Consumers' love for influencers seems to be on the wane – what they really want when they're about to buy is genuine feedback from real people – Katrina Bell reports.
Authenticity ranks highest with online visitors and it should start with your customers. Influencers may be getting the big bucks, but if you want to increase engagement and drive sales, your websites, apps and socials should be swathed in their feedback and ideas.
A 2023 report by content agency EnTribe found that consumers are not only losing interest in what influencers have to say, 86% professed a preference for more organic, unpaid material that represented real customers.
Consumer Generated Content (CGC) can be anything from reviews and testimonials, social posts, pictures, messages, videos and emails – what links them is their undeniable high worth to anyone who interacts with your brand in the digital sphere.
Most valuable is organic, i.e, not paid for. And certainly not the result of a paid UGC creator so popular on the likes of TikTok and Instagram – otherwise known as dropshippers who sell cheap products they buy for themselves and then market for a percentage of the sales.
When harnessing your brand’s CGC, the ultimate goal is a high ‘social proof score’. That’s another way of saying that your visitors and prospective consumers will see your CGC and want to share in their good fortune and good taste. Even more so because they have a solid foundation of trust in the message. This will happen when your reviews successfully establish your brand or company as trustworthy experts.
Where should you use it? Simple answer is everywhere, but here are 4 prime spots to get the most eyeballs from your peer-influencers.
1. Your website’s landing screen
Testimonials are nothing new, however the strategy of peppering curated recommendations and real-world examples needs to find a place on your prime real estate. And if you put in the work to solicit your recommendations, it also has the benefit of being a virtually free source of positive word of mouth. Have you considered using snippets in your product images?
2. Pinned posts on Facebook and Instagram
It should be stressed, true CGC does not include paid partnerships or collaborations, not forgetting the strict advertising rules on Insta in particular about being transparent about any deal. That being said, anchoring your valuable testimonials at the top of your social space ensures they don’t get lost in reels and posts.
3. Embrace the hashtag
Remind your customers regularly to tag you and use your carefully curated set of hashtags. You can still sustainably reward after the fact with discount codes for future purchases, entrance into competitions, and early-bird notifications of new product drops. Incentivising further future interactions is another low-risk trick to keep content coming down the pipe.
4. B2C advertising
There’s no need to neglect your ad spend while you are collecting up this month’s mentions. Every positive interaction is an opportunity to sell, and that can include your traditional communications streams such as banner ads and or Google campaigns. Why be generic when you are bigging up your brand?
