What is User Generated Content, and How Can Marketers Utilize it Correctly?

Defining User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) refers to any content that is posted by a third-party user. One of the most detrimental facts of UGC is that it is never created by a representative of a company. UGC is usually created by individuals who are users, experts in that field, and content creators. UGC tends to curate different angles and views about a product as it is being reviewed by various users, hence making it an effective resource for marketers.

Different Engaging Types of UGC

User-generated content can be broken down into 3 categories; Images, Reviews, and lastly video content. Each UGC marketing is a successful tool that we come across on a daily basis without realizing sometimes that it is UGC. Let's check out each type of content:

1. Photo Content

The first form that we will see is images. Visual content is extremely powerful when it comes to conveying messages and building connections. Moreover, visual content helps companies capture viewers' attention as well. What exactly is photo content in terms of UGC? For example, if Nike releases the latest pair of running shoes, users can post pictures of them running in the shoes or wearing them as well.

2. Reviews

The most effective form of UGC in my opinion is reviews. In this day and age, consumers like me always try to seek out if a company has reviews from its past customer. We seek pre-existing reviews to safeguard against potential scams and to ensure that the product aligns with our expectations and requirements. By doing so, we aim to make sure we receive a genuine and satisfactory product.

In essence, companies take reviews from other sites and embed them onto their own page to make their ongoing traffic trust their services. Furthermore, reviews can also come in video form, such as past consumers recording themselves reviewing the products.

3. Video Content

The last form of UGC is video content. This is actually the most widely used format of UGC across all social media channels. There has been a recent boom of UGC videos all over TikTok as users post videos of them using skincare or new makeup products. Video content can be broken down into further subcategories, such as unboxing videos, product demonstrations, and user experience.

Process of utilizing UGC as an effective Marketing tool

With the constant rise in UGC, marketers were on notice of how can they utilize it for their marketing strategy to leverage sales and conversions. In just a few simple steps, marketers can start implementing UGC for their brands:

1. Obtaining UGC Rights

To initiate the process of utilizing UGC content to boost sales, the initial step is to acquire the necessary rights for its usage. To do this, you will need to reach out to past customers or influencers and ask them for permission if you can embed their content onto your social platforms or website.

After connecting with users and asking for their content rights, you can repost the content where you deem it best fit. Users usually require brands to mention them when they repost their videos.

2. Boost content creation

If your brand is struggling to have more user-generated content created for it, there's actually a simple way in which you can enable people to do it. If you repost some UGC content onto your socials, more people will feel incentivized to do the same, as they will want the opportunity to be posted on your socials as well.

Another way to incentivize your audience is by creating a UGC campaign or challenge, which is highly engaging and trending. You will need to come up with a catchy caption that will grab people's attention and make them a part of the challenge.

If and when the challenge does go viral to keep it from dying down, the brand will need to comment, share, and repost videos, or pictures of its users that are taking part in it. Encouraging the viewers as well as with the help of word of mouth will lead to more content creation.

3. Ensuring the content is relevant

A vital aspect of making use of UGC for your brand is to regulate relevant content. User-generated content for a brand should be used, however, if brands begin leveraging UGC that is not directly correlated with it, it will misguide and confuse its future clientele.

Moreover, if advertisers try to utilize irrelevant UGC, it could negatively impact conversions as well as sales. We will see later in the article that UGC spreads authenticity, so using irrelevant UGC will defeat the purpose of using it in the first place.

4. Keep the content flowing

To make UGC the utmost effective resource for advertisers, you will need to keep user-generated content flowing. How may you enable this? Managers can easily achieve the flow of content by going back to step 2 and encouraging content creation. If you correctly carry out that step, you will have a lot of UGC that you can begin using.

As fresh user-generated content continues to pour in, your growing audience will be consistently updated with the latest testimonials of satisfied customers coming to your brand and making purchases. By seeing multiple satisfied customers creating content about their experiences, managers can leverage this to influence future customers to make sales.

Ideas to use User-Generated Content on social media channels

UGC is an easy tool that managers can leverage on almost any social media channel. The large influx of user-generated content for a brand's products is the main reason why. Thereby making it a highly adaptable and flexible tool. Let's have a look now on how to use UGC:

1. Embed It On Your Website

The first place where you should always embed UGC is on your website. In fact, UGC can be strategically placed in multiple places on your website. The most common place is, on your product page. Product pages, are one of the best places to embed UGCs, when customers are looking at a particular product they will be able to view post customer's honest reviews on it.

Another place where you can really benefit from utilizing UGC is on your homepage. If you embed UGC content or even a carousel on your homepage, it will be one of the things your customers come across. Displaying a rotating selection of reviews, testimonials, or user-generated content can establish an immediate sense of trust and credibility for new visitors to the website.

In terms of having a good first impression, landing pages are the first thing your potential customer encounters of yours. Landing Pages are the perfect opportunity to utilize UGC to effectively communicate any message to your audience. Incorporating user-generated content on appropriate landing sections might boost conversion rates if you have specialized campaigns or promotions.

The last place, where managers can utilize UGC is in blog posts. They can do the following by embedding UGC in relevant articles. In doing so, it backs up your article content with proof, as well as making it more engaging and hence providing a whole better reading experience.

2. Create Shoppable Videos from UGC

Imagine all your online channels have UGC strategically placed in them, but now you want to further leverage them. Well, there is good news now you are able to convert your UGC into shoppable format. Creating shoppable videos from UGC content is such a quick and seamless process, hence why we are seeing an increase in it on social media.

The shoppable format enhances user-generated content by enabling the integration of links or tags, leading to a more seamless shopping experience for customers. The insertions of tags, overall improve the use of UGC as well as the experience for customers. As the shopping experience improves, simultaneously, the engagement from customers will also start to improve. As we know UGC content is already engaging to begin with, as we add interactive shopping elements to the videos it enhances engagement and encourages viewers to interact with the content even more.

UGC is one of the more adaptable marketing content available to brands due to the large amounts of content created. Shoppable content just like UGC is very adaptable to whatever marketing channels marketers want to utilize them in. As both of them are similar this way managers can utilize them to reach a larger audience and engage customers on whichever platform they may be at.

4. Promote Employee-Generated Content

A very underrated part of the process is promoting your employee-generated content. In essence, this basically means content that your employees create and share on their own personal accounts. The reason this needs to be more utilized is that employee-generated content helps humanize and modernize the purchasing process.

Furthermore, this content gives great insights to behind the scenes of the companies operations, this can largely influence customers as they can get a completely different perspective that they usually do not see. Employee-generated content is a great way to stand out and differentiate yourself from your competitors as it is new content that customers would love to come across.

Successful and Famous User Generated Content campaigns

There have been numerous successful UGC campaigns in the recent few years so let us see a few that really took social media by storm.

1. Coca-Cola: “Share a Coke” Campaign

"Share a Coke" was one of the first major UGC campaigns dating back to 2011. It originated in Australia, and Coca-cola printed the 150 most common names on cans and bottles. The purpose behind this was to build a more personal relationship with its customers. By 2016 and 2017 Coca-cola brought this campaign to the United States and the United Kingdom where it was successful as well.

In terms of figures in Australia alone, consumption among teenagers increased by 7% as well as 2 out of 5 people in the country bought a Share a Coke pack. Moreover, #ShareaCoke became the number one global trending topic not only this the entire campaign generated a total of 1 billion impressions in total. Lastly, the UGC campaign also boosted sales in the US by 2.5% as well hence becoming a worldwide success.

2. Apple #ShotoniPhone

The "ShotoniPhone" campaign started in March 2015 6 months after the iPhone 6 was released. The purpose of this campaign was to highlight the iPhone's new camera. The purpose of running this UGC campaign was to show all the users that were previously disappointed in the iPhone's camera quality that it had significantly improved. Concurrently, Apple began leveraging paid advertisements to prove to users across the world the improvement in the latest iPhone's camera quality.

This campaign is majorly successful to the point where it is still running today! After almost 10 years the amount of interactions it brought in were meteoric. It was estimated that Apple was able to obtain 6.5 billion media impressions as well as 95% positive mentions.

3. #BMWRepost

Being a luxury brand BMW made the perfect UGC campaign. Since their cars and SUVs are obviously quite expensive, not everyone can afford them, so they were left thinking about how can they generate a successful UGC campaign. That is when BMW came up with #BMWRepost they encouraged people to go and take pictures of BMWs and post them on social media with that hashtag.

Moreover, as the pictures started to flood people's social media channels. BMW started to repost some UGC content to incentivize other people to post as well. Instagram now has over 2.7 million posts of BMWs in public along with the hashtag. For a luxury brand like BMW to have such a successful UGC campaign they needed to think of a creative and accessible way to generate UGC and they did exactly that.

Benefits of User-Generated Content

In-expensive

Once, you completely understand the concept of User-generated content you can see why it is such a cost-effective strategy for marketers. There really is no concept of brands paying people to create UGC as it defeats the entire purpose of it. Whereas, brands may only pay for the rights of the content or even incentives to obtain some UGC from creators. UGC will always be an in-expensive tool as consumers love to review products and give their entire feedback on things. This thereby makes User-generated content one of the most affordable strategies for marketers to this date.

Creates even more brand awareness

Brand awareness is a very important aspect of any business as it is key when it comes to generating sales of any kind. With brand awareness comes brand visibility and both these aspects lead to sales. So how do we get started with brand awareness? Brands can obtain this when customers start to generate User-generated content on social media, as soon as businesses see this they require to give customers more incentives to make more. Brands can incentivize them to share and repost their customers' User-generated content on all their social media channels. With a rise in brand knowledge customers will not have any difficulty in finding your brand. As more customers start to create UGCs about a brand, this leads to more people viewing it which hence brings more awareness.

Content is authentic

As User-generated content is being created by third-party users and has no company influence it therefore feels real and generates a lot of authenticity and social proof for a brand. UGC is one of the most well-perceived marketing content for future customers, hence having a great track record of being successful. User-generated content tends to be trusted by customers as people give an entirely detailed perspective of products they receive from brands. This trust may result in greater relationships with your target audience and enhanced brand loyalty. Moreover, as more UGC is being generated by your community of trusted content creators this will lead to an improvement in conversions.

Increases Conversions

Throughout the article, I have very vaguely touched upon how User-generated content helps with improving conversions as well as leading to an improvement in sales. Let us now have a closer look at it. User-generated content is the key to helping your brand improve your conversions, especially by pairing it up with a shoppable format it's a match made in heaven. Both these formats tend to be the perfect complementary tools to each other.

Customer love to see authenticity on a website and other social media channels, so once they come across your page and see that, they will tend to trust your website and likely convert into a customer. When customers witness others enjoying your products or services, they are more likely to feel safe in their decision and make a purchase. This can lead to increased conversion rates and sales.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. What does the UGC stand for?

UGC stands for User-generated content.

2. What is UGC on TikTok?

It refers to videos, photos, and other types of material that are generated and shared by TikTok users rather than by the platform or professional creators. TikTok is a social media platform that allows users to make short-form content with music or audio samples that range from 15 seconds to one minute.

3. What Should I Do With My User Generated Content?

You should publish your User-generated content on your social media channels such as:

• Publish User-generated content on your social media platforms
• Reviews on your homepage and product page.
• Create a separate section on your website known as the testimonial section and embed all of your testimonials here,
• Integrate UGC in your emails as well for your outbound strategy.

Remember, customers value the opinions of their peers more than they want to hear from your brand. So, replace pieces of your digital strategy to feature your consumers instead of creating a ton of branded content.

4. What are the Different Types of User Generated Content?

UGC can come in multiple formats:

1. Use Cases
2. Social media posts in terms of photos or videos
3. Blog posts
4. Consumer testimonials

5. Why Does My Brand Need User Generated Content?

Your brand needs UGC as it helps with so many marketing aspects from boosting your conversions to building better relationships with your customers. Here are a few statistics to help persuade why your brand may require it:

• When potential customers see images taken by post customers or “people like them” 70% of them tend to trust it more.
• 61% of people are more likely to engage with an advertisement if it contains UGC.
• Consumer reviews are considered 12 times more trustworthy than content published directly by a brand.
• When determining which brands to favor and support, 90% of consumers emphasize the significance of authenticity.

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