Any marketer will tell you – few things are more important in eCommerce than making sure your site has quality content that informs and adds value. But that can be challenging for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that have correspondingly small- or medium-sized marketing budgets. About 70% of businesses fail to consistently provide quality content, according to research from Altimeter. Creating great content takes skill and diligence, and few SMEs have the knowledge or resources to produce it regularly.
What if your company can't afford, or doesn't have the expertise, to compete with more established brands that have deeper pockets? Luckily, there's a workaround. You can crowdsource your content. Your customers know themselves better than you do, and crowdsourcing lets you tap into the knowledge of your entire target audience.
One of the most effective – and least expensive – tools businesses can use to market themselves is user-generated content. Customer photos, videos, reviews, testimonials, comments, social posts, and more can be a goldmine for businesses that know how to leverage them.
This strategy is not entirely without risk, because you can’t control what people say about your brand. But if you cultivate a community and engage with your consumers in a transparent way, this type of promotion is more persuasive than anything you can buy.
Millennials currently spend about $200 billion a year and are on the cusp of having more purchasing power than any previous generation. An infographic from Ipsos MediaCT shows that millennials consume a lot of user-generated content (UGC). The survey information indicates the following:
You can tap into user-generated content by following these simple tips.
Everything a user contributes on your site becomes branded UGC. Users add UGC to gain recognition. This is a win-win situation since brands benefit from the attention. Other benefits of UGC include:
Most importantly, UGC gives your brand a competitive advantage that's hard to reproduce since communities can't be copied or reworked by competitors.
Wikipedia is moderated via crowdsourcing, and users help make the site more accurate because they care about the community. This effort would be expensive to accomplish if the site had to pay for it. This is the power of engaging the user in content creation.
Another example is Inbound.org, with 170k professional marketers who share their knowledge. This creates an unbeatable source of expertise so that this community is very attractive for anyone who wants to know about sales and marketing.
If you would like to secure the rights to user-generated content, it’s easy to do. Ask permission via a comment.
For example, PetSmart monitors hundreds of hashtags about pets. When they see something they'd like to share on social media or for other marketing purposes, they comment on the post to get permission via the poster commenting back #yespetsmart.
If you throw a hashtag contest where contestants enter via a branded hashtag, they are giving implied permission to use whatever they post. However, it’s better to get their explicit agreement.
Companies such as Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and Alibaba depend entirely on the community. The larger the community, the more value individual members receive. However, these are extreme cases where the product and the community are the same things.
Many businesses don't have the ability to build a community-centered site. They can still interact with prospective and existing customers via social media and blog comments. Online communities help you showcase your products or services, improve your site's Google ranking, attract new members and increase your brand awareness.
These benefits yield a higher conversion rate and help you build a community for future market tests and product development.
About the Author:
Laura Gayle is a full-time blogger who has ghostwritten more than 350 articles for major software companies, tech startups, and online retailers. Founder of BusinessWomanGuide.org, she created her site to be a trusted resource for women trying to start or grow businesses on their own terms.