Unlocking the secrets of successful Direct-to-Consumer businesses
Marketing
Product Seeding: The Key to Becoming an 8-figure Brand with Influencer Marketing
Intro
Influencer marketing has quickly become one of the most effective ways to reach a targeted audience. And while it's not always easy, there are a series of actionable steps you can take to use this marketing method and benefit from it. Companies that have experienced tremendous success with influencer marketing have typically taken an approach known as "product seeding."
Fashion Nova has used product seeding to their advantage, essentially building its brand around some of the most prominent influencers, each of whom has a massive following.
The company has currently enlisted the help of around 5K mega influencers who will post Fashion Nova content here and there that appears more like a casual conversation between friends than it does an advertisement.
This marketing method has worked in favour of the fast fashion brand. The company's founder, Richard Saghian, is believed to be worth roughly $1.4 billion, selling around $500 million worth of merchandise in 2021 alone.
The influencer marketing industry is expected to reach a staggering $16.4B by the end of 2022.
Dozens of companies are starting to follow Fashion Nova's lead, using product seeding to connect with their audience on a deeper, more personal level.
1. SUGAR Cosmetics, founded in 2015 with only TWO products to its name at the time, is now worth $30 billion. Despite the company's humble beginnings, the founder's decision to utilise influencer marketing paid off, with social media marketing and viral videos helping the brand flourish!
2. Gymshark became a billion-dollar DTC fitness brand by utilising the power of influencer campaigns.
3. Another company exceeding initial expectations because of influencer marketing, PrettyLittleThing has experienced astronomical growth. Working with celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Nicki Minaj, to name a few, the brand has become the fastest-growing e-commerce fashion company.
If you want to increase your brand's visibility and make more sales, ultimately leading to a significant profit earned each day, product seeding and influencer-generated content are necessary. There are endless possibilities for this type of content, including web content, product reviews, tutorials, and much more. Before you know it, you will begin noticing an increased interest in your brand and what you offer.
If you're ready to master marketing and resonate with your audience, consider taking two approaches – influencer-generated content and user-generated content, both of which can make a difference in your marketing strategy.
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The Impact of Influencer Marketing on E-Commerce Conversion Rates and Sales
The global influencer marketing industry will reach $24.1 billion by 2025.
87% of e-commerce shoppers depend on social media reviews to help them decide where to make a purchase or not.
49% of customers rely on the recommendations of influencers before ordering online
Source: Plytix
With numbers like these, it's not hard to see why more companies rely on influencer marketing and user-generated content to sell their products and services to the masses. In fact, many leading brands in the industry have already taken the initiative to rely on this marketing method to increase brand awareness and boost sales.
What you will discover in this guide:
- Influencer Generated Content vs User Generated Content
- How to use product seeding to drive sales
- Product seeding done right: whitelisting vs influencer darkposting
🤳 Part 1. Influencer Generated Content vs User Generated Content
Most consumers will spend more than 5 hours per day watching user-generated content.
📱 70% of consumers will consider user-generated content reviews before spending money on something specific.
🙌 93% of customers agree that user-generated content is valuable in helping them decide whether to make a purchase.
Source: Everyone Social
The statistics speak for themselves, making understanding user-generated and influencer-generated content's overall value easier.
1. What is the difference between user-generated content and influencer content?
The influencer marketing market proliferated between 2016 and 2020, increasing from $1.7 billion to $9.7 billion four years later.
Source: Influencer Marketing Hub
The first step to getting started is understanding the differences between user-generated content and influencer content.
When relying on user-generated content, you depend on any customers, whether they have a following or not, to discuss your products in the content they've created.
Influencer-generated content is any content created by someone with a following of a minimum of 5K people, but usually much more than that.
In most cases, content produced by influencers is sponsored, but content created by everyday users isn't sponsored, meaning it's more honest and open to the public.
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2. Influencer-Generated Content
61% of consumers trust influencers' recommendations, giving your brand more credibility than ever.
Source: Shopify
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With influencer-generated content, you essentially have influencers with thousands of followers producing content on your brand, which means they will talk positively about the products you provide.
It's an excellent way to get more people interested in your brand and the products you sell because those who follow these influencers will feel more inclined to make the purchases.
While this content is occasionally sponsored, it's not always sponsored, and sometimes influencers make the content themselves because they love what the product does for them. s someone with a following, most would consider the influencer a trusted and reliable source who wouldn't steer them in the wrong direction. As a result, consumers who follow that influencer are more likely to purchase the products that the individual mentions in photos and videos posted to social media.
The Additional Ongoing Benefits of Influencer Marketing
✅ Benefit 1. Brand Credibility
Many big and small companies are using influencer marketing to gain credibility. While small businesses benefit the most from this, larger corporations, including Nike, Dunkin' Donuts, and Chipotle are taking advantage of the opportunity to reach new audiences and make more sales.
1. American Eagle
The brand has been around since 1977 but has had its fair share of highs and lows. Even as things may have been dying out for the brand within the last five years, the brand decided to partner with the famous social media influencer Addison Rae.
Addison Rae, a TikTok influencer with more than 70 million TikTok followers, generated $4.26 million in Media Impact Value for American Eagle over six months.
Source: Women’s wear daily
The partnership helped American Eagle advertise its new line of "Mom Jeans." Because of Addison Rae, the brand is making a name for itself again.
So, not only did the partnership enable them to gain more credibility, but it also made it possible for the brand to receive more user-generated content than it had before.
2. Sun Peaks Resort
An incredible ski resort situated in British Columbia, wanted to bring more attention to consumers and showcase what it had to offer.
With engaging content posted by influencers on different platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, consumers were getting what appeared to be a "sneak peek" at what Sun Peaks Resort is like, ultimately leading to more reservations!
Stunning images, daily Instagram stories, and short Facebook videos drove 200,000+ article views of three minutes or more, creating massive interest in Sun Peaks’ target market.
Source: Travelmindset
✅ Benefit 2. Lower Costs Compared to In-House Content Creation
Influencer content allows brands to reduce advertising expenses, saving them more money in the long run. Not so sure?
1. Ruggable
Known for its two-piece machine washable rug system, spent 25% less on influencer marketing while receiving a 32% higher return on the investment.
The famous dog influencers Asher and Ashby have an Instagram account featuring the mischiefs of two corgis with about 30K followers.
Rugglable got more than 100 high-quality pieces of content from Asher and Ashby that they reused on their website, paid ads, emails and social media campaigns.
Source: Aspire
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2. Aura Frames
Leverages influencer marketing and saves roughly 50% of its monthly content budget.
The company needed an efficient way to scale its content strategy without breaking the bank. According to Christine Zalocha, their VP of Marketing, the burn rate on digital marketing content falls from four to seven days.
20% of Aura Frames’ sales are attributed to Influencer Generated Content, or paid ads featuring influencer content
Source: Aspire
Influencer Generated Content allowed them to get over 650 pieces of content that they repurposed in over 13K custom videos to test and understand the content that truly works for the brand.
✅ Benefit 3. Authenticity
60% of marketers say influencer-generated content performs better and increases engagement over traditional branded posts.
Source: The social sheperd
1. Benefit Cosmetics
Increased awareness of its brand, with more consumers recognising its authenticity due to powerful influencer marketing strategies on social platforms such as TikTok.
By taking an omnichannel approach, the brand connected with a larger group of people, increasing organic impressions and gaining more sales.
The global beauty brand partnered with a diverse group of creators via Instagram and TikTok, to promote their new Brow Microfilling Pen. This approach achieved 2.3M organic impressions
Take a closer look at the results of Benefit’s campaign:
- On Tiktok: 1.4M impressions, 1.18% engagement rate, 3.5K hours of total viewing time.
- On Instagram: 955K impressions, 3.65% engagement rate, 102.6k engagements.
2. Levi's
Doubled views on its products by working with popular TikTok influencers. The company has also enlisted the help of some of today's leading Gen Z influencers, including Jaden Smith, to help showcase the products they sell. This approach has helped the brand appear to be more authentic to the average consumer.
Levi’s digital business accounts for over 15% of its total revenue, a 2X increase in just 3 years.
Source: Ion
Levis’s combined the power of their Future Finish 3D technology to customise denim products and influencer marketing to create authentic campaigns.
✅ Benefit 4. Increased Social Content
The number of global social media users continues to increase from 4.2 billion to 4.62 billion between January 2021 and January 2022.
Increasing social content is a fantastic way for brands to gain attention from millions of users daily because of the growing number of people who use social media daily.
1. Starbucks
The coffee brand has learned how to use the power of social media and influencer marketing to its advantage.
The platform has increased the amount of social content pushed out to its 35 million Facebook followers and 18 million Instagram followers, creating fun hashtags and other ways to interact with individuals that support the business.
A Grande Cloud Machiatto for Ari!
Starbucks partnered with Ariana Grande to launch her own drink, the Cloud Machiatto. A single post from the artist generated nearly 3M likes.
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2. Nike
Is another major company with a massive following of over 150 million people on Instagram and 35 million on Facebook. The company uses this to its advantage, regularly posting engaging and relatable content to consumers that resonate with them instead of coming off as too salesy.
✅ Benefit 5. Connection with Engaged Consumers (Brand Followers, Brand Communities, etc.)
85% of business owners agree that branded communities have positively impacted business.
Source: Views for Change
1. Lego
It has built its brand around community members. Groups of people with a passion for LEGOs can connect, share insights, find collectable pieces, and so much more, which means more business for the company.
2. Sephora
Popular cosmetics store Sephora has built a solid following with its Beauty INSIDER community. People of all ages can join the community for inspiration, helpful tips, product reviews, general beauty advice, and more. And what does this mean for Sephora? More sales!
Sephora’s Squad influencer campaign launched in 2019 with 70 influencers, including Iyana and yayayayoung.
The community has grown to over 5.7M members, who’ve created over 2.8M posts for Sephora.
Source: Fast Company
✅ Benefit 6. Informed customers and more conversions
81% of retail shoppers will spend time researching a product online before they decide to buy it. Retail shoppers who do research beforehand are considered informed customers.
Studies show many of the best well-informed shoppers are buying store brand products instead of the name brand, higher priced items in the stores. So, what does this mean? It means brands of all sizes can get ahead, even relatively new, by offering lower prices on high-quality products.
Some companies are experiencing a drastic increase in conversion rates and gaining consumer loyalty after relying on influencer marketing.
1. Windsor saw a 29% increase in web conversions after relying heavily on social media marketing, highlighting user-generated content on their accounts.
2. DMC has relied on user-generated content and influencer marketing, helping them increase consumer engagement. The valuable content allows the needlework material company to breathe new life into its marketing strategy while connecting with more consumers than ever before and boosting conversion rates.
3. With its #TravelforReal campaign, Loews Hotels increased engagement rates, getting more people to make reservations for a stay at one of their many hotels!
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Bigblue tips
How Unbottled used product seeding to inaugurate its flagship store in Paris
Unbottled gave away 100 solid-shampoo products to the first 100 visitors of their shop!
The plastic-free personal care company, recently opened its flagship store in Paris… accompanied by no other than former Miss France and influencer, Alexandra Rosenfeld.
People lined up for more than an hour to discover Unbottled’s products and take selfies with Alexandra and the company founders.
👉👉 Discover Unbottled’s success story with Bigblue
Product seeding
22% of shoppers will abandon their carts when purchasing items will take too long to get to them. Don’t miss out on making the sale because of SLOW shipping times.
Source: Baymard
If you want your business to succeed, the best way to get it to do so is to facilitate long-term relationships with the types of influencers with core values that align with your brand's values. In addition, it's best to give rather than ask these influencers to do something for you. This is a technique best known as product seeding.
So, what does this mean? Instead of asking an influencer to support your business, you send them free products without expecting anything from them. It doesn't guarantee that they will make a post about your business, but there is a relatively good chance they will. Most influencers will genuinely appreciate receiving the free merchandise and will likely post about it, whether in pictures or videos.
Bigblue Tips
Dermalogica uses Bigblue for their product seeding strategy
Dermalogica uses Bigblue’s gift-App feature to offer free products to their client’s orders. How does it work? Dermalogica can either establish conditions to add gifts (promo codes, purchase amount) or launch seasonal marketing campaigns to automatically offer a gift to each order on a given period.
See how Dermalogica’s product seeding strategy makes influencers jump straight to TikTok to share their unboxing experience.
👉 Discover Dermalogica’s success story
3. User-Generated Content
60% of consumers agree that UGC is the most authentic type of marketing content available to them
Source: Nosto
While influencer-generated content is a big deal because it can help brands of all sizes reach their targeted audience, boost engagement, and drastically increase conversion rates, it's not the only type of content working wonders. User-generated content is becoming an increasingly effective way for companies to increase visibility online, which leads to more web traffic and sales.
What is UGC
User-generated content is content created by the average consumer. Rather than paying these individuals to make content about your brand, you're exceeding their expectations enough to make them want to create content independently. From the quality of the products to the unboxing experience you provide, these are the things that leave a lasting impression and get people to post pictures and videos of them using a product or talking about what they like most about it.
Impact of UGC on CRO
+48% of consumers agree that UGC helps them discover brands and products.
Source: SimilarWeb
User-generated content greatly impacts CRO because most consumers conduct extensive research before buying products. In addition, the internet has become a valuable tool, making it easier for consumers to find reviews, tutorials, and so much more before they've even invested their funds into these products. With that in mind, the consumers searching for information on products may come across different types of user-generated content that encourages them to buy a product because of how good it works.
1. Calvin Kelin
Created the in #MyCalvins campaign, working with mega influencers and celebrities such as Justin Bieber and Kendrick Lamar. It's helped the brand gain visibility, increase sales, and connect with new audiences like never before.
2. Aerie
The famous loungewear brand, started mastering the art of user-generated content as early as 2014 when it announced it would no longer retouch its models' bodies, providing authentic images of women in its clothing and accessories.
The hashtag #AerieReal went viral and helped the brand gain more attention than ever. The brand is now valued at over $5 billion.
Bigblue Tips
Use your unboxing experience to generate more UGC
Cabaia’s unique unboxing, made possible by Bigblue has revealed 50 million views on TikTok!
To discover your brand’s unboxing virality potential go to TikTok Discover and look up your brand’s name + unboxing.
👉 Discover Bigblue’s unboxing experience
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What makes UGC so impactful?
1. People like watching tutorials and product reviews created by random people because they provide a greater sense of authenticity.
2. Most consumers find UGC incredibly relatable because it's often created by people who look like them, act like them, or even have similar interests.
3. There are so many ways to find user-generated content across different platforms. The most common platforms used include Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
Bigblue Tips
FROM FUTURE teamed up with Bigblue to deliver the most extraordinary experience to customers with custom packaging provided.
As a result, buyer satisfaction increased by 89% within the short span of four months.
👉 Discover From Future’s success story
4. IGC or UGC: Which will drive your brand's best results?
49% of TikTok users find products through videos created by brands, creators, and other social media users. Roughly 37% of those individuals bought the TikTok products after learning about them on the platform.
Source: TikTok’s Path to Purchase Report
You're probably asking yourself, "Which is better - user-generated or influencer-generated content?" The truth is that both are incredibly powerful, but it's all about knowing how to use them. It's also about working with what you can afford based on your budget for marketing-related expenses.
User-generated content is likely best for you if you're:
- Looking to save money on marketing expenses while increasing brand visibility.
- Offering additional features, such as ETAs and other conveniences, that consumers will love and want to brag about to others.
- Trying to build a community of consumers who can support one another while using your products.
- Wanting to come off as authentic as possible to your audience.
However, influencer-generated content may be the best option if you're:
- Willing to spend a budget on either sending products for free to influencers or paying them to post about your brand in their posts, stories, and reels.
- Trying to cater to a specific audience that would be more likely to buy from your business if they saw one of their favourite influencers advertising your products.
- Interested in reaching an entirely new audience of people based on different demographics.
- Looking for high-quality content created by influencers that you can use across different platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram.
But this doesn't mean you can't use a little bit of both. Some brands combine the two to supercharge their marketing efforts, and you can do the same. Check out this list of some of the pros and cons of each type of content.
🎁 Part 2. How to Use Product Seeding to Boost Sales
61% of consumers prefer recommendations from influencers over branded social media content.
50.7% of brands that work with influencers for product seeding purposes own an e-commerce shop.
The influencer marketing industry has a value of over $13 billion.
Source: Shopify
1. Benefits of Product Seeding
Before using product seeding, it helps to know the many benefits you can expect to reap when you use it as a valuable marketing tool. With product seeding, you will have the opportunity to:
- Align with different types of influencers based on your personal preferences. You can connect with people who share similar values. These are great people to select to represent your brand.
- Save money while building one of your brand's most effective marketing strategies.
- Conveniently highlight some of your favourite products or new releases to boost sales for those items, which will help you earn more profit and garner more attention.
- Strengthen your brand's authenticity and become a trusted, reliable source of whatever it is that you currently sell to consumers.
- Build more awareness for your brand without spending nearly as much as you would in the past.
💜 Some companies you may know and love best use product seeding as a strategy, such as LUSH, Zaful, and Graze.
If these are the benefits you want to experience, follow the actionable steps below to get started.
2. Use It on Your Website
If you send free products to influencers and customers, and some of them create content surrounding your brand and its products, include that content on your website! There are many ways to do this, such as:
- Having a section on your site of consumers who've used a specific hashtag relating to your business and a product it sells.
- Including a "See What Others Have to Say" section on your site with short-form video content from creators who've mentioned your brand or shown others how to use some of your products.
- Creating a section on your site that shows the faces of influencers using your product will often entice the average consumer to buy from you.
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Bigblue Tips
Create an Influencer-Friendly Website
Add a sign-up page for brand ambassadors (influencers willing to represent your brand)
Always create landing pages for any promotional offer, special deal, or event taking place
Include different types of influencer content throughout your website to gain attention and build trust with the consumers
✅ Step 1. Master the Top Types of Influencer-Generated Content to Use on Your Website
56% of online shoppers have bought a product after seeing a post from an influencer they trust.
Source: Hubspot
Most marketers envision carefully curated social media posts when they think of influencer-generated content that gets consumers' attention. Although most of the different types of influencer-generated content are readily available on social media platforms, such as TikTok, marketers can add more value to this content by integrating some of the posts from influencers into their web content.
Product seeding is the way to go if you want how-to and FAQ content. Send influencers these products, and if you think they might struggle with using them, include a nice little note with instructions in the packaging. Once they see the magic unfold in front of them, they will want to share that with their followers, which means they're more likely to create how-to content.
Bigblue Tips
Discover what type of influencers you should partner with
Kolsquare shared with us this useful table with the engagement rates you should look for nano, micro and macro influencers on each platform.
👉 Contact the Kolsquare team
✅ Step 2. How-To Maximise the Performance of your FAQ content
Work on collecting how-to and FAQ content. Why? It shows consumers how to use the product AND answers many questions they might have before buying.
Need an example? KISS, the famous cosmetic brand, made waves on social media with Falscara, an at-home eyelash extension kit that uses segmented lashes instead of strip lashes or individual lashes. And what caused such a stir? Posts from consumers on social media.
Once consumers started creating short-form videos on how to apply the under-lash system, these lash kits began selling out in stores.
In addition, major beauty influencers decided to try them, including Mikayla Nogueria, the 24-year-old makeup guru with a massive TikTok following of 13.6 million.
Can you imagine how many people learned about Falscara and decided to buy it because of her post showing how to use it?
Bigblue Tips
How to Get the Content You Need
After posting the first video to platforms like TikTok, consumers will likely have questions. The great thing about this is that the influencers can reply to these questions with video content, essentially answering FAQs for your brand so that you don't have to do it. It's an effective marketing strategy that saves you time and money!
See how Si Si La Paillette uses its FAQs to produce viral content on TikTok
👉 See how Eco-friendly beauty brands use Bigblue
✅ Step 3. Use Product Reviews from Influencers to boost your sales
Nearly 79% of consumers will trust reviews from influencers.
Source: Council Post: How Revenue Can Increase Through Reviews
Go above and beyond to exceed expectations, and you can increase your chances of having influencers create product reviews for the items you sell. How exactly can you go above and beyond? Follow these steps:
- Create an incredible unboxing experience using customised packaging that sets your brand apart from others.
- Include some of your BEST products that will WOW anyone who receives them.
- Use the right logistics company to ensure products arrive on time and in excellent condition. You don't want influencers receiving damaged products that they can't use.
- Add a special note in the package with the products you're giving to influencers. Tell them about your brand and what it stands for, which may resonate with them!
If you're providing an extraordinary experience, influencers will get excited about unboxing your products, making them want to pull out the phone to start recording. Once they've created content surrounding your brand, it's easier to reel in an entirely new audience.
Bigblue Tips
Lashilé Beauty displays customer reviews on its website to boost sales
Lashilé Beauty trusts Bigblue to delight customers with a 5-star-worthy delivery experience.
⚙️ Recommended tool: Use Loox App to add video and photo reviews to your product pages like Lashilé.
👉 Discover Lashile’s case study
✅ Step 4. Host virtual events and live shopping
The adoption of Live Shopping events has increased by a staggering 78% in the last year
Source: Acowebs
Don't underestimate the power of virtual events! Because of the pandemic, many companies had to get creative when launching new products to the masses, ultimately leading to virtual events that have become increasingly popular.
If you don't want to host in-person events, you can prepare for product launches by hyping them up and inviting a few select influencers to attend the launch. If you make it feel exclusive, you can garner more interest and get more people to attend.
Influencers will get excited about trying out these new products and sharing them with the rest of the world.
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✅ Step 5. Use guest blogging and launch contests
Hashtag challenges and contests generate a 21% increase in UGC video creation.
While 50% of Hashtag Challenges drive $5 dollars of return in Ads spend
Source: TikTok
Guest blogging is another way to share product details and get consumers excited about the upcoming release of anything you may plan to offer.
Reach out to bloggers within your niche and ask if you can create a guest post on their site.
While some may turn you down, others will agree to let you create a compelling post for their blog site, meaning more exposure for your brand!
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Impala Skates partnered with roller skater and influencer Marawa to launch a collection of high-heeled skates.
Their giveaways gathered over 70K posts from excited skaters ready to roll!
🎁 Part 3. Product Seeding Done Right
47.3% of influencers are considered micro-influencers, with around 20,000 followers on their social media platform.
You don't have to reach out to mega influencers to succeed at product seeding. Did you know that micro-influencers tend to have better engagement rates, which means reaching out to everyday people with thousands of followers instead of millions to achieve your marketing goals.
This content created from your product seeding efforts will enable you to dramatically boost your CRO throughout the customer journey.
1. Organic Posting
Getting organic posts from consumers is a fantastic way to gain awareness and build a positive reputation for your brand online. Try these steps to get more organic posts from consumers on your products:
- Connect with around 500 different influencers per month (16 per day)
- Keep track of the influencers who get back to you and agree to receive the products you wish to send
- Set realistic expectations. Not everyone will create content. However, of the hundreds of people you reach out to each month, several will post content to their platforms. It will cost you nothing when they do this!
Your effort in connecting with influencers and product seeding can lead to you receiving dozens of valuable user-generated content each month. Even if you’re not getting tons of content initially, have patience, keep reaching out, and allow the posts to come naturally!
2. Paid Media
Paid media is another option to consider. While organic posts can help you throughout your marketing journey, you can work with experts to help you redistribute your influencer content to other platforms, such as Facebook. It enables you to reproduce this content in multiple places to ensure that more people are finding the user-generated content created on your brand and the products you sell.
Influencer Whitelisting
Did you know influencer whitelisting is a thing? With this process, the influencer allows brands to access their social media to post advertisements here and there. It's not the most user-friendly approach compared to influencer-generated and user-generated content because most can tell that these are advertisements.
However, there are ways to use this opportunity to your advantage. You can run paid ads on platforms like Facebook, but you will need permission from the influencer beforehand.
Bigblue Tips
Bigblue client ROWSE uses Influencer Whitelisting on Facebook Ads to reduce their CAC by 30% and increase their ROAS by 5X!
👉 Contact Simon Robert and start using Influencer Whitelisting on your campaigns
Influencer Dark Posting
Dark posting is yet another option that can help you increase visibility and get more people interested in what your brand offers. With dark posting, you're placing a social media advertisement in the news feeds of your targeted audience, but this content doesn't get displayed on your timeline.
If a random person visited your company's profile page on Facebook, they wouldn't see this advertisement. However, someone following your company could come across this advertisement when scrolling through their newsfeed.
❤️🔥Use dark posting as a way to repurpose some of the influencer-generated and user-generated content you’ve collected.
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Marketing
UGC: the anatomy of a €3M campaign
Intro
User-generated content has quickly become one of the most effective ways for D2C brands to gain more exposure while earning the trust and loyalty of consumers. It's a crucial part of any marketing strategy that converts. Better yet, it’s easy and cheap to produce! Why? The videos, product reviews, unboxings and tutorials are created by consumers who choose to support the businesses they love.
Need a few good examples of how user-generated content works? Gymshark, the popular sportswear company, has drastically increased its sales by $3BN due to user-generated posts on TikTok alone. Because of the consumers' love for Gymshark's products, the brand has brought in millions more in sales revenue than initially anticipated.
Another example is Kris Sugartan, who brought in a staggering $3M in sales from the Maine Get Lobster ad campaign.
Incredibly successful D2C brands have noticed the trends and are choosing to create more relatable campaigns. User-generated content speaks to the audience, resonates with them, and helps them make better buying decisions they’re less likely to regret. It’s naturally beneficial to businesses that want to make a name for themselves.
In this guide, we will analyse a €3M UGC campaign frame by frame, step-by-step so you can start doing it too!
All brands make promises, but some underdeliver. It's yet another reason social proof has become so telling for businesses of all sizes, big and small. If consumers see someone raving over a product, they're 90% more likely to believe the consumer over the brand itself that makes claims about what their product can do.
In a post-iOS 14 world: storytelling and trust are even more important
74% of consumers depend on the recommendations of others on social media before making a purchase.
+84% of consumers trust peer recommendations over claims from brands on different products.
+48% of consumers agree that UGC helps them discover brands and products.
What will you discover in this guide?
- How to use UGC to drive sales
- What makes a good UGC
- How to get killer UGC
- How to build a viral UGC ad
🤑 Part 1. How to use UGC to drive sales
1. Identify consumer trends and leverage your brand’s unboxing virality potential
49% of TikTok users find products through videos created by brands, creators, and other users. And at least 37% immediately bought the TikTok products soon after discovering it.
Source: TikTok’s Path to Purchase report (June 2022)
The first and perhaps one of the most critical steps in using UGC to drive sales is paying attention to and staying on top of consumer trends.
While ever-changing trends come and go, knowing what consumers like, want, and need in the current moment can help your brand stay relevant and appeal to the masses. Consumer trends change like the weather, but if you're doing enough research, you can expect to understand these behaviours and expectations from individuals who support brands like your business.
You can increase your unboxing virality potential when you utilise consumer trends. For example, a growing number of consumers prefer when businesses take an eco-friendly approach, reducing waste while producing products and minimising the negative impact on the environment.
Sustainable packaging alone can make people want to unbox their packages in front of the camera while raving over the experience with that brand. Ask yourself what can get people to tag your products while creating content surrounding what you sell.
Discover what’s trending now on TikTok
Discovering trends on TikTok is easier than you think. TikTok Creative Center allows you to find what performs well on the platform to better engage with your audience.
You can filter by country and industry then browse through:
﹟Hashtags: see the most relevant and top-performing hashtags, related creators, audience insights and interest over time for any given industry.
👉 Browse TikTok’s trend finder
🎵 Songs: find out which songs are already trending or get ahead of the competition and discover the ones that are gaining popularity.
Unfortunately, they don’t include user-created sounds. Don’t worry, we got a hack for you. Monitor the TikTok sound trend hashtag here to discover the more engaging and breaking-through sounds created by the platform’s users.
🙋♀️ Creators: filter by country and number of followers to find relevant influencers and creators to produce UGC for your brand.
🎥 And trending TikTok Videos to find inspiration for your brand’s content.
👉 Open your Creator Marketplace account here
Bigblue Tips
Boost your unboxing virality as a sustainable brand
As an example, SMOON uses Bigblue's reusable packaging for its period-proof underwear. The highly sought-after garments are loved by women who want to experience more freedom during that time of the month. Consumers can enjoy the perks of having period-proof underwear and look forward to getting what they need in sustainable, eco-friendly packaging materials, giving them all the more reason to create content and post it to platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
👉 Discover Bigblue’s reusable packaging
Why are they tagging your products?
Consider what motivates your customers, from product launches to marketing campaigns.
56% of consumers say the types of content they most want to see from brands are user-generated photos and videos—and they’re constantly creating them!
Source: Nosto
Ask yourself, "What makes people tag products?" You may have several answers, such as their love for the product, the quality of the item, the packaging, or even other small details that mean a lot to the consumers. If you can bring that WOW factor through product launches and marketing campaigns, you can get people to tag your brand for positive reasons that yield better results.
The content they want to create following a positive experience with a brand:
- 89% want to post about their travel destination
- 85% want to post about their restaurant experience
- 65% want to post about a health or beauty product
Once you’ve identified the UGC triggers for your brand, you are ready to unlock new sales. Brands are partnering with content creators and influencers of all sizes to promote their products organically on TikTok and Instagram through referral links.
83% lift on Amazon after a viral TikTok for beauty brands like CeraVe, Aquaphor, and Paula’s Choice.
Source: SimilarWeb
Because many influencers have an Amazon storefront or a LinkTree account where that post links to their favourite products, it’s easier for social media users to find what they’re looking for after a product review.
✨ Manage TikTok campaigns from Shopify’s dashboard and measure conversions
If you use Shopify, it is quite simple to activate TikTok as a new sales channel account and deploy In-Feed shoppable video ads directly within Shopify.
More than 1M Shopify merchants have already activated the TikTok integration.
- Add TikTok’s app to your Shopify
- Install the TikTok pixel
- Select which product you would like to feature, and video ads are automatically generated to drive traffic to your Shopify for checkout.
- Use one of the ready-made templates for e-commerce and add your images and videos.
👉 See Shopify for TikTok business tutorial here
Bigblue Tips
Use your unboxing experience to generate more UGC
Dermalogica’s unique unboxing made possible by Bigblue has revealed 155 million views on TikTok! To discover your brand’s unboxing virality potential go to TikTok Discover and look up your brand’s name + unboxing.
👉 Discover Bigblue’s unboxing experience
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2. Feature your customers’ photos on your website
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
5 good reviews increase the likelihood of a purchase by a staggering 270%.
Companies with at least five high-quality product reviews have a tremendously high possibility of getting people to purchase their products.
Source: Council Post: How Revenue Can Increase Through Reviews
If customers upload photos or videos and mention your brand, whether tagging your business or in a hashtag, be sure to feature them on your website. You can create a section on the site highlighting your customers with a title that says, "Check Out What Our Customers Have to Say..."
It provides the social proof that consumers are looking for before making purchases. And, if they think that person looks fantastic because of something your business sells, you can expect them to feel more inclined to purchase the product, too.
⭐️ A BrightLocal study shows that 87% of people read reviews.
🤝 Of those people, nearly 79% of them will trust the reviews from influencers and total strangers as much as they would when receiving a personal recommendation from a friend or family member.
Because of this, online retailers continue to acknowledge the value of independent reviews and how those reviews can help them protect their bottom lines.
🦈 Learn from Gymshark’s success
On top of promoting client reviews on their product pages. Gymshark added a special section on their Instagram account “GS Family”, every Friday, a bunch of lucky customers get featured on Gymshark’s stories.
Bigblue Tips
Lashilé Beauty displays customer reviews on its website to boost sales
Lashilé Beauty trusts Bigblue to delight customers with a 5-star-worthy delivery experience.
⚙️ Recommended tool:
Use Loox App to add video and photo reviews to your product pages like Lashilé.
👉 Discover Lashile’s case study
3. Design a contest
Hashtag challenges and contests generate a 21% increase in UGC video creation. While 50% of Hashtag Challenges drive $5 dollars of return in Ads spend
Don't miss out on the benefits of hosting a contest or a hashtag challenge!
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Social media contests are a quick and effective way to increase engagement, create more awareness of your brand, and offer something incredible that gets people talking about your brand.
If you plan on setting up a contest, decide on the prize. Most brands will offer free products in the form of a gift basket full of items.
You can take this approach because it can improve your chances of having user-generated content created for your brand. In addition, the winner may look forward to unboxing their items, showing them off to the rest of the world, and talking about the specific things they love most.
👉 Learn how to create a successful Hashtag challenge
Bigblue Tips
Lashilé Beauty used their unboxing experience to launch a Golden Ticket contest for 4 lucky customers
Bigblue allowed the brand to integrate Golden Tickets in some packages, offering a weekend at Disney for 4 and a total of 3 900€ of vouchers.
A marketing operation that was a success.
👉 Discover Lashile’s case study
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🤩 Part 2. What makes a good UGC?
1. How to create a relatable UGC?
People love user-generated content because it's relatable. Consumers want to see influencers and everyday people talking about the brands they love and the products they use while showing what makes those items so spectacular. Depending on your brand and the product that you are trying to promote, you can go for either the girl-next-door or influencer aspirational approaches.
The Relatable Approach, Girl Next Door, No Makeup, Just a Normal Person:
Seeing someone who looks like them, talks like them, or even comes from the same walk of life as they do is more likely to get their attention than someone who is out of touch with reality. Going for the relatable approach can help you garner the interest you want and need to make more sales to your targeted audience.
UGC vs branded content:
Chanel’s branded post for Les Beiges foundation on Instagram generated 147K views and 33K likes
Chanel doesn't advertise on TikTok.
Les Beiges UGC clearly overcame Chanel’s branded content:
4M views and 1.1M likes for Danielle’s honest review
Jumping on the trend, beauty influencer and girl-next-door Sol Peña generated 13M views and 1.3M likes for Chanel.
Fully Aspirational Approach with Influencers:
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With this approach, you depend more on influencers who've already amassed a large following of people who trust their word and want to hear what they have to say about the products they use and love the most.
Some consumers love this content, especially if it's coming from an influencer they trust. However, this isn't always the right approach. It will depend on your brand, what you sell, and who you want to connect with, such as your targeted audience.
Hmmmm Donuts!!!!
Charli D’Amelio partnered with Dunkin’ Donuts in 2020 to challenge Starbucks’ dominance over younger audiences on social media.
They co-created The Charli, a new beverage, that went on to sell hundreds of thousands of cups within the first five days of its launch.
There was also a 57% increase in downloads of the Dunkin’ Donut app, which the brand had been trying to push. There was a 20% overall sales boost for cold brews the day the drink was released and a 45% increase the following day.
Bigblue Tips
Unbottled used Bigblue to build a conversion-oriented check-out and post-purchase delivery experience.
They enhanced their customer’s journey by adding features, such as estimated time of arrival, branded tracking emails, and super fast fulfilment, helping Unbottled boost monthly orders from 500 to 20K.
The enhanced experiences encourage consumers to speak up about brands and tell others how great they are.
👉 Discover how Unbottled uses Bigblue’s emails
2. UGC captures honest emotions
Capitalizing on a feeling means that creators aren’t doing a sales pitch. While some people may still promote products they don't believe in that aren't effective, consumers aren't turning a blind eye to this anymore and will often call it out as they see it. For that reason, brands need authentic and reliable user-generated content that consumers can believe in and trust.
Be direct and honest
1. You want to capture the raw emotions and facial expressions.
2. Reading from a script is never a good idea. It makes a person seem inauthentic.
3. Honest emotions resonate with viewers. As they're watching, they'll feel like they're talking to a friend or family member rather than watching a stranger tell them about a product.
Use real emotions
1. People can pick up on them in no time. The most important thing with user-generated content is to be as authentic as possible.
2. Use expressions such as: “Oh my gosh, I love it,” “it’s so delicious,” and “feels amazing.”
Bigblue Tips
Matthieu, Co-Founder of the agency Stride-Up, recommends sharing UGC on your organic profile, a crucial stop in the customer’s journey. If potential buyers see a video with your product in it and visit your empty profile, they lose trust.
He gave us ready-to-implement hacks to increase your brand’s social proof with organic content.
1. Duet. Find top content about your brand and add context! Try, “this is why we did this..”
2. Stitch. Stitching on TikTok allows you to incorporate 5 seconds of content from another video into your own. Find the best hooks from creators and capitalize on them!
3. Use comments in videos. Find people are asking the same thing over and over? Respond to their comment with a video. Chances are, if one person is asking, many people are wondering.
4. Capitalize on trends. There’s no shortage of trends on TikTok. Check for trending sounds, formats, and jokes.
👉 Request a free audit of your Social Ads from Stride-Up
3. The UGC that works
🎁 Unboxing
Unboxing videos have grown by a shocking 57% in one year alone…becoming an incredible phenomenon that captures and maintains a greater level of interest.
Unboxing videos are some of the simplest and most effective forms of user-generated content you can have for several reasons. Consumers see the products contained in the package within a few seconds to get a feel for what they'd receive if they made a purchase.
It also helps them get to know a bit more about the brand while seeing how the people behind the screen react to touching, smelling, opening, and applying the different items they've purchased. If you have people creating unboxing videos of your products, you want the rest of the world to see those videos.
📦 Simple unboxing:
With this simple unboxing, the person is talking about the packaging before opening it and then going through each item, usually providing a brief description of those items before opening them up, putting them on display, or even trying them.
For example, if someone orders a makeup kit with lipstick, lip liner, and blush, they might swatch these items on their arms for viewers to see the colours and the pigments firsthand.
Bigblue Tips
Cabaïa, the famous backpack brand, masters the use of UGC in their Ads strategy! This Ad alone has generated over 30K likes in the last 30 days and has been shared over a thousand times.
In fact, UGC-based ads get 4x higher click-through rates and a 50% drop in cost-per-click than average.
What they do right:
An excited customer unboxes her new Cabaïa bag. The thumb scroller “It’s here 😍” grabs the viewer's attention in the first 2 seconds. She continues building a positive experience by describing the surprises she found in her package, including a thank you note for her purchase. And finally, she clearly presents the benefits of the product, all of that in 24 seconds!
Take it one step further by adding a flyer to each parcel with a CTA for your clients: “Share your unboxing on social media, tag us and get an X% discount on your next purchase”
🎶 TikTok trend unboxing:
Another popular unboxing style is the TikTok trend style, where the client will talk about how they wish they would've discovered the website beforehand and then start talking about at least three of the products inside the box and what they love most about those products.
Bigblue Tips
And how can packaging help you get more UGC?
Bigblue allows brands to offer a premium unboxing experience by using custom packaging with your brand's unique style and wrapping paper to enhance the unboxing experience. On top of that, you can add flyers with promo codes, thank you letters, invitations to share their unboxing on social media with a hashtag, instructions for using the product, and free product samples to help customers discover new products.
🤩 Product benefit
70% of consumers will consider UGC reviews or ratings before making a purchasing decision.
Source: Social Media Today
What can the product do for the consumers? It's an important detail that needs to be discussed during the unboxing. People want to know why they should buy something before spending money on it. It helps to touch on what these benefits mean for the consumers and how they could potentially change their lives for the better, even if those changes are small and simple.
Bigblue Tips
Knowing that content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels, and it’s re-shared up to 24 times more than classic branded content…
LePantalon’s team clearly understood the assignment and effectively uses UGC to tackle one of their main challenges: helping customers choose the right size and fit for their pants.
Their UGC Ads strategy includes staff members presenting the new collections and trying them on the shops. The goal, give customers a real idea of the fit and how to style them.
❓ Transform FAQs into an evergreen source of content and reassurance elements
Build trust with your customers and prospects from the first touchpoint. If you see that certain questions about the product are being asked over and over again, that means your product description isn’t demonstrating how well your product can solve a customer’s problem.
You've likely noticed the TikTok question bubble on the profile page of a TikTok account. It's a small bubble that says Q&A in red, bold text. Utilizing this feature is a problem and solution approach, and you're using a native TikTok format to achieve better results.
Product pages with Q&As experienced a 447% higher conversion rate compared to product pages with no Q&A, regardless of shopper engagement.
Source: The Shopper Experience Index, Bazaarvoice
Use some of the most frequently asked questions to create ads that viewers can enjoy. It enables you to elevate how you show the product to the audience, discuss the problem it can solve, and detail the specific solution based on what you sell.
Bigblue Tips
Add Q&A feature on TikTok to produce UGC
CRO expert, Carl Weische recommends brands to take their FAQs and most common customer service questions and transform them into Ads for your retargeting audiences.
Allow your customers and prospects to ask you anything about your products or services. They are a goldmine to easily produce content for your organic feed and ads at scale. To activate it, simply follow the next steps:
1. Go to settings
2. Select Creator tools
3. Tap Q&A
4. Tap Turn on Q&A
5. If you haven’t guessed by now, the most frequently asked question from customers is “Where is my order” (17 billion search results on Google). Upgrade their post-purchase experience with Bigblue’s tracking page and tracking emails.
6. All the delivery tracking updates are available on one page with your branding. And your customers can check at all times.
7. Then the Q&A icon will be added below your TikTok bio. So viewers can tap the Q&A section, which looks like a question mark, to ask you questions or check the questions responded.
Go one step further and continue building trust once they’ve purchased from you. Bring your tracking experience to the next level.
👉 Discover how From Future reduced customer support tickets in half by using Bigblue’s tracking
🥰 Give the viewer three reasons why they should Buy Your Product
It's the new value proposition, and it should include the following details:
- Why Is It Great? This is a question you need to answer because consumers want to know what makes a product so great in the first place. It would be best to sell them on everything the product can do for them.
- Why Should You Buy It? Now you want to go into detail on why the consumers should buy it, detailing what it does for them and why it makes a difference in their lives.
- What Will It Bring to Your Life? Lastly, you want to touch on the value it brings to their lives. How is it helping people, and what makes it worth it?
Bigblue Tips
Matthieu from Stride-Up recommends keeping it short. The 15 to 20-second mark is the sweet spot for these kinds of ads.
See how Odyssey Longboard uses UGC to promote its new line of Surfskates.
🎵 Things TikTok made me buy
Believe it or not, the #TikTokMadeMeBuy hashtag has more than 6.1 billion views. It's a great idea to get in on that opportunity to get more people to see what your brand offers by having content creators post about your products while creating these kinds of videos.
If you've watched TikTok, you've likely viewed at least one "TikTok Made Me Buy It" video. Influencers and random content creators talk about a product they decided to buy after seeing it on TikTok, raving over it and detailing what it does for them. It's become one of the trendiest ways to review products or provide testimonials.
💀💀💀💀💀
In spooky season, TikTok drove out of stock on 12-foot skeletons at Home Depot for the SECOND YEAR IN A ROW in the United States. And yes, it made it to Business Insider’s newsfeed.
Though the skeleton costs $299, if you're lucky enough to find one in a Home Depot store, the skeletons are being listed on eBay for double or triple the original price, with some sellers listing the item at as much as $1,200.
🎥 Part 3. Getting killer UGC
1. The format
It’s best to take an approach where you’re operating as much as you can around the five senses: see, hear, imagine smelling, imagine tasting, and imagine feeling. Know how to create the content consumers wish to see. These are a few simple tips that can point you in the right direction to creating high-quality user-generated content that gets views and brings in more traffic.
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1. Film with an iPhone
The quality is decent enough without looking unrealistic or as if a production company filmed it.)
2. Vertical (9x16)
3. Film with natural light/daytime light
It’s the best kind of lighting because it looks less planned compared to videos with creators using a ring light.)
4. Film their face
For the framing, it’s best to get as close as you can to the person’s face and the product they’re showing. We want to see, feel, smell…
It’s how we want to experience things in our daily lives, and it’s what we want to see in the videos we’re watching.
2. Production
1. Record everything - Record at the moment and build your script later. It’s better to film everything to get authentic reactions instead of pre-planning them. Authentic reactions resonate best with consumers.
2. The experience of ordering on the website - Show what it’s like to easily and conveniently order something from the website.
3. Film the unboxing - Get viewers excited about the products through the unboxing process, starting with the unpacking of the box.
4. Demonstrate the product - Show what the product does, what it looks like, and why it’s special. The key here is to highlight the quality and what makes this product stand out amongst the competition.
5. React and show results - Get excited about opening and looking at these items and then show results based on what the products can do for the consumer.
Bigblue Tips
A good UGC in a nutshell, the checklist by Stride-Up:
☑ Your UGC clearly responds to one of the AIDA framework levels of interest: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
☑ The more authentic it looks, the better. This could roughly be translated in the phrase “the uglier and amateurish the content, the better it performs”.
☑ Record everything, but only use the more relevant takes.
☑ The long format works best: 30 to 40 seconds videos.
☑ Add subtitles… because most of the time, people browse TikTok and Insta at work.
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3. Post-production
Although we’re information-rich, we’re also time-starved, so it’s important to make content that is detailed and informative yet gets straight to the point.
- Pacing - Your thumb scroller (more of this coming in section 3) should be normal paced
- 2X the speed - Speed up the process while demonstrating
- Back to normal pacing - Go back to normal to grab attention again with the reaction and results
Taking these simple steps will help you create watchable user-generated content that won’t get skipped over. People want to see the unboxing and learn about products. However, they don’t want to have to sit and stare at the screen for too long because then they’ll quickly lose interest.
4. Get your clients to produce UGC for you
An authentic review and a satisfied customer willing to share their experience using your product can make a difference for your business. It's a fantastic way to promote your brand without costing a fortune. There are a few simple ways to get clients to produce UGC for your brand.
Go Through Existing Photos
Sometimes, simply looking on social media for your brand's name can help you find consumers who've posted about it before. Connecting with them is a great way to increase your chances of getting user-generated content created because they already know and trust your brand. There are a few ways to search for these photos. You have the option to:
- 📍 Search by location
If you have a locally owned business, searching by location may help you find dozens of photos posted by people who’ve visited your shop and had a great experience.
- #️⃣ Search by hashtag
Of course, searching by hashtag is another option that can help you find previous customers.
Build an Effective Strategy Using Hashtags
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Use strategic hashtags that can help you increase your views on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.
If you're hosting a contest or giveaway, have consumers use the hashtag in any post they create, making it easier for you to find user-generated content surrounding your business.
A little bit of creativity goes an exceptionally long way in the marketing world, especially when it comes to hashtags that quickly gain traction, become popular, and help you build brand awareness.
SHEIN has effectively leveraged the unboxing and shopping spree trends with the popular hashtag “#SHEINhaul”.
But to easily collect UGC and encourage their customers to produce videos for free, they added the call-to-action “Get featured using #SHEIN or tag @ shein_official” on their TikTok and Instagram pages.
Bigblue Tips
Use your order tracking emails to ask your clients to create UGC
Using branded delivery tracking e-mails has many advantages:
☑ They have an open rate of 75% vs 20 to 30% of marketing e-mails.
☑ They are open up to 4 times during the delivery.
☑ Buyers that receive an email have a better repeat rate (+4%) than buyers that didn’t receive an email
☑ And reduce bad ratings by -60%: they reassure clients, and overall increase their delivery experience. They are also a great opportunity to help you get more UGC!
Bigblue’s client, Unbottled asked their clients to post their unboxing on Instagram using the hashtag #unbottled and #dropthebottle. The result: more than 1000 UGC unboxing publications for them.
👉 Discover Bigblue’s tracking emails
Connect with Influencers on Various Platforms
You can even take an approach that involves connecting with influencers in an attempt to offer products to them. Worry less about mega-influencers with millions of followers who are less likely to respond and focus more on the micro-influencers with a few thousand followers. These influencers tend to have better engagement rates and are more likely to reply to you or post a video going over your products when they receive them.
Bigblue Tips
FROM FUTURE teamed up with us to ship their products from Bigblue’s Fashion warehouse. They benefit from specialized hanging storage racks and reconditioning processes to guarantee that their clothes are in perfect condition when customers receive them.
The company benefits from features like branded tracking emails and custom packaging, which encourages its customers to want to rave over their experience, ultimately leading to more user-generated content for the business.
Buyer satisfaction boosted to 89% in less than 4 months.
👉 Discover how FROM FUTURE uses Bigblue
🦠 Part 4. The classic principles of building a viral ad
1. Choose a product that has the potential of going viral
Even if you love every product you sell, consider selecting the one that stands out the most. After selecting the product, follow these steps:
- Choose your more relatable product The relatable product gets the most attention. Consumers feel like they can use it in some way or another, which makes them more interested in buying it.
- Choose a story to put the product into context Create a story that details your reason for creating the product and how it can help.
- Do your research - Take time to check the comments on your products and your competitor's products. You need to think like your customers and use their same language. Spend time learning more about them to ensure you can see what they see and say what they say.
- Keep it simple - No one needs to make an effort to understand your ad, so don’t make it too complicated. Keep it simple and straightforward
2. The thumb or scroll stopper
A thumb stopper must set the expectation and the premise of what you will get. It should spark curiosity. Is she actually going to do this? When it comes to social media and user-generated content, attention is the highest form of currency. Position yourself in a way that makes you look native to the feed and digestible for people.
1. Look and See
Formats to test: collage vs no collage
Using a collage intensifies the viewer’s appetite for the product. Collages are an efficient way to give the viewer a sneak peek of what they will get. You have many different photos that can spark interest, so choose them wisely and put them together to create something spectacular to deliver as much context as you can in the most efficient way.
If the collage approach doesn’t appear to be working for your business model, you can try the no-collage format to see if you get better results from it.
Bigblue Tips
Kris Sugartan’s €3M Ad campaign put the collage approach to the test.
She has developed her own TikTok Ads buying methodology to amplify D2C brand’s reach and customer acquisition.
👉 Download her step-by-step video formula to generate sales and engagement
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2. See Her Do, Reviews and Tutorials
Video reviews are 60.5% more effective than plain text reviews because they seem more genuine.
Source: Nealschaffer
Seeing someone do something is an excellent way to fulfil the viewer's curiosity.
The people are curious and want to know more, so show them and watch how quickly you can see results from it.
If you can explain what something does and why it’s special, it’s easier to sell to the viewers watching the videos and checking out the photos uploaded to social media.
Agency tips
AverrAglows viral ads campaign
The Americann brands sells all-natural skincare products and was struggling to increase their Ad spend to drive at least 30K in monthly sales and get a target ROAS.
UGC was the key to unlock a 6x increase in revenue and a 3.7X ROAS.
The “see someone do” UGC approach helped the brand overcome Facebook’s strict advertising rules.
Sugartan’s team tested 2 different stop scroller every 2 weeks and used copy they collected from AverrAglow’s clients!
👉 Read the full story here
3. Use Drop / Reverse / Snapping Effects on Your Thumbs Stopper
Try these different effects to captivate your audience and keep them engaged. According to Loft325.com, this technique can increase a person's attention by up to 30%.
Bigblue Tips
CAVAL worked with Bigblue to implement a Prime-like delivery experience in their shop. By displaying multiple delivery methods (express, green, pick-up points, and free delivery), and providing precise delivery times, 92% of CAVAL’s clients are satisfied with their delivery experience!
Like Caval, allow your clients to rate their experience with shipping with their email thanks to their Bigblue app. A good way to boost engagement (and avoid bad surprises on Google or Trustpilot).
👉 Discover how CAVAL uses Bigblue
4. Green Screen and Split Screen Effect
The green screen effect is native to Instagram reels and TikTok, and it's a super convenient effect to use for UGC. You can do just about anything you want with the green screen, creating custom, fun backgrounds as you'd like for the content you plan to post. The idea behind this is to make things look less like an advertisement and more like a relatable video or conversation one would have with someone close to them, such as a family member or best friend.
The split-screen content style is not uncommon on TikTok, especially when users choose to stitch one another. Having someone stitch a person reacting to the products while they do the same is a fantastic way to show how many people truly love what your brand can offer.
3. How to get thousands of viral UGC quickly ?
If you want to get thousands of viral UGCs, encourage your customers to unbox their goodies when receiving them. Put effort into consistent, high-quality packing. Host an in-person event and a giveaway contest simultaneously to get those hashtags going. When you're putting your all into the UGC strategy, you can reap the rewards that come with it.
Agency tips
Identify the most engaged users
- Anticipate a reward policy
- Define the process (ice breaker, counterpart, image rights, etc.)
- Analyse the feedback
- Create a detailed strategy for each social media platform
- Set actionable goals
- Host events
- Plan contests
The fastest and most effective way to get more UGC at a quicker pace is to host a contest/giveaway. People love to get free items, and having the chance to win without much effort makes the contest or giveaway even more exciting.
For example, you can host a competition that involves people using a specific hashtag to represent your brand. When thousands of people participate, it's a quick way to build more buzz surrounding your brand and get the user-generated content you desire.
Bigblue Tips
Our recommended tool for this task: Wiink!
Wiink allows you to launch challenges and rewards for your most engaged users to help you generate UGC at Scale by activating your clients and influencers, assigning them motivating marketing tasks, and automating the verification and delivery of rewards
👉 Contact Joseph Aubry, founder of Wiink
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