How Does User-Generated Content Marketing Work?

To help illustrate how UGC can revitalize your brand’s content marketing efforts, here are some of the ways that your existing customer base might be the best marketers you never knew you had.

Users Generate Content Whether Brands Know It Or Not

What makes UGC so beneficial to your company’s content creation strategies is that your consumers are already making it whether you know about it or not. Social media is a hub where people are constantly talking about their lives and the products that occupy them, which means your products are inevitably going to be mentioned on any, or all, of the social media platforms.

If you use your company’s social media accounts to highlight the positive testimonials you find, then you’ll not only be encouraging other users to share their positive experiences with you and your services, but you’ll also be producing an effective, and nearly effortless, marketing outlet.

The best thing you can do to encourage positive UGC is to include it in your ongoing marketing strategies. By pushing user testimonials in your emails, social media posts, and other marketing content, you demonstrate to your audience that you want to hear and spotlight their unique voices and stories.

People love to be seen, and the attention that brand-supported UGC provides can be an exciting incentive for them to share their own experiences with your brand’s products. Encourage users to tag your social media profiles when they post content about your products, emphasize hashtags, and be consistent in the UGC your brand spotlights.

All of this feeds into an ongoing cycle of generating content that is customer led, rather than company led. This reduces the amount of time you have to invest in your internal marketing efforts and maximizes your customer engagement by showing an audience that they are seen, heard, and valued.

Customers Trust Other Customers

Building trust is the ultimate goal of any brand’s marketing efforts. You want your target audience to think of you when they’re in need of a solution to a problem, and to earn that kind of mental real estate you need to prove that you’re a trustworthy expert in your field.

While your own marketing strategies can accomplish this, recruiting existing customers to do it for you can maximize the level of trust prospective clients are willing to give you. When it comes down to it, customers trust other customers more than they’ll ever trust a company.  

Think about it like this: how much more likely would you be to try out a new restaurant in the area if one of your friends or colleagues recommended it to you, compared to the restaurant itself sending you a flyer in the mail? This is exactly what a user-generated content marketing strategy does; it puts the power of marketing in the hands of excited consumers. Potential consumers are more likely to become actual consumers when a peer encourages them to do so.

The more in touch you are with your audience, the better equipped you’ll be to spotlight your best customers and their personal testimonies.