Brief #40: The gratitude edition

Welcome to issue no. 40 of Future of Marketing.

Just wanted to take this opportunity to let you know how grateful we are for you and your continued support. 🙏🏼

This week, we're discussing:

Internal influencers (with examples)
The psychology of shopping and social media
How eBay built its marketplace around community

Build culture with content

Employee-generated content (EGC) is making strides partly because producing content from home is now the norm. But instead of telling you what EGC is and how you can use it to build your internal culture – we will show you.

First, we asked our team to share what they're grateful for, their favorite recipes, and Thanksgiving memes. Then, we created a landing page using TrueLoyal Experience Builder to house this content.

This is the result so far.

Our VP of Customer Success even offered hashtag variations (hello internal feedback) to help categorize our content.
And no – hashtags aren't dead.

💡 Notice that we're re-sharing EGC (content created by employees) within this newsletter to facilitate *our* content production. Collaborating with internal influencers is something you can do, too.

Example #2: We filmed our team eating the hottest chip in the world via Zoom and compiled their reactions into this video for social media.

It looks like it went... well. 😅

Watch their reactions here. It looks like it went... well. 😅

You can read more about the #OneChipChallenge by Paqui (our recent Brand Crush) here. We gushed all about it.

Quantitative versus qualitative

Instagram added shopping features – but have you noticed they added the 'shop' button right where your 'activity' button used to be? 🧐

“It's in the nature of social apps to try to capture more of their users' behavior in dedicated features — whether that behavior is already happening in the app or not.”

The Verge

The thing is...

Giving users (or customers) a great experience means more than understanding quantitative data – it takes qualitative, too. Asking questions, collecting feedback, testimonials.
Sure, Instagram's data likely showed that its users crave the instant gratification that comes from likes and comments (and replaced this with a shop button) — but not all users were happy about the change…

You may be surprised to find out your customer's expectations are different than your assumptions by simply asking what they want to see from you.

And with Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming up, it's likely we'll uncover new shopping behaviors. Might be worth paying attention.

What we're learning

6 ways brands can use UGC for Black Friday promos [Social Media Today]
Some DTC brands are using SMS texting for Black Friday [Digiday]
A lesson in how *NOT* to respond to engaging UGC [AgAge]
Complete our UGC survey and we'll donate $5 to a good cause [Survey]
Upcoming Webinar: TrueLoyal and Searchspring are talking eCommerce trends post-holidays [TrueLoyal]
Webinar Recap: TrueLoyal and Hootsuite discussed 2021 social media trends [LinkedIn]

#brandcrush: eBay 💘

Each week in #brandcrush, we highlight exceptional brands that are channeling their customers' voice to connect more authentically with their audience.

eBay built its entire brand with community as its core.

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, eBay created this captivating webpage to share stories and experiences by people who use its platform to power their business, fulfill their passions, and give back.

On the webpage, eBay shared this video – which ends with a heartfelt message from eBay's CEO (hint: that's EGC).

eBay is also re-sharing user-generated content (UGC) in a web-embedded gallery by TrueLoyal – capturing unique experiences and relationships created through the global marketplace directly on its site.