I spent a year working with Sephora to develop a new community strategy.
A major plank of this strategy was integrating authentic community content into the product pages. This includes reviews, photos etc…
If you visit a typical Sephora product page, you now find a page with a lot of community-created content integrated into it.
All that content you see at the bottom (questions and answers, images, and reviews) is community-generated content. It’s managed by the community team.
Community-generated content isn’t like content created by a marketing team or top influencers. It’s not professionally created and refined. It’s raw, authentic, and breeds trust. It showcases real people doing real things and sharing their real opinions. This in turn has a huge impact upon product purchase conversions.
For sure, it’s not easy to do and you often have to corral lots of different technologies to work with one another. But if you can make it work, you’ll find creating genuine, authentic, content which shows up in the buyer journey is an astonishingly powerful benefit of nurturing a brand community.
Note too, that once you have a goal like this, your metrics begin to shift. It’s no longer the level of engagement or participation that matters, it’s the quantity and quality of authentic content which has been created.
