How to Utilize User-Generated Content in Your Marketing Strategy
Utilizing UGC in your strategy is extremely important, and here's why:
- 90% of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding on a brand they'll support, and 60% believe UGC is the most authentic.
- 79% of consumers say that UGC influences their purchasing decisions.
- And over 56% of consumers would give the brand permission to use its content in its marketing.
User-generated content is the new norm for marketing teams.
And because of this, in this article, we'll be taking you through the idea and application of a user-generated content strategy.
We'll be showing you exactly how you can utilize UGC in your strategy to improve your company's success and change how customers view your business.
Let's get to it:
In Summary: User-Generated Content & Your Marketing Strategy
Well, user-generated content is marketing material that users have generated.
It's content that consumers have posted on social media channels. Some user-generated content examples include pictures or videos or content in the form of reviews or ratings. It might also include comments that they make on your blog or social media content.
You can use this content to help promote your products or services.
The primary reason this content is so effective is this:
Because of the internet, consumers are savvy, so they're not just going to believe your word.
UGC helps establish trust between your business and the customer. Consumers trust content created by other consumers. These are people they don't consider biased or manipulative.
But before you even start compiling UGC, you must first understand your target audience. Ask yourself these questions:
- Who are you trying to reach, and why them?
- What needs, wants, and interests do they have?
- How can UGC help them engage with those needs, wants, and interests?
Once you've determined this, all that's left is compiling UGC. This means that you'll need to incentivize your customers to make UGC. Some ideas for this include:
- Offering free products or services for the user that creates the best content.
- Offering discounts for customers who submit content to the company for use later on social media.
- Creating fun and engaging social media games with your customers. You could make a post requesting that users share their most interesting stories while at your establishment.
Of course, you'll also need to establish rules for content submissions.
You'll also need to add the correct attributions for UGC and determine where you will use this content. Some ideas of great platforms to use include:
- Facebook,
- Instagram,
- Twitter,
- TikTok,
- and YouTube.
You'll need to integrate UGC into your strategy and consider how it aids your overarching strategy.
This means a rich consideration of the why and what you hope to achieve.
It also means establishing metrics to help you understand whether the UGC is helping your strategy. This includes but is not limited to looking at the following:
- Engagement metrics,
- Retention metrics,
- And reach & impressions.
Overall, UGC is a powerful and effective way to increase your conversions. It'll also help by improving the profitability of your marketing campaigns.
But this is just a summary. If you'd like more detail than just the above, read on:
What Is User-Generated Content (UGC)?
User-generated content is any content such as audio, video, images, or text that social media or other website users have created.
These people are typically not professional content creators.
They generally share their content for personal reasons, such as interacting with people on a social media platform.
UGC is a vital part of any business strategy, and here's why:
Why UGC Is Important for Businesses
User-generated content is so crucial for building. Consider the power a positive review has on your likelihood of purchasing a particular product.
That's the power of UGC. User-generated content is generally more trustworthy and authentic than content created by businesses.
Consider Coca-Cola's "Share a Coke" campaign. With bottles given random names, Coca-Cola encouraged customers to share a photo of themselves. This was done on social media with their personalized Coca-Cola bottles.
The company generated so much popularity from its once-off campaign. And aside from manufacturing, customers did (essentially) 90% of their marketing for them.
Creative efforts like this show us why UGC is so important for businesses.
This begs the question: what benefits have Coca-Cola and other companies using UGC realized?
The Benefits of Incorporating UGC into Your Marketing Strategy
There are several benefits to incorporating UGC into your strategy. This includes the following:
- Saving costs (and effort): user-generated content is much cheaper than hiring a professional photographer or a videographer team. It costs much less than if you were to create content for traditional marketing. This saves your business money and time, which can be better allocated elsewhere.
- Higher ROI: UGC has a higher return on investment than traditional marketing content. It's become known that brand engagement increases by 28% when user-generated content is involved in a business's market strategy.
- Better customer relationships: user-generated content can help create a sense of community among your customers. It changes the dynamic from an "us vs. them" situation to simply "us." Showing your customers that you value their feedback goes a long way to improving brand-to-customer relationships.
- And, of course, greater credibility: user-generated content helps enhance your credibility with your customers. It does so because it's more trusted than professionally-generated marketing content. Consumers get to see real-life testimonials and practical applications of the product or service.
There are an enormous number of benefits. But before you even start utilizing user-generated content, you'll need to conduct a target audience analysis:
Identify Your Target Audience
Identifying your target audience is one of the first steps when putting together any strategy. You should analyze this target audience to determine their needs, wants, and interests.
Let's start by looking at the former:
Who Are You Trying to Reach with Your Marketing Efforts?
Before doing anything, knowing who you're trying to reach is so important.
First, start by determining what it is that makes your product unique. This could be a particular feature. It might also be the price (most people appreciate a good deal). If it's a feature, consider who might find it useful.
Next, research competitors to see who they're targeting. Ideally, you'd want to focus on competitors offering similar products or services.
Finally, analyze your existing customers. Compile their average age, income level, typical location, and other distinguishing factors.
All this information should give you a clear idea of the person you're attempting to reach with your efforts. And once you have this, it's time to determine their needs, wants, and interests:
What Are Their Needs, Wants, and Interests?
At this point, you've probably realized that you're putting together a psychological profile of your customer.
This means (along with looking at demographics) considering their needs, wants, and interests.
Put yourself in the position of your target audience: what do they do daily? What are their values? What are their hobbies? What do they like to do to relax?
By creating this picture, you'll gain a better idea of the kind of people your target audience is.
How Can UGC Help Engage and Connect with Your Target Audience?
User-generated content can help you engage and connect with your target audience in two ways:
- The process of acquiring user-generated can be engaging: by encouraging others to engage with the brand, you can get some great user-generated content. For instance, if you owned a salon, you could do this by running a competition about the best photo of a haircut done at your salon. The winner could get a free haircut.
- User-generated content encourages shares and further engagement: consider how if you share users' content, their family and friends will likely share this with others. This will increase their familiarity and trust with your business and increase brand awareness.
Develop a Plan for Collecting UGC
Now that we've covered UGC in some detail, let's explore a sub-topic: developing a plan for collecting UGC. While we may have covered this briefly in some of the above paragraphs, in this section, we're going to go into a bit more detail:
How Will You Encourage and Incentivize Your Customers to Create UGC?
Encouraging your customers to create user-generated content may involve taking several creative approaches, including but not limited to the following:
- Hosting a social media contest: one of the most common (and acutely effective) ways of creating UGC is to host a competition. This is not only engaging for your customers, but it promotes relationship building as well.
- Create something quirky: encourage customers to share content on social media through a quirky marketing initiative. For example, you could hire interesting mascots for your store for the weekend. Encourage customers to take pictures with them. This is not only a fun activity but also builds awareness of your business on social platforms.
- Creating discount incentives: another very effective way of encouraging consumer-generated content is by offering discounts to customers who create and share UGC. Everybody likes a good discount.
- Get involved with influencers: digital influencers have large followings that trust them. This can come in handy. Influencers who post product or service pictures are likely to inspire followers to share images.
And, of course, other than encouraging customers to create UGC, you could always increase brand awareness by encouraging employee-generated content. This means encouraging employees to share posts on social media, like and comment, and share blog content with friends and family.
What Guidelines and Rules Will You Put in Place for UGC Submissions?
While the specific rules put in place for UGC submissions will vary depending on your brand, there are several more general guidelines that you can include:
- When hosting a competition, be clear about what criteria will be used to select the winner. This is so that customers know there's no bias when selecting a winner.
- Make sure that you also make the method for submitting content very clear. This is to prevent confusion and ensure that everyone submits their content so that no good entries are missed.
- Keep your audience in the loop about changes to the UGC submission procedure, desired content type, and if submissions are to be closed soon. This is to create a sense of transparency.
How Will You Collect and Store UGC?
A great way to collect UGC is to use social media channels. Users of these platforms will often post about products they've purchased and services they'll use. If your product or service is good, it's free advertising (although it's counterproductive if you get bad reviews). In this situation, requesting the use of the (positive) content is an excellent first step.
However, you may also want to get customers to send UGC directly to you: this could be either to get discounts or for a competition. Once you've collected it, storing it generally involves using a database or content management system.
Although if you've got a relatively small business, then storing it on your computer should be sufficient. Just make sure to make a backup on a cloud service.
Create a Process for Curating and Publishing UGC
One of the last steps for putting together UGC is to create a process for its curation and publishing:
What Criteria Will You Use to Select UGC for Publication?
The criteria you use to select UGC for publication depends on your strategy. Typically, however, you'd want to consider several variables. This includes but is not limited to the following:
- Originality: All submitted user-generated content should be completely original. Customers should not copy it from somewhere else.
- High-quality: while we understand that most people don't have professional-grade camera equipment, modern phones can take relatively high-quality videos and photos.
- Relevance: UGC must be relevant to the objectives of your marketing campaigns. It must also align with your brand's values.
- Engaging: User-generated content marketing must be engaging for your customers. You should never post dull and uninteresting content on your brand's social media channels.
Considering these criteria when making decisions for UGC will help you select only the best for your business.
How Will You Attribute and Credit the Creators of UGC?
It's essential to attribute or credit the creators of UGC. Social media influencers particularly would like the recognition as it will draw attention to their platforms.
To credit the creators of UGC, your first step should always be to obtain permission from them to use their work. After this, give them credit by mentioning them by name in the description and linking to the original content source.
You can add some details, such as the title and date of publication. Giving proper credit is essential because it recognizes others for their work. It also protects your company from being accused of plagiarism.
How Will You Share and Promote UGC?
The best place to share and promote UGC is your social media platform. Now the best social media platform for you to share on depends on the demographics of your target audience.
For example, men aged 25-34 have the most significant share of advertising reach on Facebook.
So Facebook is the best platform for men of that age. The same can be said about Instagram, with 25-34-year-olds making up the biggest share.
However, if you target the age group of 35-49-year-olds, then Twitter is likely the best platform. Although they're not the most significant demographic, 20.7% of users fall into that age group.
Other than sharing on social media, however, you can do one of the following:
- Post it on your website: once you've received permission from the customer, this could be a very effective way of
- Send emails to friends and colleagues: this would be more suitable if you're a smaller business. However, it can be effective and encourage them to share, especially if it's interesting.
- Increase visibility with hashtags and tags: another great way to promote UGC is to increase its visibility. Hashtags will help potential customers find the content, while tagging the creators will encourage engagement from the creator themself and their family and friends.
- Share it on relevant communities and forums: if you're allowed to, it may be a good idea to share the UGC on related communities and forums. This will encourage engagement from interested people.
Integrate UGC into Your Overall Marketing Strategy
And the final step to piecing this together is integrating UGC into your overall marketing strategy. Let's start by looking at how UGC fits into your comprehensive marketing plans and goals:
How Will UGC Fit Into Your Overall Marketing Plan and Goals?
UGC helps create brand awareness and trust by showcasing real-life experiences from real-life customers. As we've already mentioned, UGC is more relatable and considered to be more authentic.
Because of this, UGC will help you draw traffic and build better engagement.
And this type of content will help you get customer feedback, which is invaluable for improving your customer's experience and your products or services.
UGC should form a significant part of your overall marketing plan and goals. However, we shouldn't discount the value of professionally-made content. Create trust with UGC, but impress, amuse, and entice your customers with your professional content.
What Role Will UGC Play in Your Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and Other Marketing Efforts?
UGC is essential in content marketing, social media marketing, and other marketing efforts. It provides genuine and authentic content by customers actively engaging with the brand.
UGC will play the role of connecting your community of customers. It helps encourage engagement with content. This includes sharing social media posts, website blogs, and other marketing material your company has used.
How Will You Measure the Success of Your UGC Marketing Efforts?
Measuring the success of your UGC marketing efforts involves taking a look at various metrics, including but not limited to the following:
- Engagement metrics: primarily involve pageviews, which measure an instance of a user visiting a page on your website.
- Retention metrics: this is a numeric measure that lets you identify the number of retained customers your product or service has.
- Reach & impressions: this is particularly relevant in the case of social media. You can use your social media platform's provided metrics for your page to determine how successful your UGC has been.
You want to compare how your business did before the UGC marketing efforts to how it's doing now with the user-generated content.
FAQs
How do you gather user-generated content from your customers?
There are quite a few ways to get user-generated content from your customers. One such way is to offer discounts and promotions to consumers that provide high-quality content to you. Another is to create a contest or fun game (like Coca-Cola did with its personalized bottles).
What is the best way to use UGC?
The best way to use UGC is to share this content on your social media. Research has shown that customers respond better to user-generated content than professionally made content.
Where do I find user-generated content?
You can find user-generated on a lot of different places. Most notably, user-generated content is available on social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. However, you might also find UGC in the form of reviews and ratings on a Google listing of your business.
What is an example of user-generated content?
The most common examples of user-generated content are images and videos on social media platforms. These are typically posted without the company's prompting.
How does a UGC campaign strategy work?
UGC has to do with content that consumers create. This includes social media posts with photos of the product, reviews, comments, and even videos for a travel service or similar. UGC campaign strategies work because most consumers trust user-generated content more than traditional marketing.
The Power of User-Generated Content
At this point, you should have a good idea about the power of user-generated content. This type of content should form part of any business's marketing strategy.
While not technically essential, it's a good idea to use this as it's cheaper and more effective than traditional marketing. It also keeps your business competitive and will overall improve the number of customers you attract and your overall retention.
Sources:
https://blog.hootsuite.com/user-generated-content-ugc/amp/
https://www.nosto.com/blog/what-is-user-generated-content/
https://www.tintup.com/blog/user-generated-content-definition/
https://www.studioid.com/springboard/how-to/10-ideas-for-getting-more-user-generated-content/
