User-generated content (UGC) has immense influence on consumer decision-making. According to Cloudinary’s research, 70% of Gen Z and 78% of Millennial shoppers rely on videos and photos when making purchases. Fifty-eight percent of respondents to Cloudinary’s UGC survey said they are generating content in their reviews.
UGC is an effective way of supplying your customers with the content they crave. It also helps your e-commerce business develop a community-driven, engaging, and authentic brand.
With the help of Cloudinary, you can seamlessly integrate UGC into your e-commerce platforms to create an engaging and memorable shopping experience at scale.
Embracing UGC in your e-commerce strategy empowers your business to foster trust and credibility and increase engagement and conversions. Cloudinary allows you to use UGC at scale successfully and enjoy these numerous benefits.
Ninety-two percent of consumers trust UGC more than traditional advertising, making it an invaluable resource for e-commerce companies looking to stay competitive. But while UGC can drive engagement and sales, it’s difficult to use.
Brands must monitor UGC to avoid facing legal repercussions or negatively affecting their representation. Besides ensuring there’s no malicious or inappropriate content, low-quality UGC also detrimentally affects how potential customers consider your products. For example, images and videos with poor quality and sizing issues make your products less attractive. Some UGC may not match your brand’s image. Low-resolution images or irrelevant material can degrade customer trust in a brand and reduce the overall shopping experience.
When incorporating UGC into their marketing strategy, e-commerce businesses must carefully select and manage UGC to avoid these pitfalls and ensure a positive outcome for their brand and customers.
Cloudinary is a powerful solution that helps e-commerce businesses manage the entire UGC life cycle, ensuring quality and consistency across all platforms. Cloudinary’s UGC solution streamlines UGC collection, curation, and distribution to help you implement UGC at scale.
- Collection and storage. Cloudinary simplifies gathering UGC through seamless and automated workflows, including efficient upload and moderation processes. With customizable upload widgets, brands can provide clear guidelines for users while maintaining an effortless submission experience. Cloudinary’s AI technology also automatically applies tags for easy discoverability and organization.
- Curation. Cloudinary’s dynamic transformations and moderation capabilities ensure that UGC adheres to brand guidelines and maintains uniformity. By fine-tuning saturation, brightness, and contrast levels, e-commerce businesses can create consistent visual content. Cloudinary’s AI technology can also moderate content to remove inappropriate, offensive, or harmful material—ensuring businesses showcase only the most relevant and brand-appropriate UGC.
- Distribution. Cloudinary enables businesses to deliver UGC efficiently across multiple channels by automating the optimization process. Cloudinary’s UGC solution ensures ideal viewing experiences by determining the best display format, quality, and cropping based on the user’s device and browser. This streamlined distribution process also enhances the user experience, improves site performance, and reduces bandwidth consumption.
Cloudinary provides robust tools designed to streamline uploading and managing UGC. Some Cloudinary features empowering you to implement UGC at scale include:
- File Size Management. Cloudinary helps maintain a clutter-free system by allowing you to specify a maximum file size for UGC uploads. Cloudinary automatically downsizes any uploaded assets that exceed this limit, ensuring your UGC assets load quickly.
- Automated Tagging. Cloudinary’s AI technology automatically applies relevant tags to UGC during uploading. This approach enhances discoverability, making it easier for businesses to locate and organize their assets. Example tags include item descriptions, SKU numbers, campaign names, and event types.
- Derivative Creation. Cloudinary enables businesses to generate multiple asset derivatives from a single piece of UGC. This includes creating different sizes, aspect ratios, and formats, therefore optimizing each asset for its intended use. With multiple derivatives of UGC, your business can display content seamlessly across your customers’ various platforms and devices.
Cloudinary employs a state-of-the-art moderation system for handling images and videos. Its advanced AI technology effectively eliminates inappropriate or offensive content from your user-generated content. This ensures that all UGC displayed on your e-commerce platform adheres to your brand standards, fostering a cohesive and positive image for your business.
The AI-driven moderation process from Cloudinary saves time and resources and guarantees a safer and more consistent customer experience. With Cloudinary’s moderation capabilities, you can confidently showcase UGC which contributes positively to your brand’s reputation and customer engagement.
Cloudinary ensures that your UGC meets your brand guidelines and enhances the overall user experience on your e-commerce platform. To achieve this, Cloudinary provides a range of tools for fine-tuning images and videos:
- Saturation, brightness, and contrast adjustments. Cloudinary’s image transformations allow you to automatically adjust the saturation, brightness, and contrast levels of UGC images, ensuring that they seamlessly fit within your established brand aesthetic.
- Noise cancellation for videos. High-quality video content is vital for user engagement. Cloudinary’s video transformations offer a noise cancellation feature that removes background noise from UGC videos. This ensures that your UGC videos appear polished and professional and won’t don’t disrupt other site content.
With Cloudinary’s visual improvement capabilities, e-commerce businesses can elevate their UGC quality, creating a more enjoyable and appealing browsing experience for customers.
Protecting your e-commerce platform and users from malicious content is a top priority for any business. Perception Point’s Malware Detection add-on addresses this by serving processed assets instead of the original files.
By processing all assets, Cloudinary removes any traces of harmful content or embedded code before they reach your users. This precautionary measure not only safeguards your website but also maintains the trust and confidence of your customers.
To deliver UGC that maximizes user engagement and satisfaction, Cloudinary offers auto-formatting capabilities that enhance the viewing experience for your customers. Cloudinary optimizes how it displays UGC through:
- Auto-Cropping. Cloudinary’s auto-cropping feature ensures that the most relevant part of the asset is in focus regardless of the device or screen size. This feature guarantees an engaging customer experience.
- Optimal Format Selection. Cloudinary automatically determines the best display format for UGC based on the user’s browser. Optimal format selection ensures that it delivers images and videos in the most compatible and efficient format for an optimal user experience.
One key benefit of using Cloudinary to manage UGC is your significant time savings. By automating various aspects of the UGC workflow, Cloudinary ensures that your e-commerce platform always has fresh and engaging content readily available. With Cloudinary, you can keep your site vibrant and up-to-date.
With Cloudinary’s comprehensive suite of tools, you can collect, moderate, fine-tune, and distribute UGC with minimal manual intervention. Cloudinary’s streamlined process eliminates spending countless hours processing and adjusting user-generated content for distribution.
By automating tasks like resizing, formatting, and optimizing assets, Cloudinary frees up valuable time for your team to focus on other essential aspects of your e-commerce business.
User-generated content has become an essential element of successful e-commerce businesses. UGC builds trust, stimulates engagement, and gives customers a sense of authenticity they value. An efficient solution that manages, optimizes, and distributes content while adhering to brand standards will help you realize UGC’s potential.
Cloudinary is the ideal partner for e-commerce businesses seeking to maximize the advantages of UGC. With its advanced features and automation capabilities, Cloudinary ensures you can collect, moderate, fine-tune, and deliver UGC with precision while saving time and resources.
Sign up for a free trial of Cloudinary today and take your UGC strategy to new heights.
