5 Tips to Get More User-generated Content for Your Business

The race in obtaining brand awareness has never been this competitive ever before with marketing strategies changing and improving every day.

Unlike other complex strategies that could cost you so much to execute, yet still have many risks and cannot promise a result in return, user-generated content is like a saving point in terms of finance and human resources that helps carry out your marketing plan effectively.

Knowing this, many brands focus on getting as many of UGC as possible to fully absorb its benefit. There are tips to expand the collection of user-generated content.

What is User-generated Content and Why is it important?

User-generated content, or UGC for short, is any type of content that’s created by a brand’s followers, product users, or consumers. This could be anything from social media posts to a review on a third-party website. UGC can be anything that falls under three categories: text, pictures, or videos.

Since UGC content isn’t paid for by a brand, it has more genuine and honest credibility. When it comes to eCommerce, user-generated content is the digital equivalent of a personal recommendation. And a personal recommendation is the golden marketing method.

The benefit of UGC to business, especially online business, is priceless. It helps tackle online shopping anxiety and is a cost-effective way to grow your business. 

Below are the tips on how to get more user-generated content to boost your conversion rate.

5 Tips to Get more UGC Content for Your Business

1. Check Out What’s Already Available Out There

Even when you haven’t specifically asked for content submissions, your customers may be already talking about your products or services. Check them out and have them gathered on your platforms as featured content.

Not everyone is a professional content creator to use hashtags or have a density of keywords so that their pieces can be on top of the search engines. But every consumer-generated content might stand a chance to be worth re-posting on your platforms. Do some research to see what’s already out there and you will be amazed at the amount of the content you may find.

Doing this can also help you grasp a glimpse at what’s going on right now with your brand recognition and marketing plan. For example, if people are sharing written content but not videos, you’ll know that you just need to encourage video as a specific medium or vice versa. 

One critically important thing to note that when you find something great that you’d like to reshare on your business platforms, you need to ask for permission from the original content creator. Even though the customers who have experienced your products and services decided to make content about it publicly doesn’t mean we can use it freely. This is to show respect and gratefulness towards your customers as well.

2. Encourage Customers to Rate and Review 

The most common forms of user-generated content (UGC content) are reviews and ratings. The value of reviews is no longer debatable. Over 63% of consumers say they’re more likely to consult the reviews of other customers about the items.

There’s one important addition to reviews that perhaps has an even larger impact on engagement: the images. Drowning in a pool of text-only reviews, ones with real photos taken by the customers themselves make viewers trust them even more. On the customers’ side, this can give them more space for creativity and motivation to engage more in writing reviews for the products they love. So, allowing your customers to post reviews with their own photos can be a plus in driving UGC content.

While most consumers posting photos from their smartphone, increasingly reading and writing reviews on mobile, not many eCommerce websites offer the photo review feature. But now you can help your customers do that with third-party extensions. If your website hasn’t been able to allow customers to add photos to their reviews, you might want to check out the Photo Reviews feature. Now you can have collections of UGC photos to add to your marketing content.

3. Promote Powerful CTAs in Crucial Locations.

If brand recognition does matter then increasing the awareness of your marketing campaigns also needs extra attention. Don’t expect your hashtag game can be all over Instagram or Twitter overnight. To encourage your customers to engage in your UGC campaign, a strong calls-to-action being placed in crucial areas is a must when customers sharing branded photos on their social media.

Those places are where your customers are most likely to engage with your content. This could be your bio on Instagram or in the photo caption. Other places in which a CTA can be valuable: on your website, across your social channels, within your blog, and throughout your catalogs (both digital and print).

4. Using Gamification as A Marketing Tool

Gamification is a marketing tool where brands integrate gaming-aesthetics into a regular activity to make it more engaging, interactive, and cheerful for customers. 

Marketing with gamification has been immensely successful lately. Compared to other marketing tools, gamification doesn’t require complex solutions. A simple quiz or a social media post with a crossword can be implemented even within a basic email template.

Gamification attracts users and drives great engagement from customers by providing a superlative experience. It not only involves playing games but also extends to contests, quizzes, rewards, leaderboards, and other customer-generated content opportunities.

If you want to get more user-generated content for your brand, don't forget about gamification.

A tremendous amount of content will be created by customers through their involvement and engagement with your gamification marketing campaign.

The users’ experience with your brand boosted with a little competitiveness can help you gain wider exposure and brand awareness. It will build a deeper connection with your customers. You can also gain insights into user behavior.

5. Create Experiences Worth Sharing

If relying on ready-made content like product review seems boring to you or you want to decide which content your customers should talk about, then maybe the best option is to create something for them to make UGC content of. 

The most common option is to host an event. It could be a pre-release of a new product, dinner for loyal customers, or a workshop - the options are endless. Invite influencers or celebrities who can help you create a good time with the participants to attract more people to come.

This approach enables you to ask for very specific types of content by providing a submission guideline based on your needs. At the event, you can encourage people to take photos, live stream, or any method they like to share their experience with the events.

The result is guaranteed but the effort you need to put on is also equivalently huge. There will be a lot of work to do and details to attend to. The events need to be excellent for the customers to feel like sharing. Choosing the right guests is one of the most important factors for this tip to work.

Conclusion

Get creative! Think of how you can make your users’ experience more exciting. The key is to take a look at what is currently happening in terms of experience, and then add a “mind-blown factor” wherever possible. If you genuinely delight your customers, they’re much more likely to want to take part as your UGC creators.