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What is UGC? If your brand encourages customers to share photos of your products using your brand’s hashtag, then you’re already leveraging user generated content. User generated content, or UGC, it’s a strategy that helps you increase customer engagement with your brand on social media.
Now, it’s time to consider how you can boost your website’s performance with content marketing strategies focused on customer content. Why not feature it on your eCommerce site and product pages through a UGC platform?
In this post, we will dive into what is UGC and how it can benefit your eCommerce brand and enhance the online shopping experience. You’ll also find tips on how to use today’s technology to get the most out of your UGC strategy.
User-generated content encompasses all the content material created and shared by consumers about a brand or product rather than by the brand itself. This can include formats such as photos, videos, reviews, testimonials, social media posts, or a mix of all those content types.
User-Generated Content (UGC) is 5x more effective in driving conversions than professionally created content. It’s a powerful tool for engaging with your customers and encouraging genuine connections.
By gathering content shared by your customers on social media and integrating it into your website, eCommerce pages, and marketing initiatives through a UGC platform, you can create a dynamic social shopping experience that engages both loyal and potential customers.
Showcasing content from a community of loyal customers around your brand adds a human touch that feels more authentic than traditional advertising.
This also helps potential customers see real people using your products, building trust and social proof in your store. They may even share a photo or video with their new product, fuelling a virtuous engagement cycle.
If you already have UGC on social media, it’s time to gather it up. One way to collect content is to use your brand’s hashtag, inviting your customers to share their experiences. Each time a user posts a photo or video with #YourBrand, you can collect it automatically with your UGC platform and distribute it to your eCommerce site or social media channels.
With all this content gathered, you can organise the content your customers create for you. Here’s where the fun begins: select the content that best reflects your brand image to display it directly in the online shopping journey through galleries, carousels, or mosaics.
The Spanish brand ALOHAS showcases user-generated social media content on the homepage of its eCommerce site.
User-generated visual content on social media becomes a compelling element in the buying journey, letting customers see genuine, relatable emotions associated with the product.
Customers can further interact with the content through these galleries, clicking on specific images to explore more and continue their shopping journey with shoppable content.
Seeing the original post allows customers to sense the purchaser’s satisfaction with their purchase.
But don’t just take our word for it—statistics make it more reliable. Check this compilation of UGC statistics to confirm the power of user-generated content.
Marketing is more effective when you target the right audience. So, it’s crucial to analyse your customers’ social media content to better understand your brand’s demographics.
UGC platforms can also serve as a database for analysing customer content, allowing you to see where users come from and who they are.
Furniture brand Kave Home encouraged customers to share photos with the hashtag #KaveHome on social media. This generated such a high volume of social content that they needed a platform to fully harness all the visual content users were sharing.
By actively promoting the #KaveHome hashtag, this top-tier brand chose Flowbox to help organise and filter the content and monitor performance.
With insights on when and where the content originates, and who is sharing it, Kave Home gained a comprehensive view of its strategy’s effectiveness and collected key data for future campaigns.
Understanding your user community helps define your brand’s market profile and identify specific audiences for increased engagement on Instagram. An active and well-followed UGC creator who frequently posts for your brand could even become your next brand ambassador.
A UGC platform can help you identify who these creators are. UGC platforms don’t just collect and organise data. By integrating customer-generated content into the shopping journey, you offer an authentic and familiar experience for customers to choose your products. This way, you can further strengthen your strategy.
A smooth shopping journey is essential for making sales on your site. The easier the connection between searching, viewing, and checkout, the more likely conversions will increase. Once you’ve created the Lookbook for your eCommerce display, it’s time to link your products to your customers’ posts, creating shoppable content.
Take inspiration from watch brand CLUSE, which also uses Flowbox to offer shoppable content. Read the Cluse case study to learn more about their strategy.
From this stylish gallery, users can click on a photo just like they would on social media. But the real magic happens next.
Shoppers are transported directly to the content alongside the featured product from the photo or video. In an instant, they can go from viewing the best of your social content to seeing exactly how they can get the look.
Integrating user-generated content into your eCommerce store gives your buyers the social proof they need to see that your products aren’t just reliable—they’re desirable. When customers see real users wearing or using your brand, it creates a connection that’s hard to replicate with professional content.
Connecting your products to these photos is a natural next step to creating a seamless social shopping experience. With Flowbox’s MultiProduct Linking tool, you can even connect multiple products, showing how users mix and match items from your brand.
Using a UGC platform makes this process straightforward, and tools like Flowbox Recognize simplify it even further.
Flowbox Recognize leverages the latest in image recognition technology to identify products in customer photos, allowing you to link UGC to items in your catalog instantly. For brands with large and constantly changing inventories, this tool is invaluable for streamlining customer content across various marketing channels.
Once UGC is linked to products, you gain access to a vast array of data, helping you showcase exactly what customers want to see. Let’s explore how to turn this data into authentic engagement!
A UGC platform allows you to ensure you’re always displaying top-quality content. This means selecting the most effective UGC content and guaranteeing it gets great visibility. But how do you know which UGC performs best?
Flowbox’s Top Photos feature is designed precisely for this. This tool analyses which photos resonate with your customers by key metrics like conversions, impressions, and click-through rate (CTR), giving you complete control to filter as needed!
The platform even lets you track the actual revenue generated from each piece of content.
The Evangelist tool provides insight into where your top-performing content comes from (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube) and who your key UGC creators are. With this information, you can better understand who frequently posts your brand’s products, offering deeper insights into your audience.
When you find the content you love, the Pin feature ensures it remains at the top of the gallery. This tool lets you keep your best UGC visible in galleries and carousels, ensuring that all shoppers see your top user content.
Where else can you amplify your UGC? Let’s talk about ads.
Incorporate customer content into your next Ad Campaign. Eyewear brand Meller saw a 13.9% lower cost per click on Instagram ads featuring UGC compared to those showing professional brand photos. This content was gathered using Meller’s brand hashtag!
Getting this right is essential, but don’t worry: requesting media rights within a UGC platform is simple. Once you have permission from the user, you’re all set. You can then send the image directly to the Ads platform to launch your UGC campaign.
This content not only circulates on social media, earning clicks and engagement, but it continues its work on your website, strengthening your brand image and trustworthiness.
Once you start integrating UGC into your site with a dedicated user-generated content platform, you’ll want to use it for all your products.
Now, let’s see how a UGC platform simplifies the organization of your best content.
We hope you have so much UGC that you need a little help organising it. UGC isn’t only about your online community. If your brand doesn’t primarily collect content via social media, UGC can still adapt to fit your brand and content type.
AC MILAN used UGC to boost merchandise sales. By segmenting UGC into site categories, such as different players, they used fan interests to drive sales. When shoppers click “Shop by Player” on their site, they see all the UGC filtered for that specific collection.
You can use Flowbox’s Collections feature to gather content into various galleries based on genre, product, location, style—whatever category suits your needs! This way, customers can browse UGC relevant to the products they’re interested in, creating a tailored, engaging shopping experience.
This feature is especially valuable if you have a UGC gallery or carousel on your homepage but want to filter content on individual product pages. When a customer clicks on a product they’re interested in, they can see the latest looks featuring that specific item.
Instead of showing impersonal product photos, you’ll offer more engaging images and videos that showcase the product in a real-life context, modeled by the very players it was designed for, including figures that AC Milan fans would idolize. And the best part? You’re not the one telling them how great your product is; your fans and customers are.
Another way UGC can improve your eCommerce strategy: you can see which products have the most UGC. If you lack customer photos for a particular product, you have the perfect idea for your next giveaway. Or an incentive to get your customers to produce the content you need.
Because a good CHOUFFE ought to be shared. With a look that perfectly complements their product, they created a lookbook that invites users to showcase the fun and charm of their product. This approach encourages customers to share genuine moments of enjoyment, building a vibrant community around the brand.
Maxi-Cosi, the beloved children’s products brand, showcases its versatility through UGC, featuring products in a format filled with smiles and vibrant colours.
Authentic engagement, social proof, and a reliable brand image are crucial elements for online sales, all of which can be achieved by integrating UGC across your eCommerce site, product pages, and marketing initiatives.
There’s no doubt about the power of a UGC platform for your brand’s eCommerce success. If you’re ready to explore how to integrate it yourself, or if you still have questions about what user-generated content is, we’re here to help. Visit our comprehensive guide on User-Generated Content.
User-Generated content encompasses all the content material created and shared by consumers about a brand or product, rather than by the brand itself. These can include formats such us photos, videos, reviews, testimonials, social media posts, or a mix of all that content types.
A UGC platform is a set of tools that helps brands collect, moderate and distribute content created by their customers, fans, users or influencers. Flowbox is Europe’s leading UGC platform and one of the world’s leading as well.
UGC marketing consists of using the content that your brand customers create, such as photos, videos, comments, and reviews, to promote the products or services. Brands typically use this content on their websites, social networks, email marketing campaigns, and other channels where they can leverage these real experiences that truly connect with other users.
A user-generated content strategy is a powerful approach to enhancing brand visibility and fostering deeper audience engagement, based on leveraging content created by users independent of the brand. This strategy provides authentic user contributions that drive measurable success for brands’ campaigns.
User-generated content campaigns are marketing strategies in which brands encourage their customers and followers to create and share content featuring their products or services.
UGC in social media means user-generated content posts (including photos, videos, reviews, or blog articles) that are created by independent users instead of the brand, and shared on social media platforms.
UGC-style content refers to content that looks and feels like user-generated content (UGC), but it’s often created or guided by brands to mimic the authenticity and casual tone of real customer posts. For example, fashion catalogue images are taken in casual places like elevators or bedrooms.
A UGC video is an authentic, customer-created piece of video content that showcases real experiences with products or services.
Organic UGC is content that real customers, fans, or users create and share about a brand without being paid or asked. It’s authentic content that people post naturally because they genuinely like a brand, product, or experience.
UGC Ads are advertisement campaigns based on user-generated content, meaning real photos, videos, or reviews created by actual customers or brand fans, instead of traditional brand-created ads. UGC Ads are more authentic and cost-effective, while improving ads performance.
