UGC Campaign: What, How, and Why with Examples

What is most important for brands & businesses? It is reaching out to their audiences, engaging with them, interacting, building relationships & communities, promoting their brand, and turning the users into customers. Isn’t it?

To achieve these objectives, you need to create marketing campaigns that enable the necessary communication and exchange of information among brands & users.  

But the challenge is that marketing campaigns lately have seen diminishing returns on their investments due to distrust among the consumers for brands, spammy promotional content, disregard for user privacy, non-engaging campaigns, inauthentic messaging, etc. 

Marketing campaigns are a necessity for any brand, but they don’t seem to be productive & fruitful, leading to a waste of resources. So, what is the solution to this massive challenge? 

What is a UGC Campaign?

A UGC marketing campaign focuses on leveraging user-generated content to promote a brand or product. 

This includes content created and shared by customers related to the brand, such as product reviews, social media posts, or video content, as well as repurposing or reposting that content as part of the marketing plan. 

A UGC campaign can create brand awareness, drive conversions, and boost engagement on various marketing touchpoints.

A brand initiates a user-generated content campaign enabling different opportunities and pathways for the users to contribute, engage, participate, and act in the campaign, which means users are the highlight & forerunners of a UGC campaign. 

Having a UGC marketing campaign for your brand doesn’t require huge investments, and the potential to generate beneficial returns is way more than basic marketing campaigns. 

Why Do You Need A UGC Campaign? 

Since you have discovered what is a UGC campaign now, here are some key reasons that will assure you need one for your brand. 

1. Trust-Building & Authenticity

The key thing we discussed earlier is that consumers have formed distrust for the brands due to unreliability & inauthenticity. But when you add user-generated content to your campaign, it changes everything for the better. 

UGC is known to be the most trustable, authentic, and reliable form of content among users as it is created based on the real experiences of actual customers. 

So, having UGC in your marketing campaigns helps you showcase the reality of your brand, what customers say about it, brand loyalty among customers, brand advocacy & positive word-of-mouth, etc. 

2. Create Brand Desirability & Showcase Brand Image

Brand image is a massive influencer in driving the success of a brand marketing campaign. So, when you add users’ content in your campaign, that creates an image of a user-friendly positive brand among the audiences. 

Also, when other users see a brand promoting user-generated content, such as using images and reviews on brand marketing channels, it creates a brand desire among the non-consumers or non-customers. 

Brand desirability leads to users wanting to associate themselves with the brand, getting featured in the brand’s UGC campaign, brand image enhancement, positive user engagement, and much more.

3. Magnify User Engagement & Interaction 

User engagement is a key challenge that marketers & brands face with their marketing campaigns as these campaigns are mostly dull, non-interactive, and do not have any value for the users. 

But with the user-generated content marketing campaign, the worry of engagement goes out of the equation as the whole concept is driven by user engagement where users share their content, participate, and engage with other users’ content due to its relatability & authenticity, etc. 

Also, as the campaign is now authentic & trustworthy, it removes barriers to engagement from users’ minds regarding distrust & unreliability over the campaign.

Once the engagement increases, every marketer knows that it also increases the chances of conversions & revenue growth. 

4. Expand Brand Reach & Exposure

The primary goal that marketing campaigns have is to reach the maximum number of people on every possible channel, and user-generated content is the perfect solution to achieve this. 

You might have observed that most of the viral & widely popular campaigns on digital platforms are either driven by user-generated content or are shared by the users with their networks. 

So, UGC in your marketing allows you to expand your reach and exposure to new and untapped demographics as users will share such campaigns more, and there is no limit to its reach.

It will help in building widespread brand awareness and, attract new followers & leads to the brand organically. 

5. Augment Your Conversions & Sales

Now, engagement is quite challenging to achieve, yet also extremely vital as it affects the conversions & sales for any brand, whereas adding user-generated content brings a paradigm shift in this scenario.

Factually, it has been stated that 9 out of 10 users tend to trust the UGC while making a purchase online, with it being almost 10 times more impactful than influencers’ content in influencing purchase decisions.

Social ads that contain users’ content generate a 5 times higher click-through rate, and email UGC campaigns get an almost 75% increase in click-through rate. 

It is as UGC provides a clear picture with adequate authentic information to the users that help them make an informed and evaluated purchase decision. So, UGC in your marketing campaign can hugely boost your conversion rates and uplift your sales graphs. 

These are some of the key reasons why you should incorporate user-generated content in your marketing campaigns.

How To Create A UGC Campaign

Now that you know why you need to create a UGC campaign, we have mentioned in-depth information on how you can create one for your brand. 

The process has been divided into three key elements.

A. Plan Your UGC Marketing Strategy

1. Define Your Goal & Objectives
2. Understand Your Audience
3. Sources Of UGC & Its Types
4. Duration & Measurement
5. Campaign Design

B. Execution Of UGC Marketing Campaign

1. Collection of User-generated content
2. Customization & Moderation Of Content
3. Get Content Access Permission
4. Distribution Across Different Marketing Channels

C. Monitor, Analysis & Measurement Of UGC Campaign Performance

So, let’s get started with it:

A. Planning Your UGC Marketing Strategy

1. Define Your Goal & Objectives

The primary step of every UGC campaign is to know what your goals are and what you want to achieve from your campaign. Initially, define why you are creating a campaign in the first place. 

You can define some general goals like raising awareness, launching products, boosting engagement, increasing conversions, etc. or you can even set specific objectives for your UGC campaigns.

The goals or objectives should follow the SMART strategy i.e., Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. It will help you allocate your resources effectively & efficiently with enhanced returns. 

2. Understand Your Audience

The other important step is to know your audience and users as they will be the key drivers of the campaign. When talking about UGC, there are two key elements that you should consider. 

First, you should know who are your brand advocates or who will help you generate the best possible user-generated content for your brand.

You should know who will generate content, what rewards they want, their motivation, how they create it, where they share it, etc. Knowing this will help you get the best quality relevant content for your campaign. 

The other element is you should create a buyer persona for the audience who will access, browse, explore, & consume your UGC campaign. You should gain insights into what they like to access & engage with, which channels they use most, the type of content they want, etc. 

A deeper understanding of these will help you create a more targeted and impactful campaign with lesser resource allocation & investments. 

3. Sources Of UGC & Its Types

Once you know your goals & audience, you will need to define what are the sources from which you can get user-generated content. These sources include social media platforms, website reviews, direct messages, etc. 

Depending upon your objectives, you can strategize on what type of UGC you need, whether it is images, videos, texts, gifs, audio, etc. The sources and types are interrelated, so these should be defined together. 

If you need visual content, then social platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook might be the perfect sources for you, or if you need text reviews, then you will find it on your website, review platforms, Twitter, etc.

Attention: If you do not have sufficient user-generated content about your brand, then you will need to use certain small tactics like creating brand hashtag campaigns, social media promotion, brand-user interaction, encourage reviews & feedback, gamification strategies, etc.

These strategies can help you generate relevant and valuable user-generated content for your brand that you can leverage in marketing. Make sure that you give enough opportunities & time duration for the users to contribute their content. Also, provide suggestions to users on what type of content you want from them. 

4. Duration & Measurement

To assess the performance of your UGC marketing campaign, you must define a deadline. Allocating the deadline will help provide realistic results and compare actual performance with expected performance. 

You can use different strategies to instantly divide your overall duration to analyze the gap and take action accordingly. Ensure your set duration helps you easily manage and assess your campaign performance i.e.; you are not left with a load of data after a long campaign. 

5. Campaign Design

Get started by describing your campaign design, vision, identity, creative outlooks, initial brand investments & efforts, etc. Campaign design will help you explain accountability, creativity, possibilities, etc. 

Once you create the UGC campaign design, you can start with the most crucial part of the campaign: execution and distribution.

B. Execution Of UGC Marketing Campaign

1. Collection of User-generated content

The first step of execution is to gather and curate all the relevant, engaging, and valuable user-generated content from your chosen sources like Instagram or Twitter, Hashtags or handles, etc. 

If you have scattered UGC over different platforms & categories, then you should accumulate that into a single feed to manage it more effectively & efficiently. The content can be immense in quantity, so management becomes quite crucial for your campaign. 

2. Customization & Moderation Of Content

Moderation is the next step, and a pivotal one as the users have created content with the utmost freedom and open mindset based on their perspective about your brand. Hence, not all UGC will be beneficial or relevant to your brand. 

Moderation will help you maintain content relevancy, quality, positivity, supervision, campaign relatability, etc., to magnify the impact of content on your campaign. 

Customization of collected UGC is also equally important as it will help you inject creativity into the content, make it more appealing, add promotion and branding elements, instill engaging and interactive attributes, and more into your UGC marketing campaign. 

3. Get Content Access Permission

Knowing all the benefits UGC presents, you must respect the users’ content rights and privacy. Therefore, if needed, you should take the rights (permission) from the users to repurpose their content for your brand UGC campaigns. 

You can create a uniform & simple process to gather UGC rights along with a fool-proof UGC rights management agreement with details on content repurposing, ownership, management, etc. in a language that the user can easily understand. 

5. Distribution Across Different Marketing Channels

Once you collect, moderate, customize, and finalize your UGC campaign, you can publish or distribute it across any or all marketing channels of your choice. 

While publishing, remember your campaign’s concept, objectives, goal, and audience to know what channel or channels will provide the best returns on investment and where your UGC campaign will perform best. 

Remember to modify your campaign according to the channel you are publishing it on, as every channel has distinct attributes and qualities. This will help your campaign perform better and get more results. 

C. Monitor, Analysis & Measurement Of UGC Campaign Performance

Firstly, once your UGC campaign is published, you should continually track and monitor it to ensure that it is heading in the expected direction. 

Then, after the completion of the campaign, It is essential to analyze the performance of your UGC campaign, as analysis will help you find the impact of your campaign on the audience. 

You can measure the performance by evaluating and comparing the results with the expected objectives & outcomes. Based on this, you can take further actions in your strategy & campaigns. 

There are different metrics to measure the performance for different channels, so analyze accordingly. 

Successful UGC Campaign Examples

Calvin Klein’s Hashtag Campaign 

Some of the most popular UGC examples come from apparel & fashion brands like Calvin Klein. Back in 2014, the brand introduced #MyCalvins. Initially, the brand commenced the campaign by endorsing famous celebrities and models.

The campaign took a drastic turn, and instead of only including celebrities, it also stretched out to include popular internet influencers and ultimately counted in content from fans and customers. 

The campaign took big turns over the years and remains one of the most popular hashtag campaigns today, with over 1 million posts on the hashtag.  

Music Video Contest By Lucy Dacus

Another popular and unique example of a UGC campaign is a music video contest hosted by singer Lucy Dacus for her new song, ‘Brando. ‘ The song was released in 2021. 

The singer asked her fans online to record videos of themselves dancing and enjoying themselves on the song and, in return, promised to feature them in the music video. With this unique idea, she was able to create a beautifully captivating music video for her single. 

She generated a large amount of crowd-created UGC and received extra incentives by involving her fans in the process. 

Glossier’s UGC Campaigns 

The skincare and cosmetics brand Glossier has time and again, proven its power to flourish through social media. The beauty brand has several examples of impressive UGC campaigns that have successfully boosted its growth and engagement on social media.

The brand has worked its way to the top by focusing primarily on creating a highly aesthetic brand.

Glossier includes UGC in every marketing campaign and has made UGC an integral part of its branding journey. 

Coca-Cola’s ‘Share A Coke’

Another amazing example of establishing a connection with your consumers is by making them your brand’s representatives. Coca-Cola launched its ‘Share A Coke’ campaign back in 2011. 

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A post shared by Melanie Spehr (@spehrmint)

The campaign made it to the top and most popular campaigns of all time. It brought together consumers from all over the world and inspired them to post their version of ‘Share A Coke’ as part of the campaign. As a result, a huge amount of UGC was curated, helping the brand gain excellent popularity.

What Makes a Successful UGC Campaign?

A successful UGC campaign is one that effectively achieves the goals set out by the business, such as increasing brand awareness, engagement, or sales. Here are some key factors that can contribute to the success of a UGC campaign:

• Relevance: The content collected and shared in a UGC campaign should be relevant to the target audience and the campaign’s overall goals.
• Authenticity: UGC campaigns should showcase authentic content from real customers to build trust and credibility with potential customers.
• Engagement: A successful UGC campaign should engage its target audience, encouraging them to participate and share their own content.
• Creativity: The way in which a UGC campaign is executed can make a big difference in its success. Businesses should strive to be creative in collecting and displaying content.
• Timing: The timing of a UGC campaign can be critical to its success. Businesses should consider the timing of the campaign in relation to other marketing efforts and major events.
• Follow-up: It is crucial to have a strategy for following up with customers and incentivizing them to generate content and participate in the campaign.
• Measuring and analyzing: A good campaign should have key performance indicators (KPIs), metrics to track, and analysis tools to determine the campaign’s effectiveness. This way, adjustments can be made as needed.
• Promotion: The campaign should be well-promoted, whether it’s on your website, social media, email marketing, events, SMS marketing platforms, or other channels, to reach its target audience and attract more participation.

Ultimately, a successful UGC campaign should be tailored to the business’s specific goals and target audience. It should be authentic, engaging, and well-executed in order to maximize its effectiveness.

Taggbox – Best Tool For UGC Campaigns

When you want to create a UGC campaign for your brand, you need to tackle various challenges effectively to get the best possible results. 

Therefore, we have the best solution for you to overcome the challenges and create incredible result-driven UGC campaigns. 

The best tool for creating a UGC campaign is our #1 UGC platform – Taggbox. 

UGC tools like Taggbox help you with the 6 ultimate checkpoints of a successful UGC campaign, and we have mentioned them below:

• Collect and curate massive amounts of users’ content, be it visuals or text, from diverse social media and platforms using hashtags, keywords, handles, and more.

• Moderation functionality allows you to restrict irrelevant, abusive, and useless content, allowing you to maintain premium content quality. 

• Rights Management lets you ask permission directly from the users to repurpose their content with in-built rights request templates, rights agreements, and easy rights approval by users.

• Customization features like designs & layouts, colors & fonts, themes, creative elements, tickers, content play, etc. help you provide a theme to your campaign and make it more attractive & engaging.

• Branding & Sponsorship functionality lets you add branded content to your UGC campaign, display announcements, add promotional offers, showcase sponsored posts & banners in your campaigns, highlight offers, etc. 

• Publish Or Display Now that you are done creating your UGC campaign, it is time to publish it.

Taggbox provides you with the possibilities to:

• Embed UGC on the website
• Display UGC in your events, seminars, exhibitions, etc. 
• Showcase it through digital signage & in-store advertising
• Publish UGC in your email campaigns
• Display it in social advertising campaigns
• Create print UGC campaigns

Making your UGC campaign live is easy with Taggbox. You also get fresh, instant, automatic content updates and real-time customer support. 

• Analytics to measure your campaign performance with insights on metrics like most active users, engagement, user sentiments, etc. that help you plan better, find more targeted opportunities, get insights into audience behavior, and much more. 

Frequently Asked Questions:-

Conclusion

We mentioned every smallest yet crucial detail in this UGC campaign guide. Creating a UGC campaign can be a rigorous task, but the efforts will be worth the returns that you will generate for your brand or business. 

The essence of UGC is that you cannot copy anyone else’s strategy as you have a different audience with different perspectives that make it unique, so there is no limit to the possibilities you can uncover with a UGC campaign. 

So, get started with your UGC campaign now and experience what your users can do for you.