That isn’t surprising. It’s costly to create compelling visual content across your product catalog. But it doesn’t have to be! Today, social media platforms offer plenty of authentic product and brand focused social content created by your customers — aka visual user-generated content (UGC).

The average consumer devotes over two hours per day to social media. With over 250 billion photos on Facebook and 95 million new photos and videos posted on Instagram each day, user-generated visuals flood our digital devices. You and your marketing team should be taking advantage of this content and also populating your website, product pages, and own social channels with it. 

5 step go-to-market strategy

When you leverage this visual UGC that consumers are creating, you’ll be able to set the perfect foundation for a go-to-market strategy for any product you offer. 

“Customers will be your best advocates. If you want to launch with the maximum impact, it’s they, the people, who matter. Not your company. Let them do the talking,” Vishal Patel, Digital Interactions Specialist at Canon Europe.

1. Plan your go-to-market strategy early

This may sound like an obvious first step, but one reason brands often get their go-to-market strategy wrong is because they don’t leave enough time for planning.

You’ll need to make sure you leave enough time to collect visual UGC, tweak product messaging, and allow for the inevitable delays that crop up.

2. Create buzz on social media 

Social media helps consumers discover new products and brands. After seeing a product or service on Instagram, 92% of users said they have taken some kind of action, like buying the product online, visiting the brand’s website, or following the brand on social media, according to research commissioned by Facebook.   

Social media influencers can also help spread the word about new products to their followers. According to a Morning Consult report, influencers especially resonate with younger demographics. Over 50% of Gen Z and millennials say they trust influencers’ advice about brands and products.

To create buzz on social media with visual content, start with relevant influencers and your most loyal customers. Consider sending them samples of your new product and asking them to use a specific hashtag when posting about the product on their social channels.

This will build awareness about your product, make it more discoverable by new customers, and provide you with some good visual content from influencers and followers to use in the rest of your go-to-market strategy. 

You should also perform regular searches to find where else your customers are posting about you. Search your name on social platforms, find YouTube mentions, audit event photos, look at tagged locations for your physical stores, and use Google Analytics to see where on-site traffic is coming from.

3. Add customer photos to product pages

Once you start finding the visual content that customers are creating about your brand, you can use that content to enhance product pages on your website pre-launch. 

Shoppers are 6x more likely to buy make a purchase if the product page contains social content. User-generated photos are especially important for categories like apparel, food and beverage, home furnishings, health and beauty, and pets.

Use the visual content your customers post on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and TikTok to add photos and videos to your product pages. Visual content gives customers the information they need to make a confident purchase decision. We’ve seen conversion rates increase by up to 150% when visitors interact with images displayed with Bazaarvoice Galleries. And, Salesforce reports that visitors spend 90% more time on websites that include UGC galleries.

4. Learn customer use cases to influence your go-to-market strategy

Product descriptions can only say so much. But when paired with content that actually shows how the product can be used, they help customers make the most informed purchasing decisions. 

Find visual content from customers that displays how they’re using your products in their real lives. Plus, by incorporating common customer use cases and customer phrasing from social posts and reviews into your product pages, you’ll also improve search and marketing copy. 

When lifestyle brand Oliver Bonas started using UGC galleries to show how customers were actually styling jewelry, they saw a 188% conversion lift among those who engage with social and visual content.

5. Explain your products with how-to videos

With TikTok and Instagram Reels making videos as common as photo content, shoppers are taking notice. 

Bazaarvoice’s research on visual UGC found that 24% of consumers say videos may highlight something that wasn’t obvious just from the still images or product description, and 21% would like to see a product in action before they buy. 

Work with influencers to create short, engaging how-to videos that you can post on social media and product pages pre-launch. When customers immediately understand how to use your products, they’ll be more confident in making a purchase.

Get go-to-market right with a full UGC strategy

It’s time for brands and retailers to put visual UGC to work in their go-to-market strategy. Embracing this provides a tremendous opportunity to increase shoppers’ awareness of new products, inspire purchasing decisions, and build loyalty to your brand.

But a great go-to-market strategy encompasses more than just collecting visual UGC. You need to collect a wealth of different UGC and then make sure it reaches multiple digital and physical touchpoints across the customer journey. Learn more ways to successfully launch your product here.

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Embracing constant change and delivering an outstanding omnichannel experience with the best selection of products is critically important for retailers. Especially in the face of today’s increasingly informed and always-on consumer.

A retail merchant’s key focus is understanding the customer. In order to understand the customer, you must keep up with trends in the industry and ensure that their merchandising strategy is aligned.

There’s a lot of different factors that go into managing an online business, on top of keeping up with the latest trends. Every decision has to be made carefully in order to grow the business profitably and for a retail merchant to hit their ultimate goal: their OTB (open-to-buy) plan. 

Today, merchants at online retailers need to find ways to optimize and improve user-generated-content (UGC) — reviews, images, videos, and questions created by individual users — in their categories so they can drive more conversion and sales. Here’s some of the best practices to drive business success. 

What should retail merchants focus on to hit their plan?

Simple – creating product description page (PDP) content standards for your category of business.

While things like product, price, and place still play a big role in winning at retail, content is still king. And in today’s e-commerce world, UGC is the patriarch of the content family. That doesn’t mean neglect branded content, it just means you need to level out the content bias in favor of UGC.

Without being able to touch and feel products sold online, shoppers are tremendously relying on each other to get approval that a product is a good fit for them. Especially during the pandemic. Globally, 48% of shoppers say they’re reading reviews more now than they were prior to the pandemic. 

Whether it’s in the form of ratings and reviews, social images, or Q&A, shoppers want to know more about the product than what’s written by the brand before purchasing them. 85% of shoppers find UGC  to be more authentic and more influential than content made by brands, and it’s 5x more likely to convert compared with branded content.

And shoppers aren’t buying if there isn’t UGC on a PDP for something they’re looking to buy. Over 80% of shoppers say they won’t buy if there aren’t written reviews and 66% say the same for customer photo content. And if you can find a way to incorporate video into e-commerce, you’ll have even more chance of inspiring purchases.

Simply put, UGC directly influences purchasing decisions and drives conversion.

How does UGC benefit a retail merchant?

A strong, holistic UGC strategy offers a multitude of benefits for a merchant and their category of business. The top three benefits are supporting an increase in conversion and sales, developing an understanding of the customer, and reducing return rates.

Increase conversion and sales

Capture shoppers’ interest and empower them make confident purchase decisions — there’s no online content shoppers trust more than others’ opinions. In fact, we found that there is a 136% increase in conversion rate when shoppers interact with UGC on the Bazaarvoice Network. 

Better understand your customer

By leveraging direct customer feedback that comes from UGC, you’re able to get insight into the customers’ minds. With this, retail merchants can make better business decisions and plan better to hit their buying plan.

Reduce return rates

With customer reviews, you’re able to easily identify why some customers are choosing to make returns and can make adjustments to the PDP or to your buying plan accordingly.

Now, how do you reap these benefits? Create a UGC strategy for your category.

Why having a UGC strategy for your category is so important

Retail merchants who see the most success and growth in their business by focusing on UGC are able to do so because they make it part of their merchandising strategy.

When you’re implementing (and enforcing) a strategy that focuses on UGC, the process becomes seamless and vendors will start helping you get more UGC. It’s a win-win situation where both you and the vendor benefit from the conversion lift and additional sales.

5 step UGC strategy for retail merchants

1. Set benchmarks for your category 

Content standards drive results. The ultimate driver for UGC success is when a retail merchant creates and enforces PDP content standards for their category (some refer to it as a vendor scorecard). When you implement standards, you’re able to hold your vendors accountable for helping to provide that content.

Without standards, it becomes a bit more difficult to enforce to your vendors that they need to be participating in UGC for their products. Examples of UGC benchmarks:

1. All items should have at least X number of reviews or
2. X% of the whole assortment must have at least one review
3. All items must have at least a X-star rating
4. All new products must launch with reviews 

2. Engage your suppliers and hold them accountable

Now that you have your content standards for your category, communicate that to your vendors. Start enforcing them and let it guide how you prioritize products and placement.

Check to see if your UGC stakeholders have materials they can provide you to leverage when discussing content strategy with your vendors.

Again, following a UGC strategy is a win-win situation for both retail merchants and vendors. The more robust a vendor’s UGC you can get on your product pages, the more $$$ you both will see as a result.

3. Focus on areas that need review coverage

What areas in your business have low review coverage? Or zero review coverage?

These should be big areas of focus. Online shoppers are very hesitant these days to purchase a product that has a small amount of reviews, and especially a product that doesn’t have any reviews.

Use reporting tools to easily identify these areas, vendors, and SKUs and ask that your vendor work with their ratings and reviews provider to find a solution that can help them increase review coverage at-scale.

4. Launch all new products with reviews to help kickstart sales

A really important aspect of a solid UGC strategy is making sure that you’re keeping in mind any new products scheduled to launch in the upcoming months.

In order to capture the customer’s attention and validate that the new product (or brand) is right for them, it’s crucial that your vendors think ahead and collect reviews so that it’s on the PDP ahead of launch.

Product sampling is how you can achieve that. With sampling, your vendor is able to send their products to a curated community of shoppers in exchange for high-quality reviews pre-launch. This allows vendors to collect reviews for specific items and ensure that the content is ready on the PDP the moment it goes live.

5. Incorporate visual and social UGC

Inspire shoppers to purchase more by providing them with images of real customers experiencing the products. Text reviews are important, but these days customers are increasingly searching for products that have visual UGC in order to know what a product truly looks like. In fact, 66% of shoppers think visual UGC is important when they’re making a purchase.

Retail merchants biggest pain points solved

We know that as a retail merchant, you have seemingly endless pain points. But you can solve nearly every single one of them with UGC, effciently and cost-effectively. Learn how below.

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