As brands adapt to the changing landscape presented by 2020, we've worked to narrow down five core market challenges that brands are currently facing, and ways that UGC and community-driven marketing powered by Pixlee can be used to navigate uncertain circumstances, even as things begin to shift towards normal.

5 Areas Where Pixlee’s Platform Can Be Used to Navigate Today’s Environment

If you’re worried about what comes next, this post is for you. Here are actionable ways we can work together to emerge stronger than before.

1. Scale Content Creation

According to our customers and thought leaders in this space, digital engagement is growing and cost-per-impression prices are decreasing. We believe this is partially due to the sharp rise in desktop traffic. However, we’re also hearing challenges from our customers about their ability to produce content in today’s environment. A challenge before the COVID-19 pandemic, now photoshoots are being canceled and designers are adapting to new workflows and life circumstances.

How Pixlee Helps

Prior to this, Pixlee has hopefully served you well in terms of sourcing, scaling, and tagging your content to move quickly to changing demands. Here are some ways we can continue to help with your growing content needs:  

• Collecting more content – See our guide (Pixlee login required) for collecting content from various sources, ranging from Instagram stories to photos sent to your customer support team, and everything in between. You’ll also find tips and methods to collect employee and influencer content as well.
• Visual search capabilities – Our visual search capabilities help manage and use more content. Test our visual search capabilities to find the content you’re looking for. Additionally, if you share your content calendar with us, we can help you find content that matches. Or if your content calendar is being rewritten, we can help you reshape it to meet new needs.
• Contests – Even if you need fresh content, your community will find a way to participate. Brands like Michaels and Teddy the Dog are hosting contests to not only build engagement but source content in a unique way.

2. Build & Engage Your Digital and Online Community

This is a terrific opportunity in unprecedented times. Companies are shifting to be less brand-out and more community-in. We’re seeing incredible innovation around digital communities. Instagram live is attracting more people to share their lives and fitness companies have found a way to bring a sense of normalcy to their community through online workouts. Now, it’s time to create opportunities for your community to engage back. From a business perspective, investing in your community helps diversify your traffic mix and reduce your dependence and paid traffic.

How Pixlee Helps

Right now, here are some ways brands are using the Pixlee platform to engage their digital community:

• Find and identify micro-influencers who are already customers.
• Create and customize weekly community nurture emails & galleries to upload content and encourage community engagement across all channels.
• Highlight customers on brand Instagram stories.
• Highlight philanthropic work.

3. Using Earned Media to Improve LTV to CAC

Measuring the ROI from Pixlee comes down to two core areas:

• Pixlee helps you increase sales, decrease content cost, and increase customer lifetime value (LTV).
• By integrating your community across your customer journey, Pixlee also decreases the cost of acquiring customers (CAC), decreases payback periods, and improves LTV.

How Pixlee Helps

As we see a lot of brands shift towards more cost-saving strategies and ways of better using and driving earned media, we know it’s important to make sure you’re armed with ways to directly prove ROI from every technology provider you partner with. We know that successful brands are using UGC out of necessity more than ever. If you’re looking for some additional ways to realize more ROI from Pixlee, here are some examples we really like:

• Use UGC in our paid ads and ad landing pages like Morphe has done to improve conversion.
• Email: Post-purchase email, replenishment emails, and complete the look emails.
• Use Pixlee to integrate with your loyalty program to provide rewards for relevant UGC.

4. Improving Gross Margins

Doing more with less is a common theme right now. Brands that are looking to improve profitability and gross margins make Pixlee a core part of their strategy because Pixlee helps improve the performance of their direct channels and help improve the sell-through of high gross-margin products. Pixlee is committed to making your brand look big when you have to cut it to small.

How Pixlee Helps

• Create a unique visual discovery experience for your customers with interactive galleries. We recommend aligning the content filters to merchandise categories to simplify this.
• Build purchase confidence with the combination of ratings and reviews with engaging visuals.
• Highlight specific content and products with pinned and custom-ordered content.

5. Consolidate different tools & spend

Many brands will see pressure to consolidate tools and reduce marketing spend. With Pixlee, we’re proud to help many brands consolidate their UGC, influencer, and community management into one system. We often think of Pixlee at the center of commerce, community and content – our platform positively affects all three areas by reducing content costs and lowering dependency on paid channels altogether.

How Pixlee Helps

We’ve put in the work to make sure Pixlee is a consolidated tool for UGC, influencer, and community management. And as the year progresses, we’re looking towards integrating with more channels – helping you leverage earned media in the absence of paid. Here are a few things we’ve recently helped clients consolidate with Pixlee:

• Influencer management
• Measuring influencer ROI
• Managing social media & community
• Contests and campaigns
• Shoppable Instagram
• Shop the look or look book technology

The Power of People

As perpetual optimists, we feel these challenges inherently breed new opportunities. For example, digital communities are growing as is digital engagement. We’re seeing a whole new generation of innovation from those digital communities, and coincidentally, a reinvigoration of desktop browsing. At the center of all these trends are people, making honest and relatable content that connects us all. Here are some closing thoughts we’d like to share with you:

• Our team has put together a list of helpful resources for this uncertain time. From workout classes from home to work from home must-haves, this list can help, from our team to yours.
• We’ve reallocated resources to help increase our capacity for professional services to support our customers through this time. We’re also doubling up on our offerings around platform training.
• Hiring or know anyone looking for a job? We can help you source talent or find your next move with the top brands in marketing.
• Looking to connect with other marketers to exchange ideas and confront challenges? We’ll connect you!
• We know smaller businesses have been hit especially hard. Check out the Forbes list of small business relief programs to gain support at this time.
• Lastly, if you’re looking to partner with an organization working to spread helpful and positive messages during this time, check out the AdCouncil’s campaign and partnerships around social distancing. We’re part of the leadership council and are collaborating to help spread the message to be #AloneTogether.

If you’re interested in any of these above activities, please reach out to your CSM, or reach out to hi@pixleeteam.com. Now, more than ever, we need community and stories. After all, social distancing doesn’t mean we can’t still build something strong, together