User Generated Content (UGC) is not a new concept. It is perhaps something that is not necessarily done well or maximised to its fullest potential. UGC is a great way of adding real credibility to your marketing messages. Whether it’s reviews, social proof, case studies, testimonials, a community board…there are lots of ways to collate and curate UGC and maximise its potential for your business.
Why is User Generated Content so important?
Authenticity.
One thing that people crave these days when they are making a purchase is authenticity. With so much competition, both on the high street and online, brands who achieve authenticity are the ones that are most able to stand out.
In a study run by Cohn & Wolfe, 63% of consumers said they would rather buy from a company they considered to be authentic over a competitor. That’s a pretty big signal that points towards the importance of UGC.
Customers are no longer solely led by TV advertising and print. They can no longer be bullied by aggressive sales pitches. Instead they rely on social media to garner recommendations or they actively seek out the opinions of their friends.
Customers also crave stories. Something that shows that a brand’s values are aligned with their own.
And this brings us back around to UGC. When a brand can truly harness the content generated by its customers, it can much more easily align those values to the values of other customers, helping to complete the circle.
Who is using User Generated Content?
Perhaps a better question would be ‘Who is using UGC well?’
Well, some of the world’s biggest brands are using UGC and they are using it really well. Perhaps one of the best example of the past few years was Coca Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign which saw them launching their personalised bottles and cans. By asking people to share images of themselves with their ‘personalised’ bottles and cans, Coca Cola brought the world together and got millions of people doing their advertising for them.
Another company who have seen a lot of success with UGC is yoga clothing brand Lululemon. Their #thesweatlife social media campaign, where they encouraged customers to share images of them wearing Lululemon gear whilst working out went huge. In the first couple of months, they received over 7,000 images from their customers on Instagram and Twitter and the hashtag for the campaign received over 40,000 unique visitors.
There are of course hundreds of great examples of brands embracing and harnessing UGC, but how can you make the most of UGC opportunities and what should you be focusing on? We think there are three key areas you can focus on to see some real quick wins:
- Reviews with markup
- Competitions
- Integration
Let’s take a deeper dive into these three key areas.
1. Reviews with markup
This one is a no-brainer.
We all know how important customer reviews are. When was the last time you made a purchase decision of a product or service without checking out the latest reviews first?
With so many review platforms from Google to your own website, it’s important to harness these product reviews and ensure you are showcasing them both through your own site but also within the search results.
One company doing a great job of harnessing reviews here in New Zealand is furniture company Mocka. These guys are absolutely killing it in the search results with their use of schema.org markup on all their products which ensures the review score displays in the SERPs. It especially helps when you are generating so many five star reviews for your products!
Schema.org markup for reviews
There are two types of review markup available; single product and aggregated ratings.
For all individual products, you should be marking your reviews up using the single product review markup. You can find out how to do this here. For pages that don’t have a single review score, such as your homepage or category landing pages, this is where you can use the aggregated markup so that you still showcase your reviews in the search results.
Like the single product markup, the aggregated score is out of 5 and you can combine all the reviews for all your products in a specific category or combine all your reviews for all products to give you a total review rating for your business which you can use on the homepage. You can find out more about aggregated review markup here.
Note: there are some very specific guidelines about the use of schema.org review markup and especially the aggregate markup. Make sure you check out this Google article before you deploy aggregate markup to ensure you are following the latest guidelines and so avoid any manual action ‘Spammy Structured Markup’ penalties.
Collecting reviews
Of course one of the big challenges for businesses isn’t necessarily marking up the reviews correctly on the website, but collecting reviews in the first place.
Whilst more and more people are happy to leave a review, they often need a nudge in the right direction in order to get the ball rolling. There are a number of ways you can improve your chances of getting a review for your product or service. Here are a few of our favourites:
- Ask – not rocket science this one, but how many times have you made a purchase (either online or instore) and never been asked to leave a review? It happens more than you would think. The easiest way (especially with online purchases) is to schedule an automatic email follow up when someone has purchased something from you and ask them for a review. If it’s an instore purchase, you can incorporate a CTA to leave a review on the back of a receipt and whilst this will require more manual input from the customer, you may be able to incentivise this to encourage them to leave a review (see point 3).
- Keep the process simple - you only need basic information from someone to collect an approved review (name, email address, review score and review). Make sure you don’t over-complicate the review process by asking for too much. If you can link a person’s review to the prompting email, this means even less information for a customer to enter. Mocka are extremely good at doing this. They send a follow up email for every product you purchase and everything is done from within your email client. Simple.
- Incentives – this can be a little bit of a grey area so make sure you check out the guidelines from the FTC before going down this route. However, there are ways you can offer incentives and stick within the guidelines (this mainly involves declaring that your reviews are incentivised). The best types of incentives include:
- Discount on next purchase
- Reward points in your reward and recognition programme
- Entry into a competition or draw
Reviews are one of the best forms of UGC that every business can collect. Whilst you might not consider them to be ‘exciting’ when compared to an awesome UGC campaign, they are probably the most important and most reliable form of UGC, so focus on this first.
2. Competitions
Competitions are another great way of generating UGC that you can then put to use through your other marketing material.
Typically these competitions are run through your social media platforms and usually involve you asking people to submit either photo or video content in return for entry into a competition.
Out here in New Zealand, the power tools company Makita do this really well. They recently ran a campaign to get more coverage for some new blades they launched in NZ. The competition had two steps – the first part asked Makita fans to send in photos of themselves and their Makita tools (including the tool the new blades would fit). This not only ensured that only true Makita fans were entering but also generated some awesome photos of Makita fans with their favourite tools which could be used in a future campaign.
The top 20 entries (voted by the Marketing Team) were then sent the new blades and asked to submit a video review of the blades. Whilst only 8 of the 20 winners submitted their videos, this still showed a high level of engagement. Once all the videos had been collected, they were then pushed out on the Makita Facebook and Instagram pages and people were asked to react to the videos. The three videos with the highest engagement then won Makita goodies which were highly sought after.
*One entry video alone generated a reach of over 24,000
This competition generated an incredible amount of UGC but also an insane amount of engagement on their social platforms. They are currently redeveloping their website so it wasn’t a huge focus for them for this campaign. However, if you wanted to take this a step further, you could build a competition landing page on your site and drive all the traffic through there. When their new website goes live, the review videos will be used there to showcase the blades in a relatable way for customers out here in NZ.
The key to success with this is thinking about the content you ask for and how you might use this further down the line.
Remember: UGC video and image content can often lack the professional quality you may be used to. Try and put in place guidelines for these competitions that are not restrictive but give some direction on the quality you are looking for (dimensions, video length, file size etc)
3. Integration
Integration is something we’re starting to see a lot more of. This is when UGC is integrated with professionally created marketing material (on or offline) to create that sense of authenticity whilst retaining the strong branding your customers have become accustomed to.
There are very few people out there who don’t love to see their own work republished by a company, big or small. Whether that’s as simple as a repost or a more complex integration of user generated images into a major campaign, customers love to see their own work promoted by their favourite brands.
Disney do this extremely well. Their #ShareYourEars campaign was a huge success and perfectly integrated UGC into their professional campaign content. Disney pledged to donate $5 to the Make-a-Wish Foundation for each participant in the campaign, capped at $1 million. The response and support was so huge that Disney doubled its original pledge to $2 million.
Integrating UGC into your marketing campaigns has a number of benefits:
- Builds a sense of community amongst your fans
- Saves you time and money
- Creates that authentic feel to your marketing campaigns that is hard to recreate
If you can start to incorporate UGC through your website, social media and print marketing, you will really start to reap the benefits and see your community grow and your loyalty increase.
Rounding up
User Generated Content comes in many shapes and forms and this post has only just scratched the surface of what you can be doing. We would urge you to tackle the three areas we have talked about at length above though if you really want to take your content to the next level, drive more traffic, sales and above all, a community of fans/customers who are much more likely to engage with you if you are utilising UGC.
