Are you failing to generate any innovative content ideas? Do not worry, user-generated content (UGC) has slowly become the fastest and most popular generator of content to fill your company website. When utilized well and presented in a correct manner, user-generated content can end up becoming high-quality, relevant content for your website.
What is User-Generated Content?
User-generated content or UGC can be defined as any kind of content whether text, videos, images or reviews which are actually created by the users or customers and not by the selling company or brand. This UGC is then shared by companies on their social media accounts, websites or other marketing channels.
Most brands fall back on Instagram as their principal platform for posting UGC. Instagram users produce and share posts about the brand or company, featuring the products and services offered by the brand. These posts can be shared by the company, which will help in boosting the brands credibility.
First let us understand why content marketers have started increasingly incorporating User-generated content in their content marketing strategy?
Benefits of Utilizing User-Generated Content:
- Spike in sales growth
- Builds customer trust
- Strengthens customer relations
- Increases followers on social media
- Improves social presence of the brand
- Boosts credibility of the brand and its products/services
- Improves SEO
How to Generate and Utilize User Generated Content?
– Be Authentic
If you want your viewers or customers to generate positive content for your brand, you will need to be authentic in your approach towards them. Social media creates the highest amount of user-generated content. If you want to have a real impact on your viewers and want them to generate some quality content about your brand and products, you will need to take extra efforts.
How will you convince them? The first step is to interact with them. You can respond to their comments by liking them or thanking them for a positive word. In case of a complaint or redressal, assure them that you will get it solved. Keep an eye on content being generated by users and liking them and leaving a comment on them on all the social media platforms. Authenticity is the foundation on which your content marketing efforts are dependent on. You should aim to make your brand experience “personable” and build a bond with the customers. Once you form this connection, you can then start explicitly ask the users to generate content for you and post them on various platforms.
– Rewarding your Content generators
Though you may be new to user generated content marketing and may not be having the best influencers on various social media platforms writing for you, yet you can incentivize and motivate users to generate content about your brand. You can do this by highlighting the rewards they will receive in return for generating content for your brand and its products. Moreover, embracing innovative solutions like an AI article generator can further streamline your user-generated content marketing strategy.
You can announce that the best posts would get a chance to be featured on the website or page. You can start interaction with the users and comment or like on their posts or write ups, this will help in encouraging to contribute more in the future. Flagging off hashtag competitions can be really useful in generating more content.
You can run different give away contest or competitions, which will motivate users to come forward and generate positive content for you. A recent popular contest was a photo contest run for the promotion of the movie Man of Steel, it asked viewers to submit pictures and leave behind few words. Each week winners were announced. Millions of people took part in the contest which generated amazing positive user-generated content.
– Creating Hashtags
You can start a hashtag movement by creating a completely unique and easy-to-remember hashtag for your company or brand. Start encouraging users to use this hashtag everywhere. This will help in tracking all the UGC being generated using this hashtag. As the use of the hashtag spreads, awareness about your brand and business also spreads far and wide.
After creating hashtags for the brand, you can start creating hashtags for specific events or product launches etc. This helps in building the hype around the event or product and gets people interested in it.
The biggest benefit of using hashtags is that you can track all the UGC being generated and this helps you to join those discussions, or comment on them and encourage more viewers to post more about your brand.
– Introducing Customer-Centric Events
Whether you are marketing online or offline, launching customer-centric events is always beneficial in creating a strong image and improving the brand recall value. You can start different types of customer centric events like having a chat session on Twitter chat or beginning an interactive webinar or having a promotional show at a local tradeshow. These engaging and interesting events give the customers an opportunity to connect with you and know about your brand in a completely new way. You can gather a lot of content from such events which can be used for your promotion purpose on various social media platforms.
There are a number of possibilities and ways to generate user-generated content on a regular basis. Right from asking for feedback and reviews about your products or services to developing weekly posts about the wonderful things your customers are saying about your brand and the company. Choose a way which is suitable for your industry and kind of business and go ahead and use User-generated content on your social media accounts and websites to garner more attention and improve sales.
Velocity Consultancy is a Mumbai based Website Design and Development Company. We offer content writing and content marketing services which will ensure the best value for your marketing and branding needs. Velocity Consultancy is an intelligent way to infuse a dash of freshness to your brand along with all the relevant and meaningful information.