A Growing Reliance on User-Generated Visual Content
Visual content has become a key part of the purchase journey for a large (and growing) number of consumers. And increasingly, shoppers are specifically seeking out visual content — including photos and videos — from others like them. PowerReviews research found that 88% of consumers specifically look for visuals submitted by other consumers prior to making a purchase.
Consumers seek user-generated photos and videos when shopping for products in a variety of categories. This content is especially important for those industries where you are trying to relate to apparel and health and beauty shoppers. Why? These products are visual in nature, and shoppers want to make sure the items they’re considering have worked well for others like them. For example, a particular pair of pants might work better on some body types than others. Or one type of makeup works especially well for a specific skin tone or type.
Read on to learn how collecting and displaying user-generated visual content helps shoppers make confident, informed purchase decisions — and helps brands and retailers improve their bottom lines.
Visual Content Builds Trust
You work hard to foster trust with your shoppers. And for good reason, consumers are more likely to purchase from brands they trust. Research shows that 65% of shoppers are more likely to trust products that have user-submitted photos or videos in their reviews.
The good news is that collecting and displaying visual content from your shoppers can help you build trust. By displaying photos and videos taken by your customers, you’re adding a layer of authenticity to your site, showing future shoppers that they can trust your products and your brand.
Visual Content Fills in Gaps
When shopping online, consumers actively seek out visual content to gather as much information about a product as possible before making a purchase decision. For example, if you’re a health and beauty retailer like our friends at Ulta that sells a particular bottle of face lotion, your consumer wants to understand qualities such as the scale of the bottle and the texture of the lotion. Or if you’re an apparel brand, your shopper wants to understand what a dress looks like from several different angles.
Baymard research finds that the typical consumer wants to find between three and five images of a product to better understand the product’s features and scale. But most ecommerce websites only provide two images.
User-generated content helps you fill that gap — and provides shoppers with additional product information they need to make decisions. For example, if you’re the beauty retailer I mentioned earlier, your customer might submit a photo of herself holding the lotion bottle — which provides future shoppers with a better idea of how large the tube is. Or if you’re the apparel brand, you can display images from several of your shoppers wearing the same dress — all taken at different angles.
Visual Content Boosts Consumer Confidence
Consumers trust others like them. So seeing photos of other people using your products in “real life” is a great way to boost customer confidence. This is especially true when consumers are buying products that are visual in nature — including apparel and health and beauty items.
For example, let’s say a shopper is searching for a dress for an upcoming wedding she is attending. She finds a style she likes from Rent the Runway. But the model appears to be quite tall, and the shopper is much shorter. She’s not sure that the length of the dress will work well on someone of her height. Luckily, the product detail page has a gallery of images of other consumers wearing the dress. She clicks around and finds a photo of someone with a similar body type to hers — and the dress length looks great, especially paired with a cardigan from your website. Confidently, the shopper adds both the dress and the cardigan to her online shopping cart.
Visual Content Boosts Conversion
Collecting and displaying user-generated visual content is a win-win for consumers and businesses alike. User-submitted photos and videos provide shoppers with the information they need to make confident purchase decisions. And this content also improves your bottom line — by boosting traffic, conversion and sales on your product pages.
In the PowerReviews network, we’ve found that when a product adds at least one user-generated image, that product experiences an 18% average lift in traffic and a 69% average lift in conversion, compared to a product without this content.
Start Collecting More Visual Content
User-generated photos and videos play a large — and growing — role in the path to purchase. Now is the time to start collecting more of the visual content your shoppers are actively seeking out — or risk losing them to a competitor that does.
Current PowerReviews customer? Contact your Client Success Director to learn ways you can start collecting and displaying more visual content.
Not yet a PowerReviews customer? Contact us to schedule a demo today!
How to be successful when collecting content from your shoppers on Instagram
We know that 88% of consumers specifically look for visuals — such as photos or videos — submitted by other consumers prior to making a purchase.
And a simple way to generate more user-generated visual content for your site (and other marketing materials) is to gather it from where it’s already being shared and posted by your customers — on Instagram.
In this guide, you’ll find best practices for each stage of your social collection campaign.
Providing scale, targeting, social media integration and syndication to leading brands and retailers
CHICAGO – July 11, 2018 – PowerReviews, a global technology leader in reviews and user-generated social content to more than 1,000 brands and retailers, today announced the acquisition of BzzAgent from dunnhumby. BzzAgent is a leading product sampling and influencer marketing company with more than 15 years of experience working with the world’s largest brands.
Sampling to a Million, Syndicating to One Billion
The acquisition builds on PowerReviews’ success of blending product sampling with review syndication for greater scale to PowerReviews clients. PowerReviews is the only company to offer a seamless solution for clients to target the right audience from a database of one million consumers, and then distribute samples, collect reviews, and syndicate content across the PowerReviews Open Network. This enables brands to reach more than one billion active shoppers monthly across hundreds of the largest e-commerce retailers in the world. As brands seek to optimize their presence on the “digital shelf,” having reviews, Q&A and user-generated social content is a proven best practice that drives results.
PowerReviews will offer targeting based on geographic, demographic, and lifestyle interests across the U.S., U.K., and Canada.
The Rise and Connection to Everyday Social Influencers
At the heart of this acquisition is PowerReviews’ commitment to amplifying the voice of real people who enjoy sharing their recommendations through expressive content. Everyday influencers are different from celebrity influencers and online personalities in such that everyday influencers provide the most relevant content possible to consumers who trust the opinions of others and rely on this content to make informed purchasing decisions.
This acquisition further amplifies the consumer voice by syndicating their reviews directly to e-commerce sites of major retailers, helping guide the purchase decisions of millions of fellow shoppers.
Social Media Integration
In addition to the scale, targeting and expanded syndication benefits, the BzzAgent acquisition complements the recent launch of the PowerReviews’ Social Suite. PowerReviews clients can now amplify the impact of sampling by asking consumers to share their reviews on social media and have these reviews shown directly on brand and retailer e-commerce sites.
“These new features give brands and retailers a turnkey solution for increasing review coverage and tapping into the power of the everyday social influencer across the customer journey,” said Matt Moog, Chief Executive Officer at PowerReviews. “Brands can now leverage a larger number of pre-qualified reviewers to syndicate reviews and social content to the world’s largest e-commerce retailers, who account for $90 billion in e-commerce sales. We look forward to continuing to innovate on the next-generation of sampling and everyday influencer marketing solutions for brands and retailers everywhere.”
”BzzAgent is one of the early leaders in word-of-mouth marketing — growing a robust network of BzzAgents, and working with some of the world’s leading brands,” said Guillaume Bacuvier, Chief Executive Officer at dunnhumby. “BzzAgent has a lot to offer PowerReviews on its upward trajectory.”
PowerReviews has increased the number of sampling campaigns in-market by 5x in the last 12 months and typically drive 85% review response rates or higher. Customers such as iRobot, Hershey’s, Tempur-Pedic and Jet.com choose PowerReviews as their sampling partner to:
- Quickly Collect & Syndicate Reviews: Sampling provides a fast path to optimal review coverage by allowing brands to distribute product samples and collect reviews for syndication to retail partner sites across the PowerReviews Open Network.
- Uncover Key Product Insights: Product reviews are rich with insights to help brands improve future iterations, make more informed business decisions and provide better customer experiences.
- Drive Customer Awareness for New Products: Product sampling is used to generate buzz around new product launches and build buyer confidence in products with few reviews by increasing review coverage. A PowerReviews study found that 45% of shoppers will turn to a search engine if there are no reviews or user-generated images or videos for a product on a brand or retailer site.
About PowerReviews
PowerReviews works with more than 1,000 global brands and retailers to collect and syndicate user-generated content and feedback such as reviews, Q&A, images, video and more. Content is syndicated across The PowerReviews Open Network reaching more than one billion in-market shoppers every month at the right time and place. User-generated content gives shoppers confidence to make purchases and delivers actionable insights to brands and retailers to drive more traffic, increase sales and improve products and services. To learn more, visit www.powerreviews.com.
About dunnhumby
dunnhumby is the global leader in Customer Data Science, empowering businesses everywhere to compete and thrive in the modern data-driven economy. Our mission: to enable businesses to grow and reimagine themselves by becoming advocates and champions for their Customers.
The dunnhumby Customer Science Platform is our unique mix of technology, software and consulting enabling businesses to increase revenue and profits by delivering exceptional experiences for their Customers – in-store, offline and online. dunnhumby employs over 2,000 experts in offices throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas working for transformative, iconic brands such as Tesco, Coca-Cola, Meijer, Procter & Gamble, and L’Oreal. Learn more at http://www.dunnhumby.com.
CHICAGO – July 12, 2018 – PowerReviews, a global technology leader in reviews and user-generated social content to more than 1,000 brands and retailers, today announced the availability of a new product line called the PowerReviews Social Suite which ensures fast collection, management, display and sharing of user-generated images and videos from social platforms and supplements the visual content already collected natively through the PowerReviews platform.
The PowerReviews Social Suite leverages the power of Instagram to enable brands and retailers to collect images and videos associated with hashtags and mentions. Additionally, PowerReviews enables consumers to quickly and easily upload visual content from their Facebook and Instagram accounts with their reviews. Brands and retailers are able to activate the Social Suite with minimal effort, with no new feeds or code required to gain access to billions of consumers active on the world’s leading social media platforms.
“More and more consumers are making purchasing decisions based on feedback from other shoppers. Ratings and reviews are the top consideration for consumers making a purchase, and visual content is an important part of this feedback,” said Sara Rossio, Chief Product Officer at PowerReviews. In fact, “Our survey of more than 1,000 American consumers shows 88% of shoppers want to see user-submitted images and videos when making an online purchase.”
This announcement follows PowerReviews’ recent acquisition of BzzAgent, a leading product sampling and influencer marketing company with more than 15 years of experience working with the world’s largest brands. Paired with the PowerReviews Social Suite, this acquisition positions PowerReviews as the only company to offer a turnkey solution for brands and retailers to target an audience, distribute samples, collect reviews and then syndicate content to e-commerce sites across the PowerReviews Open Network.
PowerReviews clients using the Social Suite have access to fully integrated features including:
- Content Collection: Import images, videos and boomerangs posted by consumers on Instagram, moderate content, request content rights and match visual content to products, all seamlessly and directly in the PowerReviews platform.
- Content Display: Display all visual content collected from the PowerReviews Social Suite alongside the natively collected photos and videos in the Visual Content Gallery on the product display page.
- Content Syndication: Share visual content, ratings and reviews, questions and answers to a vast syndication network of top retailer sites, reaching one billion online shoppers.
- Reporting & Analytics: Track content collected and gain insight into shopper sentiment through PowerReviews’ advanced reporting tools to enhance products and the shopping experience..
PowerReviews developed portions of the Social Suite through a partnership with Wyng, demonstrating an ongoing commitment to operating an open platform that integrates best-in-class technologies to the benefit of brands and retailers. Wyng has worked with agencies and brands since 2011 to power social campaigns.
About PowerReviews
PowerReviews works with more than 1,000 global brands and retailers to collect and syndicate user-generated content and feedback such as reviews, Q&A, images, video and more. Content is syndicated across The PowerReviews Open Network reaching more than one billion in-market shoppers every month at the right time and place. User-generated content gives shoppers confidence to make purchases and delivers actionable insights to brands and retailers to drive more traffic, increase sales and improve products and services. To learn more, visit www.powerreviews.com.
