What is it about UGC that brands like Apple, GoPro, Coca-Cola, and H&M are heavily using it as a social media marketing tactic?
We have the answer, and once you know about it, you will be enticed to leverage it for your brand too.
Let’s explore the depths of UGC along with some great UGC brand campaigns to give you a broad understanding of what is it and finally key insights on how to create a UGC marketing campaign for your business.
UGC: The Definition and Use Cases
UGC, or formally known by its full name user-generated content, is any form of content such as images or videos that have been created and shared by the users on a social media platform.
The primary reason marketers value user-generated content is that it is the most authentic, trustworthy, and reliable form of content available across digital mediums.
UGC is deemed genuine because it is driven by users’ real experiences, ideas, opinions, feedback, etc. Product reviews are a form of UGC that affects the buying decisions of other potential customers and a brand’s revenue and identity.
Similarly, not just reviews, there are many more variations of user-generated content available on social platforms.
Why Does UGC Matter Now?
For marketers, there are many tactics to promote and advertise their brand. Still, most of these tactics have become intrusive and spammy for the users, especially on digital media over the years. It has led to distrust and unreliability, ultimately affecting the brand building and revenue generation opportunities.
In this age of disruptive, inauthentic marketing, UGC is something that emerges as the perfect alternative, which provides the personal, trustworthy information to consumers to help their purchase decisions as distrust over branded content rises.
Marketers have found a long-term marketing success mantra in the form of users’ content. Recent figures have shown that 90 percent of users trust UGC to influence their purchase decisions and considering it a key brand quality indicator shows why UGC matters now.
Leveraging users’ content in marketing goes beyond trust & authenticity as new technologies, innovations, and strategies are emerging for marketers to unlock the maximum potential.
Be it from changing social media platform algorithms positively towards user-generated content to the rise of UGC platforms that stretch the possibilities of UGC beyond social media to all the marketing channels like websites, events, outdoor advertising, email, print media, etc.
How Does UGC help Marketers and brands?
Here’s a quick look at some of the key benefits of users’ content for a brand when leveraged in marketing.
1. Create Trust and Reliability
First and foremost, when incorporated in marketing campaigns, UGC helps in creating & building a sense of trust & reliability among the consumers about the brand & its products.
It is necessary to build trust among consumers as it is a key metric that influences the purchase decisions of the consumers. Having reliability over brand also ignites loyalty & repeat purchases leading to customer retention.
2. Showcase Authenticity and Brand Advocacy
Moving ahead with trust, showcasing the real experiences of real customers in your marketing campaigns works as validation to the authenticity of the promotional message that is being conveyed in the campaign.
Besides, it also displays brand advocacy as existing customers become the brand representatives. It enhances the brand images along with evergreen and organic positive word-of-mouth marketing.
3. Increase User Engagement and Interaction
The traditional marketing only had one-way diffusion of information from brands to marketers. Social media marketing allowed users to engage with the marketing campaigns, and now UGC marketing takes engagement and interaction to the next level.
With UGC marketing, the engagement is at maximum with users creating content, engaging with campaigns like contributing to hashtag campaigns, interactions through responses & gamification, etc. User engagement is a key metric that marketers target as the level of a user’s engagement defines its path towards conversions.
Besides, it also enables productive two-way communications, meaningful relationship building, user gratification, reward opportunities, and much more.
4. Drive Conversions and Revenue
The benefits discussed above are all key influencers to conversions & revenue. So, starting from user-generated content marketing to the inclusion of UGC in the purchase path can help in increasing conversions immensely.
These facts, such as ads with UGC getting 5x more click-through rates, UGC being almost 10x more influential than influencers content for consumers in their purchase decisions, etc. are indicative of how UGC can drive revenue for the biggest of brands.
Brands leveraging UGC in action
Here are two prime examples of brands using UGC for marketing that provide credibility to the aforementioned definitions, benefits, & statements.
GoPro
GoPro, the American technology brand that focuses on creating powerful & versatile action cameras globally, is a perfect example of how UGC marketing can bring success to your brand.
Most of their channels, especially social media & websites, are filled with photos and videos that their customers have captured using GoPro cameras. GoPro takes the most creative & captivating user visuals & use them to promote their brand.
GoPro’s popularity has been increasing ever since with incredible brand image, customer loyalty, user engagement, and ever-increasing sales for their products. They leverage gamification strategy to encourage engagement & curate diverse UGC for their campaigns.
Apple
Apple’s UGC marketing campaign with #ShotOnIphone is a remarkable example of trust-building, showcasing authenticity, and boosting engagement & sales.
Apple faced a challenge with the iPhone, where it was stated that low-light photography quality was not good, leading to dissatisfaction. Thus, to restore the lost trust, affected the brand image, and diminishing sales, Apple asked its customers to share their photos & videos using the brand hashtag.
They curated the UGC and ran campaigns on social media featuring stunning low-light UGC visuals. This campaign not only helped in gaining social proof and increased sales but also showcased the immense brand advocacy and loyalty for Apple.
Paving the Way Forward With User-Generated Content
Now that we have discussed the depths of user-generated content marketing, get your work mode on as we explore how you can create such campaigns for your brand.
The best way to create amazing and effective UGC marketing campaigns is to use a tool like the UGC platform that can help you with end-to-end solutions for your campaigns.
With the UGC platform, you can discover and curate all the relevant and valuable user-generated content around your brand into a single feed. Then, customize the feed, moderate content to maintain premium quality, and add branding elements for effective promotions.
Once you’ve done that, you can display your unique social UGC feed across different channels including websites, events, emails, print media, in-store, and social media as your UGC marketing campaign.
The UGC platforms are an all-in-one solution to incredible UGC marketing for brands. You can explore everything about a UGC platform in this guide.
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