strategy Tag

User-Generated Content is on the Rise

Content for your audience, created by your audience is a huge marketing trend and is a powerful, often unexplored resource for marketers trying to reach younger markets like Millennials and Gen Z. Creating a user-generated content marketing plan involves coming up with innovative ways to encourage your audience to share their own unique content, often by offering them something in return, such as a discount or partnering for a cause.  

Recently, Linx created a monthly social giveaway program for Farmingdale Meat Market, a Long-Island-based butcher shop with a new national e-commerce website. Farmingdale’s social followers were encouraged to share photos of their cooked Farmingdale meats with their own followers in exchange for the chance to win a Farmingdale gift card, resulting in greater social engagement, brand recognition, and customer loyalty (during a pandemic, no less). 

As a whole, user-generated content significantly increases brand engagement, helps SEO, builds loyalty with your customers, drives conversion rates, and according to a recent study by PR Newswire, has the potential to influence the decision to purchase in as many as 90% of shoppers.  

So how can you create user-generated content? 

• Encourage your audience to share photos of your products in exchange for an entry in a giveaway  
• Create branded hashtags for your audience to use in social media posts 
• Develop campaigns your audience buys into, with a shared effort toward a specific cause 
• Leverage both product and service reviews 

If you’re looking for help developing a marketing strategy that includes user-generated content, reach out to Linx today at thinkahead@linx.com. 

Welcome to a Cookieless World

After an unprecedented year that impacted marketing around the world, a new year brings exciting new ways to attract, engage, and delight your audience to drive business growth.  

Today we’re sharing the first part of our new blog series, The Top Marketing Trends You Need to Know. 

Goodbye, Web Cookies

Web cookies are small pieces of data stored on users’ computers by their web browsers, allowing websites to remember information, such as the user’s browsing activity or the items they added to their shopping carts. For many years, cookies have played a vital role in the digital marketing machine by providing key data used in targeting and retargeting audiences at the right time, harvesting data, and improving ad performance. 

Now for the mic drop. From now on, you can expect a cookieless world. Popular browsers like Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox have already blocked third-party cookies, meaning you’ll have to get more creative in your efforts to make up for the loss of valuable data cookies provided. 

So, here’s what you can do: 

• Embrace AdTech in new ways, such as media mix modeling (MMM) 
• Build your own Customer Data Platform (CDP), a process providing long-term control over targeting 
• Be at the forefront of alternative technologies; demand-side platforms are a good start 
• Rely on the data provided by FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet); in many cases, this data is sufficient when combined with robust analytics 
• Educate, test, and train, from the C-Suite down on this issue and new ways to manage targeting 

If you’re looking for help setting a marketing strategy in a cookieless world, reach out to Linx today at thinkahead@linx.com. 

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