A sizable portion of the world’s population owns a smartphone and a laptop, opening us up to a world of conversations and content. But most importantly, modern day technologies have given us the ability to participate in conversations and the creation of content.
Brands can fully capitalise on this by incorporating user-generated content int their marketing strategies.
What is User-Generated Content (UGC)?
User-Generated content (UGC) is as any type of content relating to your brand created and published by your customers. This includes anything from videos, images, blogs, to customer reviews on social media sites.
We are all content creators in a way whether we realise it or not: every Tweet about our next online purchase or Instagram post showing our favourite Starbucks drink has the potential to shape brand conversations among consumers and influence behaviours.
In this short guide, we’ll be exploring 3 benefits of implementing UGC into your marketing strategy!
1. Increases Reach on Social Media
As you may already pick up, the clearest benefit of UGC is its cost-efficiency in generating social media reach. After all, having an effective UGC campaign is basically having marketing done for you. A successful user generated campaign not only leverages the network of a brand’s audience (or in most cases, their followers on social media) to spread content about the brand or its products, but also its audience’s audience. This is why it's important to add a touch of virality to your UGC campaign to maximise its scalability. The result of a perfectly executed UGC campaign is increased traffic to a brand’s website or social media and increased brand awareness.
Brands have a multitude of tactics to further the reach of their UGC campaigns and influence consumer conversations around their brands. A go-to tactic is the use of contests on social media where participants post a picture of products and include the contest’s hashtag to stand a chance to win prizes.
2. Creatively Engage With Your Customers
As social media technologies progress, noise has now become a hallmark of the online space. Online consumers constantly have promotional marketing messages intrusively pushed onto them, and they have learned to tune out.
UGC cuts through the clutter because it is created by fellow customers and is non-promotional in nature. Therefore, it is seen as more authentic, genuine, and a more trusted form of content, making it more engaging to customers. This also builds social proof and credibility for your brand and signals to potential target audiences that your brand is well-liked and received by your current customers.
Additionally, having your customer participate in brand building initiatives is also a good way to keep your customer actively engaged with your brand.
3. Put Your Customer At The Forefront Of Your Campaign
On the same note as the previous point, user-generated content campaigns are also a good way to drive deeper brand-customer relationships as they establish a two-way channel for interaction.
Instead of just talking about your brand or products on social media, UGC puts the customer at the forefront of the campaign. The mere act of involving customers in your brand’s marketing, acknowledging their content, and posting their content on your brand’s pages communicates to your customers that they are important to your brand, your brand is interested in participating in conversations with your customers, and that your brand has other higher-order priorities than just revenue and profits.
These efforts are especially important to building genuine fans of your brand, allowing your brand to build brand loyalty from the brand-customer relationships formed and in turn capture customer life-time value.
Looking For A Way To Get Your Customers Involved With Your Brand? Komo’s Action Screen Feature Is Your Solution!
Komo has features built into our platform that allows fans to be involved in your brand building initiatives and build a fanbase of loyal customers who have authentic connections with your brand.
Our platform’s Action Screen feature allows brands to share an array of content derived from players’ entries on their Live Trivia to their social media!
Leaderboard: The Leaderboard screen displays the current top 10 high scores on your Live Trivia game, giving your best players the recognition they deserve.
Beat the Expert: The Beat the Expert screen shows the player with the highest score. This screen can be used to ignite friendly competition among your audience!
Question Results: The Question Results screen shows the distribution of entries to a poll or questions, and is a fun way to show players where they stand with their answers.
Hardest Question: This Hardest Question screen shows the most challenging question and the percentage of wrong answers. This screen can be used to motivate your followers to step up to the challenge of getting the question right!
Smartest team: The Smartest Team screen pits teams opposing each other by revealing which team has scored the highest!
Click here to learn more about the functions of Action Screens!
