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Social media crowdsourced helps to boost your business profile with minimal effort.
In this entire season, I have been covering organic marketing for your business. I talked about different channels and tactics that can be employed for organic growth due to their popularity. These could be combined together to form a grand marketing plan, or you can use them individually.
In this blog, I am going to talk about certain social media crowdsourcing hacks that can be employed cross-channel. These hacks boost your business, without breaking your bank.
Testimonials
You’re probably rolling your eyes when you hear this word. That’s because testimonials are hard to get and end up feeling very forced. Hence, many businesses ignore them. But testimonials are a very powerful way to market your brand to your audience.
Many businesses fall over with the first step of getting testimonials from their customers. It is important to have a strategy in place of how you are going to do this. Follow this method to get more success with your testimonials.
Time it well: The best time to ask for a testimonial is at the moment when the customer is engaging with your brand, or immediately after. Depending on when you are asking for it, it can take different forms. Let me share an example of testimonials I collected for a workshop I did. The workshop was interactive and limited to a small group. I asked for feedback during the workshop, which prompted some of the attendees to write it in the chatbox of the meeting itself. Others wrote their feedback on the social media post which announced the workshop. I was able to collect feedback from more than 80% of the people who attended.
Format your testimonial: Often business owners fret about receiving the testimonial in a format that does not work for them. For e.g. they may have asked for written feedback, but someone is more comfortable with providing verbal feedback. In that case, work with what you have. As long as the customer has consented to be quoted, use the verbal feedback to create a text version.
Use it well: Use your testimonial to create more business opportunities for you. If you have video testimonials, then use them individually or collectively to build more content. Use the text testimonials as stand-alone content or combine it with what it’s endorsing. E.g. put the workshop testimonial in your workshop marketing page or post. Here’s the testimonial video I created for my workshop so that I could collect registrations for the next workshop.
User-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is a term for content that is provided by your followers or customers. It’s a commonly used tactic on social media by big brands. UGC involves asking the followers of a business to post something related to the brand. Usually, the theme is provided by the brand itself. The brand uses the content created by the followers to post on its own page. This UGC acts as social proof for others and influences them to purchase from the brand.
An example of a UGC campaign was Apple’s new iPhone 7 in 2017. They decided to differentiate themselves by using UGC to showcase their phone’s superior technology. Instead of using polished marketing messages on their billboards, they used pictures shot by their users using the iPhone 7 phone camera. Each billboard carried the message “Shot in iPhone 7” printed on it. This built trust among people about the powerful camera of the phone, which has become a necessary feature in today’s phone.
Smaller brands can also use UGC to build conversations around them. Brands can use content created around their vision or mission by their followers, instead of just their product. For e.g. a sustainable clothing brand can post pictures of their customer’s best-from-waste projects. This aligns with the brand’s vision of promoting sustainability.
UGC is a great way to get your customer involved with the brand. The posting of the user’s content will prompt them to share it on their own profiles as well, thus increasing a brand’s reach.
The two social media crowdscourcing hacks that I mentioned here are a sure-fire way of getting more engagement for your business. People trust people more than they trust brands. By involving your customer’s in your brand’s marketing strategy, you will be able to emotionally connect with your customer.
This brings us to the end of season 2 of my blog. I’ll be back with my next season in the New Year.
This article is part of a series of organic marketing strategies. You can read the full series here.
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