UGC as a Powerful Marketing Tool
UGC or user-generated content has become an integral part of successful marketing. If you’re not familiar with the term, UGC is any form of content, including blogs, tweets, photos, videos, and more, that was created by the online system or service users and is available via social media websites.
Consumers trust fellow users and UGC more than branded content, so it’s an excellent way to build brand loyalty and promote your brand. UGC helps create social proof for your brand and is an inexpensive way to develop compelling, original content. Check out the ways user-generated content adds value to your marketing strategies.
UGC Builds Brand Authenticity and Credibility
There is an overwhelming amount of information available at our fingertips — which includes product reviews and information. Consumers have also become smarter. They recognize when brands are marketing to them. It’s no surprise that over 80% of consumers are more influenced by UGC than by branded content.
Consumers trust information that comes from people rather than companies —92% trust online content from family and friends above all other brand messages — which is why UGC is crucial for building trust in your brand. People are twice as likely to share brand-related content with a friend because they want to introduce them to that particular company or product.
UGC helps you tell your brand’s story by showing real people interacting with your products. Customers love when brands notice them — it makes them feel important and that your brand cares about the people that support it. About 75% of consumers are likely to share a positive experience they’ve had with a brand. They are also 70% more likely to make a purchase after a good interaction with a company.
UGC Increases Customer Engagement
Users are more likely to engage with UGC rather than branded content — which can yield massive returns. Sites featuring UGC have seen a major increase in the time spent on their site. UGC based ads have click-through rates that are 4x higher — which leads to a 50% drop in cost-per-click. Brand engagement increases by an average of 28% when users are shown a combination of professional content and user-created product videos.
UGC is inexpensive — especially compared with the increased ROI. Consumers want to share content featuring brands that they use and like — and over 50% want a brand to tell them what kind of content to share. However, only 16% of brands actually do this. Telling your followers and customers what to share — whether for a contest or not — helps your brand collect and curate content. This can include giving consumers specific hashtags to use or asking them to share themselves using a product in a certain way.
Creating a Successful UGC Campaign
Incredibly successful campaigns begin when brands ask users to share content and provide them with guidelines for their posts. Consumers want to be involved in your brand’s story, but if everyone is sharing differently, it can be difficult to find and curate UGC. Creating a campaign with a specific, clear call-to-action not only inspires your audience to post, but it facilitates the future use of the content.
- Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke campaign encourages users to share photos of their branded cans. Their hashtag tied to their new cans featuring names and was extremely successful — generating a 2% increase in their revenue. The percentage seems small, but you have to consider that Coke’s full-year revenue from operations was $10.5Billion in 2015.
- L’Oréal’s #DermaBlendPro campaign helped bring awareness to a new product by encouraging customers to share their transformations with the DermaBlend product. Thousands of people submitted videos and photos, which quickly became a key element of L’Oréal’s brand story.
- Lay’s #DoUsAFlavor campaign is a massive campaign that is in its third year. It asks participants to submit their ideas for the next flavor. This campaign not only helps Lay’s come up with thousands of ideas but also creates social buzz across a variety of social media platforms.
Asking your customers to share content helps build brand trust, and it can help achieve specific KPI about your brand’s social followers, web traffic, and more. Moreover, customers and fans want to share content and a small investment in creating a campaign can yield incredible results.
UGC is a Multi-Faceted Value Add
UGC can add extensive value to your marketing efforts with comparatively little investment and cost. It’s also the perfect way to integrate the consumer voice — which is often overlooked in traditional marketing outreach. UGC provides social proof for your brand and supports that customers can trust your company.
Interacting with your audience not only helps promote your brand, but satisfied customers are more likely to share your brand with their peers. By asking your customers to share content with a specific task, you can create cost-effective marketing that has massive returns — both in profits and in cultivating brand loyalty.
These are only some of the many powerful benefits of using UGC in marketing that often goes unharnessed. What are some of the ways your company positions it’s UGC to boost marketing success?
For more in-dept information on UGC, check out this blog post!
