How To Use UGC To Promote Your Christmas Sales
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As most of the work for Christmas marketing happens over the summer months, you may now be turning your attention to your Boxing Day and January sales. This post takes a look at how you can use UGC content to promote post Christmas sales.
What Is User Generated Content?
First of all, I thought it was worth taking a look at exactly what user generated content is. User Generated Content or ‘UGC’ is brand content that is created by the user, or in the case of a business, someone who has purchased their products.
An example of user generated content could be a mum sharing a picture of her newborn baby in a cute baby grow. She tags the brand in her post to let them know how much she loves it. The brand will then reshare the image on their social media with her permission.
This allows potential new customers to see that a previous customer was happy with their purchase and how the products look in a natural environment without lights, cameras and editing etc. If the item is on sale, they could include that in the post eg. ‘Baby James loves his baby grow – shop now for 50% off’
This type of user-generated content can help build brand trust and drive sales.
How To Use UGC To Promote Your Christmas Sales
Create Your Own Hashtag
Creating a hashtag for users to share their purchases is a great way to promote brand loyalty and improve engagement on social media channels.
Creating the right hashtag for your business will require some thought and research. Ideally, you’ll want to avoid using a hashtag that’s been used before or one that might have copyright implications.
You may also want to write the words for your hashtag down to see what they look like when all together. Even if you plan to capitalize each letter, there is no guarantee your patrons will do the same.
There have been some rather questionable hashtags over the years that stood out for all the wrong reasons, which this article from The Guardian explores further.
So, once you’ve created the hashtag, what happens next?
Well, first of all, you’ll need to start advertising it. Add it to your social media channels and marketing material, and it can even be included when you send out products or promotional emails regarding your post Christmas sales.
You could even have a hashtag especially for sharing sale items such as #MyBestBargain or #IShoppedTheSaleAt(insert business name here).
As a bargain hunter myself I know how much people love to show off their bargain purchases. Having your own hashtag means people will be more inclined to share and in turn, more people will see your sale items and hopefully want to make a purchase so they can save money too.
Once customers start using your hashtag, you’ll need to start engaging. Reply and share when your hashtag is used and remember customers may use it without tagging you.
A big part of having social media for your business is dealing with the negative as well as the positive, so make sure you engage with any not so positive comments too. There’s nothing more frustrating as a potential customer than seeing a brand ignoring complaints but engaging with the good stuff!
Run A Photo Sharing Contest
Running contests is a great way to increase engagement on social media and drive sales. Typically people engage better with visual content, so asking your followers to create a photograph or video should help create more of a buzz around your business and any promotions you are running.
However, contests can be a bit of a minefield. You’ll need to keep within the ASA rules for competitions, as well as not breaching the rules of any social media platforms either.
It’s against Facebook’s T&Cs to ask for page likes and shares as a competition entry (source). This is because an individual user’s privacy settings can affect whether you as a business can see that like or share, meaning you could unintentionally not include their entry.
Another thing to consider is how you’ll pick a winner. Choosing someone at random is usually deemed fairest but you can’t just scroll through social media comments with your eyes shut.
There are plenty of websites that offer randomization tools though, such as Random.org where you can generate random numbers and Instagram Comment Picker which will choose a comment at random.
You’ll also need watertight T&Cs of your own which include the end date (you’d be amazed how many competitions don’t include this!).
Keeping all of the above in mind, competitions can drive a huge amount of traffic and social sharing, so they are worth putting the time and effort into getting right.
Create Social Media Posts To Keep Your Audience Informed And Updated
Just sharing a link to your Christmas and Boxing Day sales pages isn’t going to create engagement or drive sales.
You’ll want to go into this with a clear marketing strategy, while keeping everything on brand. These easily editable Boxing Day graphics are a great starting point if graphic design isn’t your strong suit.
Once you’ve added your details to the graphic it can easily be resized for other social platforms, or to add further reductions, discounts, or price changes. You could also add images of your sale products to these templates from PosterMyWall.
Here are some tips for using social media graphics to promote sales:
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- Remember to resize your design as different size graphics are needed for different social media platforms. For example, Instagram graphics should be 1080 x 1080 and Pinterest should be 1000 x 1500px.
- Take advantage of a social media scheduler to post in the evening when engagement will be better.
- Encourage engagement by asking followers to tag their friends ‘Tag a mate who spends too much in the sales!’ – ‘Tag someone who’d love these half-price pyjamas!’
- On Facebook, add your graphic and then add a link to your boxing day sales page so it’s clickable. Add actionable words like ‘Shop the sale here’
- Use lots of hashtags on Instagram – you’re allowed up to thirty per post – use them!
Quizzes and Games
I’ll admit it, I’m an absolute sucker for a quiz. Gamifying both your website and social media can be a great way to increase sales.
There are a few ways you can do this and I’m going to share with you some examples.
Lyrical Host – Find The Bunny – Finding something on a website brings out the competition in all of us but it also encourages users to click lots of pages they might not ordinarily look at. This can lead to sales if something catches their eye.
Pets At Home – Harry Potter House Chart For Pets – I saw this flow chart on Facebook the other day and thought what a brilliant piece of marketing it was. People love Harry Potter. People love their pets. It’s perfectly on-brand for a pet store and saw a huge amount of engagement without the need to be clickbait.
Spin Wheel – Another way to gamify your website is to use a wheel that offers different discount codes. It can be set up to collect email addresses for a mailing list or for the users to share their win on social media.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at UGC and the ways it can benefit your business and help promote post Christmas sales. If you have any other amazing ideas for user generated content I’d love to hear about them in the comments!
