Herbalife Nutrition Automates UGC Management and Engages Its Global Community with Stackla

Herbalife Nutrition is a global brand providing high-quality nutrition products available exclusively through independent full and part-time distributors who are building small businesses in their communities in 95 markets around the world.

Because most of their brand connections happen through the one-on-one relationships distributors have with their customers, Herbalife Nutrition wanted to amplify their stories through various channels.

Making sure they had a wide array of content to accurately reflect the global and diverse group of people who make up their brand was also a priority for Herbalife Nutrition. They recognized the power of sharing their individual stories and perspectives while also needing to be more efficient when producing authentic stories. So, Herbalife Nutrition decided the solution was in empowering and engaging their community with user-generated content (UGC).

Why UGC?

Jessica Burrows, Social Media and Community Engagement Manager at Herbalife Nutrition said, “Knowing the value of authentic storytelling through user-generated content our team was excited to make UGC a larger part of our content distribution strategy. Each distributor or customer story we share helps bring our brand story to life and allows us to build trust within our digital community.

Burrows continued, “The timing of Herbalife Nutrition adopting Stackla was also significant because we were in unique times with COVID-19 restrictions. We were challenged to continue to share engaging high-quality content, without a big production. We were able to utilize Stackla’s platform to source impactful UGC, which helped strengthen our channel’s content and engagement.”

Arlene Garcia, Corporate & Global Social Media, Senior Manager at Herbalife Nutrition, said “Stackla supports our efforts to source more diverse content for awareness campaigns like International Women’s Day and the launch of new Herbalife Nutrition products. We’re getting more quality high-quality content that has resonated with our audiences and increased engagement with our followers.”

The abundance and variety of UGC shared across social networks also helped to expand the diversity on Herbalife Nutrition’s corporate channels (social, website, etc.). Burrows said, “opening up the pool we could source content from geographically and demographically helped us to better reflect the real people who make up this business.”

Why Herbalife Nutrition switched to Stackla

When they first started leveraging UGC, Herbalife Nutrition used TINT as their UGC solution. At the time, their use of UGC was limited to social screens at live distributor events and UGC display grids on websites. But as their UGC aspirations and needs grew, they knew they required a more advanced platform with broader and deeper functionality that could be applied across the different departments of the business (marketing, sales, regional event teams, etc.).

Garcia said, “We needed to capture more content and efficiently categorize that content by specific products, fitness-related content, distributor-related, and so on. We also needed to be able to make that content accessible across our corporate teams. That would not have been sustainable with TINT.

Partnering with Stackla to getting up and running quickly

Like so many other Stackla customers, Burrows thinks of working with us more as a partnership than as just a standard vendor and client relationship. “It feels like a true partnership in my mind. When onboarding and implementing a new tool, it can be daunting without the proper level of support, but Stackla just went above and beyond.”

For Burrows, that meant working with their dedicated customer success manager to set goals, gain a thorough understanding of the platform and keep projects on track—even when everyone is busy.

“Stackla is more robust than people realize, but our customer success manager made sure we had a good handle on it,” Burrows said. “Even times when I had to juggle competing priorities, the Stackla team kept us on track.”

Garcia added, “I’ve worked with a lot of other vendors and I agree, Stackla’s customer success team could not have been better. They’ve provided us with a lot of strategic advice and guidance that’s been indispensable to our team.”

How Stackla helps Herbalife Nutrition categorize, rights manage and publish UGC across their core marketing channels

Knowing that creating custom categories for their UGC was a top priority for Herbalife Nutrition, our team quickly got to work helping them take advantage of Stackla’s Automation Rules.

“Because there is so much content out there about our brand,” Burrows said, “we’re heavily using Stackla’s Automation Rules. It makes it much easier to find, manage and categorize those items automatically without much oversight from our team.”

Herbalife Nutrition has also relied on Stackla’s Rights Management capabilities to ensure all the content they repurpose from their users is approved. So far, they have over 900 pieces of rights-approved UGC.

According to Garcia, “The Stackla rights management process has created a lot more efficiency for our team. We used to have to manually send a document for people to sign. Now, working with our legal team and using rights by response, the process is so much easier and gets us the content we want to use for our marketing a lot faster.”

What are they doing with all this rights-managed content? Herbalife Nutrition uses UGC to keep its social media channels fresh, authentic, and engaging. Regularly posting user-generated visuals from their active customers and distributors helps Herbalife Nutrition grow their social audience and promote their message of good nutrition and a healthy lifestyle.

Realizing how effective UGC can be at telling their brand story, they also showcase this inspiring customer and distributor content on their Herbalife24 Social Hub and Herbalife Nutrition Fitness websites.

“This content resonates with our community and helps to motivate people to stay active and healthy,” Garcia said.

In response to COVID-19, some of Herbalife Nutrition’s independent distributors took it upon themselves to volunteer their time and products, providing nutrition to first responders and their local communities. To help promote these worthy initiatives, Herbalife Nutrition created a video of their generous efforts, using Stackla to source real content from social media.

It’s even been an impactful way for them to show internal teams, as well as investors, how much enthusiasm distributors and customers have for the brand.

Future plans with Stackla

The Herbalife Nutrition team has set a goal of having UGC make up a minimum of 20 percent of their social media content.

Currently, the team encourages the community to create UGC with their promotional hashtags #HerbalifeNutrition, #IamHerbalife Nutrition and #Herbalife24, but they plan to be able to meet their 20 percent goal once they add Direct Uploader forms to their website so people can submit their content directly (and be notified when it’s been published).

As far as other UGC initiatives, Herbalife Nutrition has some big plans in store. They’re already working to adopt more of Stackla’s advanced functionality—increasing their use of our machine learning engine, Co-Pilot, to automatically aggregate and quickly publish the highest quality UGC for their brand. Once they connect Stackla to their Adobe DAM, they’ll continue growing and diversifying their asset library with authentic UGC.

To ensure they’re proactively growing and engaging their community, they plan to start using our social competitions as well as our Organic Influencers tool. With all the new UGC their community will be generating, they’re going to expand their UGC strategy to include paid ad campaigns, email newsletter features and more UGC galleries across their websites—complete with ShopSpots to link content from their community directly to Herbalife Nutrition products.

Knowing how much they plan to tackle their broader UGC goals, Herbalife Nutrition’s team is glad they can rely on Stackla every step of the way.

“Knowing how much UGC is out there can be overwhelming when you don’t have the proper tools in place,” Burrows said. “Having Stackla to help us filter out the noise has been so wonderful. I don’t know where I’d be without it.”