5 Ways To Market To The Selfie Society

The best and most seamless way to connect with customers has never been more personal.

In the 1960s, if you told a Don Draper-type executive that customers would eventually become a company’s greatest marketing asset, he likely would’ve fired you before you could sit down and mix a drink. Fast-forward to today, and it has become the reality.

The time when large-scale, traditional advertising campaigns could be the entirety of a marketing strategy is long gone. Now, the best brands realize that connecting on a one-on-one level is integral to driving sales and building customer loyalty. Driving this change home is the fact that 83% of people now trust content shared by peers over branded information, as reported by Nielsen.

The best and most seamless way to connect with customers has never been more personal: Interact with them on social media (and listen as they interact with one another). In an age when President Obama became known for his affinity for selfies—so much that he recently declared a moratorium on selfies at an event—leading brands are encouraging and guiding consumers to share their own selfies and experiences to participate in crafting the brand’s image.

Inspiring customers to create user-generated content (UGC) is particularly important in light of Instagram’s recent algorithm changes. Now, users see content based on relevance rather than in chronological order, meaning compelling content organically generated by users is becoming all the more valuable.

So how do you motivate your audience to create on-brand UGC—and put it to work for your marketing team? Here are five tips any brand can use to inspire, collect, curate, and leverage awesome content:

1. Provide incentives: While it’s nice when users generate social media content about your brand on their own, you can’t count on it. And when it does come in, it may not be exactly what you’re looking for. The best way to ensure the type and quality of UGC you want is to provide incentives for contributions about a specific topic.

This incentive doesn’t need to be expensive to be effective. For example, all the NHL had to do to collect 120,000 pieces of UGC for its #MyPlayoffMoment campaign last year was to offer fans a chance to be featured in the campaign’s video.

2. Choose quality over quantity: On initial review, a campaign that generates 10,000 photos and comments may seem like an unquestioned success. But if none of those photos or thoughts can be used in your campaign, it’s an unquestioned failure.

Focus less on the sheer volume of likes and retweets. Don’t just retweet every picture that uses a campaign’s hashtag. Instead, draw attention to the user submissions that align with your brand’s goals and are produced well. Challenge users to design, produce, and share exceptional content that has real value, then recognize them for their great work.

3. Get permission (and data): You’d be surprised how many campaigns get in trouble by not specifically asking for and securing permission from users to feature their content. There are a number of ways to get this permission, and you should discuss what works best for your company with your legal department.

An upside of this step is that it offers the opportunity to gather data about your contributors. This information can be used for later follow-ups, marketing initiatives, other campaigns, and additional promotional outreach, among other things.

4. Use your UGC: You’ve come up with a great campaign and provided the right incentives, and now you have a wealth of great UGC. What’s next? Use it! Those great photos, tweets, and videos should take center stage in your marketing materials.

For example, cycling studio SoulCycle used UGC collected from its #NoMoExcuses campaign, which targeted male prospects, to populate the community section of its website and featured the best shots to create a visual navigation bar at the top of the gallery. By the end of the month-long campaign, the company saw a 35% increase in male customers.

5. Monitor the results: After each campaign concludes, successful or not, take stock of the results. Determine which incentives worked and which didn’t. Leverage all the customer data you get to segment and target your audience more effectively. Any potential changes you identify now will help shape and improve future campaigns.

Personalized, targeted campaigns using UGC aren’t just the future of marketing; they’re the present. If your company can effectively encourage users to generate great content and make the best use of the content they create, you’ll reach even the most selfie-obsessed customers.