User-Generated Content for Your Beauty or Hair Brand

If you want to double or triple your hair business sales, user-generated content can be what you have been wishing for.

A plain hair website with nothing but products is not going to sell you anything.

People won’t trust you, people won’t buy from you, and people will not engage with the website except when a spark of luck strikes you.

Every joke needs its audience, and you need an audience to keep your hair business afloat. Let me show you how!

Importance of User Generated Content

User-generated content, or UGC, is a form of content created by customers.

It can be photos, videos, reviews, DMs, and post tags.

The key feature of UGC is authenticity, which gets people to trust you enough to make any purchase, build a better conversion rate over time, and benefit from the traffic.

The natural production of this medium helps to set expectations for the real-life conditions the product will be in upon delivery and styling.

And break the usual tone of advertisements that some people’s minds shut down without interaction.

Authenticity and Social Proof

The authentic setup provides social proof that people can relate to and make them trust the process. Because trust building is essential!

A network will emerge of these people. There are some claims that each person has a circle of 250 people in her life.

When word of mouth travels, more positive experiences are shared. Loyalty will be built slowly, and you will be close to a stable base of customers who contribute to your annual income.

People love to share their experiences, which will eventually benefit your business when potential customers start noticing your business.

Not only those prospects, but Google, its search engine, and social media algorithms like TikTok and Instagram. But how do you get more UGC?

How to Encourage UGC for Your Hair Business

The easiest way to get a flow of user-generated content is to install a review app into your Shopify store, an app that facilitates the process and doesn’t cause problems for reviewers.

Loox and Judge.Me is a good example of this app. They help you remind recent customers to share their experiences in a simplified way by uploading photos and videos.

My personal recommendation is to reach out to customers after 2 weeks of the fulfilled order to give them time to unbox and install their new hair extensions.

And to experience them after the first wash at least.

You can encourage them to give pictures and videos using SMS campaigns if they don’t check their emails that much.

And you can go the extra mile with a 10% discount!

A cool way is to include a memo in the packaging with a custom hashtag to let them share and tag on social media.

The key is to get creative with it so they are engaged with something familiar but with a twist.

Contests for UGC

A great way to get the biggest volume of user-generated content is through contests.

‘’The Best Hairstyle of the Month’’

‘’Top Looks of the Year’’

But you will need a bigger boat. Contests are big and require a big reward. So, warm up your pockets for this.

Invite as many people as you can, and let them spread the word for you.

All you’re going to need for this is an app to make the process easier for you and a team to moderate it.

Micro-Influencers

Some beauty influencers cost a ton right now.

It’s not a bad approach to target micro-influencers.

Micro-influencers do fewer campaigns and sound more like us.

You can harvest these natural videos and reach more people if you play your hand right. You can pay in advance or give them a cut in sales.

A way around affiliate marketing is to promote those influencers to the status of brand ambassadors. It has a better sound, and it is longer-lasting.

To run a smooth process, you can make a custom promo code for each influencer and reward them accordingly.

Overall, this can provide a higher ROI (Return on investment) than other ad campaigns from Google Ads and Meta Ads.

3-Pillars of E-Commerce

Traffic, conversion, and margins are the three control knobs and pillars of your e-commerce.

Influencers, UGC, and your SEO efforts will help you to get traffic, but you have to put work into it and be strategic and patient.

But the traffic doesn’t matter without a proper conversion rate.

A reasonable conversion rate for a new hair store is from 0.5% to 1%, and when you’re well-established, a conversion rate of 3% to 4% is very satisfying.

It means you’re getting more of every dollar you pay for your marketing and SEO budget. Eventually, the margins are the way you price your products.

Look for the average in the market for the quality of the hair you provide. You should add more the experience than the price.

So, don’t overthink it, and invest your time and money in the customer experience of people interacting with your website, such as how you can engage them to get a better conversion rate. It will run smoothly from there.

How to Showcase User Generated Content

Don’t get selfish with fame.

Keep posting your customer contributions and make your team look for them across platforms.

Ideally, you should be able to share those UGC pieces in your SMS and email campaigns.

You can feature them on your website and let the contributors get proud and tell their friends when they see themselves on the main page.

Don’t leave them unrewarded, though.

Give your top customers a big discount and let them enroll in your loyalty programs.

At the end of the day, it’s about appreciation and sharing a beautiful experience.