By Al Gomez
You can babble endlessly about how great and cutting-edge your products and services are. There’s even a chance for getting qualified traffic out of it. But it goes without saying that your target audience will always take your claims with a grain of salt. It would take them much longer to convert to loyal clients by then.
Getting customers to convert upon arriving on the designated landing page has been a challenge for so many digital specialists — especially B2B marketers. But many will tell you that finding and showing these pieces of user-generated content is well worth the effort.
There are several ways to display user-generated content on your landing pages to turn your traffic into conversion opportunities.
The Three-Fold Benefit of User-Generated Content
One marketer, specifically Koby Korman, proclaimed that user-generated content is the “secret sauce” of e-commerce marketing. And he’s right. But not just in B2C marketing. User-generated content helps B2B marketing strategies as well.
User-generated content improves your CRO practices through these three benefits. And these three complement each other and interlink together, like a well-made domino trail.
Benefit 1: Fosters Trust through Social Proof
The first and foremost — and strongest — benefit of user-generated content is that it’s social proof. And to give you a brief gist, social proof is basically human behavior that gives us a tendency to follow the crowd. It even goes as far as copying others’ behaviors.
In connection with this psychological behavior, user-generated content works to foster trust and build an honest identity around your brand.
- 70% of customers online check product reviews before purchasing (Consumerist).
- Product reviews are trust 12x more than product descriptions or sales copies (Econsultancy).
Think about it this way… Your clients and customers don’t get monetary incentives from you like your employees do. For this reason, their content is perceived as much more trustworthy than that of your team’s.
While the value of your content and your products and services’ performances matter, no amount of compelling web copy will make your customers trust you 100%. Give your previous clients and loyal customers the opportunity to share their brutally honest opinions.
Benefit 2: Drives Traffic Because of Social Proof
Third-party opinions, especially the unbiased ones, contribute so much to your site. They give your leads and customers a comparison party, set expectations, and reinforce a message that puts substance in your claims.
Many digital marketers deem social proof as a crucial part of their overall marketing strategy. In constructing web pages, and especially in attracting web traffic.
According to GetUplift.co’s Talia Wolf:
[By] Using social proof in the form of testimonials, reviews and trust icons you’re helping customers make a decision, feel confident about their choice, and a part of something bigger.”
Social proof is a basic part of experts’ marketing strategies that most of them won’t go or execute without it. It may take time, gathering them all together, but it’s absolutely worth the time and the effort.
Benefit 3: Traffic Opens the Opportunity for CRO
The form of social proof that you put before your consumers and client can trigger different emotional responses. It also instigates buying decisions. When you plan them carefully, you spark an emotional reaction that you’ve been aiming for.
For a fact, an A/B test of 5,723 visitors to an ecommerce site revealed that upon the inclusion of Instagram photos, the product page of that business’ top selling product increased in orders by 24.3%.
How to Display User-Generated Content on Your Landing Pages
Flaunting the customer feedback on your landing pages isn’t as easy as designating a spot for them on one particular part of the screen. It’s not as point-and-shoot as straight up copying and pasting reviews to the page too (although that is a part).
Many experts in the field would tell you that it takes planning, and a bit of analysis to display your user-generated content.But, generally, here are 7 ways to do it.
In your marketer’s journey, it’s already a given that your products and services (your brand) has its own social media platform, right? If it doesn’t have one yet, it would do well to make one.
Social media is one of the easiest ways your brand can reach you. Often times, before they even think to call you to make a personal inquiry, they end up visiting your brand’s social media profile first to check on your activity.
Highly likely, when they find posts that cover a particular product they used or a service they availed, they would leave feedback depending on their experience. You can take screenshots of these comments, highlighting the positive ones — of course, and feature them on your landing page for your new visitors to scroll through.
2. Showcase customer feedback and UGC in the product packaging.
For e-commerce sites and webstores, you would do well to give your customers’ feedback a physical form. You don’t have to limit the reviews in the cyber format, you can have them printed out on the product packaging too.
A local brand in the Philippines, Jack and Jill’s Hello Chocolate, is an example of encouraging consumer participation. The company encourages its customers to submit user-generated content in the form of pick-up lines printed in the back of the chocolate wrapper.
Along with the actual pick-up line is the chosen customer’s twitter handle, accompanied with the #HelloChocolate.
3. Include user-generated content on top of product descriptions.
- By 2021, e-commerce sales are expected to reach 17.5% of retail sales worldwide (Statista)
- 2nd quarter 2.86% of e-commerce website visits converted into purchases (Statista)
- 65% of consumers check price comparisons on mobile while shopping in brick-and-mortar stores (KPMG)
- 30% of online customer post product feedback online (KPMG)
- 81% of consumers trust family and friends recommendations (HubSpot)
- 9 out of 10 consumers read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business (Shopify)
- 58% of shoppers believe the star rating of a business is one of the most important factors (Shopify)
With statistics and facts like these, it’s pretty safe to say that product descriptions are secondary in importance compared to user-generated content and reviews.
4. Dedicate one page in your website to customer feedback.
If you have a ton of customer reviews waiting in the wings, you should make use of all of them.
How?
You can do that by creating an entire page in your website dedicated to customer reviews or user-generated content only.
A great example of this is ComfyEarrings. The page welcomes you with a tagline that says: “Our fans say it best.” And furthermore, you can have a link that review page from your landing page. You can invite your audience to investigate further by clicking on the link that would direct them to that page dedicated to user content.
5. Prep your published customer reviews for Google indexing.
By now, you’re mostly well aware of the fact that SEO plays a huge role in everything you do in digital marketing. Why are visible reviews on Google such a big deal?
(Well, obviously I posed the question to give the huge purpose.)
You, see when user-generated content — like online reviews — get posted on an important product page, the keywords for that specific page get a boost. Moreover, bear in mind that the reviews you get are a rich source of keywords.
In fact, studies even show that search rankings grow organic traffic by an average of 48% in 3 months. By making your SEO content crawlable to every search engine, you:
- Drive qualified traffic to your product pages
- Rank for coveted long-tail keywords that your target audience is actually searching for
- Uncover new keywords you might not have thought of before.
You should also include these practices:
- Work on being in Google’s featured snippets
- Always include the keywords in the meta titles and meta descriptions
- Perfect your page’s and site’s structured data
6. Leverage influencer marketing to grow your customer base.
It’s not out of place to say that influencer marketing is one of the fastest-growing customer acquisition marketing methods of this generation. With influencers, both big and small, cropping up on any social media platform, it’s no surprise why 40% of marketers say they are dedicating a budget to spend on influencer marketing. In addition, 80% of them say influencer marketing is efficient.
And since we’re on the subject of utilizing user-generated content, nothing screams UGC louder than influencer marketing.
In some ways, influencers can be classified as celebrities. But they differ from the A-C listers because they are more in touch with their fan base, whether that comprises a hundred thousand people or a million — like YouTubers.
Influencers are more appealing to this generation because of the authenticity they foster at all times. It’s all about being transparent with their followers, opening a part of their lives to them, and being passionate about the kind of content they pump out.
As far as user-generated content goes, you can work with these influencers by doing a collaboration with them, and consequently have their picture, name, and brutally honest feedback on your landing page. You can even have them make videos about your products or services — depending on the collaboration agreement between you, of course.
7. Connect previous clients with new ones.
Never underestimate the power of FAQs in your product pages, and especially in your landing page. It’s a good idea to cater to your target audience’s needs before they even contact you to ask them. That way, you only get detailed inquiries right after.
The traditional method is to have you and your team answer these frequently asked questions. But one thing you can do, is have your previous and satisfied customers answer the queries posed by the new ones. You can take advantage of the pros of FAQs this way.
In doing this, you encourage your customers — both new and old — to get real answers from their fellow clients or customers.
What are the benefits that you can get out of this lovely interaction? You can:
- Continue customer and client engagement even when the buying process has ended
- Expose your old and new customers to the new products on your site, or the ones that are on sale
- Be assured that Google indexes these types of UGC
- Take screenshots of this FAQ and add them to the main website as social proof
- Attract more traffic and provide more opportunities for CRO
The Takeaway
When it comes to user-generated content, remember that the quantity and the quality matters. In addition, both on-site and off-site reviews count. So if you haven’t had your ecommerce or B2B business listed on citations yet, then you’d better.
Always keep your eyes out for user-generated content. How do you tell it’s good? Alex Birkett from Conversion XL has a great answer for you.Good user-generated content consists of:
- Comparisons of products or services with competing brands
- Actual descriptions of how the product or service was used
- A balance between positive and negative feedback
- Positive reviews outweighing the negative ones (ideally)
As you display user-generated content on your landing pages, also remember that it’s not about different types of landing pages. The success depends on how you use it.
Experts advise other marketers to include social proof in areas of the landing page that might cause pain points; like a pricing quote (reasonable but a little over the budget), too good to be true claims at first glance, announcement deals that are unbelievable at first look, etc.
