10 Ways User-Generated Content is Redefining Marketing for Brands

Marketing is all about promoting a brand’s product or service. It begins with market research, goes on with advertising and still goes on with promotional campaigns. 

But marketing has got a new face.

UGC is the millennial definition of marketing. 

After the rising popularity of social media, the digital era is taken over by the techie-marketing strategies, which brought in the idea of user-generated content. UGC has its own connective approach which takes it directly to the minds of the audience through peer. 

In this article, you will know what UGC is and why the brands are replacing their traditional marketing tactics with modern UGC strategies to bring in more business and to grow their brand. 

The Concept of UGC

User-generated content is a term used to define any form of content inclusive of photos, videos, blogs, or other forms of media created by the consumers or end-user of an online system. 

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are some of the most popular sources for user-created content. With most of your customers making their presence on social media, you have greater chances to get plenty of user-generated content on the board.

As per a study, 55 percent of users trust UGC over other formats of marketing.

User-generated content holds a lot of power to impact on all marketing touchpoints of a brand. These days, every UGC campaign kicks off with a basic research to discover the target audience. After research, all the marketer need to establish is a hashtag for the audience to use. 

The hashtag makes it easier for marketers to collect the content from media. Hashtag is subject to the genre of audience you are targeting and the products/services delivered by your brand to them. 

Here are some basic characteristics of User-Generated Content:

  1. The content is contributed by the users of a brand’s product and not the brand selling the product itself.
  2. These content are posted on digital media and are accessible to others.
  3. The user can add more creative value to the content with their ideas while contributing.


Why UGC?

Since social media, user-generated content campaigns has been a constant player in the marketing world as they give successful results than other marketing tactics. There are several reasons for the positive results brought in by the UGC campaigns. 

Here, you will know why the brands have stopped creating their own advertisements and left the product promotions on the audiences and social media.

According to Conductor, by 2020, more than half of the commercial content would be created outside of marketing.

 

  • Giving Priority to the Customers

The businesses are structuring themselves to be customer-oriented and for the same reason, they’ve been keeping up with the trends around the audience. In this digital-savvy world, if the brands are not running along with the tech-centric trends, they can’t meet the customers’ needs. 

Users who are online are intrigued by the factors the brands are putting up in their marketing strategies. When the customers are given a stage where they stand up in the front and centre, others can know about the original value of the product from the customer perspective. This transparency is one of the factors which makes the implementation of UGC in marketing campaigns successful. 

In traditional marketing, customers were treated as king. In modern marketing, content is the king. UGC is all about crowning these kings together into power to make your marketing stronger on all touchpoints.

 

  • Authenticity Matters

The old-school marketing strategies are of no use! Nobody is going to connect with an over-exaggerated advertisement for any product. 

Audiences love authentic. The customers in this generation are the ones who choose their own fate and won’t be appealed with the statement of what to buy and what not to. This audience connects with the product and the promotional story on the basis of its values on a human level. 

User-generated content thus helps in building authentic material for online promotions and social ads to influence the audience. As the content is created by the users, it lifts up the possibilities for potential customers to connect its benefits to their purposes. The humanizing factor in the advertisements are what they are seeking for a proper connection.

 

  • The User’s Perspective

Previously, the brands in the market used to throw some random sleazy marketing idea to advertise and promote products or services. These days, an average guy walking on the streets doesn’t care about such pushy sales tactics.

The brands who are crafting stories to create a connection with the customer and interacts with humanly perspective win the game. The humanized angle of marketing connects more with the users and therefore engages the customers effectively.

According to a study, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from others, even people they don’t know, over branded content. 

The data itself makes clear the fact that the people are affected by what people like, rather than what the brands advertised.

 

  • Brand Advocacy

Let your customers be the advocates of the brand. 

Give them an opportunity to share their positive experiences with your brand. When they share their experiences even in their offline circles like friends and family, it would create a good impression of the brand for them regarding the quality.

As well as on online circles, their images with the product and caption about their experience can let their followers know about the brand and the product or service. 

User-generated content campaigns make it easy for the customers to share what they love about the brand and the brand can enjoy its benefits. It creates an online community which would share the love and interest towards your brand and its product. With such a growing community on the internet, you could gain more exposure and expand your market globally.

 

  • Engagement and Interaction

The use of UGC for marketing purposes can be a perfect move to boost sales conversion even through advertisement. By displaying user-generated content, it conveys a social message to the customers, on behalf of your brand through an emotional link.

With the use of such UGC-based social ads, you can engage the visitors on your website. If your brand has an e-commerce platform, UGC campaigns can be used to pull in customers from social media to the website for convertible engagement.

The visual aspects of the user-generated content can keep the visitors engaged on the website to give a hike on dwell time and results in lesser bounce rate, which gives more chances of conversions.

 

  • Community for Communication

As said above, with love growing for your brand, UGC helps bring customers together to create a community. As there are many users whose content is refurbished by the brands, they all come together as a community to portray the love for the brand. 

In a community, there are members making their mark for the brand and every user-generated content helps influence other users with the emotional connection shared for the brand. 

With a community coming together, this builds trust in potential customers to have a check on trying your product or services. The growing community is a sign of more people loving your brand, and with more followers you can gather more user-generated content for all your marketing purposes.

 

  • Cost-Effective Essence

UGC including videos, photos, blog posts, and such other content are created and published by the users themselves. They may be sharing the content to share their experience with the brand, maybe to win a contest conducted by the brand or just to build a connection with like-minded users.

With no expenses made on making TV commercials to advertise on prime time, or a celebrity endorsing the brand, your business gets sufficient content for your UGC campaign with just a hashtag to give. 

The real players of the game are the users, while marketers are the winners making the best out of such an effective UGC marketing campaign. Unlike spending a huge amount on creating content for advertisements and getting more money paid to get it broadcast on electronic media, user-generated content lets the users create the content for your brand. 

With a minimum expenditure, you can get the content created and get the promotion done effectively on digital media with user-generated content.

 

  • Obvious Return on Investment

There is a very minor investment required in leveraging UGC for marketing campaigns. All you need is a smart UGC platform like Taggbox. The social media aggregation tool lets you collect, curate, and moderate the positive user-generated content from multiple social media platforms onto a single feed making it interactive and engaging for the users.

According to ComScore, there seems an evidential rise of 28% in brand engagements when the consumers are exposed to a blend of professional marketing with UGC.

Depends on purposes like hashtag campaign or event engagement, there are different ways how user-generated content does magic to bring in a higher return on your investments. User-generated content is even leveraged for social walls at events. For events, UGC plays a major role to engage the audience and interact with them.

Social walls at events are a great opportunity for the event sponsors to gain attention. Event managers can take advantage of social walls to give exposure to the sponsors, and with happy sponsors comes greater return on investment.

 

  • SEO Benefits of UGC

As there are several uses of UGC rather than just on building engagement on social media.

There are UGC platforms that deliver brands with social media embedding tools to enhance the capabilities of their website. Even on the website, there is a high requirement for authentic content that communicates between the shoppers

UGC jumps in here to fill in the need for unique and authentic content. As the content is created by the customers, brands can effortlessly bring in genuine content with not many resources to put in. 

When it is a product or service-centric content created by the users, customers do shape the SEO aspects of keywords, titles, and links. As they involve phrases and links associated with the product in the content or its caption, it naturally works to strengthen the search engine optimization factors

 

  • Reducing Bounce Rate

Any form of content you create for the brand’s website has a major goal to get more users to visit the website. Let it be the SEO emphasized blogs or UGC, they serve as clickbait to improve the search engine visibility. But UGC has an evident advantage, as it keeps the visitors stick around the website for a longer period.

There has been a vital decrease in the bounce rate as the brands use hashtag competitions for UGC generation via social media. As I mentioned under the topic of engagement and interaction, more engagement is a sign of lesser bounce rate, creating chances for more conversions and sales.

Start Doing

There are no marketing ideas that could go well like UGC campaigns in this digital era. With UGC, you can establish a strong social media presence along to take advantage of your audience’s digital availability. Making the best use of social media and your customers’ craze to be on social media, it brings in more customers to your brand with the happy experiences of your previous customers. 

Rising technical updates and trends of social media, there won’t be any scarcity of user-generated content in the present future. Social media platforms are also offering a separate space for marketers to get along with their audience and interact with them to know their insights.

Using UGC at all your marketing touchpoint would help build social proof of your brand and increases your value in the market. Be careful with the use of UGC and its legal affairs, as the content you are refurbishing for your marketing purposes is owned by someone else. 

But, no worries! There are UGC platforms that deliver UGC Right Management services and tools. It allows you to take permission from the users to have the rightful ownership and reuse the content for business requirements.