User-Generated Content: 9 Ultimate Marketing Strategies with a UGC Twist
By: Shane Barker
Tags: Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Content Strategy, Blogger

In the marketing ecosystem, content is of prime importance as it defines the success of any marketing campaign. Content is what brands can offer to consumers besides products and services.

Therefore, if the users don’t find your brand’s content attractive, engaging, or purposeful, they will ignore it. And that will cause your campaign to fail.

User-generated content offers a solution to this underlying marketing problem with tremendous opportunities for a successful marketing campaign.

What is User-Generated Content (UGC)?

User-generated content is any form of content that has been shared by the users or existing customers of a brand on digital platforms. It is generated by users voluntarily based on their ideas, opinions, reviews, or experiences with a brand.

User-generated content can be in the form of images, videos, text, audio, digital interactions, or any other type of content. Social media is known to be a hub for user-generated content, as there are over 3.5 billion active social users globally.

UGC is the most trustworthy, reliable, and authentic form of content. In fact, over 90% of the people trust UGC while making an online purchase.

We have listed some brilliant UGC marketing strategies that can help you build a powerful brand with maximum possibilities for conversions and brand enhancement.

Brilliant User-Generated Content Marketing Strategies

These strategies have been available for some time, but we have given them a brilliant twist with UGC integration. The addition of UGC can help your brand achieve the intended outcomes of your marketing campaign.

1. Story-Telling Builds Meaningful Connections

Story-telling is one of the most influential forms of marketing as it directly taps into consumers’ emotions and helps form connections with consumers.

But when you add user-generated content into the story-telling tactic, you make it more authentic, reliable, and real. And that helps consumers connect more deeply and empathetically with the campaign.

A social media feed wall can help you showcase captivating user-generated stories from social media. Taggbox provides excellent solutions to create and add these social media walls on your websites or to showcase them at events or exhibitions.

Image Source -Taggbox

Telling consumer-centric stories in your campaign will allow consumers to engage and interact more with your brand. It can also help your brand build trust and more meaningful relationships.

2 Attract Users with an Inbound Advertising Strategy

An inbound marketing strategy involves attracting the audiences to your brand with excellent content and experiences that have been created. For your inbound marketing to be successful, it’s important to keep the behavioral attributes of the consumers in mind.

Unlike outbound marketing, it does not disrupt consumers with spammy, irrelevant promotional content. With inbound marketing, you look to build connections with consumers through positive and valuable marketing campaigns.

Integrating user-generated content into your inbound campaigns can help you build those valuable connections by tapping into consumers’ sentiments.

Image Source: Netflix

Inbound is all about attracting, engaging, and delighting consumers. And user-generated content is the best solution that can easily help you achieve those objectives.

3. Social Proof Shapes User Behavior

Social proof is when a brand has positive brand image in the market that has been developed based on authenticity, trustworthiness, and reliability. Existing customers create this image by sharing their reviews, feedback, and experiences about a brand.

User-generated content is the backbone of creating social proof. And social proof is extremely crucial as it shapes consumers’ purchase behaviors in an online ecosystem.

Image Source: Moss Miata

The solution to building social proof is collecting UGC from social media and showcasing it on your website. Social media aggregators can help you collect, customize, and display the social UGC on your website.

Along with that, the feed can help you increase user engagement, website vibrancy, and conversions with a loyal customer base. Not just a website, you can display these social UGC feeds at your events, exhibitions, or as digital signs.

4. Gamification Marketing Strategy

Gamification is a process of integrating gaming-aesthetics into a non-gaming activity or element to make it more engaging, interactive, and cheerful for users.

Marketing with gamification has been immensely successful in recent times. It attracts users and drives tremendous engagement by providing a superlative experience.

It not only involves playing games but also extends to contests, quizzes, rewards, leaderboards, and other content engagement opportunities.

Image Source: TweakYourBiz

Users will create a tremendous amount of content for the brand through their involvement and engagement with the gamification marketing campaign.

Therefore, gamifying the users’ experience with your brand can help you gain wider exposure and brand awareness. It will build a strong brand image and deeper connections with users. You can also gain insights into user behavior.

5. Reputation Creation with Affinity Marketing

Co-branding or affinity marketing is concerned with the integration of the marketing campaigns of two or more brands whose products or services complement each other.

By integrating marketing campaigns, brands can make the best and most effective use of their campaign by reaching a wider audience.

User-generated content becomes extremely important in affinity marketing. When brands come together for promotions, the user base is extended, giving you an opportunity to tap into a wider audience.

Image Source: GoPro

Red Bull and GoPro are the best examples of affinity marketing that has created a unified perception where users associate them together.

The benefits are exponential like enhanced reputation, shared customer loyalty, cross-promotions, and budget efficiency.

6. Offline Networking With Technology Integration

Marketing has seen a paradigm shift from offline channels to online channels in recent years. But offline marketing is still important, as it is an excellent way to build meaningful networks on a personal level between the brand and its users.

Events such as exhibitions, conferences, seminars, concerts, and social gatherings are still relevant with incomparable benefits for brands.

But the issue is that if the event is not engaging or entertaining enough, it can do more harm than good for both the brand and the event.

The solution is the integration of technology like social walls at your event to make it engaging and entertaining for offline and online audiences.

Image Source: Taggbox

Social walls are an interactive feed of user-generated content that has been collected from different social media networks. A social wall can be displayed on screens at events to boost audience engagement and drive a successful offline marketing campaign.

Users from online channels can also take part in an offline event along with the possibility of making the event more interactive and entertaining. As a brand, you can reap the benefits of online UGC in your offline marketing campaign.

7. Sell more with Point of Purchase (POP) Marketing

Point of purchase marketing is generally an offline upselling strategy where retail stores sell you additional or relevant products at the point where users make the purchase.

In online commerce, you can use this strategy as well. You can recommend similar products to the ones that customer is already purchasing. It is again a technology-empowered strategy where you can integrate engaging shoppable UGC for upselling.

Using a visual commerce platform, you can aggregate user-generated content that includes product photos and videos into a single shoppable feed. You can then embed it on your website’s point-of-purchase.

Image Source: Medium

The UGC will help attract, engage, and influence consumers to purchase products. And the shoppable option will allow the users to buy items in real-time from the UGC feed.

The integration of UGC with POP marketing will help you increase your engagement, conversions, and sales while also reducing cart abandonment.

8. Behavioral Analysis and Marketing

Behavioral Analysis is a concept that involves analyzing behavioral elements of consumers on digital mediums. Then, based on the insights from the analysis, you can create a tailored marketing strategy.

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

Google Analytics and social media analytics are renowned tools that provide detailed insights into users’ sentiments, likes and preferences, interests, and overall browsing behaviors.

With behavioral analysis, you can use UGC to gain detailed consumer insights about what they are posting, sharing, exploring, reviews, and experiences. Based on these insights, you can create a behavioral marketing campaign.

Behavioral marketing can help you retarget your users with a more personalized marketing campaign. The campaign can include elements that effectively align with users’ behavior, garnering positive results for the campaign and brand.

9. Increase Conversions with Social Commerce Marketing

Social commerce marketing involves the integration of social media marketing with online commerce. It allows brands to cross-promote among the two channels simultaneously.

It is a growing trend and a quite effective one in which user-generated content is of supreme importance.

Social media is a hub of user-generated content and is a primary channel of marketing for brands. But the issue is that most of the time, brands aren’t able to turn user engagement into conversions due to the gap between social media and their website, i. e. point of purchase.

Social commerce tools like TaggShop can help you increase conversions as they bridge the gap between social media and your website. Social commerce platforms can collect all the relevant and engaging user-generated content into a Shoppable Feed.

Image Source — TaggBox

You can customize the feed to make it captivating and interactive for the users. Further, you can add shoppable options to the collected posts to allow the users to buy products directly from the feed.

Social commerce platforms provide the functionality to embed these shoppable UGC feeds on your website, especially for ecommerce.

You can use user-generated content in your social commerce strategy to cross-channelize traffic from your website and social media networks.

It can amplify the website vibrancy and help you build social proof and increase user engagement and interaction. It has added benefits like visual marketing, enhanced dwell time, and shorter user purchase journey.

All of these benefits from a social commerce platform and its integration with user-generated content can lead to an increase in conversions and sales for your business.

Conclusion

In this constantly changing digital landscape, the experts from the marketing industry have defined that user-generated content is the next big wave in the marketing ecosystem.

As marketing with user-generated content provide a long-term strategy that extends beyond the fundamental objective of selling more.

The destination of marketing is to develop trust and value that can drive consumers towards conversions. Integrating UGC with marketing can help a marketer achieve that efficiently and effectively.

So, integrate UGC into your marketing strategies and make the best use of the tools like Taggbox, Google Analytics, and HubSpot to design a UGC-powered marketing campaign.