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User-generated content (UGC) is a powerful tool that provides brands with direct endorsements from real-life users, which helps gain customers’ trust and increase their sales.
A Brightlocal review showed that almost half of consumers (46%) trust online business reviews and personal recommendations from family and friends.
To help you on your UGC marketing journey, here is a checklist and starter guide to make the most of your efforts.
When starting your UGC campaign journey, ask yourself who you’ll create content for. You can begin by broadening your search by choosing an industry or two you are passionate about and then narrowing it down to specific brands you’d love to work with.
Once you identify your ideal customers, you need to pinpoint the platforms where they are most active to encourage them to share UGC which will likely spark valuable engagement.
Remember that different social media channels cater to different audiences and serve different purposes. Let’s say you work in the creative industry and target consumers who enjoy visually appealing content. Then TikTok and Instagram would be great to encourage UGC. But if you are a professional or B2B company, then LinkedIn is more suitable. Don’t hesitate to cross-post if you think your UGC might work well on multiple platforms.
Setting up a UGC campaign might seem straightforward, but things can quickly become overwhelming if you are ill-prepared. Before you begin, establish clear and measurable objectives for your UGC marketing and decide what metrics you’ll use to measure progress towards these goals.
Remember when iPhone wanted to redeem its image for “poor quality” cameras? They run a UGC campaign dubbed Shot on iPhone. Their objective was to draw attention back to what makes an iPhone special - its ability to capture memorable photos.
Their UGC marketing featured normal users taking stunning visuals through the lens of the latest iPhone cameras. The final result was a huge success, with people taking photos in dim light and posting them online for their friends to see on social media using the “Shot on iPhone” tag.
Creating a unique hashtag is the next step in having a trackable UGC marketing campaign. With that said, you want a hashtag that represents your brand. Structure it so that when people post using your hashtag, it’s intentional for you, which will help you collect your UGC much later.
Starbucks in 2016 motivated its most loyal fans to post a photo while posing with the company’s holiday cups and tagging the hashtag #redcupcontest in return for a contest entry. After a few days, over 35,000 posts willingly advertised Starbucks' Christmas cups.
People want you to respond or share their pictures on your social media pages. A New York Times study showed that 69% of social media users share content to give people a better sense of themselves and what they stand for. Another OCAD University report revealed that 73% of Gen Zs believe they need more self-expression to live a more fulfilled life. So, allowing user participation in your marketing is a great way to increase online engagement.
A good example of user participation in the industry is OnePlus’s UGC marketing to encourage its users to share themed photos captured by their smartphones in their community forum. Any content creator located anywhere in the world can participate irrespective of their skill level, which gives the brand a wealth of content to highlight its product’s versatility.
Authentic UGC saves your brand’s marketing production costs and builds more profound and profitable connections with your ideal audiences. Now that we have provided you with a UGC marketing guide, it’s time to create a plan to determine how you will propel your brand forward.
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