A Guide To User-Generated Content Platform For Marketers

Have you noticed that lately, User generated content has become a hype in the digital marketing industry? 

The emergence of social media platforms with constantly evolving features & ease of use along with the growing number of active social users (almost half of the world) is resulting in massive user-generated content creation.

Marketers have identified an opportunity to leverage User-Generated Content platforms to empower their marketing campaigns with UGC and garner positive financial & non-financial results. 

But why UGC is so important and What are UGC platforms?

What’s Inside

• Why is UGC important for marketers?
• What Are User-Generated Content Platforms?
• How Are They Relevant To Your Brand?
• How To Choose The Best UGC Platform
• Best User-Generated Content Platform 

Why is UGC important for marketers?

Primarily, User generated content marketing is so crucial for marketers as it is the most reliable, authentic, and trustworthy marketing option available. The reason for these attributes is as it is created voluntarily by the customers (actual users majorly) based on their experiences, ideas, opinions, feedback, & reviews. 

Therefore, When leveraged by the brands, it helps them build brand trust, showcase authenticity, gain exposure & user engagement, and drive conversions to boost their brand growth. 

Besides, it is incredibly cost-effective and readily available for marketers to leverage it in their campaigns. 

So, where does the role of user-generated content platforms come? Or why they are present & immensely popular among marketers & brands? 

What Are User-Generated Content Platforms?

You can understand User-generated content platforms as software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product that helps in managing the end-to-end solutions around UGC & its use in marketing.

In simple words, the user-generated content platform help in the discovery & curation of all the relevant and valuable User-generated content for a brand from a diverse range of social media into a single feed. 

Further, the platforms allow you to add branding to the curated UGC through customizations and rightfully acquire & own the users’ content with the UGC rights management attribute for legal security & happy customers. 

Finally, it lets you display your UGC-empowered marketing campaigns interactively & effectively on websites, digital signages, events, Digital-out-of-home, and many more channels. 

How Are They Relevant To Your Brand?

With all these features & attributes, a User-generated content platform provides complete marketing solutions to create campaigns that are enormously impactful and engaging for the audience. 

Leveraging UGC in your marketing campaigns is a solution to visual storytelling through the perspectives of the customers that make the campaigns engaging and attractive that contribute to the brand’s credibility & image uplifting. 

So, since UGC is a necessity in this digital age for marketers, the importance and relevance of these user-generated content platforms increase automatically.

These following points explain why user-generated content platforms will be the way to go for your brand:

• Easy UGC discovery & curation form different social media platforms into a single feed
• Fetch content using Hashtags, keywords, channels, profiles, business ID’s, and much more social elements
• Ease-of-Use for marketers with a fully-digitized & automated process
• Moderate the content to maintain the utmost quality content for campaigns
• Own the UGC by getting rights directly from the content creators with simple, reliable, and personalized permission request & user approvals
• Branding of UGC by adding banners, designs, logos, promotions, and many more marketing elements through customizations
• Display your user-generated content on websites, events, DOOH, public displays, social advertising or any other channel easily with real-time content fetching & management
• Active customer support and contact center for hassle-free campaign management
• Performance tracking and analytics to measure the impact & engagement metrics of the campaign
• Opportunities for Intensified user engagement and result-driven campaigns
• Effortless access to a diverse hub of UGC with a continuous flow of meaningful free-of-cost content

Ask Yourself These Questions

The Selection Guide

We have listed a few crucial factors that you must consider while selecting the platform for your marketing campaigns.

Let’s explore these points to understand what are the necessities of a UGC, CGC or EGC platform and how you can choose the best one for your campaigns. 

1. Features

It is probably the most essential thing anyone will look for before investing. Features are like the strengths and unique selling propositions of any user-generated content platform. 

There can be several features for any given platform, but we have sorted some key ones that you should look for primarily.

Content Discovery: The initial step towards leveraging UGC for your marketing campaigns is to discover the best content, i.e. there are many social media platforms, and your audience is scattered over these platforms along with their content. 

So, it helps you discover all the user-generated content across different platforms instantly without any extra investment or effort. 

Content Curation: Curation is the process of gathering all the relevant, meaningful, and valuable content around a particular topic or area of interest from a variety of sources. The platform should provide vast ways to curate content like hashtags, keywords, profiles, timelines, channels and more. 

Display & Advertise: once you have designed your UGC campaign, the tool must provide options to display the UGC campaigns on websites, digital signages, DOOH’s, In-store displays, events, and public display screens. 

Performance Analytics: What’s the point of using a user-generated content platform, if it does not have performance analytics to show how the UGC campaigns are performing and user engagement. It would be extremely beneficial if the platform could show sentiment analysis as well to understand the user behavior & sentiments. 

2. Content Management & Customization

The content you aggregate form social media is raw and unfiltered, so it becomes necessary that the platform provides powerful moderation to maintain the best quality of content and restrict abusive, irrelevant, and negative content. 

Also, the platform should have rights management attribute so that you can gain rights to the users’ content and repurpose that content in your campaigns legally without any hassle. 

Now, customization is an integral part as it makes the UGC purposeful so that your campaigns can become effective & impactful. The platform can have elements such as adding banners, branded posts, announcements, designing, and much more to make your campaign more interactive & attractive. 

3. Simple UI & Easy Usability

Simple UI & easy usability here relate to how easy is the platform to use for the users. With such software that manages a tremendous amount of data with extensive functionality, it becomes essential to keep the UI & usability simple & easy. 

As a user, you would not want to invest time in learning the aesthetics of platforms and then focus on their campaigns. The platform should be self-explanatory with guides & assistance along the way to make it easily accessible for the users.

The best platform is where there’s no need for coding & extensive technical knowledge to understand the procedure. 

4. Pricing 

Here comes one of the top attributes to consider while choosing a platform after the features. Each user-generated content platform generally has a unique pricing model and categories. 

Mainly, the pricing plans work in the categories that are divided based on the business size of the users like Startup, Small, Medium, Large, or enterprise or maybe according to the Use Cases like Website, Digital Signage, Events, etc. Some might even have plans based on the number of campaigns as well.

But before delving into pricing, you should check for free trial and demo that gives insights into its features, functionalities, and solutions. 

5. Customer Support Services

When you are using such a platform that might be new to you, and you won’t entirely understand the ins & outs of it, or you might have an event to present your campaign, and there is an issue that needs to be resolved instantly. 

So, you will need assistance from the support team instantly to get it fixed or understand how to resolve the queries for seamless campaign execution and experience.

Active customer support comes in handy more than you might think of it. As it can be the deciding factor for the success or failure of a marketing campaign.

These were the key points to consider when you choose a UGC marketing platform for UGC curation and marketing campaigns.

Taggbox – Best User-Generated Content Platform

Taggbox is a great UGC platform that helps the users in building trust, increase engagement, and conversions with solutions that discover, curate, manage and display engaging user-generated content at all marketing touchpoints effectively and efficiently. 

Taggbox provides end-to-end solutions to leverage the valuable UGC for the users in their marketing campaigns. 

With the robust UGC curation, incredible customization & personalization aesthetics, and display options for website, events, display screens, Digital signages, and more, it also has the UGC rights management element to own your earned content & repurpose it. Also, the User interface is attractively simple and easy to navigate. 

Taggbox offers all the aforementioned features with a diverse range of plans and their pricing so that you can choose the best one according to your requirements and budget. 

Closing Statement

It was a complete guide about the user-generated content platforms and how you can leverage the UGC for your brand by choosing the best platform.

The solutions are there; now it is up to you to decide how you want your earned media, i.e. UGC, to drive results for your brand, i.e. engagement & conversions. 

So, start now, take a demo to see for yourself how a platform caters best to your needs. 

Also Read – User-Generated Content Campaign Example