Complete Review of Stackla Visual Content Platform

Ready for a Stackla Review?

Here’s my full review of Stackla and how it can help you boost your business.

What Does Stackla Do?

At its core, Stackla is a product designed to promote a brand’s user-generated content. Beyond that, it acts as a complete digital asset manager, where you can store all of your owned, paid, and earned media in one centralized location. And like many social scheduling tools, Stackla allows you to publish from the platform. Unlike other tools, it comes with an in-publishing suite that lets you publish across multiple customer touchpoints – including email, web, advertising, social commerce, etc. – right through Stackla.

Another thing that sets Stackla apart is that it’s designed for Enterprise level use. As Stackla itself claims, “Stackla is the only user-generated content (UGC) platform that enables marketers to produce personalized experiences with authentic customer content while providing the security, scalability and flexibility enterprise IT teams require.” And there seems to be a lot of truth to the claim, which is why brands like McDonalds, Nintendo, Ford, Heineken, and Sony all signed on to work with Stackla.

Major Benefits of Stackla

Stackla comes with a lot of pro’s that we’ll cover shortly, but here’s a rundown of what Stackla does best:

• Displays authentic, user-generated content anywhere your customers are
• Features an enterprise level platform so you can scale your success accordingly
• Leverage authentic user-generated recommendations throughout customer touchpoints
• Display content on websites with customizable widgets
• Use UGC at crucial points in the sale to increase conversions
• Use across multiple platforms – advertising, social media, email, etc.
• Excellent customer service that will walk you through each process set up and campaign

Discover and Curate User-Generated Content With Stackla

With Stackla, it separates the process and features into three areas:

1. Discover

To use user-generated content effectively, you have to be able to find it first. Stackla helps brands discover content pointed at them from over 25 sources, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, as well as blogs and data feeds. You can choose to search for this content by keyword or hashtag. Or, if location is important, you can drop a pin and Stackla will pull all the content posted within that given radius. You can also filter searches by geo boundaries, verified status, follower count, NSFW, and competitor mentions to makes sure you’re finding only what’s most relevant to your business. The big pro here is that being able to tag content in multiple ways and filters creates the ability to use UGC to highlight different areas and components of a business. So if you want to specifically find influencer content to promote, you can do so, while also focusing on content in a specific location to promote locally. It will also help you pinpoint what kind of UGC is being shared with your brand the most, allowing you to incorporate strategies tailored to that content in your marketing strategies.

2. Curation

Stackla uses AI-powered Co-Pilot to help brands make efficient and accurate content choices. It works like this: Based on the content you make in the discover phase as well as audience interactions over time, Co-Pilot will make suggestions which content you should publish, categorize, or request the rights for. Once you’ve collected some content to work with, you can set up a workspace in Stackla to keep things organize. For example, you can filter your content by source, media type, sentiment, etc. as well as automate repetitive tasks and content scheduling. Another great feature? Stackla’s visual recognition will automatically identify over 11,000 objects, scenes, events, and emotions and plugin tags and metadata.

That way, when you need a piece of UGC that showcases a mall or shopping bags, you can simply search for it. The best part? You didn’t have to tag it yourself in the first place – Stackla did it for you.

3. Manage Content Rights

User-generated content can get complicated, fast. Because maybe you’ve come across that perfect piece of UGC, but to use it in advertising or without attribution, you need to gain rights to it. For example, say you run a home furnishings business. If someone runs a picture of their home and tags or includes a hashtag of your business, you still need to get permission to use that photo in your own content. So Stackla makes it easier with their rights management workflows. These allow you to reach out to users, either by hashtag or form, and request rights to their content.

How Brands Can Use Stackla

The major areas that Stackla can help are:

• Websites
• Advertising
• Email
• Social Commerce

Better Websites With Stackla

Use Stackla to power widgets on your website. These dynamic galleries can be powered by Instagram photos from around the web to help add social proof to your website and provide a visually engaging experience. Or, they can power your entire store. Travel agency VisitScotland used Stackla to create physical travel agency. But instead of magazines or brochures, visitors would be find entire walls dedicated to the user-generated content of #ScotSpirit Instagram posts. Just like a brochure, content can be segmented by region, history, food and drinks, etc. When a customer selected their favorite photos, staff could use them to build an itinerary based on their interests. Obviously, this can be done a much smaller scale. Imagine just a page of your website dedicated to Instagram widgets, where users could select one and be directed to more related information. It’s a pretty cool idea, and it’s possible with Stackla. Advertising With Stackla Stackla helps with advertising by removing stock images and replacing them with real time, rights-approved UGC. For example, if you want to retarget those who abandoned their shopping carts, you could use Stackla to serve them an ad featuring the very product they abandoned, being used by a real customer. Or, use it like Toyota did to boost Facebook ad engagement. With their Feeling the Street campaign, Toyota used Stackla to power their Facebook ads with user-generated content from street musicians around the world. So Stackla pulled photos with the hashtag #feelthestreets to use in the ads.

Toyota’s goal? To increase engagement 300% without increasing overall ad spend. The results? Mind-blowing. Toyota saw an increase in ad engagement of 440%. The power of UGC in ads in undeniable and Stackla clearly has a leg up in that arena. Beyond ad deliver, Stackla can help brands build relevant audiences through its data capture capabilities, so you’re targeting the most qualified users.

Better Email Marketing With Stackla

It’s no secret that email’s one of the best tools at a marketer’s disposal. Using Stackla can take that tool up a notch. UGC in emails is proven to boost click-through rates and reduce unsubscribes by providing recipients with relatable images from customers like them. Of course, that’s where Stackla comes in. Stackla works with any email platform by providing embeddable images through a single link, allowing you to include user-generated photos in any of your emails. Smartwatch manufacturer Amazfit used Stackla content to power their emails, and saw an 8% increase in click-through rate, 29% increase in sales, and a 7% growth in their email list.

Stackla for Social Commerce

Buying online comes with a few barriers – one of the biggest being that customers can’t actually see the product in real life. But with Stackla, you can use a catalog of user generated content in conjunction with (or instead of) your traditional stock photos. Add them to your product pages with custom tagging, include them in your CTAs for higher retention, or add custom “ShopSpots” to your photos. These allow users to click on various elements in the photo and be brought to a product description.

Or, do it like shoe manufacturer Wanted did by integrating social content from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram into their product pages. When a customer clicked on a specific product, they would then be shown the professional product photo along with real customer photos of the product. In the end, they increased conversions by 30%.

So, Are There any Cons to Stackla?

So far, Stackla’s seeming pretty great. And honestly, it really is. It consistently returns high star ratings on the majority of major review platforms, and is praised for its complex content aggregation along with its highly-attentive customer service staff. But of course, nothing comes without its cons. The biggest complaint is that with so many features, the platform can be somewhat difficult to navigate and comes with a learning curve. Luckily, Stackla’s customer service is available to walk you through the process. The other big one? Because Stackla is enterprise level, it may not be well-suited for smaller brands and businesses. It also likely comes with a hefty price tag. The pricing isn’t stated on the website, which likely translates to expensive. But for bigger brands that can afford the cost, Stackla will definitely pay off.

Wrapping Up Stackla Review

Stackla is certainly one of the leaders when it comes to discovery and curation of user-generated content. With a track record of multiple successes, it’s well worth a try.