Want to improve your brand’s conversion rates and establish loyalty with customers? Find out how user-generated content (UGC) can help. Learn how UGC provides valuable insights, establishes a community around your brand, and is a cost-effective marketing tool.
1. Understanding UGC: What is User-Generated Content and How Does it Fit into a Content Marketing Strategy?
First, what is UGC? UGC stands for User Generated Content and refers to all content generated and published by users of certain brands online. In today’s era, this type of content is now part of a company’s content marketing strategy. Also, UGC is a good way for a customer to value the products and services of companies. This type of content help brands understands their customer, the engagement rate that they measure, how they can influence new customers, and how organic referencing is working for them.
2. The Importance of Authenticity and Clear Objectives in UGC-based Marketing
UGC content is more than just online content talking about a certain brand, for a company the measurement of this type of content shows them how the consumers interact with their brand, plus they can use UGC content as a part of their commercial strategies. UGC content is a real provider of insights for companies nowadays. They can now adjust their strategies according to want people to want, for example, a YouTuber doing a review without sponsorship can help notice what is missing in a certain product. But companies must keep in mind the authenticity through their marketing strategies and prioritize clear and precise objectives such as engagement and conversion rates while using UGC.
3. Encouraging Customers to Create UGC and Build a Brand Community
This type of content can come from different types of people, it can be from customers for example through unboxing videos or posts/ stories on Instagram. It can also be from die-hard brand loyalists or fans, but this type of segment is hard to satisfy because they want a specific type of UGC content. Those people can be seen as brand ambassadors for companies.
From a brand perspective, it is important to encourage their customers to put out UGC, because it helps the engagement from those customers and creates a real community around a brand. Plus, customers can feel like they are now part of something bigger and that they matter to the company. UGC content empowers consumers in a brand marketing strategy because marketers always want authenticity as possible.
4. The Impact of UGC on Consumers’ Buying Decisions and Establishing Brand Loyalty
So, as you can see UGC is now an important source of content for brands because it gives them leverage in terms of conversion, engagement and return rate. We can see that 92% of potential customers who are looking at reviews or videos from other customers trust more this type of content than those that a brand puts out. They trust UGC so much that 4 of 5 consumers are likely to buy a product that has been previously recommended to them through UGC.
For example, “51% of consumers believe that less than half of brands create content that resonates as authentic.” And “Consumers are 2.4x more likely to say UGC is most authentic compared to branded content.” Those statistics show the real impacts of UGC on consumers buying decisions.
5. Highlighting the Cost-Effectiveness of UGC as a Marketing Tool and its Effectiveness in Reaching New Segments
When we are talking more in-depth about the impact of UGC on brand marketing KPIs, we can see that user-generated content (UGC) allows companies to reach new segments and increase their notoriety. UGC is helping brands establish loyalty from their customers and grow a community and optimize their SEO.
From a financial standpoint, UGC is a real cost-effective marketing tool for companies because it is users and consumers that are putting out content about products for them. This marketing strategy involving UGC is way more appealing than influencers because consumers are more able to rely on an average person telling them about a certain product or service. Afterwards, companies can scavenge the internet and social media and collect insights to get feedback about how they are perceived.
6. To Conclude
In conclusion, in today’s digital age, businesses are faced with a challenge to stand out from the competition and convert their audience. But UGC is now an efficient resource for them for all the reasons explained earlier to achieve their goals.
7. Learn more
To learn more about how a brand can manage to use UGC in their marketing strategies here is a link to a Hootsuite blog; https://blog.hootsuite.com/user-generated-content-ugc/#:~:text=UGC%20acts%20as%20authentic%20social,them%20to%20decide%20to%20buy.
Or if you want to understand the differences between UGC creators and influencers here is a link to an article from Future Of Marketing; https://futureofmarketing.tintup.com/ugc-creators-vs-influencers/#:~:text=Nope%2C%20they’re%20not%20influencers,difference%20between%20UGC%20creators%20vs.
