Step by Step: UGC Strategy for Business Promotion
February 2024
The traditional advertisement is no longer the only way to impact your audience. Often, a higher-performing alternative is to invest your attention and effort in User-Generated Content.
The internet has democratized not only access to information but also the sharing of texts, photos, and videos that we send to people. Brands that receive content from people who use their products and services have an excellent opportunity to leverage their relevance.
By including User-Generated Content in your marketing strategy, you can increase your credibility, humanize your communication, and even increase your brand awareness. This is a very powerful tool that not all companies are using and it can put your brand in front of competitors.
In addition, it is a very versatile material and can take different forms depending on the characteristics of your company and campaign. Want to know more? Check out this complete article with all the information you need to know!
What is User-Generated Content (UGC)?
The term User-Generated Content, also called UGC, refers to using audience-created productions as part of consuming promotional message content.
Traditionally, marketers make use of their creations to promote their products. In general, teams of experts in various areas of creativity are employed to plan and execute this type of material. UGC goes against the grain by allowing the public to market the company to you.
Working with user-generated content can be highly beneficial for brands from different industries. By relying on material created by your audience, you can increase your credibility, in addition to having a more authentic reinforcement for your strategies.
Below is a list of the most common types of user-generated content:
- photos shared on social media;
- videos shot using a particular product, such as e-commerce content;
- highlighting posts made with branded hashtags to reinforce branding;
- reproduction of creations made by the public using your product or service;
- published reviews of properties;
- sharing posted content with company location.
Why Implement a User-generated Content Strategy?
However confident you may be in your marketing messages, it's indisputable that people trust each other more than they trust your ads. And it's backed up by research: One study showed that stores that use UGC in their promotional content saw a 4X increase in click-through rate and a 50% lower cost per click.
Still want more arguments? Here are the top reasons to use a user-generated content strategy for your brand!
1. Humanization of Marketing
People like to see people. A marketing strategy based on user-generated content makes it possible to humanize your company's communication, avoiding impersonal and distant messages. This will be decisive in improving your brand's relationship with your target audience.
2. Increase in Credibility
Consumers trust each other more than advertisements. Integrating UGC or utilizing UGC platforms into your marketing efforts provides genuine proof of your product's performance, boosting credibility and reassuring potential customers about the real-world benefits.
3. Improved Brand Awareness
If your brand is not seen, it is not remembered or considered at the time of purchase. You don't have to and shouldn't rely solely on your promotional material for this, as User-Generated Content can also help increase your brand awareness.
4. Free Promotion
Dedicating part of your strategy to user-generated content also saves resources for the digital content creator. You and your team won't have to spend time and effort creating promotional material for all the gaps in your media channels, and you can fill a good number of those gaps with UGC.
Where Can User-Generated Content Be Used?
Part of UGC's versatility for your marketing strategy is due to the wide variety of channels you can leverage this material on. This makes it possible to count on the benefits of this tool regardless of where your brand has a presence in the digital environment and even outside of it.
See which main channels are where you can use user-generated content linked to your business.
1. Company Website
Visitors to your company's website can be positively impacted by user-generated content. This type of social proof will serve to increase your brand credibility in that initial audience contact in a variety of ways.
This can be done, for example, from a section dedicated to customer reviews and testimonials, photos posted with your hashtag taken from social networks and other possibilities.
2. Social Media
User-generated content is born and has everything to develop a lot in social networks. After all, that's where people publish their posts and can tag companies or use specific hashtags when referring to their products.
It remains for the brand to be able to carry out good monitoring of the content published by users on social networks that are relevant to it. From there, a collaborative relationship is created that requires trust and commitment.
3. Online Ads
Another way to use user-generated content is in the form of paid advertisements in the digital environment. This type of social proof will be crucial for your advertising not to be ignored as yet another distant advertisement.
This is a great path, as it allows you to take advantage of all forms of UGC. For example, you can use customer-made videos to build an ad for YouTube.
4. Offline World
While user-generated content has its roots online, that doesn't mean it needs to be restricted to the internet. This type of tool can be used in marketing actions in the offline world, such as print ads, and point-of-sale actions, among others.
In this sense, have a selection criterion that prioritizes authentic records of your customers and, of course, seek their authorization to reproduce the content in your advertising campaigns.
Step-by-Step Guide: Implementing a UGC Strategy
Given the full potential of user-generated content, you're probably already interested in integrating it into your strategy, right? After all, no matter how many benefits it has, it is only possible to have a positive effect if your approach is correct. Like any other marketing tool, the success of UGC depends on how you use it.
Find out below the step-by-step with each of the steps of a strategy focused on user-generated content.
1. Strategic Planning
Before starting, you need to define very well what you will be doing and what your goals are. Using user-generated content in a campaign requires detailed planning, otherwise, your brand feels like it's doing everything on the fly.
UGC can bring different benefits to your digital campaign, so it's essential to define what your goals are concerning it. For example, you might want to increase your social media engagement by a certain percentage.
2. Public Understanding
To leverage user-generated content, you need to understand who that person is. An in-depth knowledge of your target audience's motivations and needs is essential for any type of communication campaign, especially when it comes to UGC.
This understanding will be critical so that you can use the right arguments to convince these people to generate content for you. It's also important to find the best ways to spread this material in your marketing channels.
3. Definition of Channels
As user-generated content can be leveraged across different channels, an important step in the process involves defining which channels they will be. Is your site in need of a space for public reviews? Or does your social media content need a more human touch?
In any case, it is important to detail this point before starting. This will allow you to structure specific plans for each initiative and thus be able to count on actions organized on several fronts.
4. Search for Content
This is where much of the work takes place. For your brand to always have user-generated content available to serve, you and your team must be in the habit of scanning for material.
Avoid doing this manually. There are UGC tools capable of aggregating publications made with certain hashtags, tags on social networks, and other types of creations made by people.
5. Attention to Interactions
There is no point in relying on user-generated content in your communication strategy if your brand does not interact with your audience. The digital medium allows for a two-way street in this relationship, so don't leave your potential customers in a vacuum.
This is particularly important when dealing with social media. Post comments on posts that tag your profile, tag people in the posts you make, and share stories that deserve to be featured. This will make more and more people want to appear in your feed.
Conclusion
User-generated content is a very useful tool for companies to humanize their marketing and achieve superior results with their initiatives. For this, it is necessary to understand the motivations of your audience and take advantage of the right type of material for each initiative.
Take advantage of the information in the article to structure your UGC-focused strategy and start enjoying the benefits.
Written by
