User Generated Content: 8 Steps To Improve Your Sales & Social Metrics
What if I tell you that you can attain brand awareness, impressive social shares, following, sales — all at once, without churning quality content every day?
Yes, you read it right!
All of it, without thinking about content creation and straining your marketing budget.
If this didn’t straighten your ears as a marketer, I don’t know what will.
No, it isn’t a quick-rich scheme, and neither I’m talking about Influencer marketing. But there’s something else that can serve you better results than both of these.
It’s user generated content, also known as UGC and sometimes even user created content.
Stackla data report showed that consumers find UGC to be 9.8x more impactful than influencer content.
Moreover, the data report also showed that consumers believe user generated content to be 2.4x authentic in comparison to content created by the brand.
Does that ring a bell?
So what’s this UGC exactly!
What is User Generated Content or UGC?
As the definition implies, user generated content is a content created by the user or consumers of the brand.
The content does not invite any financial transaction and that’s what makes it trusted among the audience, either touched or untouched.
Do you remember Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ Campaign?
The campaign encouraged the audience to post coke-sharing pictures. The catch was the coke’s label and the person you are sharing with must have the same name/relation.
That’s an example of user generated content.
Not just this, the campaign managed its’ young adult consumption to be up by 7% in those Australia’s summer.
However, a UGC doesn’t limit to a single type or format. It can be;
- Vlogs
- Blog Posts
- Testimonials
- Case Studies
- Blog Comments
- Brand’s Product/Service Reviews
Or anything that you can think of.
The brands who applied the UGC campaign correctly have seen phenomenal growth in their sales and social metrics. Moreover, the strategy campaigns have also freed the brand’s marketing team from brainstorming about more content to produce.
Here are the real examples of the brands that have witnessed the success with it.
Examples of User Generated Content; Brands That Leveraged UGC
GoPro
If we talk about a brand that aced the UGC campaign very well, it’s GoPro. The brand came up with disruptive innovation, a light weighted camera, for the athletes. The idea was to let the athletes record their adventures without dealing with 5 kg of cameras on their heads.
GoPro almost doubled its income from 2010 to 2011(to $24.6 million) by just investing $50,000 in advertising and its UGC campaign.
And what else they got, the hashtag #GoPro has over 43 million posts, unlimited social shares, and social following.
Starbucks
Starbucks, one of the famous coffee brands, also uses the UGC campaign in its seasonal contest, #RedCupContest. The contest encourages the coffee drinkers to submit shots of their coffee(along with Red Cup) to win a gift card from Starbucks.
And this campaign has led to enormous season sales in the past. Of course the customer has to buy the red cup first for clicking pictures.
Checklist on How to Get Started with User Generated Content
Here’s the checklist that can help you to get started with your UGC campaign.
Understand the Objective Behind the Campaign
From writing a piece of content to creating any marketing strategy or a campaign, your ‘why’ matters. Thus, sketch your goals first.
Discuss with your team, why do we want users to create content for us?
Is it for sales, for traffic or brand awareness or you just want to address a notion(or a cause)?
However, don’t blanket your real goals with other goals. Your audience is smarter than you think and the campaign may backfire.
Starbucks has faced the same situation. The UK media showed that Starbucks was evading taxes by showing no profits, this led to a brand boycott by people.
Underestimating the audience’s intelligence, Starbucks released the #SpreadTheCheer campaign on twitter without giving the controversy enough time to settle.
They put a big display showing users’ tweets with the hashtag, but without any moderation. So just when the brand expected some positive Christmas stories from people, they got accusations of tax evasion and unfair treatment with their employees.
Well, the lesson is crystal clear now.
Understand Your Audience
Your audience will be the driver of the campaign and once the engine has started, the brand will have no control over it. Thus, understanding how the audience perceives the brand, what are their motivations, what are they talking about, and even what bond they carry with the brand; knowing all of it matters.
McDonald’s failed miserably while starting its UGC campaign on twitter. They expected some heartwarming stories to explode under the hashtag #McDStories. Unfortunately, they got tweets of some bashing stories. The reports said that McDonald’s pulled the campaign back after two hours but stories kept rolling.
Thus, it is important to research first before trying.
Check, how your audience feels for your brand.
Have you ever interacted with them before?
Also if you have a cold audience, consider taking time before starting the campaign and make your bond warmer — by engaging them in social comments or on Twitter.
Choose the Right Distribution Platform
The distribution platform can be a brand’s website page or any social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.
The choice of platform depends upon;
(i) the goal of the campaign and
(ii) where your audience lives socially.
If you are choosing Facebook, make sure that you run Facebook ads afterward as the platform’s organic reach is almost null. Most of the brands find Instagram to be a perfect choice for sharing user content. However, twitter isn’t as behind as it seems in terms of sharing pictures. Thus, choose only after analyzing the goal and your audience.
Set the Campaign Duration
Set a specific duration for how long the campaign will run so that you can;
- Draw sharp conclusions
- Measure the campaign’s potential
- Know your consumers better than before and
- Treat the results as a benchmark for future campaigns
Decide the Type of User Generated Content
The type of user generate content is limited to one’s creativity only. The content can be a video or photo-sharing contest, a storytelling campaign, or even a hashtag campaign.
Selecting the content type retracts us to the same path that says see what suits the campaign’s goal and audience’s interests.
You can also give the campaign a push, if needed, with the help of influencers. Just make sure that it’s not complicated.
Think of a Reward
When it comes to asking for a favor from your audience, you better come up with a reward in exchange. We all know how it matters, the foundation of marketing lies on ‘why should your audience care?’
A reward can be anything that the audience desires and the brand is willing to give away. As more as it can be a gift card, or as less as it can be a huge exposure. Thinking of the reward in advance contributes to the higher success rate of the campaign.
Test the Strategy
Sit with your teammates and have a brainstorming session. Show them the campaign, be sure to include the fresh but experienced eyes on the bench, and ask what outcomes they can predict.
- Can they imagine anything going wrong with the idea?
- Will your contest impact the controversy your brand has been in recently, or
- Is it violating the ideologies of your audience or any communities, non-profits, environmentalists, etc?
The goal behind this step is to test the plan with new brains so that you can fix the points that can potentially misfire the campaign.
Track the Performance
Irrespective of what your goal is, tracking your campaign’s performance is one of the important aspects you shouldn’t leave behind. How will you call your campaign successful if you don’t even consider the results — either it’s social followers, brand awareness, or anything else — your efforts brought in?
You can find the insights of your campaign in your respective social media’s performance board.
Minor Tips on User Generated Content
- Always ask the person before posting their content(with real credits) on your platform, we call it social media etiquette.
- If you’re using a display to show tweets in the real world, employ a filter or moderation to handle in case of hashtag hijacking*.
*Hashtag hijacking is a practice where the trending hashtag gets used by other users for unrelated tweets.
Conclusion
The UGC is no less than a goldmine and brands still use it even if they have faced massive failures doing it in the past. The reason is straight and simple, user generated content shows unexpected results in less time and at a much lesser marketing budget.
Moreover, UGC takes the stress off of creating content from the brand’s shoulders. However, taking it to the point where it can propel further, is neither a cakewalk.
By the way, have you ever tried a UGC campaign before? Let me know in the comments section.
And even if you think that I have missed something, drop those points in the comments too.
