E-commerce and brand managers will soon have to rely on first-party data — the data you collect directly from customers yourself.

Not just to stay compliant with privacy regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA, but because a first-party data strategy can enhance your revenue, provide value internally for your business, give you better customer data, and ultimately help you build a relationship with your customers. 

Chapters:

1. What is first-party data?
2. How to use first-party data
3. How to collect first-party data
4. First-party data e-commerce strategies
5. Examples of first-party data strategy in action
6. Maximize your first-party data

What is first-party data?

First-party data is customer information and data that you collect yourself — directly from your audience. Nobody else owns this data except you. It cannot legally be sold or shared, it doesn’t follow users outside of your website, and it’s made up of two different “types” of data.

1. Declarative data

Declarative data is the data that your audience self-reports, such as their name, email address, location, and more. It doesn’t just have to be rote demographic data, however. It can also be data such as their income level, the number of pets they have, and more. It’s especially useful for understanding consumer behavior and finding out what triggers buying behaviors.

Example: A customer informs you that they have pets: two cats. This information comes directly from the customer.

2. Behavioral data

Behavioral data is data based on the activities of a site visitor. This type of data is often collected via the use of a first-party cookie or tracking pixel. This cookie is unique to your site and your site only, and never follows the user across the web. Tools like Google Analytics are commonly used in conjunction with behavioral data to analyze site performance and user behavior, giving marketers and managers granular details about what parts of their website are performing and what parts need improvement.

Example: A customer likes several cat pictures and pages on Instagram but does not explicitly tell a business they have any cats. It’s up to the business to make that inference.

How to use first-party data

Before you start on your first-party data strategy, there’s some housekeeping and tactics that will need looking at first.

Align with stakeholders on what first-party data you’ll collect

First, you need to align with stakeholders on what first-party data you’ll collect. This way, you have buy-in from everyone on your team, and everyone’s needs are equally represented. Because this first-party data will become your only data source, it needs to be as robust as possible, while still keeping within regulations.

Aligning with stakeholders requires some prep on your end. Before meeting with the different stakeholders in your organization (managers, executives, legal, IT), come up with a list of metrics you’d like to track. Some common ones include sales interactions, emails, phone numbers, site behavior, purchase history, and common demographic information, such as age and location.

Next, you’re going to want to run this list of possible data points by your stakeholders, justifying why you want to collect each data type and how you’re going to do it, so there isn’t any friction between departments over what data is collected and how it’s being used.

Update to the latest Google Analytics data model

Google Analytics version 4 includes new ways to segment and track users, is GDPR and CCPA compliant, and is built to take on first-party data by utilizing AI to fill in data gaps that third-party data would ordinarily have filled.

The ever-popular analytics tool specifically addresses issues with the retirement of third-party data and inconsistencies in cookie consent options by using AI to fill in missing customer information, meaning you can still collect and analyze user data even if you don’t have a complete user profile.

Additionally, Google Analytics 4 helps you easily find and delete user data upon request, which means you can stay compliant with “the right to be forgotten.”

Looking to get started with a site implementation? Google has some valuable resources and a step-by-step guide to implementing Google Analytics 4 properties on your website’s analytics property.

Build new personas and segment your audiences based on first-party data

Because you’ll be using first-party data moving forward, you need your personas to be as accurate as possible; working with inaccurate or baseless buyer personas is a huge waste of time and resources. But you can’t keep relying on third-party data to build your buyer personas. Ask any marketer how accurate their third-party data is, and you’ll probably get back a “not very.” Survey data collected by Deloitte unearthed some startling facts about first-party data’s ugly cousin:

• Over 66% of respondents said that the third-party data about them was zero to 50% accurate as a whole
• Around 71% of all third-party data was deemed inaccurate after a review by survey respondents

As part of a first-party data strategy, personas based on first-party data are crucial to providing a personalized e-commerce marketing and advertising experience. Buyer personas based on first-party data have a number of benefits, including a 10–20% reduction in marketing and sales costs, a 20% higher customer satisfaction rate, a 10–15% increase in sales conversion rates, and a 20–30% increase in employee engagement.

Start by leveraging all the first-party data you can to build your personas. This might include data like location, age, purchase history, audience research, CRM data, or user account information, all of which can be consensually collected without the use of third-party data or cookies.

How you divide your customer base is entirely up to you. But some common shopper segmentations include: 

• Shared characteristics and behaviors
• Common interests
• Demographics
• Region
• Purchase or browser history
• Frequent shoppers or buyers
• New customers
• Recent cart abandoners
• Browsing or buying habits
• Engagement levels
• Average AOV (e.g. big spenders, sales hunters, etc.)

Build a data governance strategy that keeps you compliant

Data governance is the process of ingesting data and managing that data’s lifecycle from creation to storage to deletion.

Both the GDPR and CCPA have clauses that allow users to request their data be deleted — “the right to be forgotten” and “right to erasure.” Data governance strategies play a huge role in both of these clauses — you can’t comply with a data deletion request if you can’t easily find and manage that data in the first place.

Failure to govern your first-party and third-party data in accordance with regulations could put you in regulatory hot water. The GDPR imposes stiff fines for companies who fail to comply. Amazon was hit with a massive $887 million fine for not complying with the GDPR.

Failure to govern your first-party and third-party data in accordance with regulations could put you in regulatory hot water.

Building a data governance strategy requires you to consult with two teams: legal and IT. Legal will be able to tell you what needs to happen to the data you have from a governance standpoint. IT will be able to help you find a solution to managing your data.

Start collecting first-party cookies in place of third-party cookies

You may have seen those popups on some websites asking to place cookies on your browsers while also offering you the chance to opt in or out of data collection. That’s how first-party cookies are placed in a way that’s compliant with regulations — and it’s a crucial aspect of your first-party data strategy. There’s a few key ideas at work here:

• Customer information gathered from first-party cookies is gathered consensually
• This data is being used on this site and only on this site and will not follow the user across the web

Ordinarily, companies use third-party cookies — cookies that have been placed on users’ browsers by third-party sites — to gather customer data. These cookies are placed without the consent of the user, directly violating the GDPR and CCPA, which prohibit the non-consensual placement of third-party cookies. How do you start collecting first-party cookies?

You can do this manually by consulting the different teams in your org about how you’re going to implement a first-party cookie strategy. Design the language and copy, then take your plan to legal, and finally to IT, who can implement a first-party cookie solution. 

If you’re a small or medium-sized business, services like Cookiebot can help you set up collection popups. Larger organizations can rely on tools like OneTrust to do this at scale.

Value exchange

Value exchange is a tactic used to entice customers into exchanging their personal information for high-value content or services (you might recognize this as giving your email in exchange for an e-book or a discount from a company). Value exchange is consensual data collection that’s compliant with the GDPR and CCPA, and it’s mutually beneficial to your business and the customer. It’s a win-win that provides some great, long-term benefits.

Common value exchange tactics are to offer discounts, which help you gather emails, and loyalty programs, which can improve your bottom line and your brand’s relationship with your customers. You get their data and earn their trust, and the customer gets a valuable piece of content, item, or service.

Additionally, it represents your commitment to user privacy and data transparency. You’re being upfront about what you’re collecting, why, and what the customer is getting in exchange for their data. This type of approach is great for building goodwill with your customers and helps you stay compliant with regulations.

How to collect first-party data

Collecting first-party data starts with building users’ trust, gaining their consent, engaging the customers in ways that prompt them to volunteer information, and having the right tech to gather first-party data in place. Here are some tried-and-true methods of collecting first-party data:

Be transparent about the data you do collect. Customer trust is built on transparency, but one in five consumers still believe businesses don’t care about privacy. Separate your business from the pack by explaining how you’re going to use the data you do collect and how it’s being collected in your cookie consent popup.

Ask for reviews from customers. Asking for customers to review products in your e-commerce store is not only a great way to improve your sales performance but also gain access to customer data consensually.

Offer quizzes to your customers in exchange for personalized recommendations. Customers like personalized product or content recommendations — 35% of Amazon purchases come from product recommendations, and 75% of Netflix watches come from recommendations based on customer data. Learning a buyer’s likes, dislikes, and interests is a great way to improve the customer experience, your ROI, and consensually gather first-party data.

Let customers make accounts in your e-commerce store. Accounts are a veritable treasure trove of first-party data. By letting customers volunteer information via user-created profiles, you give them an incentive to return to your e-commerce store and can also mine their accounts for useful bits of data.

Reward repeat customers with a loyalty program. Building a successful customer loyalty program provides you with a dynamic source of customer data — a data source that is constantly evolving and is updated by the customer — as well as better sales numbers and increasing your brand loyalty. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Ask users to participate in surveys. Customer satisfaction surveys are an excellent way of improving your products and services. Surveys can also function as a source of first-party data, giving you the ability to tie interactions back to specific customers so you can identify points of friction within your e-commerce store or customer journey.

First-party data e-commerce strategies

Follow these best-practices for using first-party data to drive e-commerce growth.

Retarget hesitant shoppers

Retargeting is a super effective way to use first-party data to reach customers who have shown interest in your products but haven’t completed a purchase. Use data from website visits to create targeted ads that remind them about their viewed or wishlisted products or items left in their carts.

This subtle-yet-not-so-subtle nudge brings reluctant customers back to your site and also nudges them to complete their purchases.

Generate personalized product recommendations and promotions

With 91% of consumers more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations, implementing this strategy into your e-commerce marketing plan is a no-brainer. Utilize purchase and browsing history to tailor offers and product recommendations that are most likely to appeal to each customer.

These can be displayed on product pages, in email campaigns, and even during the checkout process, and should include related or complementary items that encourage upsells and cross-sells to increase average order value.

Enhance the shopper journey

Strengthening customer relationships is paramount for any e-commerce business’s growth. The stronger the relationship, the greater the trust. And the greater the trust, the deeper the loyalty — which just so happens to convert to higher online revenue. 

Analyze your first-party data to identify any pain points and areas for improvement. This will allow you to optimize the customer experience by reducing any friction throughout the conversion funnel. For example, your first-party data might highlight that many of your customers make their exit during checkout after they see limited payment options.

So then you could add more payment methods, such as buy now, pay later.

Strengthen your loyalty program

A recent study found that 79% of consumers are more likely to do business with a brand because of its loyalty program, which translates to increased customer retention and revenue. Your best approach for making your loyalty program a reason that shoppers seek out your business?

Begin by using your first-party data, such as shopper preferences and previous purchases, to tailor your rewards to each customer. 

And with third-party data going away, loyalty programs are going to be more important than ever when it comes to customers actively sharing their information. With a well-executed, personalized loyalty program, you can increase your customers’ lifetime value, drive repeat purchases, and create champions for your brand.

Target shopping cart ditchers

Customers often leave your site and abandon their full shopping basket with no intention of ever returning to complete a purchase. While this might seem like a waste of time, it’s actually a great opportunity to build connections with online consumers you might never have heard from again.

First-party data can identify those who have recently abandoned shopping carts, and you can then send targeted email reminders or offers to encourage them to complete the purchase. This strategy is proven to work well, especially when an incentive like a limited-time offer is included. 

Looking to catch cart abandoners before they leave your site? Machine learning tech (like Bazaarvoice) can use first party data to identify when a shopper is likely to abandon, and intercept before they’ve made their exit.

Implement dynamic pricing

Dynamic pricing can help you maximize revenue by charging different prices to different customers at different times, optimizing based on each consumer’s willingness to pay. Determine whether this hyper-personalization strategy could benefit you by looking at first-party data like customer preferences, buying behavior, and historical purchases.

You’ll also want to take a look at competitor pricing to ensure you’re not over (or under) reaching. From here, you can adjust prices based on your customer segment and offer discounts to customer groups who would benefit from them most to encourage purchases.

Create personalized campaigns

A large part of your marketing budget is likely going toward advertising. Take your wealth of first-party data, including purchase history, browsing behavior, and demographics, and use it to create highly targeted campaigns that spark interest in your segmented groups.

For instance, a furniture retailer may target a group that has all purchased the same sectional with ads featuring a matching chair or ottoman, along with a limited-time discount if they buy it within a set time frame.

Don’t forget to test your strategies

Testing different strategies and messages based on first-party data is paramount to determining what resonates best with your audience.

Make sure to continuously refine your marketing and personalization strategies using A/B testing, and experimenting with different messaging, offers, and channels.

You can then use first-party data to measure the impact of these changes on key metrics like conversion rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and average order value.

Examples of first-party data strategy in action

First-party data is used like any dataset to improve your products, services, revenue numbers, or processes. In the following examples, you’ll notice a common thread throughout: a strong first-party data strategy is in place, and best-practice data collection techniques are used to do a lot more than just target customers for ads or remarketing.

B2C — The slipper store

An e-commerce store selling fun and stylized slippers severed its ties with its data vendor in order to build a first-party data strategy. Upon visiting its website, users are greeted with a prompt asking for their email and phone number in exchange for a 20% off coupon. The user fills in the form and collects their discount.

During checkout, the user is then prompted to create an account to speed along the transaction and manage future purchases. The customer creates an account, enters their shipping and billing information, and completes the transaction. The e-commerce store now has some data points it can use to help improve its products or services.

But that’s not all: first-party data can be used to retarget and nurture leads during the sales process.

B2B — Applicant tracking software vendor

An applicant tracking software (ATS) has a new website and a blog it’s using to capture organic leads. Employees notice that while the blog itself is attracting a fair number of leads for the company, once users navigate to the rest of the website, they bounce within seconds, most never completing an action beyond clicking through a few pages.

The company’s first-party data strategy helps uncover the problem. Using a first-party data cookie and Google Analytics 4, the vendor can see the users coming in via the blog, attempting to schedule a demo with the CTA link on the homepage, and then bouncing. Upon analysis, the vendor realizes that the form isn’t opening when users click the “schedule a demo” CTA. They re-work the form but have another problem on their hands: the vendor has no way of remarketing to leads who didn’t convert.

They turn to first-party data to help. The vendor creates high-quality e-books and assets and then gates them at the bottom of their highest-performing blogs, asking for some basic customer information, such as their email and phone number. Now the vendor can send personalized email content to their leads, educating them on the benefits of ATS in their business and qualifying them for a sales conversation.

Maximize your first-party data with Bazaarvoice

E-commerce managers and brand managers who don’t embrace first-party data are living on borrowed time. Regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA, in conjunction with unanimous motions to quash third-party data and cookies, have put additional pressure on businesses, that often don’t have the time or resources to prepare for third-party data’s retirement.

An easy solution is insights and reports tools from Bazaarvoice. Rather than waste time hiring third parties, the tools help you analyze customer behavior and sentiment, build your brand, and source more reviews to diversify the voices in your first-party data strategy.

Today, perusing through ratings and reviews and other user-generated content (UGC) has become a foundational part of the routine of online shopping. It’s how you truly experience a product without being able to see it in person — by hearing about the intricacies of a real product experience from one of your fellow shoppers. 

But even though we shop online so frequently (100% of shoppers we surveyed said they shop online at least once a month!) and therefore are utilizing UGC just as frequently, due to nefarious actors, we’re unfortunately having to spend a portion of that time validating the authenticity of that UGC.

Three quarters (75%) of our survey respondents are at least somewhat concerned about encountering fake reviews when shopping online. Only 9% said they’re either not very concerned or not concerned at all. 

So, how can we solve this problem? Not just to make e-commerce more efficient but also to make UGC more trustworthy and transparent. A trust signal (also referred to as a trustmark) might be the answer.

What are trust signals?

A trust signal is a logo or badge displayed on websites that tells customers the site has passed certain digital security tests or qualifications that confirm content authenticity. Their main purpose is to make shoppers feel more secure and confident in their purchasing decisions.

Trust signals research report key findings 

To find out exactly what consumers think about fraudulent UGC, what would give them more confidence in the consumer content they’re consuming, and what brands plan to do about it, we surveyed over 8,000 shoppers and 400 brands across the globe. Here’s what they said. 

1. Consumers are concerned about all types of fake UGC

Fake reviews aren’t the only type of fraudulent UGC that shoppers are worried about. Consumers are at least somewhat concerned about encountering fake shopper images (69%), fake social media content (69%), fake shopper videos (68%), and fake shopper questions and answers (66%).

Because they’re so worried about this fake content, they’re taking steps themselves to verify the legitimacy of an online store or product before making a purchase. Using trusted online shopping platforms (63%), researching the brand or company online (58%), checking for secure website indicators (e.g., padlock symbol, “https”) (51%), reading customer reviews (47%), and recommendations from a friend/family member (46%) are the most common ways consumers typically do so.

2. Consumers think brands should be taking care of fake reviews

Even though they’re doing it now, consumers don’t want to be doing all of this detective work themselves. The majority of shoppers we surveyed (63%) think the brand’s website they’re visiting should be solving issues of fraudulent content online, followed by governmental bodies (49%) and a third-party expert (36%).

And even while doing all of their own sleuthing to verify the online stores they are using, almost three quarters (73%) said that websites today are doing at least somewhat of a good job of blocking fraudulent content. Over a quarter (27%) think they’re doing a relatively poor job. 

However, they’d prefer if content on brand websites would be verified by a trusted third-party over than by the brand itself. Over two thirds (66%) said they’d have confidence in a “trust signal” [i.e. — lock, checkmark, symbol] that shows each piece of content has been verified by an independent third party – only 8% said they wouldn’t trust it. 

3. Brands think they’re on top of fraudulent issues

The vast majority (94%) of brands and retailers said that they rate the importance of maintaining online content authenticity in e-commerce business either high or very high. The majority are also either moderately (41%) or very (35%) confident in their current strategies and tools for detecting and preventing fraudulent or counterfeit content within their online channels. But only 10% said they were extremely confident. 

Despite their confidence, the majority (69%) of brands and retailers don’t currently use any fraud detection software today for transactional fraud (fraud that occurs where money is being exchanged). Only 31% do.

Two thirds (67%) are actively exploring or planning to implement any new technologies or strategies to enhance online content authenticity and fraud prevention. The majority (81%) said that they would consider utilizing a third-party vendor specializing in content authenticity verification to enhance their fraud prevention efforts, but 57% said with the caveat that the solution aligns with their needs. 

4. Consumers want a trust mark signal to help verify online content

When asked if they’d trust an industry-leading, third-party authentication provider to verify the trustworthiness of the content for all of the sites they visit, 70% of consumers said they would. 

On the other hand, when asked if they’d trust a website to verify its own content without an industry-leading third-party authentication of the UGC on its site, less than half (47%) said they would trust it. And when asked our survey respondents if they’d have confidence in a “trust signal’ [i.e. — lock, checkmark, symbol] that shows each piece of content has been verified by an independent third party, 

• 73% said they’d trust it for ratings and reviews
• 66% said they’d trust it for social media content
• 60% said they’d trust it for influencer content

5. Brands are interested in incorporating trust signals 

Brands are open to getting help in verifying their website’s content for shoppers. A whopping 79% said they have no concerns or reservations about outsourcing content authenticity verification to a third-party vendor.

When asked if they’d consider adding a “trust signal’ [i.e. — lock, checkmark, symbol] that shows each piece of content has been verified, 78% said they would be for ratings and reviews, 79% said they would be for customer answers, 73% said they would be for customer images, and 71% said for every customer video.

A trust signal eases consumers’ stress around fake UGC: give it to them

As our research shows, consumers want to continue using UGC. But they also want to make sure that it’s authentic. They want brands to ensure the validity of the UGC they consume, and a trust signal would be of use to them.

The Bazaarvoice Authentic Reviews Trust Mark is a symbol of a company’s dedication to authentic consumer feedback regarding its products and services. The Trust Mark is also a signal to consumers that the review content they see is safeguarded — by a neutral third party — with sophisticated fraud detection technology and industry-leading best practices. Learn more here. 

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The authenticity movement: building consumer trust without fake reviews

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Social media and search algorithms reward fresh, relevant content and frequent posting. That’s great news if you have a lot of content and resources to work with. Not so much if you don’t.

Saturated digital spaces and higher standards for content put pressure on brands to elevate and increase their production. The time and effort needed to regularly create and distribute engaging content across channels is substantial. 

Forming a content curation plan is a game-changer for streamlining the production process and supplementing original content creation. Learn how to conquer the challenges of curating authentic content and how to implement a successful strategy.

Chapters:

1. What is content curation?
2. How does content curation benefit e-commerce brands?
3. Hurdles to curating authentic content
4. 8 tactics for curating quality content and distributing it across channels
5. Continue to evolve your content curation strategy

What is content curation?

Content curation is a way for e-commerce brands to share content from outside sources, including individuals and organizations, on their own marketing channels.

Effective content curation sources relevant and authentic content, and shares it with helpful context on appropriate channels. You should have an intentional strategy for content curation to bring value to your audience and drive results. 

Examples of different types of content you could curate include visual social media like images and videos, articles, data reports, podcasts, TV or film clips, and customer reviews. You can share curated content on your most active customer touchpoints, including your product pages, blog, social media channels, and emails. 

How does content curation benefit e-commerce brands?

Content curation offers a range of benefits to e-commerce brands regardless of size or maturity. Some of the top advantages include:

• Eases workflow: Curating content reduces the pressure, time, and effort required to regularly create original content. Instead of ideating, writing, filming, shooting, and designing content from scratch each time, you can supplement by sharing the content that someone else produced 
• Reduces costs: Because content curation reduces the time and in-house or outsourced talent that original content creation demands, it also eliminates the associated costs
• Supplies social proof: Whenever you share the kind of content that features or specifically mentions your brand and products, you’re providing social proof. When your audience sees other people recommending your products and showing love for your brand, it has a persuasive and contagious effect — this is the power of user-generated content (UGC)
• Diversifies content mix: The same type and tone of content can get boring and predictable quickly. And if the content is only coming from your brand’s perspective, that can be a turn-off. 74% of shoppers trust UGC more than brand-created content on product pages and 55% say they’re unlikely to purchase a product without consulting UGC, according to our Shopper Experience Index. Curating content allows you to share diverse voices, viewpoints, and styles of content to keep it fresh and interesting
• Increases engagement and reach: By sharing content from customers, influencers, publications, or other media and tagging those creators, you’re encouraging those sources to respond in kind. When they like, comment, or share your curated content, that’s introducing it to their own audience for further reach and engagement
• Demonstrates thought leadership: When you intentionally and thoughtfully share content, it shows you’re in tune with the latest trends and important voices. Even if you didn’t create the content originally, you can amplify clever takes and creative insights while adding to the conversation

Hurdles to curating authentic content

Content curation seems simple and straightforward enough, but to do it right, it gets more complicated. And by right, we mean consistent and authentic. It’s not just about sharing content to fill holes in your content calendar. It needs to be content created by real people voicing honest opinions that accurately reflect your brand, online community, and products. 

Understanding and addressing these challenges is crucial for e-commerce brands to establish a trustworthy online presence. Here’s some of the top obstacles to seamlessly curating a steady flow of authentic content.

Shortage of quality content

Consumers today are always-on and confronted with more content on every channel than ever. To get their attention and pique their interest, you need to express a unique style and voice along with striking visuals.

That goes for both the content your brand creates and curates. While there’s no shortage of content in every major digital space, finding the kind of quality content worthy of sharing is the real issue. Before you select and share content, you need to ensure it meets certain criteria, like it: 

• Comes from a trustworthy source
• Is accurate
• Is timely and up-to-date 
• Meets your visual and editorial quality standards
• Serves a purpose for your audience
• Reflects your brand values and identity
• Meets your content KPIs, i.e., increases brand awareness and drives conversions

Inconsistencies across channels

Customers notice when a brand’s presence across marketing channels is disjointed, and it may cause them to abandon their journey. The majority (75%) of shoppers expect a cohesive and connected experience on each brand channel. Discrepancies in tone, style, aesthetics, and messaging on different channels can compromise a consistent experience for your customers.

Content formats, audience, and language can all vary from one channel to another. All of these factors need to be in alignment when distributing curated content according to each channel’s unique characteristics. Your email newsletter has totally different capabilities and a more narrow audience than, say, your TikTok profile.

So, while you want to maintain your major brand elements on each, you also have to modify your content to fit each channel. 

Challenges in content verification 

When you’re sharing content from other sources, it’s crucial that the source and the content itself are legitimate. There’s bots, fake reviews, misinformation, and manipulated visuals at play in today’s digital arena. You need to have a reliable fact-checking and content-vetting process in place to ensure authenticity and deliver trustworthy content.

Copyright issues

Before you share content from other creators, ensure you’re not violating any intellectual property or copyright restrictions. To avoid infringement and any associated consequences, follow these best practices: 

• Check the fair use guidelines for any channels you don’t own
• Ask for permission to share the source’s content
• Properly attribute and credit the content source

Partnering with Bazaarvoice takes care of this important step for you with our automated rights-requesting capabilities. This feature enables a streamlined way to ask creators permission to use their content in your marketing materials. 

8 tactics for curating quality content and distributing it across channels

Luckily, you can easily sidestep all of those roadblocks to successful content curation and create a successful strategy by following these best practices. 

1. Understand your audience’s interests and preferred channels

How do you know if the content you curate, share, and distribute will be valuable? First, you need to understand what will help, attract, and reach your audience. Research your audience to understand what their needs and pain points are that your product solves. 

What type of content gets the most engagement? Where is your audience most active, and which of your channels has the most engaged followers? Those answers will reveal what to focus on, whether that’s tutorials on TikTok, reviews featured in email campaigns, shoppable Instagram posts, galleries of customer photos on product pages, etc.

2. Create and follow a content style guide

Establishing and implementing a content style guide is key to maintaining consistency across channels. It also provides a clear framework for your team to follow. Your style guide serves as a rulebook that includes instructions for executing your brand’s content curation strategy. These are some of the elements to include:

• Voice: The unique personality and message of your brand that represents its values and mission
• Tone: This can change depending on the situation, from the norm which could be upbeat and friendly to empathetic and understanding for delicate situations
• Format: When to use short-form and long-form content, images, videos, audio, and other elements depending on the channel
• Verification steps: The process for verifying content is authentic
• Image and video specs: The quality standards, length, and dimensions for visual assets
• Content types: What types of content work best for each platform, including educational vs. entertaining, top of funnel vs. bottom of funnel, etc.
• Tagging and attribution: How to give credit to content sources and tag them on each channel

3. Tailor content for each channel

While consistency is key, it’s also essential to respect the unique characteristics of each channel. Tailor content to fit the specific nuances of platforms without compromising the overarching brand message. Adapt visual elements, messaging length, and content formats to align seamlessly with the expectations of users on each channel.

This approach also helps broaden and diversify your marketing content mix. Different types of content have their own unique advantages, and you can track how each performs. For example, on e-commerce websites, product reviews impact purchasing decisions for 78% of consumers, and product photos taken by shoppers impact purchasing for 69%. Social media is another popular shopping source where lifestyle videos and photos taken by real shoppers thrive.

When you curate content for one channel, you can repurpose it for a different channel to maximize its reach and impact. For example, you can play clips of a podcast that mentions your brand or niche as an Instagram post and link to the episode with a written takeaway in an email campaign. Or, you can share a TikTok tutorial of how to use one of your products on your brand’s TikTok feed and also embed it in a blog post on a related topic on your website.

4. Encourage and foster UGC

You can create a steady flow of authentic content by leveraging UGC to distribute across channels. Besides its authenticity, it’s also very persuasive, giving 78% of shoppers more confidence in making purchases. 

UGC includes reviews, photos, videos, blog posts, podcast episodes, and any other content created by your own audience. UGC can come from anyone who’s purchased a product from you regardless of their online presence or from an influencer with a large following. There’s so many ways to collect and encourage UGC, including: 

• Promoting branded hashtags for users to include when posting UGC for a chance to be featured on your website or social channels
• Using customer satisfaction surveys to collect feedback and reviews
• Requesting reviews via email and SMS marketing 
• Hosting a social media contest or giveaway for followers who submit photos, videos, or reviews
• Launching a product sampling campaign offering consumers samples in exchange for UGC

FAs a good example, The Body Shop entices customers to share their social media photos using #TheBodyShop to be featured on their website gallery. Showcasing UGC galleries earned The Body Shop a 13% increase in average order value.

5. Use social listening and search engine alerts 

Social listening tools and search engine alerts are excellent content curation resources because they track content that tags or mentions your brand, industry, or relevant topics.

Social listening means monitoring online conversations across social media platforms that mention your brand or a specific hashtag you’re tracking. With social listening, you can gain valuable insights into consumer sentiments, preferences, and emerging trends. By actively listening to your audience, you can identify content to share, reveal relevant topics to focus on, and gauge the effectiveness of current content.

Setting up Google search alerts keeps you informed about industry trends, competitor activities, and relevant keywords. These real-time notifications allow brands to keep up with fresh content to share and current interests. You can set up alerts for any topic you want and receive them in your email inbox.

6. Add context and your brand’s perspective 

Merely sharing curated content isn’t enough. When you post content from other sources, add your own feedback, recommendations, or thoughts. If it needs explanation outside of its original location, provide that for your audience. Add to the conversation and tie it back to your brand’s message and content goals.

MAM Baby does a great job of this on Instagram. The brand curates relevant content from their customers and shares it on their Instagram page. They add their own message to each post, like more context on featured products or their own reactions showing their brand’s personality.

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A post shared by MAM Baby (@mambaby_usa)

They also combined their UGC curation with social commerce to make their Instagram feed shoppable, leading to increased site visits by 157% and an extra £96k in annual revenue.

7. Streamline and centralize content planning and distribution 

When you have multiple people juggling all the content for your various marketing channels, you need an easy way to manage it all. You can do that by having a content supply chain that everyone can access for all your content planning, drafting, approval, and scheduling tasks. That could be folders with multiple documents for content calendars, drafts for review, your style guide, and other resources. 

Or, you can invest in one centralized platform to access everything you need, including Bazaarvoice tools like Social Media Manager. This tool lets you create and schedule content, plus analyze performance and competitors all in one place.

8. Implement authenticity review processes

Establish a process and guidelines to ensure the content you’re sharing is trustworthy and true to your brand pillars. Make sure you collaborate with influencers who create genuine content and whose presence aligns with your brand values. Check each review and piece of content you source to make sure it’s not fraudulent. 

If you’re a smaller business, it might make more sense to vet each piece of content and its creator manually, one at a time. If you’re scaling your business or marketing efforts, you could partner with a team like Bazaarvoice that uses fraud detection technology, algorithms, and analysts to ensure authenticity.

Continue to evolve your content curation strategy

Once you have your plan and process in place for curating content, put it to the test and then measure the results. Use analytics to see what’s working and what’s lacking engagement. Then, use those insights to refine your strategy, continue what’s performing well, and address what isn’t.

Find out more about how to find, analyze, and apply consumer insights to optimize and elevate your content strategy in our guide: The smart marketer’s guide to finding and using customer insights.

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Masterclass: Fuel your content engine with quality content at scale

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What is brand trust?

Brand trust is the amount of loyalty and support customers have for your brand and how strongly they believe you can fulfil your brand promises. It’s based on customer experiences with your brand as well as company messaging and reputation.

Brands and retailers who can’t establish trust with consumers, or even worse, who lose established trust, will struggle to win business. We’re in an age when consumer opinions are shared on a massive scale and directly influence brand perception. 

In a Bazaarvoice study, 54% of consumers said that if a brand hasn’t broken trust, they’d still buy from them again — even after a negative experience. 

5 ways to build brand trust

It’s simple. When your customers trust you, they’ll be loyal to you almost no matter what. Here’s how to build consumer trust in your brand. 

1. Work with a trustworthy UGC provider 

One way to increase brand trust in e-commerce is by getting your consumers to advocate for your brand for you. Shoppers trust user-generated content (UGC) in the form of reviews more than they trust family and friend recommendations. Instead of trying to control what people are saying, brands and retailers should embrace this conversation and amplify it.

However, to maintain brand trust, reviews must be authentic. According to our survey of 10,000 global shoppers, if shoppers suspect a product has fake reviews:

• 81% will avoid using that brand again
• 48% leave a negative review
• 25% wouldn’t purchase from the website
• 16% will post negatively about the brand on social media

That’s why a good UGC program requires strong content moderation. A trustworthy UGC provider that values authenticity can help your brand sort through reviews and eliminate fake ones that hurt your credibility and destroy consumer trust.

For example, Bazaarvoice evaluates UGC through a process of machine learning and human moderation to ensure it isn’t fraudulent and that it represents a customer’s genuine opinion about their experience with the product(s).

27% of consumers think brands with fake content should be fined up to 30% of their revenue — and governments are taking note. The FTC recently fined one company over $4 million for suppressing authentic content, so not only will fake content harm your reputation but it will harm your wallet too.

2. Publicize company values

According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, consumers today grant brand trust based on two attributes: competence and ethical behavior. Like doing the right thing and working to improve society.

Consumers want to see what your brand believes in and how you follow through on those beliefs. And with the various significant events taking place across the globe, they especially want to know how your brand responds to your community in times of crisis. This is particularly true when it comes to Gen Z, who value brand trust, transparency, and authenticity above all else.

Creating content about your values for your website is a good start, but make sure this messaging is also visible on your social channels. About 35% of consumers look to a brand’s social media to seek out content about company response and values. 

You also need to be mindful of who your brand partners with. Any influencers or partners you collaborate with should share your brand values and have a solid reputation. They’ll connect with consumers in ways that are relevant and sensitive to their needs and help authentically communicate your brand’s values. 

3. Focus on great customer service 

90% of consumers say a brand’s level of customer service is an important factor in their choice to become a customer. A proactive customer service strategy should include responding to customer feedback and reviews, both negative and positive.

Around 60% of consumers say that negative reviews are just as important as positive reviews in their decision to purchase. And the way you respond to these negative reviews can speak volumes about your brand’s values and may even convert more browsers into buyers. A consumer’s willingness to purchase a product with a negative review doubles when seeing a brand’s response, as opposed to seeing the negative review by itself. And, up to 70% of dissatisfied customers will do business with a company again if their complaint is resolved.

When you see a negative review, take the time to craft a quick, but personal, response. Consumers want to talk to a real person, not a review response bot. Show them that you sympathize with their issue and that you’re learning from criticism. Mention that their feedback will be used for future improvements. This will only boost your brand trust.

In your online response, ask the customer to contact you offline. And be clear about why. Are you trying to understand the problem because your team is working on product improvements? Are you looking for details on the issue so you can prevent it from happening again? Was there a defect, and you need their contact information to send the new product?

Don’t forget to give the customer a way to contact your brand, whether that’s via a preferred phone number or email address. 

4. Create high-quality products

Reviews are excellent sources of information to analyze how consumers feel about your products’ quality. When you pay attention to common customer pain points, you have the opportunity to fix issues before your products earn a negative reputation and win back customers before you lose them entirely.

Look for key topics in your negative reviews. Do customers complain about particular product features? Long shipping times or damaged delivery? Is there something missing that they wanted from the product? Was the product description inaccurate?

Share this customer sentiment with your product quality or manufacturing team (or with vendors if you’re a retailer) to make improvements that keep your products competitive and meet consumer expectations. 

5. Price your products fairly 

According to Prisnyc, a competitor price tracking and monitoring company, about 60% of consumers consider pricing as the very first criteria of their buying decision, and 86% say it’s important to compare prices from different sellers when shopping. 

When’s the last time you compared your product price to the competition? If it’s been a while, it’s time to re-evaluate. How do your prices differ from competitors? 

Consumers value transparency. If your product is significantly more expensive than the competition and there’s a reason for it (like you use a higher quality material), don’t be afraid to call that out on your product pages. 

Build brand trust with the voice of the customer

To protect consumer trust, your brand must prioritize honesty and transparency in everything you do, from reviews to customer service to product pricing. One of the best ways to gain insights into how customers feel about your brand and communicate trust is through ratings and reviews. 

Leverage the authentic voice of your customers to build brand trust and sell your products. Taking the time to invest in your ratings and reviews program will help you build the foundation for long-lasting relationships and brand trust with your customers, leading to more sales — after all, customers who interact with UGC are 2x as likely to convert.

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Masterclass: How to grow and protect consumer trust

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Chapters:

1. What is word-of-mouth marketing?
2. Why word-of-mouth marketing is so effective
3. How to increase your word-of-mouth marketing
4. How to implement word-of-mouth marketing (with examples)
5. Measuring your word-of-mouth marketing

Think about the last time you used a product or service that solved your problem so well, you wanted to tell everyone you know about the experience. Perhaps you found the perfect pair of headphones for work. Or handmade chocolates that you can send as a cute gift. Whether you talked to a friend or relative directly, posted about it on social media, or left a review, telling others about your experience is word-of-mouth marketing in action.

This powerful form of marketing fuels a whopping $6 trillion of annual consumer spending globally. It can also be more effective than paid ads, resulting in 5x more sales. 

This form of marketing isn’t just for big brands. Any company that provides services or sells products can benefit from word-of-mouth marketing strategies. For instance, in a survey by Alignable 85% of 7,500 small business owners reported word-of-mouth referrals as their top source of new customers.   

Here’s everything you need to know about word-of-mouth marketing so you can start benefiting from this powerful form of advertising.

What is word-of-mouth marketing?

Word-of-mouth marketing is when consumers share positive experiences with a product or service with their peers, whether in person or online. In the connected marketplace where shoppers are always-on,

Because the information comes directly from your customers, word-of-mouth advertising is authentic and cost-effective. It’s also highly valuable. Over 50% of consumers read at least four reviews before buying a product, and 93% say online reviews have influenced their purchasing decisions.

What is the digital version of word-of-mouth marketing?

Digital word-of-mouth marketing is how your customers speak about you online — in product reviews, social media posts, blog posts, and emails.

In the consumer-to-consumer commerce world we live in, digital word of mouth is how potential customers find out about your brand.

Why word-of-mouth marketing is so effective

No matter what strategy you pursue, word-of-mouth marketing helps increase your social exposure, create excitement about your products or services, foster brand loyalty, and build trust. 

Considering that consumers talk about brands casually at least 90 times a week, this type of marketing can have a substantial impact. Word-of-mouth marketing can help grow your business in the following ways

1. Consumer trust

Think of the last time you needed a recommendation for a doctor. What’s the first thing you did? You likely asked a friend or family member who they use or posted a question on social media.

The positive experience of others becomes a key factor in your buying decision. You’re more likely to buy or use a service because you trust the feedback from your peers.

Brands and retailers can “borrow” that trust to gain new customers with minimal effort.

2. Brand loyalty

When it comes to building trust and loyalty, businesses need all the help they can get. 

According to HubSpot Research, 65% of people don’t believe advertisements and 71% don’t trust sponsored social media ads.

Yet people do trust their peers. 88% of consumers regularly consult online reviews from other shoppers to help make confident buying decisions. Since the information comes from actual customers — not the company — word-of-mouth marketing helps build a strong, loyal community. 

The more businesses can encourage or make it easy for happy customers to share their experiences, the better. As loyal followers talk to others, those individuals get excited, become customers, and tell more people — creating an ongoing source of word-of-mouth advertising.

When you consider that about 65% of sales are from existing consumers, you want to ensure that you’re keeping your loyal base happy and making it easy for them to spread the word about your company. 

3. Increase brand awareness

People can’t buy from you if they don’t know about your business or products. Therefore, getting the word out about your business organically, especially new products and services, is essential. 

Word-of-mouth marketing is a perfect way to make people aware of your brand and what you have to offer. 

Sometimes word-of-mouth advertising can catch hold, especially on social media. This excitement can quickly spread among your ideal audience causing a powerful viral effect. 

How to increase your word-of-mouth marketing

There’s two ways to increase the influence of word-of-mouth marketing: organic and amplified. 

1) Organic word of mouth

Organic word-of-mouth marketing occurs naturally. Customers freely talk about your brand, service, or product. This can occur online, over the phone, or in person. Examples include reviews, ratings, social media comments, or conversations in the checkout line.

It’s unlikely you can control consumer conversations in the street. But these conversations are also happening in the reviews, social posts, and other forms of user-generated content (UGC) shoppers are creating about your brand — you just amplify their voices across your e-commerce site and beyond.

You can syndicate product reviews and display them across all your customer acquisition channels. Or you can browse your tagged posts on Instagram and take the photo of a customer happily sporting one of your products and feature it on your product pages. Featuring this UGC can increase average order value by 15%.

2) Amplified word of mouth

Amplified is when companies offer rewards, affiliate programs, freebies, discounts, contests, or they partner with influencers.

The goal is to motivate people to talk about their experiences. Example: A business may receive more entries to a contest if they tell others about the competition on social media. 

These types of word-of-mouth marketing strategies can be easier to track than organic ones, but they require more effort from your team.

How to implement word-of-mouth marketing (with examples)

Now that you know how word-of-mouth marketing works, here’s six ways you can use it to increase engagement and boost sales.

1. Create a referral or loyalty program

Whether you use them to generate awareness about a new product launch or a subscription service, referral programs are designed to get your customers talking.

Additionally, a referral or loyalty program that’s created with your ideal audience in mind can build trust by showing customers you care about their needs and interests.

Before launching Girlfriend Collective, the brand decided not to use paid ads. Instead, they launched a referral program that allowed people to get a free pair of $80 leggings by sharing a referral link on Facebook. 

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A post shared by Girlfriend Collective (@girlfriend)

The approach worked so well that the had brand received 10,000 orders on launch day.

2. Reward customers for creating and sharing user-generated content

When someone is excited about your brand, service, or product, you want to make it easy for them to share their enthusiasm. 

Customers who are excited about your brand might post user-generated content on your company page, share stories of using your product, create videos, and more. These people are your super-sharers. They care about your business and want it to succeed, so reward them. 

Comment on their posts. Provide positive feedback on their videos. Share their posts on your social media channels and in your emails or newsletters. 

You can also motivate others to share their UGC by asking people to post, or running events that encourage followers to create their own content. The coffee and tea company Top of the Mornin posts user-created artwork on its homepage. Artists are clearly credited and a social link is provided so people can see more of the person’s work. 

By amplifying the work of its fans, Top of the Mornin helps foster a loyal community of super-sharers.

3. Connect with influencers who are a great fit for your brand

Influencers are a valuable resource for many companies, with 93% of marketers relying on influencer marketing. 

Pairing up with an influencer who fits your products, services, and company values can help increase your brand awareness and bring in new customers. The key is finding someone who already has the right type of followers for your brand.

For example, food and beverage giant Kraft Heinz wanted to drive buzz and word of mouth around new product releases, so they sent product samples to the Influenster App’s community of everyday influencers who matched the brand’s target market. They were then encouraged to create authentic feedback and other UGC about the products.

According to Elizabeth Northrup, Associate Brand Manager at Kraft Heinz, the campaigns, “over-delivered on our targets for the program, delivering 2x the product reviews we expected, and the earned media was over 5x our program investment.”

4. Ask customers for reviews

Reviews are the pinnacle of word-of-mouth marketing. They’re organic testimonial ads in action. If you come across a positive review for a product on your social feed, it’s likely to catch your attention. It’s likely to get you to check out that product. Maybe it convinces you to purchase.

But people are busy. Sometimes, they forget to leave a review after making a purchase. But most will happily share their experiences — all you have to do is ask.

You can schedule a social media post requesting reviews from current customers. You could also send an email inviting customers to leave a review or a testimonial after they make a purchase. Or leave QR codes next to checkout tills in-store.

The key takeaway here is to make it easy and quick for people to share their feedback — and then display it on your channels.

Hardys Wines for example uses customer reviews as their word-of-mouth marketing, displaying the positive customer feedback in adverts.

5. Create content that people are excited to share 

Take time to create posts, emails, videos, and articles that interest your followers and are easy to share. As a result, they’ll keep coming back for more and tell others about your content.

The niche clothing brand CLOAK knows its followers. The brand consistently posts unique and engaging content that customers are excited to share. 

This includes quizzes related to CLOAK’s products and images of the company’s owners modeling the clothes. 

6. Authentically connect with your community

Loyal customers want to feel connected to your brand. Instead of just focusing on increasing your followers, make your social media channels a 2-way conversation. This will play a huge part in boosting organic word-of-mouth marketing. Reply thoughtfully to customer comments and thank them for leaving a review. You can even spotlight UGC by sharing it on your own channels.

Growing your community with intention can also provide you with valuable consumer insights, allowing you to better serve them while strengthening your brand. 

Threadless evolved from a T-shirt company into an e-commerce marketplace fueled by the brand’s Artist Shops community. 

Knowing that its ideal audience was creative and fun, Threadless created contests and challenges designed to showcase its followers’ creations and build its community. This helped Threadless attract 10,000 members in its first 2 years of business and earn $6.5 million in less than 4 years. 

In an interview with Forbes, Threadless’ then-vice president of marketing, Cam Balzer, stressed the importance of building social media followers organically. 

“We believe the more organic the growth, the more loyal the fans, the more likely they will be repeat customers.”

Currently, the Threadless website provides multiple ways for customers to connect with artists and the community, like the Artist of the Day section on its homepage.

Measuring your word-of-mouth marketing

Accurately measuring word-of-mouth marketing can be tough. You won’t always know when someone recommends your product or service, especially if it happens offline or in a private Facebook group. But you can get a sense of how well your word-of-mouth marketing is working overall. For instance, you can:

• Ask customers at checkout or after their purchase how they learned about you
• Use a customer satisfaction survey to gleam relevant information
• Start a loyalty program that includes promo codes or other trackable links to monitor if the information is shared

Word-of-mouth marketing lets you authentically build brand awareness, trust, and loyalty. All for very little cost.

As the stats show, people trust family, friends, and online reviews from their peers. And as a business, you want to encourage word-of-mouth marketing by embracing the strategies that fit your brand and audience.

Because the more you understand your followers, engage with them, and provide quality content, the more excited they will be to share their positive experiences with everyone they know. Which means more traffic to your pages. Which means more sales. And who doesn’t want that?

The best way to get started is by activating content creators and existing vibrant communities you can tap into. Our on-demand masterclass below will teach you how.

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Masterclass: The future of marketing: creators and communities

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This comprehensive guide to thought leadership strategy for brands and retailers will explain the benefits of thought leadership marketing and what quality thought leadership content actually looks like, including examples from consumer brands.

Chapters:

1. Thought leadership marketing benefits and metrics
2. How to get started with thought leadership content strategy
3. Create brand momentum with owned media 
4. Convert momentum into revenue with earned media
5. Fuel brand momentum with shared media
6. Why a thought leadership strategy needs authenticity to work

Tech and finance workers in New York City adopted a new look after 2008’s economic downturn, one that reigns supreme today: a button-down, slacks, and a Patagonia vest. Patagonia, an outdoor brand known for their commitment to sustainability, was an incongruous staple in the “midtown uniform,” but a staple it became. One might see a sweater knit, a Nano Puff, and a fleece on the same Murray Hill city block, but all three vests will be Patagonia. And until recently, the finance worker’s vest might have included a logo of Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, or Goldman Sachs.

In 2019, Patagonia decided to stop selling logo-clad fleece vests to finance firms through their corporate sales program, a move that was lauded by the press and Patagonia’s core audience of outdoor enthusiasts alike. While the decision came with accolades, it also carried risk: in excluding finance companies from corporate sales, Patagonia intentionally walked away from a cash-flush market of consumers who were unexpectedly loyal to their products.

Patagonia initially said they’d continue to work with “mission-driven companies that prioritize the planet” in corporate sales, but in 2021, they doubled down on the strategy, deciding to transition away from corporate logos altogether. The move impacted Silicon Valley tech workers, in particular, who often donned a similar uniform to their East Coast counterparts.

Shutting down their practice of adding other companies’ logos to their clothing was a landmark move in Patagonia’s brand marketing, one that gave credibility to decades of thought leadership strategy.

Patagonia’s brand has its roots in climate impact — before launching Patagonia in 1973, founder Yvon Chouinard was working on a way to reduce rock damage from steel pitons. Until the early 1990s, they were more product-driven, focusing thought leadership campaigns on textile innovation in the 1970s and 1980s. Patagonia returned to their sustainable roots in the early ’90s, pivoting their brand and marketing strategy toward sustainability without abandoning textile technology completely. 

Patagonia’s pivot paid off. But it took time, consistency, focus, and action to succeed. Patagonia’s decades of commitment to sustainable practices — using cause marketing to evangelize their message — earned the brand a meaningful reputation as a commercial thought leader in sustainability in the modern era. Today, Patagonia is considered one of the world’s most powerful brands.

Thought leadership marketing benefits and metrics

At its core, thought leadership is about building credibility as a brand. By showcasing unique strengths and passions that exist at the heart of a brand through content, consumer marketers build trust, foster loyalty, and stand out from competitors.

Why focus resources on building brand strength when about three-quarters of brands say that economic pressures will impact media budgets and performance marketing is easier to prove? Ignoring brand strength isn’t about vanity metrics — it’s about revenue and resilience. 

Brand strength makes everything else in marketing — including direct response — easier and cheaper. A strong brand is the basis of a resilient consumer business, one with a large base of loyal customers who repurchase, engage, and evangelize. 

Revenue-resilient thought leadership takes alignment between a brand, its consumers, and industry experts. If a brand is beloved by experts but not by consumers, it can’t grow. If it’s beloved by consumers but side-eyed by scientists, it can’t sustain its market share indefinitely.

How to get started with thought leadership content strategy

No brand is equipped to become a thought leader about everything. If your brand doesn’t know itself well enough to focus on one core message, you’ll have a harder time building enough traction with consumers or media to develop a reputation as a thought leader. A thought leadership strategy takes depth, experience, commitment, and focus over a long period of time, and successful thought leaders pick one topic and stick with it. 

Brands that have developed momentum in thought leadership marketing tend to focus on either values or products but rarely both in the same measure at the same time. 

It’s possible to be value-driven and product-driven as a brand. However, successful thought leaders put one or the other at the center of their thought leadership marketing strategy to fuel momentum in a single direction over time.

Value-driven thought leadership uses emotion to examine why a company exists and showcases their positive impact on the world. Product-driven thought leadership uses logic to showcase proprietary technology, unique product expertise, or original opinions about a product category. 

Compare Dyson, another one of the world’s most powerful brands, to Patagonia. While both have used a thought leadership marketing strategy to build and retain brand strength over decades, Patagonia now focuses on values, while Dyson continues to showcase their engineering expertise. Dyson’s relentless commitment to invention and innovation gives them a competitive edge over alternatives in multiple verticals — something they reinforce with content marketing.

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A post shared by Dyson (@dyson)

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A post shared by Dyson (@dyson)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dyson (@dyson)

Product-driven thought leaders like Dyson build trust through expertise and logic. On Dyson’s blog, the brand showcases the curiosity and brilliance of their engineering team to humanize and clarify product features. This interview with Dyson engineer Tim Jukes takes customers behind the scenes of a proprietary technology. Jukes details a summer-long meteorological study he conducted to recreate the feeling of a natural breeze, which was eventually incorporated into Dyson’s air purifiers.

Value-driven thought leaders rally their existing audiences around a cause. Patagonia’s video about plastic called The Monster in Our Closet, featured prominently on their website, is an anxiety-inducing manifesto about the problems of plastic in apparel, including Patagonia’s own products. 13 seconds into the video, climate advocate Maxine Bédat says, “The planet freaking needs this, and we don’t have time to be d****** around. Excuse me.”

There’s emotion in Bédat’s voice, a call to action for Patagonia’s audience to create change in collaboration with the brand.

1. Create brand momentum with owned media 

Owned media, like email, is the ideal place to create momentum toward a brand goal by seeding advocacy with happy customers.

Patagonia collaborated with Bédat, an existing thought leader in textile sustainability, to strengthen their own brand. In a case where a company’s founder or executive is value-driven and vocal themselves, brands often leverage the founder’s own voice in thought leadership content.

Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of values-driven spice company Diaspora, uses owned media to showcase her brand’s commitment to ethical sourcing. When Diaspora launched Surya Salt in 2023, Javeri Kadri focused the brand’s email announcement on ethics, not product, and signed the email herself. By detailing the mistreatment of Indian salt farmers during British imperial rule and explaining the “awful labor practices” that still exist in the salt industry, Javeri Kadri issued a rallying cry to Diaspora’s customers to help the brand solve an important societal problem through a commercial product.

On product pages, Diaspora reinforces their commitment to ethical sourcing by surfacing regularly updated wage statistics for each product. As of August 2023, Diaspora’s living wage for Surya Salt was more than 14x higher than the Fair Trade International price.

Diaspora is vocal about one thing — ethical sourcing — on every channel. Diaspora’s focus, consistency, and commitment to a specific brand value is why the brand has a reputation as a thought leader in spices, a notoriously competitive space, in a relatively short time.

All of that brand advocacy turns into revenue. When Diaspora launched a $145 salt cellar in the shape of a tiger to complement Surya Salt, the first production run sold out in 41 minutes.

Thought leadership tactics to try on owned media:

• Conduct an in-house research project and publish the results to build credibility, like Dieux’s clinical study on cannabinoids in Deliverance Serum
• Promote a value-based blog post on a store page to deepen brand affinity, like apparel brand Eileen Fisher’s feature on their Regenerative Cotton, which they featured on their cotton collection page
• Surface user-generated content (UGC) that promotes key differentiators or resonant brand values on your product page to improve conversion rates, the same way Iconic London did with their liquid highlighter 
• Humanize a brand value with personal narratives to resonate on an intimate level, like perfume brand Scent Trunk’s Q&As with their perfumers

Leverage owned media to clarify brand positioning and deepen affinity with a core audience before growing traffic and purchase intent on other channels.

2. Convert momentum into revenue with earned media

Earned media, or content that others create to celebrate your brand and your messaging, is great for converting an audience of non-purchasers to loyal customers. UGC, press, and PR are all earned media and can all be used to convert awareness into revenue. 

A product-driven thought leadership marketing strategy tends to produce UGC about products but not values, while value-driven thought leadership campaigns result in a mix. Diaspora’s audience posts UGC about the brand’s values and their products, while Dyson’s customers overwhelmingly create content about Dyson’s products. A search for “dyson” on TikTok is full of demo videos from real customers using their hair styling tools and stick vacuums. One demo of the Dyson Airstrait has 15.9 million views. 

East Fork, a pottery brand, has earned glowing features in media publications that celebrate their thought leadership in both ceramics and equitable business practices. The New York Times celebrated chief executive Connie Matisse’s candor and commitment to issues like wage equity. Architectural Digest focused on founder Alex Matisse’s artistic distinction in ceramics, highlighting his family connection to both Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp. 

Together with their co-founder John Vigeland, Connie Matisse and Alex Matisse have leveraged traditional media to turn East Fork into a thought leader and resilient business by each focusing on their areas of passion and expertise. As East Fork grows, their thought leadership messaging leans more and more in the direction of Connie Matisse’s focus. Their owned media platforms now feature values front and center, a cue to earned media that East Fork is about equity. 

Traditional media and industry outlets can be powerful advocates in building thought leadership, or they can negate a brand’s claims and disrupt momentum toward thought leadership objectives. In 2023, NPR and The Washington Post both published skeptical, even critical, articles about the prebiotic soda industry, questioning the validity of health claims from brands like Poppi.

Harper’s Bazaar was more forgiving of the industry but still refused to validate prebiotic soda brands as thought leaders. Writer Katie Intner concluded, “The wellness benefits of these tonics might be hard to quantify, but the experience of sipping one — and Instagramming it — makes me happy, and isn’t that a benefit in and of itself?”

Poppi has since removed thought leadership content from their website, including a consumer study about gut health and blog posts detailing prebiotic benefits. Instead, Poppi is doubling down on UGC, sending free products to popular influencers like Miriam Ezagui to generate buzz and featuring UGC from creators like Cassie Yeung on their homepage. 

Poppi competitor OLIPOP is testing the opposite approach to combat skepticism with thought leadership — their gut health study is still available on their website alongside resources on probiotics and the microbiome. 

Surfacing UGC in a prominent place builds trust, improves conversion, and reinforces a thought leadership campaign’s core message. In a regulated space like consumer packaged goods, UGC is helpful but not enough to build credibility as a thought leader. Pair UGC with PR campaigns to generate industry press on thought leadership campaigns and foster more trust in the market.

Thought leadership tactics to try with earned media include:

• Quantify the revenue impact using earned media value (EMV) to identify valuable placements and influencers to extend your best experiments
• Leverage UGC as a source of inspiration for thought leadership campaigns to resonate with consumers using their own words

Brands have limited control over earned media. Promote and surface the placements and UGC that reinforce core messaging to build momentum for thought leadership objectives.

3. Fuel brand momentum with shared media

Shared media refers to a channel where you have access to an audience through a third party but cannot access that audience through another tool — like social media. Leverage channels like TikTok and Instagram to reach new audiences and build awareness of thought leadership marketing campaigns. 

Established brands like Everlane pair conversational videos on shared media with long-form content on owned media. Everlane uses long-form thought leadership content to clarify their brand position and connect values to corporate action, while short-form content on shared media distills thought leadership into bite-sized messages for the everyday consumer.

Everlane focused their lens of transparency on recycling, taking customers behind the scenes of their partner recycling facilities on TikTok and publishing personal narratives of recycling professionals on their blog. 

Intimates brand Cherri, founded in 2019, uses grassroots techniques and a shared-media-first approach to build thought leadership in their marketing strategy. In a 2023 interview, founder Gabriella Scaringe said, “It wasn’t until 2021 when I discovered TikTok that Cherri was really born.”

That year, Scaringe went viral on the platform with a video talking about insecurities and underwear. It received supportive comments from other consumers who shared her frustrations, which inspired Scarine to focus on gusset sizing in her thought leadership content. 

Scaringe built on her overnight popularity with a research campaign to study whether gussets on the market actually fit the modern consumer. According to her study of over 5,000 people, the average vulva is 2.5 inches wide, while intimate brands’ average gusset is 1.8 inches wide. Scaringe’s videos generated millions of views, inspiring a new area of brand focus and catalyzing a groundswell of brand advocacy for Cherri. Scaringe continues to build on the success of her thought leadership campaign, criticizing other industry studies for only focusing on Caucasian women and inviting her audience to participate in Cherri’s ongoing research.

Dieux, a skincare brand founded in 2020, uses opinionated thought leadership content on social media to stand out in a crowded space. Dieux’s approach is still about product but with progressive values woven through to build advocacy with their target audience. In CEO Charlotte Palermino’s popular Sunscreen Diaries series, Palermino frequently criticizes U.S. sunscreen legislation. 

Palermino explains the challenges of formulating a sunscreen that doesn’t leave a white cast through videos of herself and Dieux’s team trying lab samples with mixed results. In August 2023, Palermino even collaborated with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to spark conversations on sunscreen filters, claiming that the U.S. is lagging behind countries like South Korea due to regulation practices.

Thought leadership tactics to try on shared media:

• Share key insights from a research project similar to Diaspora’s recent Instagram update on their Farm Worker Fund
• Build in the open, like Dieux’s TikTok series about the obstacles they face in trying to formulate a sunscreen that doesn’t leave a white cast
• Experiment with UGC on paid social campaigns to improve click-through rate, like Parachute, which improved click-through rate by 35% using UGC in paid social ads

Shared media is powerful but volatile. Balance shared media with more predictable channels, like email, to avoid disruptive peaks and valleys in engagement metrics.

Why a thought leadership strategy needs authenticity to work

Brands fall short of becoming thought leaders when they aren’t committed to backing their marketing messages with meaningful — even risky — actions. Yes, even the ones that spend a lot of money on their thought leadership marketing strategy.

Thought leadership takes more than high-quality content and high marketing budgets. Publishing a clinical study doesn’t automatically make a brand a thought leader. Writing an opinion piece doesn’t either. Over a long period of time, those pieces of content can fuel the groundswell necessary to strengthen a brand’s reputation — if they’re focused on the same core message and backed by meaningful action.

Otherwise, it’s just fluff. And in an era when consumers are exhausted by marketing, fluff isn’t enough.

In order to generate momentum, not scandal, thought leadership content must be grounded in truth and backed by action. Diaspora doesn’t just talk about ethical sourcing — they’ve structured their entire company to support that goal. Dyson doesn’t just talk about innovation; they hire inventors who routinely invent new technologies.

It’s not enough to pick a buzzy topic and post an opinionated take on the blog. It’s not enough to claim a brand value on a website and run a splashy campaign to improve a brand’s image. Without years of focus, commitment, and systemic action, those tactics aren’t a thought leadership strategy — they’re just PR.

A well-crafted thought leadership marketing campaign can break through the noise and engage rather than exhaust consumer audiences. Thought leadership takes time to pay off, but getting started is easy. Start asking high-value customers for UGC to kickstart inspiration and foster trust almost immediately. Not sure how? Try this on-demand masterclass: How to collect content that engages and converts.

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How UGC strengthens customer relationships to grow your brand

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What is brand reputation management?

Brand reputation management refers to keeping tabs on how consumers perceive your brand and reacting in a strategic way to maintain, improve, and protect that image. Much of your brand reputation hinges on what consumers say about you on social media and in reviews, and how you communicate with these shoppers. 

Focusing on your brand reputation management is crucial for growth. A positive reputation fosters brand loyalty, inspires shopper confidence, boosts sales, and puts you above your competition. Whereas negative sentiments may cause sales to drop and scare off customers. But hey, it’s not all bad. 

Paying close attention to the chatter about your brand — both positive and negative — presents an opportunity to learn about your customers to help you better meet their needs in the future.

Brand reputation management strategies

Brand reputation management isn’t a one-time deal. It’s a continuous process of keeping up with consumer perception and taking time to resolve any issues that arise.

Here’s the 10 most effective brand management reputation strategies to guide your brand.

1. Encourage ratings and reviews

Shoppers love sharing their opinions of brands, and review spaces give them a forum to offer that feedback. Reviews are a valuable part of the shopping experience. According to our research, 88% of consumers always or mostly read reviews before buying anything and 78% say reviews have the biggest influence on their purchases.

Keeping a fresh crop of reviews flowing in is vital. Consumers tend to spend more on products and services when they encounter positive reviews, and 25% of shoppers think reviews remain relevant after 12 months but most prefer reviews written in in the past three months. After turning to ratings and reviews for their site, retail brand Brother, for example, saw customers spend 3x longer on its website, and they were 2x more likely to click a call-to-action when they engaged with reviews.

The tools can help brands collect reviews and other user-generated content (UGC) like photos and videos.  

If you don’t have many reviews for a certain product, first focus your attention on increasing your review volume. Just a handful of reviews can noticeably increase sales and customer sentiment. There’s several methods for getting more reviews, including sending review request emails and product sampling.

2. Respond to all reviews (even the negative ones)

When customers trust a brand, they’ll return time after time, Cydni Lauper style. Engaging directly with shoppers helps build trust, and one of the best ways to do that is to respond to their feedback — both negative and positive. 

Respond to positive reviews with a thank you and comment on a specific element from their review to personalize the response. Or take the opportunity to emphasize your brand pillars, like your brand’s commitment to customer service. Positive reviews are excellent content, too, so promote them on your product pages and social media channels.

Over 60% of shoppers say negative reviews are just as important as positive ones. (Many people get suspicious when there’s too many positive reviews.) So, you need to respond to this negative feedback as well.

Be understanding and authentic in your reply, and offer a solution, such as sending a product replacement or a genuine apology. This signals to customers that you’re listening and care about making them happy. 

Among unhappy shoppers, 70% will do business with a brand again if their complaint is resolved and 34% will delete a negative review if they’re satisfied with a brand’s response.

3. Answer customer questions 

If an in-store shopper asked you a question about a product or your customer service, would you answer them? Of course, you would. So you need to answer online questions, too. Answering customer questions is a critical part of brand reputation management — it builds loyalty and helps shoppers make confident, informed purchasing decisions.

Enabling a questions and answers platform on your product page(s) can also slash your return rates and the number of customer complaints you’ll receive, and boost conversion rate. 

For example, brands that use Bazaarvoice’s Questions & Answers platform to respond to shopper queries can see a 98% jump in conversions. You can also garner valuable insights from the customer questions to help improve your products or business.

Nestlé Canada enabled Bazaarvoice Q&A on its site and within three months had already responded to 700 questions. Noting consistent negative questions and comments about a particular product, the brand reacted by changing the recipe and the product’s average star rating jumped from 1.7 to 4 stars.

4. Share your mission 

Consumers increasingly want to shop with ethical brands that have a mission that aligns with their own values. Especially millennials and Gen Z. 71% of consumers think brands and retailers have the potential to positively impact society, and about 60% believe brands have a social responsibility to speak out and take action on important issues. 

Sharing your mission — whether it’s sustainability-focused, supporting specific social causes, or being a top-notch place to work — across social media sites and on your e-commerce site helps build trust and emotional connections with shoppers. 

When you share your mission and commitment to important causes, it makes your brand more relatable to the public. This will do wonders for your brand reputation. According to a Sprout Social report, 64% of consumers want to connect with brands, and 53% feel connected when a brand’s values align with their own. 

Communicating your mission also helps you control the narrative that surrounds your brand and lets you present your values in an authoritative and accurate way. 

5. Embrace visual and social content 

Authentic experiences are important to today’s shoppers. They like to see products in real-world settings — clothing modeled by real people and consumers demonstrating how something works. Actually, 40% of shoppers won’t purchase if a product page lacks UGC. Consumers seek out customer photos on product pages, search engines, social media, and other websites that sell the items.

Deploying the right visual and social content across every channel where your brand can be found engages shoppers and promotes a positive brand reputation. 

Displaying authentic imagery from real shoppers on your e-commerce site does more than just improve your brand reputation. When consumers interact with visual content on-site, shoppers spend more time on the website, buy more, and conversion rates soar.

For example, Le Col has seen average order value increase by 13%, revenue per visitor by 155%, and conversion rate by 125% when shoppers engage with UGC. 

6. Optimize creative product pages

Shoppers want to feel confident that anything they buy will meet their needs, and they rely on product descriptions to provide all the information they need. When product detail pages lack details, it’s so frustrating for consumers that they abandon their shopping cart. 

A whopping 98% of shoppers say they’ve been dissuaded from purchasing something because a product page didn’t have enough information. Not including detailed descriptions or including incorrect information can weaken your reputation and drive up your return rates. 

Highlight a product’s key features and use sensory wording that’s relatable to consumers. Include details about how an item works, how it’ll help in consumers’ daily lives, and the results that it will provide. Featuring visual UGC, reviews, and questions and answers helps shoppers make quick (but well-informed) decisions and inspires loyalty. 

7. Step up your SEO tactics 

A significant amount of shopping journeys start on search engines, like Google. So, it’s crucial to optimize your SEO strategy to ensure your brand gets noticed at this critical stage. Producing high-quality, SEO-centric content on your website will help you stand out. So, your brand reputation management process should factor in SEO, including how you’ll monitor negative online search results and what action you’ll take. 

You can gather insights into the wording that shoppers use to search for your products and describe how they meet their needs from syndicating reviews and other UGC. This information can then be used to create your SEO strategy around user sentiment and keep up with Google’s algorithm changes. 

8. Monitor your reviews on other websites

The more ratings and reviews that your products have, the more likely shoppers will be inspired to purchase. But, your website isn’t the only place where people can leave reviews. A key part of your brand reputation management strategy should be to keep an eye on what consumers are saying about you everywhere reviews can be posted. Channels like social media, Yelp, or your Google seller rating.

With thousands of reviews likely to pop up on multiple platforms, overseeing it all can be overwhelming. If you need help, a ratings and reviews platform can streamline everything. The right tools feature built-in insights and analytics to help you quickly identify themes and problems that could affect your brand reputation. As well as ways to take action to improve the sentiment around your brand.

9. Focus on top-notch customer service

Happy customers keep coming back. The best way to keep your most loyal shoppers happy is with proactive customer service and unique, personalized customer experiences. Customers are actually starting to expect these experiences from brands, with 25% of consumers saying they’re interested in personalization in shopping.

Getting it right — which involves actively listening to consumers and quickly resolving any problems that come up — offers endless benefits, including higher customer satisfaction and conversion rates, which translates to a stellar brand reputation. 

The most loyal customers tend to use words like “happy,” “love,” and “adore” when discussing their favorite brands. This kind of customer sentiment resonates with other shoppers and helps attract new ones. When happy customers share something positive about your brand on social media, for example, reward them with a special discount or other perk or highlight their stories on your website.

Showing appreciation for your best customers will amplify your brand and reinforce your reputation. 

10. Crack down on fake reviews

Nearly all shoppers (97%) say fake reviews make them lose trust in a brand, according to our research of 10,000 global consumers. That’s significant because 81% of shoppers also say they’d never use a brand again after losing trust in it. And they’re getting better at spotting fake reviews:

Cracking down on fake reviews associated with your brand is an essential part of your reputation management. Effective tactics include:

• Don’t allow fake reviews. Sounds obvious, but don’t be tempted to allow fake reviews just because they may be positive. Use an in-house our third-party content moderation service to screen them out
• Keep on top of legislation. Fake reviews are becoming so prevalent that new regulations are constantly being drawn up. For example, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently proposed new regulations to crack down on fake reviews
• Never incentivize positive reviews. You can ask customers for reviews (and you should!) but never offer financial reward for a positive review. If you do incentivize a review, through a coupon for example, then make sure to add a disclaimer to the review

Brand reputation management case studies

1. Retail giant River Island keeps on top of its brand reputation management through authentic visual content. The brand wanted to provide an authentic shopping experience for customers so they incorporated visual UGC onto their homepage, landing pages, and product pages. Visitors that engaged with this visual UGC on the brand’s site drove a 184% increase conversion rates
2. Hairhouse wanted to build a web presence that today’s shoppers expect by providing social proof through honest reviews. Not only did implementing reviews provide this, but the brand ensured only authentic, genuine reviews were featured. This real life social proof from shoppers inspired other shoppers to make purchases and led to a 35% increase in conversion rate.

Get a head start on your brand reputation management

These days, with consumers always-on, you can’t ignore your brand reputation. Taking the opportunity to listen and respond to customers, in both positive and negative situations, is crucial for growth. Follow these steps, repeat them and repeat them again and again — brand reputation management is an ongoing process. But a worthy one.

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And while almost all shoppers use ratings and reviews (88%) to evaluate or learn more about products, fake reviews are affecting their ability to confidently turn to reviews as a trusted source when making product purchasing decisions.

And preserving that trust isn’t just about maintaining your customer base and increasing sales. It’s also about maintaining regulatory compliance. Government agencies all over the world enforce consumer protection laws that prohibit unscrupulous marketing practices — including fake, deceptive or misleading reviews.

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently announced two important regulations they’re taking to battle fake reviews:

1. They published the final Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. This is the first refresh of the Guides since 2009 and it provides new and updated guidance around endorsements by social media influencers as well as ratings and reviews 
2. The proposed Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials which clarifies what constitutes a “fake” review

What does the proposed FTC regulation say?

The new regulation proposed by the FTC will strengthen the agency’s ability to impose significant monetary penalties in cases involving fake and deceptive consumer reviews — up to $50,120 for each offending review to be imposed each time the review is viewed by a consumer. The aim is to ensure that consumers are provided with a more authentic, honest shopping experience and businesses are able to better protect their brand.

In its notice of proposed regulation, the FTC explained the need for the new rule by citing examples of clearly deceptive practices from its recent cases. They specifically called out the widespread emergence of generative AI, which will make it easier for bad actors to create fake reviews.

According to the FTC’s Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, “Our proposed rule on fake reviews shows that we’re using all available means to attack deceptive advertising in the digital age” and “should help level the playing field for honest companies.”

The proposed new rule clarifies that businesses are prohibited from:

• Selling or obtaining fake consumer reviews and testimonials. Writing or selling reviews by someone who doesn’t exist or has never bought the product
• Review hijacking. Using or repurposing a consumer review written for one product so that it appears to have been written for a substantially different product
• Buying positive or negative reviews. Providing compensation conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative
• Illegally suppressing negative reviews. Using unjustified legal threats, other intimidation, or false accusations to prevent or remove a negative consumer review or hiding a negative review from the website
• Using “insider” reviews. Having employees or other insiders write reviews or testimonials of its products or services, without clearly disclosing their relationships
• Selling or buying fake social media indicators. Selling false indicators of social media influence, like fake followers or views
• Fake websites. Creating or controlling a website that claims to provide independent opinions about a category of products or services that includes its own products or services

As the champions of authentic shopping experiences, we at Bazaarvoice fully agree with the premise of this proposed rule and already provide our customers with powerful tools and processes to help them comply. This is simply another strong and welcomed step to help protect brands and the sanctity of consumer reviews and the role they play in commerce.

3 ways to protect your brand

Whether you’re in the US or another country, here’s the three golden rules we instruct our clients and partners to follow, to ensure they protect their brand, and their bottom line, from fake reviews.

1. Be transparent about who you collect reviews from, and how you do it

While consumers continue to trust reviews, they’re increasingly on the lookout for any signs of untrustworthy content. Typically, the behaviors that causes the most suspicion among consumers are:

• Multiple reviews with similar wording on the same product (55%)
• Review content not matching the product (49%) 
• Bad grammar/spelling mistakes (36%) 
• An overwhelming amount of five star/positive reviews (35%) 

Consumers have a right to trust the reviews they encounter and businesses have a responsibility to ensure this content is legitimate. The importance of this trust is further echoed in the guidance being put out by governments and consumer agencies around the world, echoed by the proposed FTC regulation. 

There’s a variety of ways businesses can ask customers to provide a review — review request emails, directly from e-commerce sites, sampling campaigns, or in a social media campaign. Additionally, brands may choose to share the reviews they collect with their retail partners so that consumers can find them anywhere they’re looking to make a purchasing decision. 

Regardless of how a review is collected, brands should never ask for or incentivize positive reviews. If consumers are offered a free product, promotional material (such as discounts or coupons), or a chance to win something of value in exchange for providing an unbiased review, then we recommend adding descriptors such as “this reviewer received a free product in exchange for their honest feedback” to any reviews collected using a promotion. 

2. Don’t screen out negative reviews — find value in them 

While some might think that negative reviews are an absolute disaster for their brand to have, they’re actually a necessity for your ratings and reviews program to thrive. In a survey we ran, over half (60%) of respondents said that negative reviews are as important as positive reviews in their decision to buy a product. The majority claimed that negative reviews contain more detailed info on product pros and cons, while 32% think that they are less likely to be fake reviews.

In addition to giving consumers a true feel for a product or service, negative reviews are an opportunity for engaging with consumers and identifying potential product improvements. 

Responding to, and taking action on, negative feedback will protect your brand by fostering trust and loyalty with customers.

3. Have a zero tolerance policy for fake reviews

Not protecting yourself against fake reviews undoubtedly puts your brand at risk. In the same research as above, respondents said that fraudulent reviews from a brand’s employees (42%) and from other customers (34%) would cause them to lose trust in a brand.

We also found that after losing trust in a brand, a vast majority (82%) of consumers would avoid using the brand ever again. If shoppers suspect a product to have fake reviews:

• 36% wouldn’t buy the product
• 28% wouldn’t trust the brand,
• 27% wouldn’t trust the site’s other reviews
• 25% wouldn’t purchase from the website
• 18% said ‘all of the above’

Companies should be aware of the possibility of fraudulent content through a variety of means, including disruptive or trolling activity, commercial messages, generative AI submissions, illegitimate or degrading content by a competitor, and self-promotion by employees.

We help protect our clients from a variety of different types of fraud. Using textual moderation and data driven, anti-fraud processes to evaluate reviews in the Bazaarvoice Network helps us to protect our clients and their shoppers. 

Our biggest and best piece of advice to protect your brand is to ensure you have a process in place to detect fake reviews, and to not allow them to be posted on your site. Hiring a third-party ratings and reviews provider and moderator is a huge help for this task. 

Protect your brand now

User-generated content is necessary in commerce today. But a reputation for fake reviews will damage your brand reputation as well as your bottom line. Brands and retailers need to continuously and proactively work to combat fake reviews by ensuring they have the right processes in place to protect themselves and their shoppers.

The steps we’ve outlined above, as well as the new guidance and proposed regulation from the FTC, will help you achieve this.

When shoppers can turn to ratings and reviews as sources of truth, it helps them to feel confident in purchasing from your company. Which boosts your bottom line and who doesn’t want that?

Learn more at Bazaarvoice.com/fakereviews.

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What is single-sign on (SSO)?

Single sign-on is a form of identification that allows users to log in to multiple applications and websites with a single password. Users simply create a password that then works across multiple web applications like Salesforce, Workday, Coupa, and even our very own Bazaarvoice client portal.

With single sign-on, logging into different websites becomes a breeze because you only need to remember one password. It’s also much more secure for organizations to manage user access to these apps.

Challenges of SSO

Single sign-on does come with its own set of challenges. For starters, organizations need to keep a watchful eye on maintaining strong password policies. After all, convenient access shouldn’t mean compromising security. SSO providers also need to ensure high availability with minimal downtime because they’re the gatekeepers to critical applications.

And let’s not forget about the importance of offering multi-factor authentication as an extra layer of defence against hacking attempts.

Benefits of SSO

While there’s challenges associated with SSO, the benefits tend to outweigh those.

The first (and main) benefit of federated single sign-on is that it makes life far more convenient for users. 68% of employees switch between ten apps every hour, so migrating to a single login can save businesses considerable time and money.

Without the need to manually juggle a bunch of different usernames and passwords you can say goodbye to access issues and endless help desk tickets for forgotten passwords — according to Gartner, over 50% of all help desk calls are due to password issues.

Not only do all of those help desk tickets cost organizations significant time, they also often cost significant dollar. Migrating to single sign-on will save you money by removing much of this burden on the help desk.

On the IT side, single sign-on gives teams the power to control user access to specific applications. It’s like having a magic wand to enable, track, and monitor who gets access to what. And when someone leaves the company, you can simply edit or disable their access with a few clicks.

So, if we can agree that SSO, managed properly, provides a secure balance between additional convenience and increased productivity, wouldn’t it stand to reason that organizations would want their personnel to be able to leverage these same benefits when they access the client portals?

Federating single sign-on

That’s exactly why from May 2023, Bazaarvoice is offering ‘Federated’ access to eligible clients. What does that mean? It means clients can seamlessly integrate access to the client portal with its SSO-enabled apps. No more separate usernames and passwords to manage.

It’s all about extending productivity, efficiency, and top-notch security from Bazaarvoice to our clients and their teams. And there’s no reason why your business can’t do the same. Get in touch here to learn more.

Brands and retailers have realized the importance of user-generated content (UGC) on product pages, on social channels, and even in-stores — featuring UGC can increase revenue per visitor by 162%. That’s why many have built out a UGC strategy that includes partnering with a trusted user-generated content provider.

But how do you know your potential user-generated content provider is to be trusted? Understanding how a provider handles authenticity and content moderation, respects privacy, and behaves ethically can help you feel confident that you’re working with a trustworthy business.

What to ask your user-generated content provider

The Bazaarvoice moderation team works tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure all UGC across the Bazaarvoice Network is authentic and trustworthy. Based on what we see on a day-to-day basis, these are the questions we recommend you ask before signing that contract with your new content provider.

1. “What protections do you have in place for client and consumer privacy?”

Whether you’re asking for star ratings on your products from customers or are collecting written and visual reviews, you necessarily will obtain personal information from your customers. And as a business, you’ll have your own confidential information that you won’t want being publicly shared.

Understanding the security processes a content provider has in place can give you confidence in how they’ll approach data protection.

2. “How do you moderate content?”

Content moderation is a fine art – as a business, you want as much content as possible on your pages, but you also want it to be inoffensive, factually accurate, and authentic. Your content provider’s moderation practices can not only impact your content quantity and quality, but also your brand’s reputation.

Selecting a provider with thorough moderation processes is key to protecting your brand and getting your customers the information they’re looking for. Whether they’re fully manual, automated, or a combination of both.

3. “What are your authenticity practices?”

Similar to moderation practices, authenticity helps your customers attain the information they need to make their purchasing decisions. While moderation is often focused on things like reviews matching the product the review is for or that the review is topical, authenticity looks at whether the review is fraudulent or not.

Fake reviews are incredibly harmful for your business. But a content provider with top-notch authenticity practices will have methods of detecting fake reviews and patterns of fraudulent behavior.

4. “What are your standards for rejecting or accepting content?”

Not only do you want to know that your content provider has the highest standards for authenticity and moderation, but you need to understand what goes into those standards and what type of input you can have on behalf of your business.

Your provider should be able to share some of the rules in place for accepting and rejecting content. For more sensitive industries, work with your regulatory team to tailor some of those standards to better serve you.

5. “Do you badge or otherwise disclose incentivized reviews?”

While sampling, discounting, and cashback are all ethical, honest business practices, consumers prefer to know when a review has been incentivized. Or when there’s material connections to the review. That way, they’re able to consume content with that caveat in mind. Good follow up questions here would be asking what automatic badging processes they employ and what guidance they give to consumers for self-disclosure and to inform their content. 

Badging and disclosures create trust with consumers when review origins are displayed, too.

6. “What kind of support can my team expect after our service starts?”

A good company supports you through the sales process, implementation, and checks in regularly throughout your contract. A great company supports you through all of that and becomes a trusted strategic partner that helps you take your UGC program to the next level.

Look for a content provider who will give you a dedicated point of contact, analyze the success of your UGC program, and provide insights to help you understand how your business compares to others in your industry. 

7. “Are your policies up to date with current global privacy laws?”

Whether your brand predominantly does business in one country or multiple, your provider should be well-versed in global privacy laws to keep your business in good standing, no matter where your customers are located. 

The same goes for consumer protection legislation and product health and safety legislation.

8. “What does your company stand for?”

Last but certainly not least. The content provider you hire is an extension of your brand. Understanding a provider’s mission, values, code of ethics, and best practices can give you better color as to how they do business. Not just how they say they do business. Every business has a level of corporate social responsibility — guarantee your provider is matching yours. 

For example, Bazaarvoice proudly shares its code of business conduct and ethics on our site. You can view it here.

Work with the right content provider

The right user-generated content provider can take the worry and hassle out of your content strategy for you. You can sit back knowing that your partner is working hard behind the scenes for you to ensure your UGC (and branded content) is authentic and trustworthy. And particularly relevant to current times, they also drive your business growth during an economic downturn.

And if you are going to choose a content provider to work with, why not work with G2’s #1 user-generated content platform on the marketplace.

Did you know, 82% of shoppers said they would avoid using a brand again if they lost trust? Learn what threatens trust and how you can deploy strategies to protect it in our webinar below.

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