UGC Marketing Simplified – A Comprehensive Guide for 2020

Here’s a complete guide about how (user-generated content) UGC marketing is redefining the marketing ecosystem for brands and businesses globally. 

Content is what users crave and they will be attracted to places where they can find exciting and intriguing content and successful marketing is about having captivating and valuable content. 

As social media and digital media consumption are rising among the billions of users globally, it became crucial for brands to find & create content that can attract and engage users with their brand through their content marketing strategy. 

This is where the role of UGC marketing comes into the picture of marketing for brands. 

The Evolution of Content Marketing

The importance of content marketing has been increasing ever since it came into existence. Earlier the brands used to created promotional branded content about their products to lure customers and sell their products. 

As time progressed, content marketing saw an evolution into delivering more information rather than promotional content which also proved to be helpful but as time changed, it wasn’t effective or fruitful as the marketers expected it to be. 

As consumers became more aware and involved along with the rise of social media and digital platforms. 

Coming recent times, brands and marketers realized that spammy and promotional marketing has led to distrust & unreliability among the users as they saw misrepresentation & unreal content that promised untrue things. 

Not just that but the old-age content marketing only allowed one-way communication where consumer engagement was minimum that led to low conversions & revenue. 

Given these challenges in content marketing, brands & marketers now looking for solutions that help them build trust, showcase credibility, and enable the user engagement with the brand. 

This quest led to the identification of “user generated content marketing” being the most suitable option for marketing that perfectly serves the need of this era.

So, the content marketing that started from being too loud and promotional about the brand has evolved into consumers being the drivers of user generated content campaigns for leading global brands. 

What Is UGC Marketing? 

UGC marketing is driven by the content that has been created and shared by the users on digital and social media platforms. 

When we discuss it in the business context, UGC is any form of content that has been created by the users based on their real experiences, ideas, opinions, feedback, reviews, etc. about a brand or its products. 

Now, it is so hyped up in content marketing in this digital age as it is immensely trustworthy, reliable, credible, and authentic that has the power of influencing users’ behavior and decisions. 

So, UGC marketing is when brands & businesses try to leverage all the relevant, valuable, and powerful user-generated content in their marketing campaigns to build trust, increase engagement, and drive conversions. 

UGC Marketing Advantages For Brands

You have explored above that why content marketing resorted to the user-generated content to drive results and here we present some advantages that UGC marketing presents for content marketing & brand growth. 

1. Reality & Credibility Is What Users Look For 

In this age of digital media consumption and commerce, to address the concerns of users regarding the brands about their authenticity, security, and credibility to drive results. 

Now, doing so isn’t possible with branded content as a brand will obviously talk positive and progressive about their brand so UGC marketing becomes a perfect choice to show the real image of the brand and prove its credibility to potential customers. 

2. Trust & Reliability Is A Must For Any Brand

Again continuing on the path of reality and credibility, the next checkpoint is to gain user trust and build reliability among the users so that they are not hesitant to engage with your campaigns & brand. 

Building trust and reliability requires having authentic and realistic content that has been shared by the existing customers as they are the perfect advocates to show the quality of your products & brand. 

So, user-generated content being real & authentic content can perfectly help you to build trust and reliability for your brand through your marketing campaigns. 

3. Bring-Forward Brand Advocacy & Desirability

Having positive word-of-mouth about a brand is extremely crucial as it works like a magnet to attract consumers to your stores. Now, it isn’t possible for the brand to showcase advocacy through their own content thus UGC paves the way here. 

User-generated marketing correctly showcases how the existing customers are using your products/brand, their experiences, satisfaction levels, and much more creating brand advocacy about the brand. 

Also, as consumers come across this brand advocacy, this creates a sense of desirability to associate themselves with the brand and reap all the benefits that other customers are reaping. 

4. Get The “Most-Important” Engagement From Your Users

Engagement in marketing campaigns is a key metric that defines the success of the marketing campaign and content is most important when you want to engage users. 

UGC marketing is known to be most engaging and intriguing to the users and rightly so as it is created by the real users based on their creativity and experience. 

This makes it aesthetically diverse, entertaining, unfiltered, and relatable to the users thus they tend to engage more with the UGC as compared to the branded content. 

User-generated content can be said as the content that is created by the engagement and for the engagement. 

5. Boost-Up Your Conversions & Revenue

Probably the ultimate goal that every brand and marketer keeps in mind while creating their content marketing strategy is to increase their conversions and thereby revenue. 

User-generated as we know is highly trustworthy and engaging among the users, has the potential to drive immense conversions. The fact that over 90% of the people trust UGC to assist them in their online purchase decision is a validation of how UGC drives conversions. 

Now, showcasing relatable and positive user-generated content across your marketing campaigns and channels leads to intriguing consumers towards the sales funnel. 

6. The Most Cost-Effective Option For Your Marketing

Content creation is a mammoth task for brands as there are various challenges like uniqueness, freshness, authenticity, credibility, creativity, etc. are necessary to be included. 

To manage all these aspects, it leads to brands investing huge budgets into labor, time, and resources into content creation and the negative element is that the branded content won’t be as impactful as user-generated content. 

UGC marketing is a cost-effective method where you don’t have to make a huge investment into content creation, instead; you can use tools like a UGC platform to discover, collect, and curate all the relevant UGC with the constant flow of unique & fresh content. 

UGC Marketing Strategies & Tips

Since we have explored how user-generated content can benefit your content marketing campaigns, here are some of the best ways to leverage UGC in your content marketing. 

1. Hashtag Campaigns

Hashtags campaigns have been a popular trend among the brands as part of their marketing campaigns. As social media platforms have gained popularity, the use of hashtags with the content-sharing has also magnified.

So, to get users to create UGC about your brand and engage users with your campaign, you can create a hashtag campaign, distribute it on social platforms, and encourage users to involve & engage.

2. Constant Social Engagement

Now, creating UGC marketing campaigns and distribution of campaign is not enough, it is essential that you constantly engage and interact with your users and social media platforms are the best place to do so. 

Since social media provides an easy way to interact with the users, you should take it as an opportunity. This will help you build a positive brand image and trust among the users. 

Also, this social engagement will encourage users to share content more and engage more with your brand. This can be leveraged in your future marketing campaigns.

3. Gamification Strategies

It is one of the most trending tactics among the brands nowadays where they create gamification strategies like polls, contests, quizzes, leaderboards, participation benefits, rewards & recognition, and many more to engage users and drive conversions along with the brand building. 

These gamification strategies help in attracting users towards your campaigns to get rewards and recognitions whereas you get valuable user-generated content from your users that you can leverage in your UGC marketing campaigns. 

Many leading brands use this tactic and one such globally popular brand is GoPro which is the leader when it comes to creating gamification strategies and using UGC in marketing.  

3. UGC Platform

It is the best solution when it comes to leveraging UGC in marketing strategy. A UGC platform like Taggbox helps you in the discovery, collection, and curation of user-generated content from different social media and digital platforms. 

You can then display this user-generated content across various marketing channels like websites, events, digital signages, emails, social ads, etc. easily with the UGC platform. 

The UGC platform also allows you to customize your UGC campaign with beautiful themes, creative design elements, colors, styling, and much more. Also, you get the moderation feature to keep the best UGC and remove irrelevant UGC from your campaign. 

Besides, you can enable real-time automatic updates, manage UGC rights, gamify the experiences, integrate your hashtag campaigns, measure your UGC campaigns’ performance with analytics and much more. 

Conclusion

The hype around UGC has been increasing and the reasons have been the benefits it presents through content marketing. We have tried to show you the major benefits of UGC here but there are many more possibilities that you can uncover with UGC marketing. 

It is essential that you should integrate UGC with your content marketing strategies to maximize your returns and drive brand growth. So, get started with the strategies that we have suggested and create your unique and amazing UGC marketing campaigns and for all of this, you can use robust and powerful UGC tools available in the market.