Looking to earn more attention from people towards your brand or product? Then you should incorporate user-generated content in your marketing strategy to promote your brand. There are a lot of benefits of user-generated content, from increasing authenticity to boosting your content marketing efforts.
User-generated content (UGC) is any form of content – videos, images, text, reviews that are generated or created by users (or customers) on online platforms and that can be accessible publicly.
UGC is also known as Consumer-Generated Content or CGC. User-generated content is powerful enough to influence people’s decisions before taking any step related to buying something, visiting somewhere, or even watching movies.
It was a time when influence marketing was only for celebrities, where they promote brands with a script. Nowadays people trust online reviews that are created by someone who’s not part of that particular business – “Genuine Users or Customers”. In this influencer marketing world, User-generated content is like a diamond.
Not convinced about the power of user-generated content? Then have a look at these mind-blowing stats that is curated by EveryoneSocial:
- Word-of-mouth marketing generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising.
- 74% of consumers rely on social media to inform their purchasing decisions.
- As few as 16% of brands have a strategy regarding user-generated content.
- Millennials find UGC to be 35% more memorable than content that came from mainstream sources.
- Consumers on average spend 5.4 hours per day with user-generated content.
- According to ComScore, brand engagements rise by 28% when consumers are exposed to a mixture of professional marketing content and user-generated content.
- Consumers find UGC 9.8x more impactful than influencer content when making a purchasing decision.
- 84% of consumers say they trust peer recommendations above all other sources of advertising.
- UGC increases conversions by 10% when included in an online purchase path. (Studyclerk)
- 87% of brands use UGC for authentic (and free) content.
Hope these statistics are enough to prove the value of user-generated content.
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But how consumer-generated content can be beneficial for your brand or business?
Now marketers and brand promoters are highly preferring to include User Generated Content in their marketing strategies.
UGC comes with many benefits, it is a powerful, authentic, and valuable tool for brands. When it comes to increasing your sales and boosting your hashtag campaigns, UGC can be a game-changer for your brand anytime.
6 Key Benefits of User-Generated Content
Come, let’s have a look at major ones of those many benefits.
1. Make Brand-Customer Relationship Stronger and Healthier
User-generated content creates a stronger, reliable, and authentic relationship between customers and brands. UGC helps to fill the gap between brands and customers by mixing customer-generated content and branded content.
UGC has the tendency to tap into the ego of the customers and help you inculcate a stronger and healthier brand-customer relationship.
“In fact, according to a study, engagement increases by 28% when consumers can view a mixture of user-generated product videos and official brand authored content. (SEMRush)”
UGC is one of the most trusted parts of website content. All this leads to a better, well-communicated, and well-driven brand-customer relationship.
2. Boosts Revenues
Budget crunches are one of the very common marketing challenges.
By outsourcing content creation to your customers through UGC campaigns, you’re not just ushering in user trust and increase in brand credibility but also saving a lot on the financial end.
User-generated content generates more sales than brand-generated content because UGC is more authentic, trustworthy, and capable of converting leads into sales. Incorporating UGC is not just cost-effective but also revenue-generating.
UGC creates a buzz around your brand which leads to people buying your products/services.
What could be better than that!
3. Build Brand Trust With UGC
“90% of online buyers report that they are less likely to buy or will take a longer time to decide to purchase if a website does not have any customer reviews listed.”
Brand trust is the essential way to make a customer loyal and improve conversion consistency. User trust over brand always gives confidence to customers to make a purchase from your brand.
UGC is both transparent and compelling. It fetches trust from all sections of demographics. It’s because the origin of UGC lies in the very fact that users love your brand, hence, they created content displaying their experiences with your brand.
So, what could be more trust-magnetizing than that?
People also trust user-generated visuals more than any brand text or photoshopped images owing to the objectivity UGC carries along.
Hence, incorporating UGC into your marketing strategy helps you earn customers’ trust.
4. Expands Your Social Reach
“Nine out of ten online consumers trust user-generated content more than traditional advertising.”
Social media platforms are a great source for discovering user-generated content for your brand.
So, when you mainstream UGC as an integral part of your marketing campaign, you are indirectly opening the floodgates to your social profiles where users readily engage with you.
User-generated content looks more interesting and interactive as compared to brand-created content that’s why it is so impactful.
UGC campaigns and social media platforms go hand in hand. When both meet with each other then magic happens. You can run a UGC campaign on social media platforms to increase brand awareness and build a strong relationship with people.
UGC earns more likes, comments, and shares than brand-generated content, as a result, gains more reach on social media. This helps you to expand your social reach and multiply your social influence overall across multiple social media channels.
Also, it turns your website’s visitors into social media followers of your brand.
5. Reinforces Credibility and Authenticity
“According to a study done by Stackla, 86 percent of consumers said authenticity is important when deciding what brands they like and support.”
Credibility and Authenticity could be the synonyms for user-generated content. What could be more credible and authentic than content created by your brand-loving genuine users themselves? You obviously cannot buy your users.
Hence, whatever they say or post about your brand is cent percent untempered and real. This is the reason why user engagement is enhanced by almost 28% when your marketing is UGC oriented.
User-generated content helps your brand to establish a real human connection with users and gives a human touch to marketing efforts. UGC adds more authentic information by showing the experiences of previous customers about the brand’s product or service.
6. Improve SEO
UGC is a great aid in optimizing your overall SEO efforts and improving search engine ranking.
User-generated content not only puts you right in front of your potential target audience but also helps to increase your overall organic reach.
Always, buyers starting their online shopping from google search. They don’t directly jump on a company or brand website to make a purchase. Shoppers prefer to collect detailed information about products such as price comparisons, reviews, and trustworthy sources.
Online buyers like to search for information that is unique, trustworthy, and relevant. UGC helps to add unique and relevant information on your website that buyers can trust, Also, Google prefers to show a website in top results that has relevant and unique information.
UGC keeps your website refreshed and allows you to hold your visitors for a long time on the website. As a result, it improves your website dwell time and bounce rate.
How User-Generated Content Help Brands To Increase Authenticity
User-Generated Content helps your users to feel a real human connection with your brand as it the content created by people like them in the first place. This brings along authenticity and credibility to your brand.
Customers have grown tired of the redundant brand content and paid celebrity endorsements. Authentic user-generated content for brands is what customers respond to.
User-Generated Content brings your customers into the spotlight and makes them an integral part of your brand’s marketing campaign. This makes them feel valued and acknowledged which creates a personal connection between the brand and the customers. When customers are in the spotlight of your brand’s content then this breeds more UGC for your brand, thereby encouraging more engagement and thus more purchases for your brand.
RYU’s #WhatsInYourBag UGC campaign is a great example of how a brand can employ user-generated content marketing to enhance more user engagement by encouraging customers to submit more content to be displayed as part of brand content as part of a competition or giveaway.
Competition-based user-generated content marketing gives your brand an ultimate and wide exposure through means of social media platforms and others.
One awesome way of structuring a loyal customer base is by displaying user-generated images and videos as part of your advertising campaign. The overwhelming response and amazing support that UGC gets from the audience are just so intriguing. This form of marketing is inexpensive and authentic which helps to create a strong community base.
Today’s digital landscape is not an easy space to survive for thriving brands. When you provide multiple touchpoints to your customers, it helps you improve the overall brand experience, build a unique identity and engage community actions with your brand across various platforms.
Many big brands like Coca-Cola, Netflix, Apple have successfully engaged their users with successful UGC campaigns. So, what are you waiting for? Incorporate UGC in your marketing strategy and turn your customers into brand advocates.
Try Onstipe – The Best UGC Platform
To leverage the power of user-generated content you may use Onstipe – The Best UGC Platform. User-generated content is a modern-day marketing solution for brands and Onstipe as a UGC aggregator tool provides a platform to leverage the UGC perfectly.
Collection, curation, and aggregation of social media content in one place is easy now with Onstipe. This is the best user-generated content platform so far that helps you to discover UGC from multiple social media channels and allows you to showcase this UGC on your brand website or on digital screens during any event.
From content moderation to design UGC, Onstipe provides everything. Easy to use interface, robust moderation and many customization options make Onstipe so unique and valuable.
I think there is enough to understand the importance of user-generated content now it’s time to incorporate UGC in your marketing strategy.
Boost your hashtag campaigns, build more trust among people, and spread more awareness by employing Onstipe as a UGC platform. It is easy and simple that comes with affordable price options.
