User Generated Content Strategy for E-Commerce
Your customer doesn’t start on your homepage. They meet you on social, spot a post, skim the comments, save a Reel, and tap through when something interest them. Online shopping is second nature now, and expectations are high. They want a smooth path: clear details, real photos, and a checkout that just works. Brands that win remove friction at every step so curiosity becomes confidence and then a cart.
What they can’t do online is pick up the product. That’s why they look for the next best thing: real people using it. Lifestyle imagery and UGC help customers imagine the fit, the finish, and how it works in their routine through try-ons, close-ups, in-home shots, and before-and-afters. Curate that content into product detail pages (PDPs), shoppable galleries, and ads so they can picture your product in their world.
Treat social and site as one story. Track which images, creators, and formats your audience saves, shares, and clicks; answer the questions they ask in comments and DMs; double down on what moves them from browse to buy. Do that consistently, and everyday scrolling will turn into steady growth.
What Is Lifestyle Imagery?
Lifestyle imagery is a type of photography that showcases the use of products in-situation. As the physical sense of shopping is removed, consumers heavily rely on product photography and customer reviews to evaluate purchase decisions. A few more functions of lifestyle imagery:
- Invoke feeling and emotion around products
- Show product scale
- Provide social proof
- Demonstrate product use-cases
Exposure to lifestyle imagery on product pages enables the consumer to more easily ‘see’ themselves using or wearing the product, increasing the likelihood of purchase vs. simply seeing catalog photography.
What Is Catalog Photography?
Catalog photography is the most commonplace style of photography for e-commerce storefronts. Simply put, catalog photography showcases products photographed on a simple white, or light background. This is a necessity for any e-commerce marketing strategy for the following reasons:
- The customer can see the product in a clean, neutral setting
- The brand can clearly articulate exactly what is being sold
- It puts the focus on the product
In order to strike a balance between showcasing your products accurately and marketing in a way that compels consumer emotion, it is important to use a blend of both high-quality catalog and lifestyle imagery. With social media, you can leverage your user generated content strategy to test and learn which types of lifestyle photos make an impact online.
What Is User Generated Content? (UGC)
User-generated content is any type of content-most commonly photos and videos- that have been posted to social media by a user and feature a brand or product. This can often come as a user’s review of a product, or influencers wearing a brand in a lifestyle setting.
Repurposing this type of content on social media can help instill customers’ trust in a brand, allows your fans an opportunity to share how they use your product, and provides a breadth of additional assets to use in your social strategy. When posting UGC on social media, your followers will tell you in real-time what types of content they find the most engaging by liking, sharing, and saving the content for later.
This continual feedback loop can then be used to inform your lifestyle imagery direction, in order to align your e-commerce experience with your audience’s unique tastes.
Aligning Your Content Strategy
It takes more than one touch to convert a customer, and there are many customer touch points to consider. Such as organic and paid social media, display ads, organic and paid search, referrals, and your e-commerce site itself. Thinking of your entire marketing ecosystem holistically is an industry best practice. Social media should not be a siloed effort, as it can act as a great driver of traffic for your website. The way consumers perceive your brand on social media should align with the brand they see when they arrive at your site. There are a few methods to bring these two worlds together.
First, leverage your social media user generated content strategy to gain understanding of what types of imagery to create. Your audience is your resource to understand what they prefer to see, and the creative direction your content strategy should go in.
Second, run your photo shoot through Dash Social’s Vision AI to pinpoint top-performing images and videos. Vision AI delivers real-time predictions based on your audience preferences, so you can select the most engaging content with confidence.
Finally, creating custom on-site galleries of user generated content, top-performing social posts, or lifestyle imagery for each of your unique product pages adds an extra layer of discovery for the customer to fully understand the uses and benefits of your products.
Discover why the best brands choose Dash Social as their partner in social media management, get your demo today.
Updated on October 6, 2025.
