As per a study conducted by Stackla in 2020, 61 percent of marketers believe authenticity is the most important component of effective content, yet the content they believe is most authentic—brand-created content—is not the content consumers view as most genuine. Consumers are 2.4x more likely to say user-generated content (UGC) is authentic compared to brand-created content, while marketers are 2.1x more likely to say brand-created content is authentic compared to UGC.
UGC is simply content produced by your customers in the form of text, video, etc. posted on social media and other websites. UGC includes unboxing videos of apparels, cosmetics, or merchandise which any consumer makes and posts on social media channels.
The sheer authenticity and reliability of UGC motivates customers to engage with them. Hence, understanding UGC and how one can use it to enhance their company’s brand image is a key factor in influencing customer engagement and increasing conversion rates.
Listed below are seven key reasons that make UGC an indispensible tool for marketers.
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Establishes Brand Loyalty UGC is invaluable as it comes from a third party and is objective in nature. UGC is a unique and great way for your customers to become involved with your brand’s growth rather than simply being an onlooker. It helps in building and growing a community where there is a two-way interaction between the brand and the customer.
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Authenticity and Relatability The sheer authenticity and relatability of UGC entices customers to engage with them. UGC is akin to word-of-mouth advertising as it influences customers’ buying decisions. It can be used across social media and other mediums like email, landing pages, etc. Companies however must shy away from faking their user generated posts as audiences will easily spot it and it can result in serious damage to their brand. UGC must always come from the following: customers, cohorts, and brand loyalists.
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Winning Trust Today, companies have to really make efforts to win their customers’ trust to be able to stand out in the crowd. Since consumers trust UGC over content created by brands, UGC is the perfect format for businesses to level up their trust score. UGC acts as a reliable and trustworthy source for end-consumers, mostly millennials. It’s similar in nature to the way they would seek validation from their friends and family.
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Converting Customers UGC has an enormous impact during the last stages of your customer’s purchase cycle. It removes doubts from your customer’s mind that they should go ahead and buy your product. For instance, when your customer finds that people who are just like them are using your product, it motivates them to purchase your product.
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Adaptable and Flexible You can use UGC as an omnichannel approach in your marketing campaigns. For instance, UGC images can be used in an abandon cart email for nudging the prospective buyer to buy or insert UGC to landing pages to increase conversion rates.
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Economical than Influencer Marketing Seeking the services of an influencer to endorse your product can be very costly but endorsing your products via your customers doesn’t cost anything. UGC is an economical way to grow your business by introducing a new marketing strategy. You can also save money from hiring an advertising agency for producing brand assets or content.
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Social Commerce These days customers find it very convenient to shop on social channels as it allows them to directly interact with their audience. It allows you to tap on a product, learn about it, make a purchase decision, and buy the product through the app. So, UGC and social commerce are a great match as UGC drives conversions.
Role of Content Moderation in UGC
So, now that we have understood the value UGC adds to your marketing campaigns, we need to focus now on ensuring that through content moderation we can protect our brands, customers, as well as communities. Content moderation is also helpful in locating content that can be used on other channels.
Your company’s brand image is important to you and that’s why you must ensure that you join hands with the right content moderator. There are companies that do not invest time in evaluating the right firms and face consequences. In order to avoid the same, here are some tips that might prove handy.
Impact of Generative AI on UGC Now let’s look at how Generative AI can impact UGC and digital marketing.
1- Intelligent and dynamic representation of UGC: Generative AI can help in representing UGC in an intelligent fashion. It is capable of looking at UGC ranging from text to videos to images and display it in an intelligent and dynamic manner. Generative AI assists brands in identifying the most important pieces of UGC collected through the platform to ensure its represented in the right areas.
Going a step further, AI tools can view the search history of new visitors to your website. After analyzing the history, it can offer the visitor with a bunch of UGC which include pictures of products or testimonials that can lead to a sale or repeat visit.
2- Directly Targeting Customers: Generative AI enables brands to target customers directly. It is ideal in going through large data sets and locating hidden patterns. Machine learning enables AI technology to pinpoint customers who will potentially buy or attach to your brand as per demographics, visit history, and previous purchases. Targeting customers will only become stronger with adoption of AI tools and generative AI algorithms.
3- Mass Content Creation: Generative AI will affect marketing and UGC marketing campaigns through creation of content on a mass scale. As social media and Internet are moving on a rapid pace, you need to create many content pieces per week ranging from social media posts, videos, blogs, etc. Creating all the content can prove to be very expensive and result in wastage of time. Using Generative AI, much of the task can be offloaded onto AI tools. Within minutes, Generative AI generates accurate articles relating to trending topics in your industry.
4- More personalized: Generative AI can assist you in making money by creating marketing materials and web content that resonate at a deeper level with your target audience. E-mails and marketing messages tailored as per every reader’s interest can be sent at the time your target audiences are likely to engage with them. Only highly relevant website content will be displayed as per visitor’s online activity and location helping in improving conversion rates. Hence, there is no doubt that Generative AI is bound to make a sea change in the marketing industry in a couple of years. By personalizing and tailoring content that’s tailored to single customers, brands are likely to collect more data around conversion and the way it’s related to the content that’s shared.