That’s pretty great for customers. But it’s also a huge opportunity for your brand. The average social media user spends 2 hours and 23 minutes a day on social platforms — that accounts for over a third of every minute spent on the internet. Because you now have the chance to engage with your audience in a more meaningful, direct way, you can turn literally every one of those minutes into a potential moment of conversion. 

Chapters:

1. Why does social shopping matter for brands
2. How brands in different industries win with social shopping
3. Access the full benefits of social shopping

Why does social shopping matter for brands

Social shopping addresses a shopper pain point by making it easier for people to connect with what they want to buy. Where social commerce focuses more on selling, social shopping focuses on research and purchases, and improving the whole shopping experience.

Our Shopper Experience Index, an annual report into consumer behavior, tells us that there’s no more debate about the importance of social media and shoppable content. Here’s why:

• Social media is the new search engine. Across the board, 58% of people are discovering products on social platforms. And before hitting the ‘buy’ button, 50% of shoppers are digging deeper, using social media to research their finds
• Young adults are leading the charge. Nearly three quarters (73%) of 18 to 24-year-olds find their next purchase through social media. It’s their mall, their catalog, and their wishlist, all rolled into one
• Buying is the new liking. With 50% of consumers making purchases directly through social media in the past year, the “double tap” has taken on a whole new meaning
• Voice of the customer is key. 78% of consumers feel more confident in a purchase when they view shopper content — that includes creator-, influencer-, and user-generated content

In short, social shopping allows you to meet your customers where they are and where they increasingly prefer to find, research, and buy products. 

How brands in different industries win with social shopping

At Bazaarvoice, we have the pleasure of working with brands across every industry under the sun. We’ve helped beauty, CPG, and hardware companies tap into the magic of social shopping and user-generated content (UGC), lift conversion rates, and increase average order value.

We learned a lot from helping our customers. Here, we distill the most important lessons and fascinating case studies to help you.

Health & beauty

The health and beauty industry thrives on visual appeal. Social media platforms are the perfect stage for brands that fall into these categories. They can showcase their products in action, with vibrant images and videos that do more than sell — they tell a story. 

UGC plays a starring role here. Rich visual content from customers offers authentic glimpses into real-life results and applications (e.g. is the eyeshadow patchy? Does this foundation look good on a complexion like mine? Is this shampoo the key to becoming the star of the live-action Tangled remake?). 

This authenticity is key in an industry where trust and transparency are as important as the products themselves. And if people like what they see, shoppable posts make it easy to click and buy on the spot, turning inspiration into action in mere seconds.

The Body Shop

The Body Shop, a decades-long player in the beauty industry, wanted to enhance its online customer experience. In the words of Indar Chanicka, the brand’s Vice President of E-Commerce, “we set out to fully utilize our social content to drive engagement and use it as a tool to educate customers through their purchasing decisions. We want customers to (…) see the actual products and their benefits through the experiences of real customers.”

To accomplish this goal, The Body Shop integrated social media UGC directly onto product pages. The results? A 28% conversion rate on product pages and a 13% increase in average order value. 

Iconic London

Iconic London is a shining example of how brands can bridge the gap between social media inspiration and e-commerce action. First, they recognized the disjointed experience between social platforms and their website. Then, they set out to create a seamless journey that maintained the authenticity and engagement of social media while guiding customers smoothly to the checkout page. 

Iconic London implemented Like2Buy, a tool that turns your Instagram pictures and videos into informative, directional, or shoppable posts. This approach allows customers to transition from social media to the website without feeling disconnected. 

By coupling UGC, Instagram, and Like2Buy, Iconic London was able to increase conversion rates by 126% and lift average order value by 11% in just 12 months. 

Apparel & accessories

Trying on clothes is a pretty important part of the shopping experience. How else will you know if that pair of jeans fits just right? In the context of e-commerce, apparel and accessories brands have found a savvy way to bring the fitting room to their audience, right through their screens. 

Social media brings fashion shows to every feed. Each scroll is an opportunity to show off the latest and greatest trends, pieces, and styles in action. 

Once again, UGC proves to be a valuable ally. Just like with beauty products, it offers a front-row seat to real-life product demos. Authentic, diverse, and oh-so compelling, this type of content turns everyday customers into the stars of your show, modeling the clothes in their own unique styles and settings. 

Isabella Oliver and Baukjen

Isabella Oliver and Baukjen acknowledge the value of showing their clothes on different bodies. The brand embraces visual UGC to enrich the virtual try-on experience and make online shopping feel as personal and engaging as visiting a store.

Their strategy is simple yet impactful: a monthly hashtag contest encourages customers to share their #BaukjenStyle, turning the competition into a curated display of real-world fashion. 

Bazaarvoice Galleries then takes these snippets and places them on product pages to create a digital window display that’s both beautiful and relatable. The feedback speaks for itself, with customers expressing newfound confidence in their purchases, inspired by seeing the clothes on bodies just like theirs. This confidence translates into tangible results: a 120% increase in conversion rates and a 10% lift in average order value.

We love Isabella Oliver and Baukjen’s approach because it proves that, in the online fashion world, the best way to know if those jeans fit just right is by seeing them in action.

Home improvement

In the home improvement sphere, the phenomenon of social shopping introduces a dynamic where the aspirational is instantly attainable. Instead of just sources of décor ideas, platforms like Instagram and Pinterest become marketplaces where inspiration seamlessly leads to transactions. 

And with a little help from UGC, facilitating this transition becomes easier. Shoppers don’t have to hesitate before buying because they don’t know whether that chaise longue would look good in their homes. You already have a library of relatable content showing them it will.

Dreams

Dreams took their success to new heights with UGC. The brand spotlights their bed frames, sofa beds, and furniture through the lens of real customers’ homes. The #mydreamsbed social media campaign (sensing a #theme here?) showcases customer-inspired bedrooms but also serves as a testament to the power of community in shaping brand perception. 

With high-quality, scroll-stopping images populating their homepage, Dreams has created an engaging first impression that draws customers deeper into their product range. Their strategic use of UGC has led to a 200% increase in conversion rate and a 62% rise in average order value. 

But perhaps more interesting is how the influx of customer photos has informed Dreams’ own creative direction. Octavia Benham, Dreams’ Head of E-commerce, explains how UGC inspires the team and helps them craft their own content. ”Previously, our own product images didn’t look very lived in, but we changed that based on the UGC content we were getting,” she says.

Consumer electronics

Let’s face it: the more expensive the purchase, the more we rely on other people’s opinions and the longer we consider handing over our money. Such is often the case for consumer electronics, where the price tags tend to be heftier and purchases less frequent.

Given social media’s role as the hottest rising star in consumer research and purchase, there’s an opportunity for brands in this industry to share social proof and nudge people towards purchasing in one fell swoop.

Midland Radio

Midland Radio, a leader in two-way communication devices, recognized the untapped potential of showcasing UGC to enhance their digital presence and boost customer engagement. The brand successfully curated UGC from Instagram, Facebook, and other social channels to enrich their site’s content and make it more relatable.

The results speak volumes: a 143% increase in conversion rate and a 27% increase in average order value. But Midland Radio’s approach didn’t stop with collecting and displaying UGC. With tools like Reveal, Showroom, and Like2Buy, they also enhanced their Instagram strategy, making it easier for followers to transition from browsing to buying. 

Food & beverage

Being able to taste a product on social might be a little ways down the road. Thankfully, humans have other senses that food and beverage brands can appeal to. When done right, visuals can almost convey flavors, aromas, and textures (drink if you’ve never “eaten” with your eyes!) 

Social media is the perfect place for storytelling. Food and beverage brands can get creative with their shoppable posts by sharing recipes that feature their products or partnering with food influencers and UGC creators who show the goods in action (yes, this does include eating said goods. There’s a reason mukbangs are still a popular type of content — some people just enjoy seeing other people eat. It is what it is).

T2 Tea

T2 chose to stir up their social shopping strategy with UGC and shoppable posts. They partnered with Bazaarvoice to amplify brand presence and cultivate a digital environment that mirrors the communal and sensory nature of enjoying a steaming cup of tea. 

“Our aim is to create a community of tea lovers,” said Sally Lennox, Head of Digital at T2. “UGC is a way for us to embrace our customers by hearing their unique perspectives and displaying that word-of-mouth content on our digital screens. It provides such powerful social proof when customers can see that others are loving our products.”

T2 celebrates its fans by capturing and posting social media UGC on its home and product pages with Bazaarvoice Galleries. The brand also implemented Like2Buy and shoppable posts on Instagram so browsers can immediately access the products that catch their eye.

Consumer packaged goods

The landscape of consumer packaged goods (CPG) is a competitive one, with direct-to-consumer (DTC) companies increasingly taking over a share of the market. Building trust and signaling safety is thus becoming more and more essential. 

Many CPG brands are turning to social media to push educational content highlighting how real people use their products to make their lives better/easier/more fabulous. And if there’s a direct path to purchase right there in the posts? That’s the cherry on top.

MAM

Understanding the concerns and desires of parents who want the best for their little ones, MAM UK harnessed the power of social proof. So the brand leveraged real-life experiences and endorsements from satisfied parents to reassure potential customers. 

To amplify their UGC strategy, MAM implemented social commerce solutions, effectively completing their full-funnel marketing approach. Bazaarvoice Galleries allowed MAM to curate and display authentic social photos and videos from advocates, creating beautiful product galleries on their website. 

The strategy made their products more relatable, which translated into engagement and profit — more precisely, a 258% increase in time on site, a 108% increase in conversions, and a 58% increase in average order value. 

Access the full benefits of social shopping

Social shopping isn’t a fad — it’s the new normal. And if you have the right tools and the right partners, there’s no reason why you won’t be able to adapt and thrive. 

Dive into the world of social shopping with the ultimate guide to social media conversion for more actionable tips on how to create captivating shopping experiences that impact your bottom line.

FEATURED RESOURCE

How to define and measure social commerce ROI and value

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After all, some of the best performances happen when an artist steps aside and allows someone else to shine. It adds a unique, shall we say, flavor to the entire spectacle.

Social media takeovers, a strategy where you temporarily hand over your brand accounts to someone else, require that you step out of your comfort zone and allow fresh, diverse voices to echo through your social channels. 

These voices, whether they belong to influencers, industry experts, or even your own employees, can captivate your audience in ways you might not have imagined.

Chapters:

1. What is a social media takeover?
2. Why brands should run social media takeovers
3. How to plan and execute a successful social media takeover
4. Examples of social media takeovers in action
5. Unlock the full potential of social media

What is a social media takeover?

A social media takeover is a strategic move where an external influencer, celebrity, or internal team member takes the reins of your brand’s social media accounts for a short period. During this period, the guest takes charge of creating and posting content, interacting with your audience, and essentially representing your brand’s voice on social media.

The concept thrives on diversity and freshness. The guest brings their own style to the table, offering your audience a different perspective they don’t usually see. 

In a social media takeover, your partner typically has the freedom to create content that aligns with their personal brand and your brand’s values and goals. The key is finding the right balance between the guest’s creativity and your brand’s messaging.

Why brands should run social media takeovers

Influencers and other user-generated content (UGC) creators have a lot of sway with consumer audiences. And this influence is shaping how people shop and interact with brands online. According to our internal research, three out of four consumers say their shopping behavior is significantly influenced by social media, with 60% making purchases directly through recommendations or links from influencers.

By taking part in a social media takeover, you tap into creators’ credibility, reach, and ability to impact consumer decisions. It’s an effective way to leverage the trust and rapport that they have built with their audience, translating it into increased brand visibility, engagement, and, ultimately, sales. 

We know consumer attention is fragmented and fleeting. Social media takeovers are an opportunity to capture interest in the midst of all the content and drive consumer action. They provide a platform for you to showcase your products in a relatable and authentic manner, making the shopping experience more engaging and personal for the consumers.

How to plan and execute a successful social media takeover

You can’t just give an influencer free rein to do whatever they want and call it a day. You have a brand to protect. And every action taken under your banner should reflect its values, voice, and objectives.

1. Set your goals

Takeovers are smaller, time-bound strategies that should fit into your broader social media strategy. Before scouring Instagram for the ideal influencer, take a beat to define clear and measurable goals. This will set the foundation for a successful campaign that benefits both you and the creator. 

Are you aiming to increase follower count, boost customer engagement, or generate buzz around a new product launch? Whatever your goal is, it will require a tailored approach. If increasing brand awareness is your aim, you might focus on reaching a wider audience through an influencer with a substantial following.

On the other hand, driving sales might involve collaborating with a smaller creator known for their persuasive product recommendations. 

The more specific your goals, the easier it is to measure success post-campaign. Instead of a vague objective like “increase engagement,” think in terms of tangible metrics — e.g. a 20% increase in interactions on your posts during the takeover period. 

2. Choose the right platform and format

Which of your branded channels should you hand over? The choice comes down to where your target audience spends their time and how they like to consume content. 

Let’s say your audience is on the younger side and prefers visual storytelling. In this case, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok are your best bet. Here, product tutorials or behind-the-scenes stories can generate a lot of attention. For a more conversation-driven approach, X (the blue bird formerly known as Twitter) or LinkedIn are more suitable. These platforms are excellent for hosting Q&A sessions, sharing insights, or discussing trends. 

The format of your social media takeover should also resonate with your audience’s preferences. Do they enjoy live interactions, or are they more inclined towards curated posts? Instagram Stories or TikTok videos are great for dynamic, engaging content, while X threads are ideal for informative discussions.

3. Find the perfect takeover partner

Time to cast the lead role. You can go straight to the source (social media channels where creators are already active) to kickstart your influencer search. Use hashtags and track your brand mentions, or look for micro-influencers that already follow and engage with your brand. 

If you have the budget for it, influencer marketing platforms cut down on the amount of browsing you have to do. They immediately show you relevant influencers to your industry and audience.

Once you have a list of potential collaborators, study their content more closely to avoid mismatches — like a luxury brand partnering with an influencer known for budget shopping. That’s just asking for a one-way ticket to Cancelled City.

While you want someone with healthy engagement metrics, don’t make your choice based on numbers alone. Choosing someone who genuinely appreciates and understands your brand will come across as more authentic to the audience than a cash grab with a very popular influencer.

4. Craft a collaborative content plan

This is where the magic begins to take shape. ​​The part where you blend the influencer’s style with your brand’s message so that the content resonates with both your audiences. 

Start with a meeting between your team and the creator. Discuss themes, ideas, and messages that align with your campaign goals, and decide on the types of content that will be most effective and that the influencer excels at. Will it be behind-the-scenes stories, product demonstrations, or Q&A sessions? 

Once you agree on the content, develop a social media calendar that outlines what will be posted and when, including the announcement of the takeover on both accounts. It should take into account the best times to post for optimal engagement, depending on your audience’s online activity patterns. 

Be prepared to make adjustments based on real-time feedback. It’s great to have a plan to guide the takeover, but if certain types of posts end up resonating more with your audience, consider tweaking your plan to include more of that content.

5. Manage permissions and security

The trickiest part of a social media takeover is deciding how much access to grant your collaborator. You need to maintain control and safeguard your brand’s confidential data while allowing enough flexibility for the influencer to be creative and engaging.

Temporary access is the most balanced choice. Instagram, X (Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn all allow you to add collaborators to your account without handing over login credentials. This way, creators can engage directly with the audience via comments, Q&As, and reactions. 

However, these permissions allow collaborators to see analytics and data insights, which might be something you don’t want or the legal team won’t allow. Plus, TikTok doesn’t have the option of adding someone else unless you’re collaborating on ads. You can circumvent this in one of two ways:

1. Have the influencer hand over content (so your team can post it)
2. Share login credentials directly

With a content hand-off, you don’t have to worry about permissions or the influencer seeing more than they should. On the other hand, it keeps them from interacting with your audience in real time, which credential sharing allows. There are more risks associated with this approach, but if you feel comfortable doing so, you can change the password at a later time.

6. Launch the takeover

Before the big day, make sure you and your partner build excitement by announcing the takeover in advance. Share posts on your social media channels (even those that won’t be taken over) introducing the influencer and giving a sneak peek of what followers can expect.

The first post should grab attention, set the tone for what’s to come, and encourage followers to stay tuned. Throughout the takeover, keep the communication between your team and the influencer open so that any last-minute changes or updates are smoothly handled. 

As the takeover unfolds, monitor the engagement and encourage the creator to interact with the audience. Responding to comments, sharing insights, and keeping the conversation going are all key to maintaining momentum. 

Don’t forget to capture the highlights — these can be used for post-takeover content, helping to extend the life of the campaign and providing valuable content for future marketing efforts.

7. Analyze your performance and gather insights for future campaigns

Analyzing the results of your social media takeover gives you a complete picture of what worked, what didn’t, and how you can improve future campaigns. 

Start by examining key metrics related to the goals you first set, such as engagement rates, follower growth, website traffic, and conversion rates. Tools like Google Analytics or using a social media management platform provide a wealth of data on this front. 

Be as granular as possible — look at which posts, stories, or tweets performed the best. Read through comments and messages to gauge the audience’s reactions and perceptions. Did they find the takeover informative, entertaining, and engaging? 

This is also a time to reflect on the partnership itself. Was the influencer’s communication style and content in line with your brand? Did they bring new ideas and perspectives that benefited your campaign? 

Once you gather and analyze the data, create a comprehensive report consolidating all the findings. This document should highlight the successes, areas for improvement, and recommendations for the next takeovers. It will also serve as a blueprint to brainstorm ideas for further campaigns that follow this format.

Examples of social media takeovers in action

Don’t just take our word for it. Check out how three different brands leverage takeovers to keep their content fresh and their followers glued to their social media feeds.

Dripping Gold highlights influencer takeovers on their profile

Dripping Gold, a luxury tanning products brand, knows the power of user-generated content and its effectiveness at promoting authenticity, engagement, and customer loyalty. The brand often partners with influencers to produce a steady content stream that populates their Instagram and TikTok accounts. One of their preferred strategies is — you guessed it — social media takeovers.

Dripping Gold often taps young female influencers to partner with, known for their fashion, makeup, and lifestyle content. Creators like Katie White (pictured above) share long videos on the brand’s Instagram Stories showcasing how the audience can use Dripping Gold’s products to create makeup looks or achieve the perfect tan.

To ensure the longevity of the collaborations (the best content is evergreen content), Dripping Gold pins all of the takeovers to their Instagram highlights. This decision allows followers who might have missed the live events to view the content at their leisure, further extending the reach and impact of the takeovers. 

Stephanie Garber engages with readers through the Barnes & Noble account

Stephanie Garber is a beloved young adult writer. In the days leading up to the release of her eagerly anticipated book, “A Curse for True Love,” Barnes & Noble invited Garber to take over their Instagram Stories for a cool 24 hours. 

Throughout the takeover, the author offered Barnes & Noble’s followers an intimate look into her day, including sneaky book signings and snapshots of her lunch meetings. The day’s highlight was a live Q&A session, where Stephanie allowed fans to engage with her directly and ask about the novel, book recommendations, and her dream travel destinations.

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A post shared by Stephanie Garber (@stephanie_garber)

The takeover was a smart move for two reasons: first, it leveraged Stephanie Garber’s personal brand and loyal fan base to drive anticipation for her new book. Second, it provided Barnes & Noble with engaging, authentic content that resonated with their audience of book lovers. 

Fenty Beauty dedicates every Friday to a social media takeover

UGC and influencer content are the pillars of Fenty Beauty’s social media strategy. The brand’s Instagram and TikTok feeds are verifiable galleries of real-life product applications, with actual users and influential beauty enthusiasts taking up more space than branded content.

One of the many ways Fenty Beauty hands over the mic is through takeovers. Back in its earlier days, the brand dedicated Fridays to creators from various backgrounds, where they demonstrated everything from achieving the perfect winged liner to creating a flawless foundation routine (using Fenty Beauty products, of course.) 

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A post shared by Stephanie Garber (@stephanie_garber)

And they didn’t stop at Instagram. Instead of letting the content sit idly by, Fenty extended its life and reach by compiling the best takeovers into YouTube videos for their 900K+ subscribers to enjoy.

Unlock the full potential of social media

Takeovers are a dynamic way to showcase brand personality and keep your content from getting stale. But (there’s always a but) they’re just a fraction of the broader spectrum of strategies that drive consumer action on social media. 

Social commerce is revolutionizing how brands interact with their audiences, blending social media’s immersive and interactive nature with the convenience of online shopping. With shoppable images and videos now a feature of most social media channels, they become more than marketing tools. They become powerful sales channels.

Read this Ultimate Guide to Social Commerce Conversion and hop on the social commerce train before it leaves the station.

LEARN MORE

A practical guide for social media professionals to drive engagement and commerce

Read here

By integrating user-generated content into your marketing strategy you’ll build brand authenticity, drive sales, and seamlessly integrate your brand into the ever-growing creator economy. All absolute necessities to succeed in today’s turbulent market.

Chapters:

1. What is UGC (user-generated content)?
2. The benefits of user-generated content
3. How to increase engagement with user-generated content
4. UGC best practices guide
5. Curate your brand identity with user-generated content

What is UGC (user-generated content)?

User-generated content, or UGC, is a form of content that’s created by real people to promote your brand. This includes written ratings and reviews, photos, videos, and even audio that your brand’s customers, followers, ambassadors, or even employees create and share across social and other digital platforms.

Recently, user-generated content has evolved to include professional-quality images, engaging videos, and thoughtfully written content that seamlessly support your brand identity. The days of grainy selfies and lacklustre videos are long gone, but UGC has retained its essential component of authenticity.

UGC doesn’t feel like an ad, and just like a word-of-mouth recommendation, it’s often more influential than one.

UGC is far more powerful than traditional brand marketing. Essentially user-generated content is the modern-day equivalent of a product recommendation, and the numbers back it up. 84% of consumers are more likely to trust a brand’s marketing campaign if it features user-generated content, and 77% are more likely to buy a product they found through UGC. 

Who provides UGC?

User-generated content is usually found through your customers, brand loyalists, and employees. An easy way to turn customers into UGC creators is to make it easy for them to leave reviews and add their own product photos. Brand loyalists are repeat customers who love your product so much that they’re willing to advocate for you without incentives.

Love them or hate them, the infamous Crocs knows how to rally its brand loyalists, with its hashtag #croctok gaining traction on TikTok and spreading its message to over 300 million viewers.

Finally, employee-created content, like video content discussing the company’s values, acts as a source of UGC that demonstrates diversity, support, and authenticity.

The benefits of user-generated content

Not only is user-generated content more influential than traditional advertising, but it’s also free, authentic, and engaging. There’s several benefits to UGC that have a big payoff for brands.

Builds authenticity and trust

User-generated content showcases how actual people use products in real-world settings. This creates authenticity for brands and allows them to promote products without being overly salesy.

Authenticity means a lot to consumers. 84% of millennials say user-generated content influences their purchasing decisions. And nearly half of Gen Z cites social media as their chief source of inspiration — even above family and friends.

Plus, people trust peer recommendations over branded advertising. A whopping 85% of consumers say they turn to visual UGC, rather than branded content, when making purchasing decisions.

Boosts search engine optimization ratings

Search engines place a premium on fresh and relevant content. UGC often contains keywords and phrases that can enhance the visibility of your brand in search results, indicating that the content is higher quality and more relevant to the reader, which leads to more organic traffic visiting your site.

And as we know, more traffic means more MQLs.

Increases engagement

User-generated content is all about connecting with consumers, building an online community, and creating a conversation between customers and a brand. So it’s no surprise that your content receives 28% higher engagement when UGC is integrated alongside your typical posts.

This is evident in all types of marketing content, including digital ads. When direct-to-consumer bedding and bath brand Parachute incorporated UGC into its retargeting ads, the ads generated a 35% higher click-through rate and a 60% lower cost per click.

What’s behind this higher engagement? It comes down to the fact that people want to get in touch with their favorite brands through social media channels. 60% of millennials alone say brand loyalty influences their purchasing decisions, according to joint research by Future Workplace and Elite Daily.

Plus, the most followed brands on social media are those that share their followers’ content. And engagement breeds further engagement, which inspires the creation of more UGC.

Drives sales

Using data from our Bazaarvoice Network of over 12,500 brands and retailers, we found there’s a 144% lift in conversion rate when shoppers engage with UGC and a 162% lift in revenue per visitor. Further research shows that visual UGC is more likely to convert compared with brand-created content.

78% of shoppers gain more confidence in a purchase when they see UGC, and 35% indicate they’re depending more on UGC during the cost of living crisis, according to our SEI. UGC provides social proof that assures consumers they’re making the right purchase, which translates to more sales.

However, some brands have experienced much greater growth in conversions, thanks to UGC. Take apparel brand Tuckernuck, for example. When Tuckernuck implemented a gallery of user-generated content on its website, as well as displayed UGC and influencer photos on its product pages, conversions skyrocketed by 190%.

“Having social content on our PDPs really helps with conversion,” says Kayla Robinson, a Tuckernuck customer experience and marketing associate. “When a customer sees other customers and influencers wearing the product, it inspires her or him to purchase it as well.”

User-generated content can be particularly beneficial to certain industries. The table above compares the click rate of posts both with and without UGC among various industries.

Provides audience insights

Consistently engaging with customers and analyzing the content they post about your brand allows you to better understand your audience. This enables you to not only improve how you interact with customers but also make adjustments to products and services based on customer feedback.

For example, branded hashtags often offer a ton of insight into what consumers want. If you own a cosmetics company, try searching for product names on social media to see what your target audience is saying. Do they want a more diverse shade range or sustainable ingredients? If a lot of people are voicing similar concerns, it’s time to take action and adjust your product offering. 

Ratings and reviews also contain a wealth of insights. If you’re constantly seeing customer reviews containing similar feedback, you know how to improve your products going forward. European retailer Vertbaudet noticed multiple customers had left reviews saying a maternity line dress was too small.

So in response to this feedback, the brand reassessed the dress and fixed the sizing of the cut which led to the average customer rating increase significantly.

Synchronizes with social commerce

Advertising on social media isn’t a novel concept, but social commerce is quickly becoming the new generation of shopping. 69% of shoppers say social media has inspired them to purchase products, and 52% have already shopped through social media. Consumers name convenience and product photos as the top reasons for embracing social commerce. 

User-generated content seamlessly aligns with social commerce because UGC takes the place of a branded ad and becomes an authentic, shopper-approved recommendation. Social media users see the UGC on a TikTok or Instagram post, click it, read the reviews, and purchase the product because it’s convenient and doesn’t require them to go to a different website to checkout. 

How to increase engagement with user-generated content

Let’s take a look at some of the most inspiring UGC campaigns in the world to emulate for your own UGC strategy.

Host contests or giveaways

Holding contests or giveaways is a classic way to have your customers get directly involved with your marketing campaigns and generate user-generated content

Offering a compelling prize is a crucial element to encourage more consumers to join in with your campaign. However, a good reward isn’t necessarily an expensive gift or a large amount of money. Starbucks, for example, came up with the #WhiteCupContest, encouraging customers to doodle their cups and upload a photo to social media with the #WhiteCupContest hashtag. The best part? The winning white cup drawings were featured as Starbucks’ limited edition reusable plastic cup.

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A post shared by Brita Lynn Thompson (@zenspiredesigns)

The contest generated great buzz on social media and within three weeks there were over 4000 doodled cups uploaded to Twitter and Instagram.

Incentivize your products/services

By giving customers good incentives to feature your products or services, you can quickly generate a huge number of organic content and tap into their follower communities at the same time. ‍

Hilton Grand Vacations encourages customers to upload their holiday pictures on social media with the hashtag #myHGV for a chance to be featured on their Instagram Feed.

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A post shared by Hilton Grand Vacations (@hiltongrandvacations)

These beautiful images act as a source of authentic inspiration for potential customers to book their next vacation at the hotel.

Develop authentic and inclusive brand messaging

Building an emotional connection between your products and customers is one of the best ways to improve customer engagement and form long-lasting relationships with loyal shoppers.

Women’s clothing brand Aerie launched the #AerieREAL campaign to promote body positivity and inspire women to be comfortable in their skin. The brand encouraged users to post unedited photos of themselves in Aerie’s swimsuits and shared customers’ photos with authentic captions. As part of the company’s initiative to promote real women’s bodies, the campaign was a move to empower women who are fed up with the idealised body type promoted by fashion brands.

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A post shared by Aerie (@aerie)

Aerie leveraged UGC to create an inclusive community of brand advocates on social media. By spreading the message of body positivity through its customers, there was also a huge boost in terms of brand image.

Partner with influencers

Influencer marketing is a great way to generate buzz and awareness around your products. Collaborating with the right influencers allows brands to tap into an existing audience and drive purchasing decisions.

Before the release of the Samsung Galaxy A model, Samsung collaborated with Blackpink to launch the hashtag challenge #danceAwesome. The dance challenge includes a short dance on the campaign’s catchy music, “Awesome screen. Awesome camera. Long-lasting battery life,” which perfectly highlights the smartphone’s features.

The brand then partnered with influencers like TikTok influencer @hollyh — who has about 16 million followers — to drive awareness of the challenge.

@hollyh working with @samsung on my audition for blackpink #danceAwesome #galaxyA #ad ♬ Awesome Phone Song(BLACKPINK Ver.) – BLACKPINK

These user-generated content videos went viral across social media and resulted in a whopping 4.7 million user videos with a combined 16 billion views.

UGC best practices

Adding UGC to your marketing strategy is an easy decision, considering the value it delivers, but there’s a few rules you should keep in mind. Follow these best practices to ensure your UGC works for you and your customers.

Develop a UGC strategy

With so many different types of UGC available, and with the countless ways your brand can utilize it, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. However, developing a user-generated content marketing strategy will help you search, curate, and publish the most effective UGC for your specific brand.

Provide clear guidelines

Tell your target audience exactly what kind of content you’re looking for. Only 16% of brands provide clear guidelines about the kind of content they want fans to create and share, but 53% of consumers want specific instructions on what to do.

Let’s say you’re running a giveaway on Facebook for a new product. Make sure the instructions on how to enter are super clear, and the value prop is front and center. Consumers appreciate clear directions as well as general guidance.

Include calls to action on site, on social, in emails, and on receipts, product packaging, and in-store displays. If you’re really in need of UGC, cast a wide net. You can also use a social commerce tool that’s created to source and sort existing user-generated content.

Ask for permission (and give credit)

Just because a customer tags your brand in a post or uses your hashtag doesn’t necessarily mean you can reuse it. So before reposting a user’s creation, reach out to them — whether it’s through email, comment, or direct message — say something complimentary about the content, and request permission to use it.

Once you receive permission, keep a record of it. Take a screenshot of the conversation or save the email in case any issues or questions come up in the future.

Always credit the original source of the content, and tag them if possible. This is respectful of the creator, and it encourages them — and other users — to continue creating content and sharing it with your brand.

Moderate it

User-generated content is considered quality if it’s created by real, non-paid users and conforms to your brand and community guidelines, government regulations, and audience expectations. That’s the only UGC you want. Any low-quality UGC (blurry images, typos, etc) or prohibited UGC (nudity, hate speech, etc) needs to be filtered out, reported, and binned. 

Content moderation can make or break your brand. Wanting a high volume of UGC is understandable, but quality is better than quantity. You don’t want to become known for showcasing low-quality UGC because, “Lawsuits and marketing to rebuild a bad public image are expensive” warns Abi Schuman, Senior Director of Content Management Services at Bazaavoice.

Share diverse content

Diversity and inclusivity are essential in marketing. Not only does it help your brand reach more customers, but it also makes your brand more accessible.

Users want representation, plain and simple. To quote Ad Age: “Given the fact that social networks are accessible by people of all backgrounds, shapes, sizes, and families who experience different seasons, communities, and landscapes, the diverse visual content found in UGC feels more like native social media content than advertising.” Couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Make sure your audience finds this diverse content by syndicating it to everywhere they are.

Track content

Keep an eye on all the UGC around your brand — even the content you don’t use. UGC is like a continuous feedback loop you can use to stay on top of what people are saying about your brand. Bazaarvoice’s Insights and Reports offer a user-friendly dashboard to track and analyze your brand’s different types of UGC content, from reviews to social media posts. 

Evaluate content performance

The UGC cycle doesn’t end with distribution, it ends with an evaluation. Consistently compiling product reviews on your product pages that no one sees is a waste of time and money. That’s why evaluating the performance of your UGC campaign and monitoring the data is essential. 

Start with our UGC audit webinar here to learn the six core factors that should be evaluated, and get a handy scorecard to see how your content measures up. 

Curate your brand identity with user-generated content

Your customers are already talking about your brand on social media.

They’re posting selfies and uploading stories that feature your products. They’re comparing items and making recommendations. So take advantage of this and curate your brand’s content from the multitude of user-generated content out there. And with 69% of people making purchases because they saw a product on social media, it’s also the very kind of content that will inspire your customers to convert.

After all, this is the authentic and relatable content that your followers want, the essential meaning of UGC.

When it comes to answering the question “what is UGC?” few are more qualified than Bazaarvoice. As the #1 user-generated content platform (not our words, the words of G2) we’re well positioned to provide you with a comprehensive UGC education.

Looking to get started with UGC? Contact us below to learn how Bazaarvoice, the leading UGC platform, can help you transform your brand and marketing strategy with user-generated content and drive a better ROI for your business.

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Masterclass: How lean teams can drive e-commerce growth with UGC

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It’s understandable for a retailer to focus on metrics that are directly related to sales and profits, but those numbers only give you a small part of the picture. They’re an indicator of the times you did everything right — for customers who are so perfect for your brand that they wanted to find you. 

But they don’t tell you about the customer who clicked through to your site and then bounced because the navigation was weird. Nor do they tell you about the person who blocked your social feed because after liking one ad, they found themselves bombarded with unconvincing content. 

Social media KPIs help you track and understand the success of your entire marketing and sales funnel. They grant you a look into potential customers’ minds and uncover weak points in your company’s shopping experience. 

Here’s the social media KPIs every e-commerce company should be measuring and why they matter. 

1. Awareness metrics
2. Consideration metrics
3. Purchase metrics
4. Going full-funnel with social media KPIs
5. Connection is the future of social commerce

Awareness metrics

Customers will only come to you if they know your company actually exists. Awareness marketing can be hard to make a case for, especially in a revenue-driven outfit. Campaigns to teach people about your company don’t translate into immediate or direct sales. These efforts are further upstream than that — but if they don’t happen, your company won’t get the downstream benefits. 

There’s three major awareness KPIs you can (and should) track to show that your awareness efforts are making a difference on social media. 

1. Impressions

Your impressions, or views, track how many times a post was seen. The number of impressions you get is not equal to the number of people you reach. Some people may see your content more than once, either by revisiting it, seeing it shared multiple times, or even encountering it on different platforms. 

Impressions are useful in determining whether you’re visible to the audiences who want to see you. This metric may fluctuate from week to week, which is normal. But in the long term, you want an upward trend to show that your social output is reaching more people. 

Impressions benchmarks

Industry-wide benchmarks for impressions may not help you because a small e-commerce brand won’t have the same reach as a large multinational corporation. Likewise, a brand that shoots for a niche audience can’t expect the same reach as one that’s going for the least common denominator. 

You could look at your direct competitors’ posts to see how they’re doing, or you could just track numbers internally and compare today’s operations to those of last year.

Increasing your impressions 

The key to reaching more people with your posts is constant engagement with a platform. You should always be posting new content and interacting with your followers. As you do so, you’ll begin to learn what works best for your brand on each platform; following those trends will lead to more impressions. 

2. Followers and community growth

Hopefully, some of the people who see your content (“impressions”) will decide they want to become a part of your community. Follower numbers matter because they represent the people who decide they want to see more from your brand. They’re signing up to hear your sales pitch so you can reach them without paying for ads.  

When looking at follower numbers, keep in mind that some accounts will follow you and then go dormant. Therefore, if your follower numbers aren’t actively growing, your actual audience size is likely shrinking. 

Increasing your follower numbers and community size

Give people a reason to follow your account by being more than just a bulletin board for bland announcements written in brand-speak. Many accounts have success with giveaways, either entering new followers into a raffle or sending a coupon code to those who sign up for updates.

Just know this “hack” only works if you have a plan to keep those followers around. 

3. Social engagement rate

Social engagement tracks how often your audience interacts with your content. Engaged audiences are worth more than passive ones; only those who have some level of emotional involvement will watch your videos and like or share your posts. 

It’s worth noting that certain types of engagement are worth more: Someone who follows a link to your store is more likely to buy your product than someone who watches a short brand video. However, watching that brand video may lead to a future link click, so don’t focus only on the engagements that lead to imminent conversion. 

Social engagement rate benchmarks

According to Rival IQ, the median engagement rate across platforms (per post) is: 

• Facebook: 0.06%
• Instagram: 0.47%
• TikTok: 5.69%
• X (Twitter): 0.035%

Increasing your engagement

As long as you’re not buying followers (don’t ever do this, by the way!), your engagement should increase as your impressions do. There’s a ton of ways to increase your social media engagement and conversion rates, so test out multiple approaches to see what works. 

Two of our favorite tips: first, interact with the people who interact with you. Second, share your community’s user-generated content (UGC). People love it when their posts get attention from an official brand account, and showing a bit of personality makes your brand seem more authentic.  

Consideration metrics

After awareness, would-be customers enter consideration mode — they start thinking about whether they want to buy from you and become the type of person who uses your products and associates with your brand. Some shoppers quickly move from consideration to conversion, but others linger in this phase for a while. 

These are the social media KPIs you can track to learn more about both types of buyers — and how you can win them over more efficiently. 

1. Site traffic

Any person who comes to your site is interested — at least briefly — in becoming a customer. In e-commerce terms, visiting a site is like picking up a product off the store shelf to look more closely or taking a piece of clothing to the fitting rooms. Your site visitors have found enough value in your social media presence to evaluate your brand more closely. 

For specific KPIs numbers, you’ll need to dig into Google Analytics data to determine how much of your site traffic came from your social media efforts and what campaigns drew visitors. 

Site traffic benchmarks

Most online retailers don’t publish raw traffic numbers, much less traffic numbers broken down by source. However, you can use your site traffic data to reverse-engineer your social media click-through rate. Chatdesk published the following click-through rate benchmarks:

• Instagram: 18% (organic posts) and 18% (ads)
• TikTok: 14% (organic posts) and 2.3% (ads)
• Facebook: n/a (organic posts) and 9% (ads)

Alternatively, simply use internal benchmarks for those raw traffic numbers.

Improving your site traffic

Since site traffic depends on your social media click-through rate, you’ll want to focus on the posts that are bringing visitors to your site. Make sure your link cards give an accurate description of your site and include eye-catching imagery. 

Every post with a link should include a clear CTA that tells people what they’ll get by clicking through. And, most importantly, you have to follow through on that promise. Someone who clicks through and has a disappointing experience is less likely to follow your links in the future. 

2. Lead generation

Gathering email addresses or phone numbers of interested shoppers helps you close the deal if they’re not ready to buy quite yet. Winning a social media follower is like getting your foot in the door. Think of someone giving you their contact information as inviting you in for a cup of tea (or coffee — your choice). 

You can continue to nurture leads by adding them to a newsletter that shares your values and highlights UGC to show your product in the wild. Or, you can send them coupons and notifications about sales to convince them to buy. 

Lead generation success benchmarks

No one has benchmarked lead generation success rates, perhaps because it’s a difficult thing to measure (and definitions of “what counts” may vary by company). We do know pop-ups that ask for visitors’ emails have an average conversion rate of 3.8% though. While this data appears to be largely e-commerce-focused, it’s not broken down by industry. 

It may be best to compare your performance to internal social media benchmarks on this one for now. Your lead generation rate KPIS specific to social media followers should at least equal, if not exceed, your overall lead generation rate. 

Increasing your leads generated

Customers often don’t want to give out their contact information (for good reason — how many times have you signed up for an email list and gotten five emails per day about “can’t miss” deals?). 

You can try the dreaded pop-up that promises a coupon or discount in exchange for contact information, or you can request it in a less aggressive manner. There are many clever e-commerce lead generation techniques that start with a useful, and therefore less annoying, interaction. 

If your social media efforts are bringing in a lower percentage of leads, it may be time to reconsider your audience and targeting strategy. A smaller, more engaged audience can be better when you curate a list of followers who are actually likely to buy from you. 

3. Site visits (number of sessions)

How many times does the average person come to your site before buying a product? If you know this, you know how many times you should be trying to get prospective customers to visit. 

Someone who’s been to your site once may not be the best person to retarget with an ad if you can spend that same money on someone who’s already browsed it three times in the past month. 

Site visits benchmarks

Your audience’s behavior is unique, so this is a metric that relies on internal benchmarks. It’s also a number you don’t need to worry about improving — it’s just important to know. 

Pull this information from Google Analytics (or your chosen analytics software) by looking at your user sessions. To get the most valuable data, you’ll have to dig into the session attribution statistics. There, you can see how often people visit before they buy and whether visitors from different sources have different behavior patterns. 

Increasing site visits

Like site traffic, it’s tempting to think this metric is about things outside of your site. After all, you just have to post another link and people will click through, thus taking themselves a step closer to buying from you. Right?

Not exactly. That CTA and link won’t be as effective if someone’s first visit to your site was a pain. Slow-loading pages, confusing navigation, and hard-to-read text can drive visitors away. 

You should think about ways to remind potential customers you exist, but it’s even more important to make sure interacting with your brand is a joy. Shoppers who know they’ll have fun browsing your site are more likely to come back.  

4. Time on site

The amount of time a visitor spends on your site indicates their engagement. Thirty seconds is about enough time for them to scroll down whatever page they landed on and then click away. In a minute, they can browse a category of products and see if you have the type of item they’re looking for. 

Someone who spends ten minutes likely looks at multiple products, reads up on them, and checks out ratings and reviews. (Make sure it’s 10 minutes of activity, though, and not 10 minutes of “let me just check this email really quick in another tab.”) 

Time on site benchmarks

This is another benchmark you can gather yourself using Google Analytics. Google will track someone’s time on page, which is a specific measurement per URL. So, you may see someone spend 30 seconds on your homepage, 15 seconds on a category page, and then three minutes on each of two product pages. 

Altogether, this would give them an engaged time of six minutes and 45 seconds. Both time on page and engaged time duration are important but in different ways.

Increasing time on site

There are two ways to approach convincing people to spend more time on your site. The first is by looking at the average time on page for each of your site’s pages. Are there any outliers? Some page types may lend themselves to shorter visits, but big variations between pages of the same type may indicate differences in user experience. 

Second, ask how you can extend a user’s engaged time. The most important thing to consider here is whether your CTAs match a user’s experience. Someone who clicks through to see your massive clearout sale and then gets bounced to your homepage rather than a catalog of on-sale items will likely bounce.

Purchase metrics

At last, the metrics your CEO probably cares most about — money. Now that you’ve been tracking users through the rest of your marketing and sales funnel, you have the context you need to tell a bigger story using these metrics.

After all, no purchase would happen without the awareness and consideration components you worked on. 

The most difficult part of handling purchase metrics is thinking about attribution. Someone who learns about your brand through Instagram and signs up for your email list because of an Instagram post might end up making a purchase after clicking an email link.

If you’re not using multi-touch attribution, the email campaign would get all the credit for that buy. That’s not fair to your social media efforts and KPIs — nor is it good data to base business decisions on. 

1. Revenue

This metric may be officially in the domain of your accounting team, but there’s no reason you can’t track it as well. When looking at revenue, you can track gross (all earnings) or net (earnings minus expenses) as your company prefers. 

Revenue benchmarks

When measuring the revenue your social posts brought in, you’ll want to look both at past earnings and future projections. Calculate the percentage of revenue you can attribute to social posts, then multiply that number by your company’s revenue predictions to get the benchmarks you’re aiming for. 

Increasing your revenue

Effective CTAs are part of the equation to increase revenue, and you should already be working on those. You also want to make sure customers have a clear path to purchase (and get the deals you talked about, if relevant) either directly through your social channels or when they land on your site.

For paid social efforts, ask how you can decrease your customer acquisition cost. This move won’t impact gross revenue, but it will increase net revenue. 

2. Transactions

Having more buyers is always a good thing. Not only does it bring in more revenue, but it also means you have a wider base of customers to solicit for return business. The number of completed transactions is also a measure of how easy it is for visitors to make a purchase after landing on your site. 

Transaction benchmarks

It’s natural for transaction rates to ebb and flow across e-commerce. The holidays typically see more sales, and various industries have different peaks at different times of the year. You may do best to compare directly across times of year.

For example, did your company process more transactions during December of this year than it did during December of last year?

Increasing your number of transactions

Since many shoppers (and social users) are accessing your site via mobile, you need a mobile-friendly shopping experience. You’ve already done your part to make sure your CTAs are fulfilling their promises. Now it’s time to dig into how your site can best serve your social audience as a whole.

Work with your website team to learn about the transactions that don’t happen. You should be tracking your shopping cart abandonment rate to see why buyers back out at the last minute. Often, convenience is the issue

But, if your abandonment rates are higher among visitors from social specifically, you may want to ask how your posts can better prime shoppers for the checkout experience. If you’re approved for shopping on platforms like Instagram, reassess your digital storefront:

• Are your posts filled with rich visual UGC that entices browsers to shop?
• Do you showcase ratings and reviews?
• Is the in-app shopping experience smooth, or are you forcing people to click through to your website?

All these factors affect a shopper’s decision to follow through with a transaction.

3. Conversion rate

How many of your social media click-throughs turn into purchases? This is your conversion rate, and it’s a number that can tell you a lot about your overall brand perception. 

There’s plenty of reasons a customer might not convert. Maybe your prices are too high, maybe they find your site annoying, or maybe you don’t ship to their country. Not all of these are things you can (or even need to) fix.

But, if the shopping experience is getting in the way of users making a purchase, it’s time to step in.

Conversion rate benchmarks

BigCommerce tells us a good e-commerce conversion rate is around 2-3%. That’s pretty low — but if your social media visitors are buying at that rate, then you’re doing well. 

Increasing your conversion rate

Your conversion rate affects the revenue and transaction metrics you’re measuring, and you improve all three in the same way. A smooth, fun shopping experience is a must if you want customers to convert.

Also, keep in mind that customers coming from a social link are likely responding to the offer in the post. They’re not here to browse, so don’t try to force them through extra steps before they can make a purchase.

If you can steal some more time with your website team, try our top 10 tips to improve your conversion rates. You’ll be able to help each other with these efforts. 

And if you’re selling directly on social, look for opportunities to optimize the experience. Like2Buy, for instance, is a tool that turns your Instagram pictures and videos into informative, directional, or shoppable posts. The transition from liking a post to buying a product from your store becomes a seamless process for shoppers.

4. Average order value

Shoppers often pick up a few tempting extras when they go to the store. Convincing them to mimic this behavior online will help your company. Obviously, more items bought lead to a higher average order value (AOV), which means higher revenue (gross or net). 

Customers who buy more are also putting more trust in your brand. If you deliver on your promises, they’ll be that much more likely to come back the next time they need the type of products you sell. 

Average order value benchmarks

There’s no e-commerce benchmark for this metric because it’s very dependent on your products and customer base. Your accounting team is likely already tracking this metric, so see if they have historical data — and if not, start gathering it now to set an internal benchmark. 

Increasing average order value

Growing your AOV is all about giving customers who are already buying a reason to splurge. Get your social media audience excited to spend by promoting offers that encourage them to .Free shipping over a certain amount? Tell them in the ad. Do loyalty program members get points for every dollar spent? Use your post copy to remind shoppers they can get more by spending more. 

The methods that work best vary based on the type of product you’re selling and your customer profile, so try a few techniques to nail down which is most effective. 

Going full-funnel with social media KPIs

Hopefully, by this point, you can see the direct link between awareness, consideration, and purchase metrics — but you work in marketing. Stakeholders in other parts of the business may not understand these ties as well as you do. As you’ve seen, some of these metrics require cross-department collaboration to gather. They also require collaboration to build.

If your leadership (or other department stakeholders) don’t buy into this approach, it’s helpful to frame it as an examination of today’s market. People don’t find products directly in stores anymore. They go online, do research, and often buy straight from their social feeds. 

Every cent of revenue a brand earns depends on shoppers being able to find your brand when they’re doing that research and then being impressed by what they see. 

Buyers typically have multiple touchpoints with a brand before they make a decision. They’re often navigating the awareness and consideration phases at the same time. Your online presence — social, site, and beyond — must account for this behavior by offering shopping content in places where people go to learn, and educational content in places people go to buy.

Here’s how to bring your efforts together. 

Set shared goals

What KPIs are more important for your social media channels this month — impressions or site traffic? Social engagement or on-site conversion rates? When your company sees these metrics as competitors, you’ll end up shafting efforts that need to be collaborative. 

Get everyone in the same room to talk about foundational goals so you can identify how the metrics you’re tracking work as indicators for other teams as well. With this shared baseline, it’s easier to remind other departments how that action item you asked for to support your goals will also help them meet theirs.  

Take it slow

Creating a full-funnel social content and commerce strategy is a difficult task, and if you’ve never done any of this before, give yourself space to learn and grow. 

Yes, you’ll eventually want to have branded content and UGC at every touchpoint. But when you start with perfecting operations on one platform, you’re making the wise choice to build a foundation that you can scale. Later. 

Appoint a “UGC coordinator”

UGC is central to bringing the awareness, consideration, and purchase behaviors together. That puts it at risk of becoming a secondary issue in each of those areas because no one wants to step on anyone else’s toes. 

Beat this tendency by choosing someone to own UGC efforts, and — this is important! — make sure they have the authority and sway to implement their strategy across multiple teams and departments. 

Bring the social to your site

Social commerce doesn’t only live on social networks. When you integrate UGC into your site, you’re giving people the chance to see what real customers have to say about your products. 

They don’t have to go searching for that valuable social proof, so you’ll see your conversion rate improve. There’s no need to integrate UGC into every product page off the bat. Start with a fun gallery on your homepage to see the promise of this technique in action. 

Build a UGC “treasure trove”

UGC, like any marketing asset, can be used more than once. Set up a central UGC database or library where you share the best pieces of UGC. How you organize this collection is up to you, but make sure you have some way for everyone to search by product type/line, content type, etc. 

Connection is the future of social commerce

With all the content on the internet, people are turning more to one another for trusted advice and reviews. Company-generated marketing materials aren’t dead yet, but they work best when they’re paired with UGC. And when you can integrate your brand communications and your fans’ contributions into the entire marketing and sales funnel, you’ll add authenticity to your communications.

That means your metrics — the social media KPIs and those more related to your site and sales — will keep going up.

Curating UGC can be a job of its own unless you have a strong platform supporting you. Our Social Commerce solutions help you curate the best of the best (now with AI assistance and recommendations!). We track UGC’s performance as part of your marketing campaigns and sales efforts to return full-funnel metrics — like the ones in this piece. In short, it’s easy for you to execute on your strategy and tell stakeholders the story of how your work is important. 

Your social media KPIs are only one slice of the pie. If you’re hungry to learn more about the future of social commerce, check out our social commerce conversion e-book — it’s full of tips to help you integrate UGC into every consumer touchpoint and help you measure the impact of that work. 

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The ultimate guide to social commerce conversion

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In essence, influencer marketing is about collaborating with the right individuals who can build awareness of your brand with their audience. It’s important for your brand equity to get these partnerships up and running well from the get-go.

By clearly outlining expectations, brand standards, campaign details, and more before a partnership kicks off, you can attract the best influencers to your project and help them create better, more powerful content.

What is an influencer brief?

An influencer brief is a document that outlines your influencer marketing campaign goals, guidelines, and content deliverables with any influencers you plan to collaborate with. It tells your creators what you need and expect from that in order to have a successful partnership that meets your objectives.

Your brand should have an in-house influencer brief template (accessible to anyone who communicates with creators) that contains basic information like brand guidelines, contact deets, and core values, etc, but that can also be customized to suit each influencer campaign.

Why should I partner with influencers?

The right influencers can help you create a goldmine of user-generated content (UGC) — reviews, photos, and videos created by customers rather than brands.

UGC is the key to earning customer trust and loyalty. 84% of millennials say UGC affects their purchasing decisions, while almost half of Gen Z customers say social media is their top inspiration for buying a product — even more so than recommendations from family and friends.

The six elements of a strong influencer brief

A strong influencer brief helps ensure you and the creators you partner with are on the same page. It’s one thing to say you want winning content — it’s another to show an influencer what winning content actually looks like.

It can also help you attract the right partners to your project. 

Influencers — especially the good ones — are picky. They want to work with brands and retailers that align with their mission and audience. According to a recent Bazaarvoice influencer survey, 62% of content creators said they’ve turned down potential brand partnerships and 35% declined because the brief they received was unclear or not a good fit.

Digital creator Marina Mitrakos says strong influencer briefs are critical to affirming a good fit between brands and creators (and their audiences).

“It helps me decide, ‘Is this something that fits with who I am and my audience? Or is this something that feels off and I can’t produce for?’” Marina said. “Influencer briefs help set clear expectations and ensure both sides of the partnership that the project will work out.”

Creating an influencer brief will also save you time and money. No more going back and forth with creators on revisions or retakes. No more off-brand content that makes you scratch your head and ask, “Where did they get that idea?” No more confusion from partners about what to include in a post.

Here’s six elements to include in an influencer brief to attract the right influencers and create effective content together. 

1. Your brand story

Building brand awareness and maintaining brand loyalty isn’t easy. It’s difficult enough to do this with brand-generated content. But influencer-created content? Even trickier! 

The key to helping influencers create content that generates brand loyalty? Storytelling. After all, research has shown that the human brain is wired for stories. 

A brief that outlines the story you want influencers to tell will help them craft content that goes beyond the product specs. This section gives creators the info they need to paint a bigger picture of your brand. 

• What makes your company unique? 
• Is there a compelling origin story? 
• What’s your brand’s “why”? 

Explain those answers here — so influencers can tell their audience great stories about your brand. This is the kind of information that helps followers more easily connect emotionally with your products.

2. Campaign summary

Influencers will have immediate questions: What do they need to do? What are your goals? 

Answer those questions in your campaign summary. Include an overview of the campaign, deliverables, and overall objectives. With influencer briefs, clarity is the name of the game. Consider starting with a one-sentence, high-level description of the campaign. For example: 

This is our holiday influencer campaign, where you and your followers can get to know our brand and seasonal products better through fun and creative videos.

After the 30,000-foot overview, dive into the logistical details. For example: 

• How many posts does the influencer need to create? 
• What hashtags should they use?
• What products should they promote? 
• What’s the theme of the campaign? 
• What do you hope the campaign will do? (Increase brand awareness, sell more of a specific product, drive X amount of additional UGC like social imagery or product reviews from the influencer’s audience)

When brands and creators disconnect on campaign fundamentals like these, it can lead to confusion, frustration, and ineffective content. That’s the exact opposite of what you want. 

3. Product usage

This section is the instruction manual part of your influencer brief. After reading, an influencer should know exactly how your product works and how to use it. This part of your brief should also outline expectations for how they showcase the product. Should the content show the product in action or do you want an unboxing video? 

For example, say you’re a pet care company. Maybe you want a cute video of a dog wagging its tail and sniffing the box as its human opens it. So much excitement! 

Or maybe you want to show the durability of your new chew-proof dog toy and suggest the influencer record them playing tug-of-war with their pup. 

In this section, you’ll also want to outline how to overcome hesitations users have about the product. What are some common questions that consumers ask about the item? How could an influencer’s content answer those questions? 

For instance, maybe the same pet care company has a product that allows pet owners to give their pups peanut butter as a treat. Great news for dogs — but pet owners might worry it’s hard to clean. An influencer brief could suggest a video showing the creator taking the toy apart and easily wiping off the mess. With influencer marketing, the possibilities are endless.

4. Brand guidelines 

Every piece of content an influencer creates should strengthen your brand and align with your voice or standards. If you have brand guidelines, send them over. If you don’t, here’s a few suggestions to set influencers up for success:

• Words your brand likes to use (and ones you never use)
• Specific colors you want your photos and videos to include
• Existing product descriptions, so the influencer doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel to describe how the item works

These are all helpful tidbits to tell influencers before they create UGC for your brand. Your influencer brief should include details about messaging, tone, content must-dos, etc.

Think of your brand guidelines as guardrails — not total roadblocks. (Remember, allow some space for the influencer to be creative. That’s why you’ve hired them!) Instead, these guidelines are helpful barriers that keep collaborators’ content from straying off course.

5. Content inspiration 

Sometimes, lists of do’s and don’ts can only go so far. Creatives need to see in-the-wild examples of what you have in mind. This is where content inspiration like mood boards come into play. 

If you’ve worked with creators before, this piece of your influencer brief can include links to past work that generated great results. 

However, if you’re new to influencer partnerships, don’t fret. Create a folder or mood board that includes examples of effective work. For example, link to your favorite posts on the company’s Instagram page or in-house videos that were popular on TikTok.

Bonus: Create an “anti” mood board. Can you find examples of content that absolutely doesn’t work for your brand? Seeing “what not to do” can help guide influencers and keep them from creating misaligned content. 

Finally, are there other brands or retailers whose work you want to emulate? These don’t have to be direct competitors. Often, they’re companies in another industry whose content you enjoy. 

Maybe their campaigns always include humor. Or the lighting in their photography and videos always makes the product look amazing. Include all that inspiration here — but be sure to also explain how your campaign will differ.

6. Payment terms 

Many influencers expect to be paid for their brand partnerships. This area of your influencer brief should include: 

• Terms and conditions (for example, do they need to sign an NDA? Is there a cancellation clause?)
• Compensation type (flat rate, commissions, affiliate income)
• Payment method
• Payment dates

While the main goal of an influencer brief is to drive on-brand, impactful content, this section also helps prevent headaches and awkwardness — for all parties. 

You don’t have to talk exact numbers at this stage, but clearly explain the terms of the collaboration up front so you don’t get into messy payment or legal disputes down the road.

Common questions about influencer partnerships

The world of influencer campaigns is still relatively new in the grand scheme of marketing. Understandably, many brands and retailers have questions about how to hire collaborators, when and how to use an influencer brief, and best practices for effective collaboration.

Here are some FAQs we get at Bazaarvoice — with answers to make your journey smoother.

When should I use an influencer brief? 

Any time you partner with an influencer for a campaign, you want to use an influencer brief. It helps produce better content and ensures everyone knows what they’re getting into before the project begins. 

How much should I include in my brief? 

If you’re unsure about what to include or leave out, err on the side of more detail. 

Remember, you’ve enlisted a creator to get the word out about your brand or company. The more they know, the more effective their content will be. 

Alternatively, the less they know — well, the less likely they’ll be able to deliver on expectations. A strong influencer brief can save you from wasted time, wasted money, and the stress and frustration of not getting what you asked for.

How do I know if I’ve chosen the right influencer? 

Unfortunately, it’s hard to be 100% sure without a crystal ball. But there are some best practices to follow. Before you even reach out to a potential collaborator, you want to make sure they’re a good fit for your brand or product. Sift through influencers’ content before contacting them. 

• What kind of content do they usually post?
• Are their feeds video-heavy or photo-heavy? 
• What value do they provide their audience? 
• What’s their skill set? (Injecting humor into content? Explaining complicated concepts in simple terms? Connecting on a personal level with followers?) 

It’s also helpful to clearly establish your own goals before contacting influencers. What kind of audience do you want to reach? For example, Kraft Heinz partnered with the Influenster community to identify key consumers, then matched them with products they would likely enjoy. Thanks to this targeted strategy, Kraft gained 20,000 new reviews and 39 million impressions.

Determining your audience in advance will also prevent bad-fit rejections. According to our influencer research, 49% of creators have turned down a brand partnership because it didn’t align with their values. And sometimes the potential collaboration just doesn’t make sense — like asking an influencer to promote a product they wouldn’t use in their real life.

“I remember when I was asked to partner with a baby toy company,” said Marina Mitrakos. “If they did some more research on me, they’d realize that I don’t have a child or younger siblings, and I’m not expecting soon. So if I said yes to the collaboration, I’d be putting out content that doesn’t make sense.”

Oops! 

Don’t make the same mistake. Do the up-front research to ensure a partnership is aligned before diving into campaign details. It might save you from a little embarrassment.

An influencer brief: Your ticket to authentic, effective content

Influencer collaborations certainly have a lot of moving pieces. But that doesn’t mean the process has to be disorganized or confusing — for either party. 

A strong influencer brief is your key to more effective partnerships. This document streamlines workflow, clearly outlines expectations and standards, eliminates confusion, and helps your brand get the content it needs. 

While it may take some work up front, creating an influencer brief is well worth the time. By including the six sections outlined above, you’ll be able to set any collaborator up for success. 

If you’re ready to partner with reliable, influential creators to amplify your brand, check out Bazaarvoice Creator Partnerships.

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But these KPIs are just the tip of the social media marketing iceberg. Social commerce can improve your metrics throughout the funnel. And with marketing budgets under intense pressure these days, knowing what and how to measure can help you impress your stakeholders and prove your social media strategy’s success. 

Keep reading to learn how social commerce affects key phases of the shopper experience, how to make it easy for social media visitors to become customers, what to look for in a social media marketing tool, and how to tie your social marketing efforts to revenue. 

Social media marketing’s impact on product discovery

When it comes to organic product discovery, social media can be a brand’s best friend. For many consumers, especially Gen Zers and Millennials, social media is one of the most popular channels for discovering brands and products.

Many are even going as far as saying social media is the new search, with a whopping 73% of 18-24-year-olds discovering products through social than any other way.

To jump on this trend and help drive product discovery, the luggage brand Samsonite used collect user-generated content (UGC) about their products from social media. Because these photos and videos were made by actual customers, the content was more authentic and relatable than anything Samsonite could produce in-house. 

The brand’s marketing team turned this UGC into social media posts and experiences that drove shoppers to the brand’s website and partner sites. 

The same authentic and inspirational travel content that caught shoppers’ attention on social media was then displayed throughout Samsonite’s product pages, creating a consistent and engaging shopping experience that increased conversions by 4x and revenue by a striking 250%. 

And it all began on social. 

Social media marketing’s impact on consumer trust 

Because UGC — like ratings, reviews, and user-submitted photos and videos — are created by actual customers, they provide other shoppers with powerful social proof. This increases consumer trust and confidence in your brand and products. 

• 89% of shoppers rely on reviews to learn more about products 
• 85% of consumers say they consider online reviews just as trustworthy as recommendations from friends and family

“People want to buy products and services based on recommendations and inspiration from people they trust. That could be family, friends, and communities, and it can also be authentic influencers they follow on social media.” – Accenture

In general, when shoppers interact with UGC that’s relevant to their product search, brands and retailers can see up to a 145% boost in conversion rates, as well as increases in revenue per visitor and average order value.

For lifestyle brand Villeroy & Boch, incorporating customer photos of products into their website, emails, and newsletter resulted in an even bigger boost to consumer confidence — and sales. The brand used UGC to inspire shoppers by showing how their products can be used in real-life situations. This strategy helped Villeroy & Boch achieve: 

175% increase in time on site

275% boost in conversion rate

29% higher average order value

“We want to show authentic, trustworthy, real-life content from our customers’ lives, their tables, their rooms, and their homes,” said Sabine Kaufmann, Head of E-commerce Operations, Dining & Lifestyle at Villeroy & Boch. “A picture is worth 1,000 words. It can help describe a product far better than any words could.”

Want to increase revenue from social media marketing? Create an easy path to purchase

One of the top reasons people prefer shopping on social is the convenience. They already spend time on sites like Instagram and TikTok. Why not spend money there too?

• 55% of shoppers like to shop directly on social media
• 69% of shoppers have been inspired by social media to make a purchase through another channel

The key to getting the most revenue from your social media marketing is to make it easy for consumers to go from scrollers to shoppers. By creating a seamless path to purchase, you’ll increase key e-commerce metrics from site traffic to, most importantly, sales. 

Make it shoppable, make it measurable

When measuring the impact of a social media marketing campaign, you need to go beyond the traditional metrics of reach and engagement. That’s because social commerce is different from social media. 

There are multiple KPIs to track and optimize throughout the shopping experience (and prove the value of your efforts):

Awareness metrics:

• Impressions. The amount of times your content is displayed (whether actually clicked on or not)
• Social engagement rate. The measure of how much your audience interacts with your social content
• Followers and community growth. The number of social followers and advocates you have

Consideration metrics:

• Visits. Web users who visit your website
• Site traffic. The sum of all traffic to your website (including return visitors)
• Lead generation. Earning the interest of potential customers to increase future sales
• Time on site. The amount of time site visitors spend on your webpages per session

Purchase metrics:

• Revenue. Your income from sales
• Transactions. Number of sales made
• Conversion rate. The ratio of site visits to conversions — whether a sale or lead generation
• Average order value. The average amount of each transaction from purchases made on your site

Each social media marketing campaign is different. And each brand has different goals. By understanding how these KPIs play into your campaign’s success — and your social media marketing revenue targets — you can set goals and adjust your strategy accordingly.

How to measure the impact of your social media marketing

We’ll be real with you: It’s almost impossible to measure your social media marketing impact on your own. There’s so much data to collect, let alone analyze. Fortunately, there are tools out there to help you understand the impact of your social media marketing efforts. Here’s what to look for:

Tools that put an emphasis on ROI. After all, for most marketing teams, measuring the revenue from social media campaigns is the ultimate factor for proving a campaign’s success to higher-ups.

Ability to measure full-funnel metrics. As you can see, there’s more to a successful social commerce campaign than likes and comments. You need a tool that can help you capture and analyze all of the KPIs that matter.

A holistic platform for the full shopping experience. Shoppers may start their journey on social media. But they may then visit your website or partner sites to complete their purchase. Some may also sign up for newsletters or read your blog along the way. You need a tool that can measure your social media impact across the entire buyer journey. 

Robust reporting dashboards. End-of-the-month reports are nice, but dashboards make it easier to see your social commerce campaign performance in real time. With them, you can quickly gauge what’s working (and what’s not) to make fast, data-backed decisions.

Some of the most actionable reporting dashboards include:

• Revenue summary
• Revenue generated per post
• Top-performing contributors
• Engagement and ROI breakdown

Choose the right social management tool

Social media marketing’s impact on e-commerce is undeniable. Brands and retailers that embrace social commerce enjoy higher conversion rates and increased sales. 

But with so many metrics to manage, proving the ROI of your social media marketing efforts can be challenging. 

Using a tool that helps you understand all the KPIs that matter — and track and analyze them —  allows you to develop powerful social commerce campaigns that boost sales (and your reputation around the office).

Bazaarvoice Social Commerce empowers you to turn social content into shoppable experiences that drive sales — in all the places your shoppers hang out. Even better, we give you the tools to develop and measure a winning social commerce strategy. Get in touch to learn more.

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It all starts with having a stellar social commerce strategy that blends compelling user-generated content (UGC) from your creator network with memorable (and seamless) shopping experiences. 

This approach helps you stand out on social media, connect with shoppers authentically, drive traffic, and convert at e-commerce. It also gives you plenty of data to measure your success.

But data points alone don’t tell the full story — you need to delve deeper into customer sentiment and what your competitors are doing. You can get the most out of your insights with a social media scorecard.  

Chapters:

1. What is a social media scorecard?
2. The benefits of a social media scorecard
3. What to include in your social media scorecard
4. Social social media scorecard template

What is a social media scorecard? 

A social media scorecard numerically demonstrates the value of your social media marketing efforts. It’s a structured method of tracking your social commerce efforts using true data.

Social commerce refers to integrating social media content and e-commerce. It’s an experience that consumers increasingly want and expect brands to deliver. 

54% of shoppers say they’re more likely to buy a product on social media when they can click the post and get product details right then. Shoppers want to be inspired and entertained by your content — but they also want social experiences to include information that helps them feel confident purchasing. Best-in-class social commerce programs include several essentials: 

• Curated and shareable UGC: Consumers want to see how your products look and work in real life. Collecting content from your most loyal customers — your most authentic voices — about your most popular products will resonate with other shoppers and boost purchases

• Get your content noticed: Amplify UGC by featuring it in your marketing campaigns. Showcasing content from real shoppers heightens your authenticity and boosts engagement. 

• Make content shoppable: Make it easy for people to buy in the moment. Ensure that all your content, including UGC, features a link to buy to increase sales.

Measuring the impact of your social commerce program is vital. But you need to look beyond traditional metrics and focus on contextual data, such as sentiment, customer satisfaction, and how you measure up against your competitors. 

A social media scorecard incorporating this data helps you improve your brand reputation, stay on top of trends, stand out, and create your own niche. 

The benefits of a social media scorecard

CEOs are generally part of a brand’s social/PR strategy, albeit in more of a spokesperson role. But if you want to make the most of your social media strategies and really deliver a worthy social ROI, you and your team need to be actively using social insights and data to guide you.

Using a social media scorecard to track and deliver these insights across teams will enable you to:

• Identify growth opportunities. Social listening insights reveal customer preferences, new trends, and shopper pain points. Using these insights can help you create more focused campaigns and products that drive sales
• Track your competition. Competition is fierce, especially in the social sphere. Combining your own KPIs and metrics against competitor and industry benchmarks can identify the strengths and weaknesses of your rivals, so you can set smarter goals
• Gauge customer sentiment of your brand. Insights are more than just getting a few likes on your instagram posts. Social is an always-on focus group that reveals the customer sentiment about your brand and products. You can discover what shoppers like about your brand, customer service, and products, and use that to guide your offerings

What to include in your social media scorecard 

To tap into the ever-changing social media landscape and grow e-commerce, you’ll need to include these components in your social media scorecard. 

Content collection

No doubt your brand is sitting on a goldmine of social content. Instagram alone sees about 4 million pieces of content posted every hour, and TikTok has one billion monthly users. Collecting and leveraging this content is central to social commerce. 

Comb social media for brand mentions, or simply ask consumers to post about you. 60% will take photos if you ask them to, and 53% appreciate brands telling them what kind of content to post. 

Shoppers consider UGC to be more social, interactive, and authentic than traditional marketing messages. It creates organic engagement, and when you make content shoppable, it drives sales — and you can track both of these metrics. 

Site display and experience 

Displaying social content, like customer photos and videos, creates shoppable features to showcase your products on product pages and anywhere you sell. When you optimize your product pages with social proof (a phenomenon where people mimic the actions of others on social media), sales and revenue soar. 

We’ve found that when shoppers interact with these galleries, you can see e-commerce conversions increase up to 140%. When you display ratings with the gallery photos, conversions jump 5x.

Product sampling campaigns offer unique experiences to shoppers, increase content, and inspire others. Bazaarvoice’s tools help you make this content shoppable by tagging products and requesting rights, enabling you to make data-driven decisions about what content drives the biggest results. 

Marketing amplification

Using paid ads that feature UGC drives conversions. Facebook’s and Instagram’s algorithms give more exposure to ads with high engagement. Each social media platform lets you monitor ad campaigns and offers analytics so you can keep tabs on your return on investment (ROI). 

On Instagram, you can turn any post into an ad to target specific audiences and also create ads across platforms and apps, such as Facebook and Messenger. You can also promote photo, product, and video pins on Pinterest and directly link to checkout pages. Plus, TikTok’s ad options include in-feed ads and video shopping ads. Include every social channel you’re on in your social media scorecard.

Analytics and competitor insights

Social listening — where you monitor keywords, hashtags, and other content surrounding your brand — helps you see how successful your social commerce campaigns actually are. It also helps inform future strategies. 

Delving into customer insights like engagement metrics, feedback, and reviews lets you get the most out of social commerce. You’ll learn what consumers are saying about you and gain a competitive edge. 

You’ll understand what types of content shoppers consider most engaging through Social Analytics. You should also compare your competitors’ social metrics and KPIs against your own, so you’ll know where to focus your efforts.

Social media management

Traditionally, social media marketing and e-commerce teams often work in silos. Each team has its own focus without a complete picture of the full funnel and what entices someone to purchase based on a social media interaction. 

However, working together, these teams can skyrocket social commerce conversions. You’ll be able to collect, curate, and create high-performing, authentic social content — and measure its performance. And the best part? It also saves time and money to streamline social media management. 

Technical health

Consumers’ perceptions about your brand and products should be a key part of your social media scorecard. Gathering and featuring UGC and tracking the engagement offers insights into what consumers think and inspires future social commerce. 

Include customer service metrics, too. Track messages received, responses, reply times, and customer satisfaction. Both brand perception and customer service are crucial for tracking your technical and brand health. 

Earned media value

Make sure to include the amount you would have spent achieving the same level of promotion as your organic social efforts. Your earned media value is essentially how much your brand is saving with organic social content.

Social social media scorecard template

A social commerce strategy is an authentic way to drive sales and heighten customer engagement. Having a social media scorecard in your marketing arsenal can ensure your approach hits the mark — helping you stand out, drive sales, and boost social and web traffic. 

Just make sure your scorecard includes content collection, site display and experience, marketing amplification, analytics and insights, social media management, and technical health. 

An easy way to get started is with Bazaarvoice’s own social media scorecard insights — get full funnel metrics and benchmarks, trending data, and insights into your audience and competitors all from a customizable dashboard. Learn more here.

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Understanding the six core types of shopper — and the best strategies to reach them — will help you better connect to your customers, meet their needs, and drive more ROI for your business. 

What are the six types of shopper?

Most buyers will fall into one (or two or three) of the following buckets:

1. Impulse buyer: makes quick, spontaneous purchases
2. Researcher: looks around for the best deal before buying
3. Casual shopper: browses without a specific purpose or need
4. Needs-based shopper: shops only when they need a specific item or service
5. Brand loyalist: prioritizes familiarity and usually buys from the same trusted brands
6. Social shopper: relies on input and recommendations from friends, family, or social media

It’s important to understand each of these types of shoppers — and target them with customized content and strategies.

Impulse buyers 

There’s no shopping lists for this crew. Impulse purchasers are spontaneous. They don’t obsess over researching the best products or brands. They don’t spend hours comparing prices. Instead, they’re all about instant gratification. They have a problem. You have a solution. Let’s make this happen!

Perhaps the most important thing to know about this type of shopper is that they’re driven by emotions. These emotions can be positive: They’re excited to try a new hot sauce or they can’t wait to buy a new couch. 

Impulse buyers might also be motivated to address negative emotions. Maybe they feel embarrassed by a skin condition and want to find a product that will ease their symptoms and make them feel more confident. Or they might feel like their current phone or tablet isn’t as cool as their best friend’s. An impulse shopper will want to address this feeling of inadequacy by buying a new device — quickly. 

Finally, impulse buyers may be driven by emotions that have nothing to do with the product they‘re buying. Instead, they’re simply trying to address feelings of boredom, job stress, anxiety, etc. Shopping makes them feel better.

How to sell to impulse shoppers

The best way to appeal to this type of shopper? Make it easy for them to see your products as the solution to their emotional needs. 

If they’re shopping in-store, use stand-out imagery and signage to highlight your product. Place the items you’re trying to promote in areas that get a lot of traffic, like the entrance. The checkout counter is also a prime place to reach these spontaneous shoppers. 

You can also embrace the power of user-generated content (UGC) — social imagery, product reviews, and videos created by customers, not your brand — to reach impulse buyers because 76% of impulse shoppers say reviews and other forms of UGC affect their purchasing decisions.

In-store, that can mean signage that promotes user ratings. Online, you can have a field day with your UGC — especially customer photos:

• 65% of impulse buyers say photos of products taken by other shoppers affect their purchasing decisions
• 60% expect to see shopper photos on product pages

When Hobbycraft, the UK’s largest arts and crafts retailer, featured visual UGC on their site, they saw a 219% increase in conversions and a 24% boost in average order value.

Finally, make it easy for impulse buyers to see related items or add-ons throughout the e-commerce experience. If you have additional solutions that can address their needs — or related products that make the item they’re purchasing more powerful — by all means, let them know!

Researchers

Researchers are the “Type A” of shoppers. Before making a purchase, they launch a thorough investigation. Which companies sell what they need and at what the price point? Are customers generally happy with their purchases? How do the products look in the real world?

A researcher will have all the answers. They might even have a spreadsheet full of answers. But what they don’t have is a desire to make a willy-nilly purchase. They take their time, weigh their options, analyze all the available information, and (eventually) make an informed decision. 

How to sell to researchers 

One way to quickly turn away this type of shopper is to have an outdated website or social channels. When buyers are neck-deep in research, there’s nothing worse than finding a lack of usable info on a brand’s website. 

Maybe you’re running online ads for a new couch — but there’s no photos of the piece on your website or social. Or maybe all the reviews on your site are from 2017. This could be a big problem for researchers. Make sure to regularly update content so researchers get a full, current view of your brand and products. This includes up-to-date UGC.

• 32% of this type of shopper need to see three to five photos and videos on a product page to confidently make a purchase 
• 51% of researchers likely won’t buy a product unless they see shopper content like reviews, photos, videos, Q&A, or social posts 

When cycling gear company Le Col promoted authentic customer reviews and images on its website and product pages, visitors were 5x more likely to convert.

Remember: Researchers are on the hunt for the best deal. So offer one that will catch their eye! 89% of shoppers will spend five minutes or more reading reviews, images, and social content before making a purchase. You need to make research shoppers find your deals regardless of the channel they use. And it can be really simple to achieve.

For example, to win over researcher shoppers on social, Kelly Reis, Product Development and Merchandising Manager at Linon Home Decor, makes sure that, “we provide our Instagram followers with opportunities to shop our products on sale at select retailers and guide them towards the best deals for them.” They also include sale-specific information in captions to drive shoppers directly to their Like2Buy.

Casual buyers

These are the shoppers who don’t necessarily need a specific item. They’re just browsing! Maybe they already have a solid winter coat. But they saw your puffer jackets are on sale and are clicking through out of curiosity.

This casual behavior can be good news and bad news. 

On one hand, browsers probably spend a lot of time shopping — which means there’s an opportunity to turn them into dedicated customers. Since they’re already on your website, a great user experience could inspire them to keep coming back.

On the other hand, casual buyers like to keep their options open. They’re less likely to make a quick purchase and are even okay with not buying anything at all. They abandon their cart more frequently than other types of shoppers. With no compelling purpose behind their shopping and no pressing problem to solve, these customers need a little extra motivation to click “buy now.” 

How to sell to casual shoppers

Human beings — especially casual shoppers — are drawn to stories. So lean on the story behind your products. When a casual customer can connect to the “why” behind an item, that product becomes more than a thing to buy. It sparks an emotion or helps the customer relate to a brand. 

To appeal to this type of shopper, you’ll also want your overall shopping experience to feel welcoming and comforting. 

• DO: Have clear, upfront offers to get their attention
• DON’T:  Rely on aggressive tactics, like multiple pop-up windows or frantic “last chance” messaging. In-store, these shoppers will also be turned off by high-pressure salespeople

Casual customers don’t want to be pushed into buying something. They want a stress-free, low-stakes shopping experience.

Needs-based buyers

When it comes to the different types of shoppers, needs-based buyers are the ones moving with purpose down the aisle (or through your product pages). They know what they’re looking for. And they want to find it quickly and conveniently — with no distractions. 

They don’t want to wade through “similar products” or recommended add-ons. They just want to click or swipe and get on with their day.

How to sell to needs-based shoppers 

Make sure you have the products this buyer needs: That’s priority #1. Beyond that, think about how to provide more value and education throughout the buying journey. 64% of needs-based buyers use shopper content to evaluate whether the product is worth the investment

This is your chance to provide webinars, articles, and more that showcase the benefits of your products. What content can you offer to reassure this type of buyer that your product is exactly what they’re looking for?

Gift guides are another way to reach needs-based shoppers. Let’s say they’re shopping for an espresso machine on your site. Why not offer a handy buyers’ guide that outlines the features and benefits of different models? This gives needs-based customers all of the info they need to confidently make a decision. 

If these purpose-driven shoppers have questions, the last thing they want is to dig through your website to find the answer. Having FAQs on your website is a good way to close that gap. Chatbots can also help answer basic questions. For more involved customer service, make sure the contact info for your human-led team is easy to find on your website. 

Brand loyalists 

For brand loyalists, it’s all about trust. They repeatedly buy from brands they know, can identify with, and can rely on. 

This type of shopper values consistency and is less likely to swap allegiance to a new brand based on a random sale. And that’s good news for brands and retailers: Once brand loyalists trust you, they’ll often pay a premium for your products. 

Apple enthusiasts may pay a little extra to have a Mac computer, an iPad, an Apple watch, and the latest iPhone. But you’ll have a tough time persuading them to switch to a Samsung phone or PC. Nike fans could probably buy a different brand of sneakers — but instead they’ll wait in line for hours to pick up the latest Jordans. There’ are’s plenty of polo shirts out there in the world. But Lacoste brand enthusiasts want the ones with the iconic alligator sewn onto the chest. 

In these instances, brand loyalty beats the cheapest price, most convenient buying experience, or other consumer preferences. 

How to sell to brand loyalists 

Even among these types of shoppers, nothing is set in stone. 54% of loyalists are still open to trying a different company. The secret to keep them coming back is to elevate their experiences with your brand:

Loyalty programs. For example, try a reward system where customers earn points with each purchase. Then they can redeem those toward discounts, bonus services, or even free products. 

Ambassador or referral program. Reward happy customers for sending new shoppers your way. For instance, if a customer refers three buyers to your brand, they get a free tote bag or a discount on a future purchase. 

Customized user experience. Wherever you can, show customers they’re not just a number. Maybe give them access to a unique login portal where they can see their points balance or special offers that month. Or give specific product recommendations based on their previous purchases.

Shoppertainment opportunities. Shoppertainment is an emerging method for boosting shopper engagement and creating loyalty. If there’s a way to promote your products through a fun experience, take advantage. For example, customers can use virtual reality to visualize new furniture in their living room or to try on clothes before purchasing. You can also incorporate gaming elements into the shopping experience.

However you can show this type of shopper that they’re special — and that your brand values them — will help you remain top of mind the next time they want to make a purchase.

Social buyers

These social butterflies make purchasing decisions largely based on recommendations. What do their friends like? What do online reviews say? Is there social media buzz around a product? 

This type of shopper wants social approval and likes to stay trendy. They value feedback from others, both in person and online. Shopping is a social activity to them, and their friends’ input in real time can help boost a product in their eyes. 

UGC also makes a big mark for this segment of shoppers. If a particular kitchen appliance or dog-grooming tool keeps getting recommended by their social media algorithm or influencers they follow, they’ll pay attention. 

How to sell to social shoppers

You’ll want to keep your brand’s social media pages up to date. Better yet, make sure these are engaging. Don’t just post and click away from the page. Interact with your online community! 

Don’t forget to feature all of the awesome UGC you’ve collected, including stories, testimonials, and photos or videos, on your social media profiles. Because for many shoppers, social media is the new search: 

• 64% of social shoppers use social media as a product discovery tool
• 62% use social media to research a brand or item
• 56% of social buyers follow their favorite brands on social media to discover more products
• 42% of social shoppers prefer to shop directly on social media

Considering how important social media has become to most customers’ shopping experiences, your social media profiles are gold mines of opportunity. Take advantage of this space by beefing them up with shoppable UGC. Incorporating shoppable UGC onto your social channels — and everywhere social reaches — inspires purchases which leads to tangible results, as these three social commerce case studies demonstrate: 

1. UK bed specialist Dreams saw a 200% lift in conversions and a 62% increase in average order value
2. MAM, a brand selling premium baby products, doubled traffic and conversion rates — and even saw a 258% increase in time on site
3. Bemz, which creates made-to-order furniture covers, increased its new revenue by $1.65 million

And don’t forget to include UGC on your homepage, landing pages, and product detail pages. Even if someone doesn’t go to your social media profiles, they should still be able to easily find your customers’ reviews, photos, or testimonials wherever they shop.

Reach every type of shopper by optimizing your customer experience

With so many distinct groups of shoppers — each with their own desires and behaviors — it can be overwhelming to try to reach them all. But given that world consumer spending in 2021 was $53,100 billion, it’s well worth optimizing your shopping experience to appeal to all six types of shopper: 

• Prioritize UGC. For most consumers, the top two factors influencing a purchase decision are customer ratings and reviews and UGC (especially photos and videos) from real customers
• Update your website and social profiles. At least 39% of every buyer type discovers new products or services on social media. When your profiles contain accurate, relevant, and authentic information, you’ll turn visitors to your social media pages into customers
• Customize where possible: For example, you could target casual buyers with an abandoned cart email sequence. Enlist influencers or content creators to meet social shoppers where they already are. Or start up a rewards program for brand loyalists

To connect with more prospective buyers, retain current customers, and ensure higher ROI, it’s important to understand the distinct types of shoppers. With better insights into each segment, you can craft more focused marketing strategies — and drive more consistent sales.

Learn more about current shopper behaviors and preferences in the Shopper Experience Index — a global survey of 7,000 consumers and 465 brands and retailers.

When consumers post about these purchases on social media, they’ll usually tag your brand, helping others shop for and purchase these same items. This user-generated content (UGC) fosters a peer-to-peer recommendation cycle that continues attracting new customers and benefits brands and retailers in many ways. 

Most shoppers check social media and read reviews before buying anything. 78% of consumers feel more confident purchasing when they view UGC, and during tough economic times like today, 35% depend on it even more, according to the Bazaarvoice Shopper Experience Index. 

Shoppers are already posting about you and creating buzz for your brand on social media, whether you realize it or not. Everyday shopper communities like the Influenster community add over 500k new pieces of UGC monthly. So it’s crucial to tap into these conversations, learn what they’re saying, and collect this untapped UGC.

With so much social UGC created and shared each day, it’s impossible for brands to use everything that comes through in their campaigns. It might seem like it just funnels into the void — but this untapped UGC still has a profound impact on a brand’s reputation, awareness, discovery, and sales.

How untapped UGC still works for you 

Brands can get a ton of mileage out of UGC, even if you don’t or can’t directly use every piece of content your customers generate. Not all UGC works for every campaign or purpose, but it’s still valuable in many ways. Here’s all the ways untapped UGC benefits your brand. 

Introduces new customers to your brand 

Everyday social media users see other people talking about and sharing photos of your products. This fuels conversations between users about your brand. 

For example, someone might comment, “I love your shirt! Where did you get it?” And a consumer will tag you or send a link to the item. Another shopper will click and add it to their shopping carts, browse the rest of your website, and complete their purchase. 

Consumers trust content produced by real people. 100% of consumers — yes, every shopper! — say they’ve purchased a product based on the recommendation of someone they saw online.  

Social media is also where almost 60% of consumers go to discover new products. They typically follow their favorite brands, interact with them, and increasingly purchase directly from social platforms (so, it’s always a good idea to make your content shoppable!). 

Educates through trusted voices

Shoppers are likely to discover your products from UGC on social media. The platforms also serve as educational tools. Consumers can learn how a product will meet their needs and see it being used in real-life situations. 

The ability to see how something looks and works from photos and videos of real consumers builds trust. In fact, 78% of shoppers trust everyday social users just as much — or more — than they did five years ago, according to a June 2023 Bazaarvoice study of consumer and influencer communities. 

To help educate shoppers about your products, highlight UGC that showcases how the item can be used. This might include makeup tutorials, outfit-of-the-day (#OOTD) posts, and recipes. 

Shoppers want to learn from UGC. Our Shopper Experience Index shows that 62% use UGC to ensure they’re getting good value for their money, 50% to understand the quality of materials, and 44% to see whether a product matches a description. 

Build your brand’s identity 

Consumers who align with your values or vibe will naturally gravitate towards your brand. Tap into the growing creator economy, which is now valued at $16.4 billion, to find everyday consumers who are the biggest fans of your brand — and the largest pool of untapped UGC.

These content creators will produce the most authentic UGC — 69% of marketers are working with smaller creators these days. 

You don’t need a big marketing budget to tap smaller creators to produce content that effectively markets your brand. Ideally, 1% of your most engaged shoppers could produce about 90% of your content in a cost-effective way. 

UGC produced by everyday social media users has higher engagement and builds trust and authenticity.

Tracks your engagement and informs your strategy 

To meet your marketing and UGC goals, it’s crucial to continuously manage, measure, and optimize your creator marketing strategies. Use the content that you see from social media users as a baseline for measuring who’s engaging with your brand — examine demographics, their opinions, and the content they’re sharing. 

This can help you decide how to best interact with consumers effectively and meaningfully. Tracking engagement will drive future strategies. Powerful Social Commerce solutions let you identify top creators and content that performs best.  

The social butterfly effect

UGC collection is never a one-time thing. You need to engage customers all the time and encourage them to post about you on social media. This social butterfly effect encourages more UGC. 

Product sampling is one way to get your products in shoppers’ hands and generate conversations about them on social media. Bazaarvoice can help you hyper-target your ideal customers by giving you access to the Influenster community.

These UGC creators produce photos, videos, and reviews about your products from their own experiences — and you can share this valuable UGC on your social media channels, product detail pages (PDPs), and retailers’ websites. Plus, consumers who sample products are more likely to purchase them in the future and recommend them to friends and family.

When Petco launched a sampling campaign, for example, the pet supplies retailer saw a 48% increase in revenue per visit for sampled products, a 28% conversion rate boost, and a 15% higher average order value. 

How you can tap into the vast web of social UGC

Don’t let untapped UGC go to waste. Consumers are already sharing photos and videos of their favorite items and commenting and sharing product-related posts from others. Tapping into this robust network helps you leverage the true value of UGC.

Create a branded hashtag

Make it easy for your shoppers to start and join conversations about you by setting up branded hashtags. This can work wonders for consumer discovery, especially for creating buzz around a new product launch. 

Hashtags let you collect content about your brand all in one place, making it a go-to spot for UGC. This helps you grow brand awareness and drive traffic to your social pages and website, ultimately enabling social commerce. 

Dreams, a U.K.-based bedding specialist, has a winning hashtag strategy — its #mydreamsbed campaign attracts photos of real customer homes, which the brand incorporates across its social channels.

When customers interact with UGC, Dreams has seen a 200% increase in conversion rates and a 62% increase in average order value.

Comment on users’ posts 

When you organically come across a photo of one of your products or someone mentioning your brand on social media, make sure to leave a comment — whether the post is negative or positive. Responding to this feedback shows that you care about consumer feedback. Shoppers will respect your brand and feel valued, making them more likely to consider  your brand for future shopping sprees or treat it as a go-to. 

Consumers enjoy producing content and will create UGC when you ask them to, but they expect you to engage with their content quickly. Our Shopper Experience Index shows that 54% of consumers expect a response if they write a negative review, and 58% want an answer to a question they post in your Q&A on the same day. 

Display social UGC on your website

Spotlight your real customers by showcasing social UGC in a gallery on your website and product pages. This approach creates a positive sentiment for your brand — essentially, it shows how much you value your customers. 

American Eagle encourages customers to share photos of themselves wearing its jeans using hashtag #AEJeans. The photos are then displayed in a gallery, and when you click on a picture, you can go right to the product page to buy the exact jeans. 

Just about everyone researches what they buy online before completing a purchase. Consumers read reviews and search social media to see what their peers have to say or how real people use the item. This in turn drives sales for brands.

For example, The Body Shop showcases authentic photos and videos from real customers. The UGC is featured on product pages to inspire shoppers as they browse.

After integrating Galleries, the brand saw a 13% increase in average order value and a 28% jump in product page conversion rates. 

Recognize the impact of untapped UGC 

UGC is the most valuable content you have — it’s cost-effective to generate and highly effective at creating buzz, building brand awareness, and increasing sales. But, using every piece of UGC you collect in specific campaigns is tough — there’s just so much of it! Still, untapped UGC serves multiple purposes, including: 

• Introducing new shoppers to your brand
• Educating consumers about your products
• Building and boosting your brand identity 
• Encouraging social conversations about you
• Informing future campaigns 

There’s several ways to tap into untapped UGC, such as creating hashtags, participating in conversations, and featuring UGC everywhere your customers go.

Bazaarvoice’s end-to-end UGC technology can help you collect valuable content that fuels your media mix, effectively target your ideal customer profile globally, and get the most return from every piece of UGC. Learn more by exploring Bazaarvoice’s solutions.

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How to tap into UGC with creators and communities

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Every day, hundreds of millions of posts appear on social media. Consumers are often inundated with content from brands, while retailers and brands find themselves shouting into the void. 

To stand out among the marketers jostling to be heard on social media, you must be smart, not loud. The best strategy is leveraging user-generated content (UGC) creators from your ideal customers. This approach will help you go beyond the once-and-done buyers and reach consumers who shop again and again. Let these loyalists become your brand advocates. 

Consumers want to build relationships, connect emotionally, and support the brands they cherish, especially during a tough economy. You just have to guide them. Here are some strategies for targeting and nurturing loyal customers to become your brand advocates. 

What is a brand advocate?

A brand advocate is an individual who shares their positive sentiment and experiences about your brand with their followers and friends.

Brand advocates are true loyalists. They enjoy your products, interact with you on social media, and appreciate opportunities to share feedback with you. It’s more than just whether people are spending money with you — it’s about emotion and identity.

According to Leonie Brown, Qualtrics XM Scientist, “True loyalists understand your product and brand, believe your offering to be good value, and identify with your product on a personal level.” 

Why you need brand advocates

Brand-generated marketing is important in a healthy marketing mix, but it’s impossible to meet consumers’ demands for content with traditional marketing messages alone, especially when your marketing team has a lean budget. Consumers also actually prefer UGC created by their peers. 

Brand advocates, who are real customers and love your brand, are the mouthpiece you didn’t know you needed. Because brand advocates are just regular people and not affiliated with your company, they’re highly influential. 

Consumers trust other consumers more than anyone else. 100% of shoppers say they’ve purchased a product based on a recommendation from another shopper that they saw online, and 78% trust everyday social media users just as much or more than they did a few years ago. 

Most shoppers say they won’t buy anything without consulting UGC first. They especially seek out customer reviews and photos or videos from other shoppers. 

Encourage a peer-to-peer recommendation environment by tapping into your brand advocates. 69% of marketers today are working with smaller creators, like everyday consumers and social media users. Partnering with these creators brings higher engagement, trust, and authenticity than traditional marketing — and, it’s cost-effective, scalable content. 

The creator economy is booming and is currently valued at $16.4 billion. Over half (53%) of shoppers consider themselves to be UGC creators, according to the Bazaarvoice Shopper Experience Index. 17% of these creators actively create UGC, and 36% will do so when asked. 

5 ways to find brand advocates

Both shoppers and marketers are tightening their budgets these days. Activating brand advocates makes other consumers feel more confident shopping with you, and this strategy offers a high return on investment when marketing teams need to do more with less. 

Consumers are leaning more into the expertise of everyday social media users and subject matter experts to discover new products, learn about how something can meet their needs, and purchase with confidence. 

We’ve found that about 1% of your community — your loyalists — can produce about 90% of your content. You just need to target your brand advocates and harness their power. Here’s how to find them. 

1. In-person events

Events like in-store holiday activations, sports-themed contests, or awareness month campaigns are a fun way to engage shoppers in real life. In-person events can help you stand out by offering something unique and memorable. 

In-person events also help you get to know your most loyal shoppers. Pay close attention to those who show up, as well as consumers who make an effort to speak to you, ask questions about your brand or products, and purchase from you. 

Loyalists tend to show up organically to an in-person event. But, you can reward them and make them feel extra special by peeking into your shopper data and personally inviting them to attend. This approach will build and nurture relationships with brand advocates. 

Another way to leverage in-person events is to see who usually attends similar activations. For instance, we spoke to digital creator Marina Mitrakos, whose passion for fashion and beauty led her to create content for brands. One way she’s developed her business is by attending fashion and beauty events and posting about them on social media. 

2. Email list/newsletter

While people enjoy receiving messages from brands in their inboxes, sending a mass blanket email to everyone on your list isn’t the best way to find brand advocates. People stay on email lists for years and never actually interact with brands. 

So, go beyond the people that are simply on your email list. Instead, track engagement on email content, like clicks on coupons, responses to polls and surveys, or email replies. These interactions showcase the consumers who are genuinely interested and invested in your brand. 

Emails are also a great way to ask customers for feedback and collect UGC, ultimately turning them into brand advocates. Our Shopper Experience Index revealed that 43% of consumers prefer brands and retailers to use emails to ask them for their opinions on products they’ve purchased. 

Sending an email after someone purchases from you to say thanks and ask for reviews and other UGC yields big results. We’ve found that review request emails increase review content by 4x to 9x, and sending a follow-up may lead to a 50% increase in review volume — or much more. Clothing brand MeUndies, for example, has seen a 218% increase in review collection since optimizing review request emails.

When requesting UGC, consumers like it when you tell them exactly what kind of content you want. For example, 60% will take a photo if you ask them to. 

Shoppers appreciate it when they feel like brands care about what they have to say and are listening and responding to their needs. They’ll be more than willing to respond to your request, create UGC, and become a brand advocate. 

3. Cause-related marketing campaigns

Cause marketing refers to marketing strategies that strive to increase revenue, while also taking action to improve society in some way. This might involve raising money or awareness for an issue or charitable organization or highlighting your sustainability or corporate responsibility initiatives. 

If your brand values a specific social, environmental, or humanitarian cause, be vocal about it — and take note of who’s interacting with content related to your cause. Consumers want to support and advocate for brands and retailers that also support the issues they care most about. 

For instance, if being eco-friendly matters to your brand, share your sustainability efforts and regularly promote that you’re cutting down on boxes and shipping to target customers who prefer to shop with sustainable brands. These efforts pay off. 

According to a Bazaarvoice survey of the Influenster community, 78% of shoppers said they prioritize using sustainable products across categories, and 77% will pay more for products promoted as “sustainable” or “clean.” 88% will purchase from new brands if they claim to be more sustainable. 

4. Pay attention to your social channels

Who are your most engaged followers? Most shoppers do follow their favorite brands on social media, but you should hone in on the followers who interact with you most. 

Knowing who frequently comments on your social posts, shares your content, enters giveaways, tags other users, and talks about your brand on social is crucial. These social media users make compelling brand advocates!

Social media is an amazing platform for starting conversations and getting noticed. Nearly 60% of shoppers discover new products and services on social media, where they research items and make purchasing decisions. Most shoppers also buy things directly from social media. 

Keeping tabs on who’s talking about you on social media is important, but don’t neglect people who are sliding into your DMs. Direct messages are an excellent place for one-on-one conversations and connections. 

Responding to any DMs, posts, or other customer feedback is crucial for relationship-building. Consumers expect a response from brands when they offer feedback, and responding heightens trust and showcases your authenticity. 

5. Targeted shopper communities

Using a product discovery and reviews platform like the Influenster App, gives you the opportunity to target the largest community of everyday consumers and skilled creators to generate the highest-quality UGC — including reviews, photos, videos, and social content. This, in turn, increases brand awareness, lets you reach new audiences, and helps you convert more customers across brand and retail. 

Influenster matches your product to your ideal audiences based on over 1,000 data points for each of the community’s 8 million global members. You can activate unique segments, such as loyalists and competitive users, members who shop at key retailers, and consumers with specific skincare or dietary needs. 

The ability to hyper-target consumers based on behaviors and other characteristics beyond typical demographics was a key benefit in choosing Influenster

Elizabeth Northrup, Associate Brand Manager at Kraft Heinz

Influenster members are also prolific content creators. Based on Bazaarvoice Sampling Community data from June 2023, here’s a look at what these members bring to the table: 

• 500,000+ new pieces of UGC each month
• 73 million total monthly impressions for Influenster social campaigns
• 34,000+ posts for Influenster social campaigns
• $5.5 million total monthly earned media value for Influenster social campaigns

One of the most effective ways to tap into the Influenster community and reap these benefits is through product sampling. This strategy gets your products into the hands of your ideal customers. In turn, they create authentic content about your brand in the form of social posts, reviews, photos, or videos. 

Beauty giant Rimmel sent its new Wonder Ombre Holographic Eyeliner out to target consumers through sending custom sampling boxes. This helped the brand collect over 1,200 product reviews, which are displayed on Influenster, the brand’s website, and syndicated across its retail partner websites. 

Rimmel’s sampling campaign generated real impact for the brand, including: 

• 44% higher sales lift versus benchmarks for average digital campaigns in the beauty category
• 69% higher sales life versus benchmarks in the product categories of the sampled products
• 73% of samplers said they would likely purchase something from Rimmel in the next 6 months 

Targeting your ideal customers to be brand advocates

One-time or some-time customers are great. But, marketing to all-the-time customers is a winning strategy. These shoppers are your ideal customers, who love your products, your mission, and the experiences you provide, both online and in-person. 

Finding and building relationships with your brand advocates builds trust with other consumers — helping you stand out and helping them feel confident and appreciated.

If you’re struggling to find advocates for your brand or you don’t know where to look, Bazaarvoice affable.ai is an AI-driven influencer marketing platform that lets you easily find your creators, manage collaborations, track your campaigns, and measure your performance.

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