Leveraging UGC for your brand

You may have heard of it before, the term UGC. It stands for user-generated content and includes all forms of content created by 'ordinary people' who have nothing to do with your brand. UGC is becoming increasingly important in marketing to build more engagement, trust and authenticity for your brand.

In this article, we will take a closer look at UGC, what it is and how you can best use it for your business and content marketing.

What is user-generated content?

User-generated content stands for all content created by your customers, followers and other independent parties. These are not partnerships or influencer marketing, but simply mentions of your products or services.

A good example is someone who posts a story of her eating at a restaurant, in which she tags the restaurant. This gives the restaurant positive visibility on social media, without them having to do anything for it themselves (except good cooking, of course).

UGC can come in different forms, such as social media posts, reviews and testimonials, videos and more.

Why is UGC important?

UGC works well and many studies have shown that. We are happy to list the benefits:

Authenticity: this type of content is very authentic. You see people who are genuinely satisfied with a product, without getting paid for it. According to one study from Gartner give 85% of the millennials indicate that they are affected by UGC.
Engagement: user-generated content creates more engagement with your brand. You connect with your customers and followers, build communities and create dialogue. Thus, a study from Comscore that UGC attracts 28% more attention than content from a brand itself.
Sales: we are massively influenced by each other, so we also buy products that others are satisfied with. This used to be the case through word of mouth, but now it is just on a much larger scale thanks to social media. If you put this to good use for your business, you will get here up to 29% more sales (according to a study from Forbes).
User data: there is no better data at hand than sincere reviews about your products or services. Of course, videos on social media are mostly made when people are very satisfied or very dissatisfied, but it gives you a good insight.

How to encourage UGC for your brand?

Would you also like to see UGC about your brand? Then you can follow the following steps to encourage people to create user-generated content.

The basics, of course, start with good products or services that people are satisfied with.
Make your own campaign to encourage customers to participate. This could be by posting a social media post or recording a video.
Show that you use the UGC coming in. People only like having more reach on social media because of a brand sharing their content. Leaving a comment also works wonders.
Another option is to offer something. This can be done through a competition on social media, but you can also offer discount codes or share a nice incentive with a purchase.
Suppose you really want to deploy it on a large scale, you can get started with UGC creators. These are sort of influencers who create content about your products. At your request, they may or may not show themselves on screen. However, be aware that this will quickly lead to sponsored content.

How do you ensure quality UGC?

Of course, not everything we see passing by online is as good of quality. If you don't really work with UGC creators, unfortunately you don't have a lot of influence on this. You will then have to see for yourself which content is worth re-sharing on your brand's socials. Make sure the content matches your brand strategy and tone of voice as closely as possible.

If you do work with UGC creators, then this is obviously a completely different story. We then recommend drawing up clear guidelines to which the content must comply. The better the agreements in advance, the better the content will be and the less work you will have to do to adjust it.

Legal and Ethical Considerations

When working with images of others, it is important to comply with privacy rules. How do you best ensure this?

Ask for permission: it seems simple, but it is an important step that is often skipped. Just ask permission from the creator to make sure you can use the content for your own brand.
Give proper credits: make sure you always give credit to the person whose content it is. You can do this by tagging or naming them in it.
Take creator preferences into account: if you share someone else's content and ask for permission, also ask right away if you can make adjustments or not. If the creator prefers not to, take this into account.
Monitor feedback: did you repost something without asking? If so, be sure to keep an eye on the comments. The last thing you want is for the creator's fans to leave massive comments because you copied content. As soon as you notice negative comments, think twice whether it is smart to leave the content on your account.
Be transparent: the more transparent you are online, the less you can get into trouble.

Measuring impact of user-generated content

All well and good, but how do you know if user-generated content is doing something for your business or not? There are a number of KPIs you can track to measure the impact of UGC.

On the one hand, it will be important to monitor where your company is named. You can do this using various tools such as Google Alerts, BrandMentions and more. With this, you simply set which keywords you want to be notified about and the tool keeps track of everything for you.

If you get a notification, you can easily go and see if it is something you can re-share as a company in the form of UGC. This saves you a lot of valuable time that you would otherwise spend on manually tracking brand mentions.

On the other hand, it is also important to track how the UGC you share as a company is performing. You can track this the same way you track regular social media posts, namely with KPIs such as engagement, new followers, reach and more. Suppose you set up ads with the user-generated content, then you can also track metrics like cpc and number of sales.

Conclusion

User-generated content is an important part of today's content mix and will only become more valuable in the future. The sooner you commit to it as a company, the easier it will be to gather sufficient and quality UGC.

Looking for the right partner to support you in this? Do not hesitate to contact us, we are happy to help you.