VP of Marketing and Strategy at Linqia, Keith is a leading voice in the intersection of marketing and technology.
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Think about your last experience searching for a restaurant on Yelp or a hotel on TripAdvisor. What pictures did you look at to see how the food or hotel look? More often than not it’s customer photos, not professionally produced photos. The food and travel industries have figured out the extent to which consumers prioritize authentic photos of real-world experiences over advertising, and the consumer goods industry is starting to implement the same best practices in their own shopper journeys.
Brands are increasingly using influencer content on retailer e-commerce product detail pages (PDPs) as a way to showcase their products and engage with potential customers. This is coming to life in three key ways.
1. Above-The-Fold And Below-The-Fold Imagery
Customers engage with images on product detail pages in the carousel and below-the-fold description, both of which are opportunities to show everyday people using your products.
As an example, this page is a great example of influencer content featured in the carousel at the top of the page, as well as the beautiful content below the fold. (Full disclosure: My company executes A+D Tattoo’s influencer marketing campaigns.) These images were created by social media creators as part of an influencer campaign, and they look really professional. Leveraging influencer/creator content for product pages like this can be a big opportunity for brands.
2. Ratings And Reviews
Another way that brands are using influencer content on retailer e-commerce pages is by including influencer reviews and ratings. This can be particularly effective for products that are new to the market, or for products that may be unfamiliar to potential customers. By featuring reviews and ratings from influencers who have already tried the product, brands can give potential customers an idea of what to expect and help them make more informed purchasing decisions. Just make sure a paid review is properly marked as such.
3. Testimonials, Demonstrations And Unboxings
Featuring product demonstrations or unboxing videos can allow influencers to show off the product in action and give potential customers a better sense of how the product works. This can be especially useful for products that may be difficult to explain or demonstrate through traditional product descriptions or images. It’s also worth noting that since Amazon recently released Inspire, short-form video is a great method for delivering this type of message.
When creating content with influencers, don’t forget to expand usage occasions by focusing on tertiary uses of your product. This can be especially effective for products that have multiple uses or that can be incorporated into different types of routines. Mastering your primary use case is obviously the top priority, but the more uses you showcase, the more applications consumers can visualize with your product.
Be sure to leverage influencers to drive traffic to your PDP pages, too, not just create content to use on them. Incorporating links in Stories, Reels, bios and influencer media can all help increase e-commerce traffic. Carting can also be especially effective in driving purchase intent by skipping the PDP page altogether and just adding products directly to the consumer’s cart when they engage with the content.
In terms of measuring the effectiveness of influencer content in driving purchase intent and conversions, there are two primary methods brands are implementing.
Content Scoring
Brands are increasingly adopting scoring technologies, whereby you can load all of your content—influencer, user-generated content (UGC) and brand-produced—into their platform and artificial intelligence (AI) will assign scoring numbers based on the likelihood of the customer being influenced by the content. From personal experience, my company has witnessed how influencer content consistently delivers higher scores than brand-produced content, but feel free to test for yourselves!
Sales Tracking
The obvious conversion tracking method is to observe e-commerce sales data before and after the influencer content has been applied. There are many factors that affect a sale, but if other variables are kept consistent (price, availability, etc.), then analyzing conversion rates (how many people purchased divided by those who visited) before and after will tell a clear impact story.
At the end of the day, influencers are often seen as more relatable than branded advertising, which can make it easier for potential customers to connect with the product and see themselves using it. When customers see that an influencer they follow or a trusted source has already tried the product and had a positive experience, it builds confidence and encourages them to make a purchase.
It’s clear that brands are increasingly applying influencer content on PDP pages to drive conversions, and as the retail platforms make it easier to syndicate influencer content to those pages, this trend will only continue.
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