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- The Weekly Sharpener #132
👋 Hey fam!
I'm really excited to share this 👊 Wednesday roundup with you!
Another Add Creative is out and you're for 🌶. Excited for you to spend some time learning from Joe Marston (Co-Founder of SOAR With Us & For You Advertising) who joins us and shares his strategies on building killer ops and sales.
We also dive into the evolution and or death of user-generated content and where it might be going.
Finally, we get a new social proof badge hack and a style of creative that can increase your thumb stop rate.
Hope your ads are scaling and LTV is 📈!
Cheers,
Chase
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The individual visual elements within an ad are the single least tracked thing in the entire DTC industry… They’re also the only thing standing between you and the sale.
Don’t just track metric performance.
Track design performance.
Courtesy of Sarah Levinger
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Come and hang with Joe Marston and learn about sales, operations, and UGC for agency business serving DTC brands. He’s incredibly thoughtful and tactical.
I found myself taking notes when I listened to this episode again, I hope you have a pen and notepad ready!
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Content That Matters 🐐
UGC is pretty much dead
— Daniel Okon (@thedanielokon)
May 17, 2023
Why it matters: It’s not dead but it has lost its teeth as the “art form” has become ubiquitous.
What is UGC —> User Generated Content
This is when your customer posts or send a testimonial about their experience with your brand, that can then be used to create ads or other brand collateral to drive more sales through leveraging their authenticity.
This tactic has been around for years. However in paid social it has risen in prominence of the last 3-4 years.
There are a few subsets of this style of content we should all be aware of before proceeding:
User Generated Content
Creator Generated Content (most prevalent today)
Brand Generated Contant
AI Generated Content (my favorite 😈🤖)
STATS ON UGC
72% of customers believe it is more credible when other customers share their experiences rather than brands speak for themselves.
92% of consumers listen to people they know for referrals about products or services they trust.
62% of consumers agree they are more likely to click on ads, social posts, emails, or websites that feature real customers rather than images solely created for advertising by the brand.
Campaigns, including UGC, result in29% higher web conversions than campaigns lacking UGC.
Why do these stats matter if UGC is dead…👇
Every tactic or hack has a season when the performance becomes incredible and it’s optimized.
This is the peak, you start making plans to have this be your entire strategy because you’ve mastered it and it’s scaling your business.
Like every tactic layered on top of a business, it fades.
Why?
The masses read your threads about how successful it’s become.
Technology or service providers crop up that are focused on solving the problem and it becomes harder to stand out.
The tactic is adopted fully by the masses and inevitably it fatigues.
So UGC V1 is dead.
Not dead a tactic but dead a growth tactic.
Remember last year when TikTok was the best thing since sliced bread and facebook was dead?
How has that aged?
UGC isn’t dead, what is - is the version that we see homogenized across every paid social channel is in decay.
What starts moving the needle?
Real customer testimonials that aren’t slick collected by testimonial.io
“Re-enactments” of customer reviews
Actors debating what reviews to trust
These are a few ideas I have off the stop of my head. But UGC isn’t dead, it’s evolving. We just haven’t seen one of those evolutions take shape.
Expert Strategy + Learnings
Some amazing learnings from thought leaders in DTC.
Dylan's CRO Tips 🙌
Recently added an "as seen on tiktok" badge to a website that had a viral tiktok video a year or two ago. The brand doesn't even push tiktok traffic but CVR skyrocketed .
Interesting form of social proof.
For more 🔥 follow Dylan Ander.
Rahul's Paid Media Learnings 🤘
Color plays such a big factor in your ads.
Catch someones attention with bright colours
Push how your product will help the customer
One thing I would change about this is maybe adding a headline that speaks directly to an audience segment.
Follow Rahul and reach out to Reach Digital to work with him 🧠
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