The User-Generated Content Challenges Faced By Brands

User-generated content has been all over the place… but in a good way. Every business uses UGC when they want to flourish, but there are also challenges that brands face while having UGC produced. That’s why in this article, we’ll talk all about User-Generated content challenges faced by brands.

User-Generated Content Challenges Faced By Brands

Below are the user-generated challenges that are faced by brands, and how they can be tackled or eliminated:

Maintain A Constant Flow Of Content

The major obstacle faced by brands who incorporate user-generated content into their marketing strategies has to be to gain a constant flow of content so that the brand has an ample amount of content they can market to satisfy the visual appetite of the audience.

There are many ways to overcome this. Firstly, with the power of social proof. When you leverage UGC across your marketing touchpoints, it creates a bandwagon effect among your audiences when they see people like them becoming the voice of your brand. It encourages them to create content for you.

Another way is by creating hashtag campaigns on social media. Hashtag campaigns or contests allow brands to give their audiences basic guidelines on the kind of content they want them to create.

Not just that, it also allows brands to amplify their branded hashtag and create a constant flow of user-generated content for the brand.

Gaining User-Generated Content Rights

When it comes to leveraging user-generated content, many brands tend to ignore the part where they have to take content rights from the content owner. It may seem minimal, but using user-generated content without the users’ permission can get the brand under a lawsuit.

But when one leverages UGC across marketing touchpoints, gaining user rights from each content owner can be a little challenging. That’s when you need user-generated content rights software that helps you to seamlessly fetch content rights from multiple content owners and incorporate UGC more confidently.

Quality & Relevancy Of The Content

When it comes to user-generated content, you know it is created by different people who have their way of expressing themselves, and one cannot expect high-quality and relevant content from each user. So, maintaining the quality of the content to streamline successful marketing campaigns become challenging.

So, how does one overcome that challenge? The best way to do so is by choosing a social media aggregator tool that comes with a content moderation tool that will bring all the relevant user-generated content to one place and filter out the irrelevant or repeated content to maintain the quality of the collection of your UGC.

UGC Best Practices

To achieve the best with UGC, being in line with these five key aspects is essential.

Always Ask For Permission

Repurposing UGC has legalities involved. If you haven’t ever considered it, the possibility of inviting unnecessary legal trouble is for real.

Undeniably, hashtag campaigns are a great way to inspire people’s participation, and they might also do so without knowing of it being tied to your brand’s UGC campaign.

To let users play advocates for you, gain the rights of using the content created by them to your advantage.

Hence, before resharing their produced posts, make sure that you have explicit permission to do so. Otherwise, you certainly would end up killing goodwill and putting out some of your best advocates.

Give Credits To The Creator

When you share content generated by your users, make sure that you give them clear credits. This is important to ensure that your users are excited to use and talk about your brand through their generated content. Added benefits? Giving potential users a reliable face that verifies your brand.

Moreover, giving credit is essential as a practice because it generates satisfaction in the minds of the creators about their work being appreciated and will be further inspired to create more content that speaks of you.

Hence, tag your users and give them credits wherever due.

Encourage Content Creation

According to statistics, social media posts that incorporate UGC significantly drive more engagement than the content of other types.

Hence, by encouraging more people to participate in content creation, brands stand a chance to better attract potential customers, as any visual UGC content is way more impactful than brand-generated content.

Further, content creation fosters authenticity, which eases the marketing efforts of the brand. But, in order to achieve this, brands can reach out to people on social media, give away their products for free, ask users’ to introduce them for a couple of days, and share their honest feedback.

Simultaneously, asking for visual reviews and testimonials apart from the organic creation of UGC can be a great way to push more people to participate.

Streamline Your Search For UGC

With billions of people using social media platforms and an unimaginable amount of Content created, it is indeed difficult to streamline your search for relevant UGC.

Users’ across the globe not only use brand-generated hashtags to share content but also tag and mention the social media handles of brands. Keeping track of this UGC is in itself a wearing-out task.

Further to which a manual process of moderation can probably make anybody feel fatigued. Here, the role of social media aggregator tools is pressing.

They are not only effortless and cost-efficient but also greatly assist brands in maximizing their UGC.

Improved UGC Curation With Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning are gradually taking over the world, making things more fluid for the masses. But, how does AI & ML work? While AI imitates human roles enabling software to perform human tasks, ML is an AI application that grows and improves over time by acquiring knowledge and learning algorithms through data.

Get on board with AI and machine learning to save time and gain access to maximum user-generated content. Integration of AI helps brands to have a quick scan across the collected UGC, reads audience behavior, and makes recommendations on what will work best for your prospects.

When you incorporate user-generated content as a major part of your marketing, you need an intelligent assistant that will make things easier for you, and what could be better than AI?

User-Generated Content & Influencer Marketing

Some may perceive that influencer marketing and user-generated content marketing are two different entities. But if you strategically put them together, they can leverage optimum results for your brand.

Many brands connect with micro-influencers who have followers around 1500, but they have created strong relationships with their audiences as per their high engagement rate. These organic influencers can encourage their followers to try your products with the power of their content.

Not just that, these influencers can create social proof among their audience and encourage them to create user-generated content for your brand.

Find Your Inspiration From Other Brands

A guide without examples is like pita bread without falafel. Well, yes, that’s disappointing! Head up to the last part of the blog to learn from some stand-out examples of brands that made UGC lucrative and how you can do it too with Taggbox.

Daniel Wellington

Daniel Wellington strategically leveraged a blend of influencer marketing and user-generated content to build their brand’s identity and reach millions of consumers online who might not have otherwise known the brand.

As a part of their approach they:

Laid focus on developing a brand story that would attract and inspire the audiences, gave away the product free of cost to the shortlisted influencers in an effort to promote their product, and curated an exclusive hashtag for the brand #danielwellington to prompt social media users to create and post content showcasing their products.

The best UGC content is then selected to repost Daniel Wellington’s Instagram account with the #DWpickoftheday

The hashtag campaign potentially generated more than 800K Instagram photos and videos, its account followers grew from 850K to 2.1M in a year, and its profits increased by 214%.

With these figures, it won’t be wrong to configure that UGC as a part of Daniel Wellington’s marketing strategy is its ticket to be extraordinary!

Dune London

Dune London, a luxury brand, introduced UGC to its product pages to inspire customers while they browse the website. They claim that this practice helped them boost their sales significantly.

Dune used to feature a part of the UGC in customer product reviews. But in a span of two weeks post embedding user and influencer content into their product detail pages, their sales grew by 82% following the shopper’s interaction with UGC.

To quote what Mark Blenkinsop, digital marketing manager at Dune London, said,” Our customers respond very well to UGC – being able to see others wearing our products gives them extra confidence to purchase.”

Furthermore, he added,” This is the latest step in a wider strategy to leverage these images as well as our own beautiful lifestyle content across the web and make the products contained within photos and videos fully shoppable. Rather than asking customers to search for what they’ve seen, we’re taking them directly to it.”

Additionally, UGC incorporated in their email marketing featuring Dune London’s ‘Your Style’ gallery saw 55% more click-throughs when compared to previous emails not featuring UGC, this drove a six-hold hike in their revenue.

Overall, the brand witnessed a 28% higher conversion rate among shoppers who engage with UGC while shopping. Talking about their average order values, they grew by 17% over the last three months.

Adobe

Being the brand behind photoshop, you sure expect some eye-popping pictures on Adobe’s feed. And they most definitely deliver in that department, as they repost customer photos to foster a sense of community.

Adobe treats its users more than just data points. The brand complemented its followers in one of its posts, referring to them as Adobe’s ‘creative community.’

Appreciating people for their efforts via a repost will further motivate them to create more content.

Chipotle

Chipotle leverages user and employee-generated content in its marketing strategies. Their careers page highlights EGC titled #PeopleofChipotle across diverse touchpoints. Content that is produced and shared on social media by their employees is embedded in their gallery.

In their efforts to attract quality talent, Chipotle uses EGC to build trust and boost conversions by simply reposting what their existing employees have to say.

This practice also effectively reduces the efforts and costs incurred by the brands in the hiring process.

Skull Candy

Skull Candy has a creative content marketing strategy centered around creating a visual appeal by showcasing users’ experiences and ideas. Along with this, the brand also features customer reviews on its website, and this form of user-generated content is essential to boost conversions.

Reviews given by their customers have existed for a long time on their eCommerce websites, which has been playing a leading role in generating more reviews.

Irrespective of how compelling your brand’s visuals are, leveraging UGC-like customer reviews can take your users’ experience to another level.

Conclusion

We tried our best to provide insightful, in-built analysis that will enable brands to know the performance of the campaigns and make changes wherever required to magnify results. Perhaps now you will have a sound understanding of UGC and all that you can unlock with its use.