisely. Every comment, review, pictures, and videos posted on social media, forums, and inside your website has the potential to create engaging contents. You can even categorize each of these contents based on the topic they tackle.
2.UGC can help your site rank for long-tail keywords
It makes perfect sense. Your customers are the same people searching questions in Google. They create the same keywords you are using in your website copies.
Got the point? People are getting smarter when searching for queries on Google. The same way goes for Google, of course. Ordinary keywords are not enough anymore.
Long-tail keywords are highly specific search phrases that are used by people who are looking for particular products. One of your UGC categories, for example, talks about the benefits of using your unique product. They will most probably use specific phrase talking about the technicalities, features, and other specs of the product – all which generate specific keyword phrases.
3.UGC helps shape the attributes of SEO
In UGC, customers do all the work – even your SEO campaigns.
UGC contains almost all the necessary ingredients to shape your SEO attributes. Your consumers tend to use relevant keywords in their testimonials, reviews, and comments. This automatically generates a good SEO evaluation for your website. Moreover, the linking of the site can also boost your domain authority.
4.UGC improves your social media optimization (SMO)
Gone are the days when SEO relies on website optimization. If you want to sell your brand, you have to be prominent in social media. This is where the majority of your customers reside. Most people discover products and services through social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
It has become a significant requirement for business these days. Having a cool, feature-rich, and user-friendly website is not enough. If you want to reach a broader range of audience, your site must be integrated with the different social media platforms.
On top of all that, you also have to engage with the different marketing strategies in social media. You can invest in ads to reach a range of targeted audiences. You can also initiate viral marketing through social media influencers.
The goal is to increase your footprint in the social media environment with user-generated content.
5.UGC helps you to implement automatic and manual optimization
Once you’ve gathered enough UGC data, Google can help you optimize these resources further. Google spiders or crawlers look for these types of contents when evaluating your SEO ranking.
Legitimate reviews and testimonials contribute a lot to your overall ranking. Ratings, specific queries, and reviews from actual customers provide relevance. They also offer elements of authenticity and authority, which are crucial criteria when search engines evaluate websites.
6. UGC can boost customer engagement and conversions
Customer engagement is one of the best advantages of UGC in social media marketing. It allows you to know your audience better by listening to their queries, reviews, and statements. You will learn about the trends and buzzwords going around the internet, hence, giving you the opportunity to act accordingly.
With this, you can respond and adjust your marketing campaigns based on specific situations, which is exactly what marketing is all about.
7. UGC amplifies your brand’s content
The best content for business websites are the ones that can persuade customers.
UGC has this exact effect on people. The majority of internet shoppers will look for reviews before they make a purchase. More and more webmasters are applying this principle by adding social walls on their websites because it attracts customers’ attention and funnels them into the checkout page.
Conclusion
User-generated contents can bring your business on top. All you have to do is create effective campaigns. People are willing to help the ones who helped them. The power of UGC is always in the hands of entrepreneurs.
These are just some of the SEO marketing tips for small business to boost their revenue. But as you go forward in your journey, you will soon discover an ocean of opportunities. It’s also advisable to look for affordable SEO experts, to ask questions and clarify everything as you go along the way.
The digital world is vast. You will need the help of others, such as your customers, to survive and conquer. Never underestimate the power of the herd.