Nykaa's UGC platform Nykaa Network crosses one million subscribers

As user-generated content remains one of the biggest drivers of  Nykaa’s content marketing strategy, the brand announced that its online interactive beauty platform, Nykaa Network now has about one million subscribers.  Starting with less than 10,000 subscribers less than a year ago, the forum has grown organically, powered entirely by user-generated content, while simultaneously allowing users exclusive interactions with beauty brands, industry experts, and fellow beauty buffs.

On an average 40,000 active weekly users engage on the Nykaa Network. Expert Lives on the platform see traffic of 20,000 users in a span of just two hours. At present, the platform has over 1,00,000 answers to 50,000 questions. Incentives such as interactive contests, rewards, surprise giveaways and pinning popular user posts on the feed are some of the engagement tactics to boost stickiness for this burgeoning community.

Madhavi Irani

“A common mistake many brands make is to assume and not ask what their audiences want to consume and engage with. To this end, we strive to give our consumers hyper-personalised content by communicating with them constantly through touchpoints at every stage of the consumption funnel from awareness to purchase. While talking to your audience is important, creating a space for them to talk back - express their queries, concerns and opinions - is what will set your brand apart and ultimately build brand loyalty,” said Madhavi Irani, Chief Officer – Content.

“Consumers today spent up to five hours daily on UGC and almost 90% of online shoppers rely on online reviews to make a purchase. Today on the Nykaa Network there are over 5,000 monthly organic brand mentions by beauty buffs by way of product recommendations to beauty queries of fellow users, and this is a classic example of brand loyalists becoming brand advocates,” added Irani.

Nykaa.com gets a monthly average of approximately 20,000 questions from its customers across its product pages on the site. A vast majority of products listed on the site have customer reviews (both textual and image-based). Taking this one step ahead, the Beauty Book Home Page has been customised to allow ongoing customer engagement via comment boxes, social sharing and other such CTAs. Weekly AMAs (Ask Me Anything) sessions on the Beauty Book Instagram social handle, field live queries (over 150 within an hour) on a variety of topics.

“By piggybacking on the UGC trend that isn’t just a marketing buzzword any more, we’ve put our customers front and centre, catering to their needs and staying authentic by using their voice to do our marketing for us, thereby creating a community of loyalists that has helped make our content marketing strategy an overall success”, said Irani.

User-generated content (UGC) has long been pegged as the next big thing in online marketing. Citizen journalism that completely disrupted the news journalism model started out on social networking sites like FB and Twitter. Today, brands are going down the same path using UGC as a mode to communicate and connect with their audience using the user’s voice and their word-of-mouth referrals to come across as friendlier, more relatable and more honest.