User-generated content: How customers form opinions

Many forms of user-generated contents (UGC) are used in digital marketing. For example, e-commerce sites, such as Amazon.com, allow customers to post their opinions right below Amazon’s products. There could be both positive and negative reviews regarding the product, but the reviews are helpful for revenue generation. Specifically, a recent study from MarketingSherpa (http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=32170#) showed that customer reviews generated 125% higher conversion rate, 157% longer dwell time (time a customer spends on a website), and 10% increase in organic search traffic. However, some e-commerce sites have fake reviews, a false-marketing technique, and many customers are aware of it.

Original Article by: Augustin Kendall

Link: http://memeburn.com/2012/07/user-generated-content-how-customers-form-opinions/

 

From a customer’s perspective, I somehow trust customer reviews more than advertisements from marketers because I know that the advertisements will only tell me “good things” about a product or service but not “bad things.” I believe that this kind of distrust on marketers also applies to many other customers too. However, from a marketer’s perspective, this is a good opportunity –marketers can now utilize UGCs for advertisement! Since there are many social media available, such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, the marketers can encourage the social media users to generate and share contents that are related to the marketers’ products or services via incentives, such as free coupons or gift-cards. This UGC marketing strategy will not only generate revenue, but also provide an opportunity for a company to understand strengths and weaknesses of its offering products or services.