Attention last-minute gift givers of the world: Mother’s Day is on the horizon! For us marketers, Mother’s Day isn’t just a single Sunday – it’s a weeks (sometimes months) long affair! In fact, 70% of Mother’s Day-focused online activity happens the week before Mother’s Day. This means that for brands that want to capture their piece of the $23.6 billion spent annually on the Moms of the world, any campaign efforts needs to be launched no later than 7 to 10 days before the big day.

When it comes to Mother’s Day, focusing on your online social efforts can be the key to increasing revenue. Online shoppers spend 38% more on Mother’s Day than their offline counterparts. For brands that want to capitalize on this spending trend, we recommend that brands use their SocialToaster program to solicit, curate and distribute Mother’s Day-themed user-generated content (UGC).

Here’s why.

Why User-Generated Content For Mother’s Day?

According to a Nielsen study, 92% of consumers trust online content generated by family members and friends more than any other type of brand messaging. This trust has a direct impact in the level at which your target demographic engages with the shared message. UGC posts claim a 28% higher engagement rate than a standard post. They’re also twice as likely to be shared than posts published to a brand platform.

With a SocialToaster program, your advocates are already sharing your blog posts, sales info, and product announcements; by using your advocates to also create UGC for you, you double-down on their trust-building magic. The more Superfans you have creating UGC, the greater your opportunity to reach a wider audience with a more trusted message.

SocialToaster lets you leverage your fanbase to share your Mother’s Day messaging without having to pay a dime for pay-per-click advertising.

Structuring Your UGC Efforts Through An Advocacy Marketing Program

Call us biased, but we recommend structuring your UGC efforts through a SocialToaster program.

A program built on the SocialToaster platform makes it easy for you to manage all aspects of a UGC campaign including:

• Building awareness of the UGC campaign
• Awarding points or rewards for participating
• Curating content to ensure all published posts meet brand standards
• Turning UGC into shareable content, taking the best posts and having your advocates share it in real time

3 Ways To Encourage Your Advocates To Create UGC Via The SocialToaster Platform

There are an infinite number of opportunities to encourage your SocialToaster advocates to create UGC to support your Mother’s Day efforts. Here are our three favorite:

1) Host An Instagram Contest

Instagram contests are a great way to encourage your SocialToaster advocates to create UGC. Start by deciding what specific action you want to center your contest around. Determine what the specific picture you’d like your advocates to submit. Do you want them to take a selfie with their Mom? Or show off how they’re celebrating?

Whatever you ask, just remember to keep it simple. The more complex the entry requirements, the less overall content you’re going to receive.

You’ll also want to create a unique, branded hashtag (ideally tied to Mother’s Day) that your advocates can use to tag their UGC. Not only is the inclusion of a hashtag a common official contest entry method, but the hashtag is also what you’ll use to view all submitted pieces.

Be sure to incentivize the contest with a prize that relates to both your target demographic and the ask. Typically, the better the prizing the greater the response. If you’re focused on attracting true brand fans consider using brand-related product for your prizing. Likewise, if you want to focus your UGC efforts on attracting a new audience to your brand, elect to use more general prizing that can excite a user who is not yet familiar with your brand or products.

SocialToaster makes it easy to approve UGC posts from right within our app by automatically pulling in Instagram pictures that use the designated hashtag. Once pulled into the platform, you’ll be able to curate the content, assign rewards, and even designate the post as content your advocates can share to their network.

2) Create A Branded Mother’s Day Board On Pinterest & Use Your Advocates To Populate It

Pinterest has more than 150 million active users each month. From gift ideas to delicious recipes, Pinterest users upload thousands of pins every day. Leverage this content curation platform to your advantage by creating and managing a specific Mother’s Day board that fits your target demographic. Seed the board with a handful of carefully selected pins, including a few product or brand-related images.

Once the board has been started, use the full power of your advocacy marketing program to encourage your audience (and your audience’s audience), to add to the board. Whether it’s repinning their favorite pins or creating brand new pins on your behalf, the finished product will be a Pinterest board created (for the most part) by your fans. As the campaign progresses, encourage your advocates to repin their favorite pin to other boards across Pinterest.

As with the Instagram contest, you can structure incentives around your Pinterest efforts, awarding prizes for the specific actions your SocialToaster advocates take.

3) Use Our Built-In Survey Tool To Capture Compelling Stories From Your Audience

UGC doesn’t always have to be visual. You can also lean on your advocates to create written content for your brand by using SocialToaster’s built-in survey tool. Our survey tool not only makes it easy for your team to create and disseminate your content ask, it also allows you to easily reward advocates that take the time to share their story.

Decide what prompt you want to give your advocates. Do you want them to share a favorite Mother’s Day memory or perhaps a time when mom’s perfect plan didn’t quite go according to plan? Whatever the story you want to capture, again, remember to keep the request simple. Also, when asking for submissions, be sure to indicate that by submitting their story, an advocate has given you their permission to share it later.

Very few advocates are going to write your next blog post word for word, but most are more than willing to write a handful of sentences for you – especially if they are excited by the prompt.

Once your advocates have shared their story, repurpose these short snippets and use your SocialToaster Superfans to share your favorites through your advocacy marketing program. Whether you’re tugging on emotional heartstrings or giving everyone a much-needed Mother’s Day laugh, keep the stories being shared authentic to the user who wrote them.

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From sharing images and video to creating pins and written stories, SocialToaster has the tools you need to make this Mother’s Day one for the record books.

Ready to start leveraging the creative power (and social network size) of your biggest fans with SocialToaster? Give us a call today and schedule your free consultation.