Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Learn how brands in niche industries like drones, financial services, and lingerie are coming up with creative methods to use reviews to drive sales.

When people think about industries that use reviews, their minds tend to two places first:

Restaurants that ask for Yelp endorsements to attract more traffic, or eCommerce stores that display customer testimonials to improve on-site conversion.

But tons of growing industries have started using reviews in innovative, industry-specific ways to attract customers, gain traction, and boost sales....

An infographic by Crowdtap and Ipsos showed how much millennials (individuals born in the 1980s or later) use and trust user-generated content (UGC).

Here are some interesting facts:

-  Millennials trust UGC 50% more than other media. This doesn’t surprise us in the least, and we’ll explore why below.

-  More millennials trust peer reviews (68%) than professional reviews (64%!).Think Wikipedia vs Encyclopædia Britannica. Just because something is ‘professional’ doesn’t mean it’s accurate.

-  UGC influences millennials’ purchasing decisions 20% more than other media. After all, would you still readily buy something after reading a bad review?...

Word of mouth used to be the most valuable form of a referral. With92 percent of consumers trusting the recommendations of family and friends over ads of any kind, brands were scrambling to figure out how to get these referrals. As it turns out, it wasn’t as difficult as they thought. Through user-generated content, consumers are excited to share about brands they love.

User-generated content is media created by users of a good or service. This comes in the form of Instagram posts, Facebook comments, website reviews and blog posts, tweets, and more. Generally, the motivation behind UGC is simply to share your opinion about the brand, product, or service you have consumed....

Experiential marketing is a method of advertising through an interactive experience that gets customers to talk about your business or product. It can be an extremely powerful tool for those companies that want to leave a strong and lasting impression on customers.

It’s a unique take on attracting customers, as it relies heavily on creativity to not only capture attention, but to motivate people to experiment with and refer your products to others.

Costs can be low—this is definitely a guerilla tactic at heart and will rely more on thinking outside the box than shelling out the kind of money that’s required in traditional advertising.

Perhaps it’s easiest to explain the process by highlighting some successful uses of a memorable customer experience as a marketing tactic....