Nowadays as we look intently, we will notice that the engagement between users and brands is happening through the quality content. Marketing has evolved from being promotional to having value-driven content.
Content has become the most crucial element of the marketing mix as consumers are looking for more and more engaging and entertaining content. This is where the role of user-generated content comes into play.
User-generated content has been hyped a lot recently among the brands and the marketers. So, let’s understand what exactly it is and how UGC should be the way forward for your marketing campaigns.
What Really Is User-generated Content?
In a business context, user-generated content is the content that mainly the customers of a brand has created and shared about its products/services or is relevant to the brand’s activities. It is created by the real users based on their real experiences with the brand, therefore, making it highly trustworthy, relatable and authentic. Since the content is so reliable and credible, it is immensely helpful for the brands to leverage it and build brand awareness & engagement along with driving conversions & sales.
Here we have listed the 10 best reasons why you should also leverage UGC in your brand building and marketing campaigns.
10 Reasons To Use User-Generated Content
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Brand Authenticity & Relevance
Since the content is shared by the real users based on their real experiences with the brands, thus it makes the content authentic and highly relatable for the other users.
Having authentic & relevant content helps in attracting the users to your campaigns as consumers like to engage more with real content rather than branded content.
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Brand Credibility & Trust
In this digital age, the distrust and unreliability have increased a lot among the users for the brand with the reasons being spammy, valueless promotional content in campaigns.
Therefore, to drive brand growth it is important to have credibility and trust for the brand among consumers and user-generated content is the best way to do so as it perfectly highlights how good or bad a brand or its products are leading to showcasing a realistic brand image.
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Audience Reach & Exposure
What user-generated content does really well is to magnify the reach and exposure of the brand to a greater audience than usual i.e. it will take your campaign to audiences that you might not be familiar with or is untapped.
When users share content about your brand they expose your brand image & quality to their social media network and following. So, the more users share content about your brand, the more brand exposure & reach it will create.
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Original & Unique Content
It is one of the most challenging attributes for the brands to create unique and engaging content that can help them drive successful marketing campaigns.
User-generated content here emerges as the perfect solution as it is an original form of content that is unique as it is created by a diverse group of users with diverse backgrounds based on their ideas & experiences.
Also, UGC curation does not require as much investment as the content creation requires for brands.
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Interaction & Engagement
Engagement is one of the key objectives of any marketing strategy created by the brands as it defines success and returns. So, user-generated content helps you achieve it perfectly.
As user-generated content is highly trustworthy and relatable for the audience so it attracts them to engage with it. Besides, as the engagement increases, it also results in increased interactions between the brand and users.
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Loyalty & Advocacy
One of the goals that brands look to achieve but face a lot of challenges is gaining customer loyalty. To gain customer loyalty, it is important for users to have trust in brand quality & experience.
User-generated content helps in showcasing customer advocacy as they highlight their experiences through it. This shows their loyalty and creates a desire among the non-customers to associate with the brand & become loyal customers.
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SEO Benefits
Search engine optimization is when brands make efforts to gain maximum traffic to their website from search engines and content plays a huge role in achieving these goals.
Thus, user-generated content on the website in the form of reviews, UGC galleries, UGC feeds, etc. can help in increasing the user engagement that leads to increased dwell time & reduced bounce rate. This helps immensely in improving the SERP ranking giving more exposure & possibilities to your brand website.
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Audience Insights
Analytics helps us show the key performance metrics for our brand based on which we decide our future actions & campaigns. Similarly, you can gain detailed audience insights through user-generated content as well.
When you take the help of social listening, content measurement, behavioral analysis, etc. it shows you what topics users are talking about, the content they share, the content they engage with, their social interactions & behavior, and many more useful details.
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Boost Sales & Conversions
Probably the most important goal for brands and marketing is to ultimately boost their sales and conversions. User-generated content helps them to achieve their goal perfectly.
The fact that over 90& of the people trust UGC while making online purchases and ads with UGC getting 5 times higher click-through rate and the importance of user reviews on eCommerce platform shows how influential UGC is in driving conversions & sales.
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Relationship Management
Last but not least is that with UGC you can effectively manage meaningful relationships with your customers and users along with community building as well.
As encouraging & sharing UGC by brands motivates the users to create more content. Rewards & recognition for content creation further strengthens the connection between brand & users leading to better relationships & powerful brand community.
Conclusion
These were some of the best reasons as to why you should leverage user-generated content in your campaigns. You can use UGC tools like Taggbox to curate UGC & display it as your marketing campaigns across different channels & platforms.
So, don’t lag behind in this race and get started now to unlock the power of your valuable user-generated content for brand growth & success.