Gone are the days, where influencer marketing was meant only for celebrities, where they promote brands with niche content. In today’s fast-paced and competitive business world, people trust online reviews that are created by genuine users or customers rather than putting complete trust in endorsements and product mentions from influencers. User-Generated Content is increasingly becoming the trending topic in content strategies for global brands. Marketers and business owners are highly preferring to incorporate User Generated Content in their marketing strategies as they have witnessed that they are able to capture the target audience’s attention like never before with UGC.
Want to know more about User Generated Content and its benefits when you incorporate it into your sales strategy? Well, keep reading this article.
All About User Generated Content
In simple words, UGC refers to the unsponsored content created by genuine users or customers of a product or service. This content created by the brand’s audience comes in the following forms.
- Social media content including images, videos, reviews, etc
- YouTube videos
- Blog posts with product reviews
- Testimonials on various platforms
- Forums, Community discussion threads, etc
In the digital era where online shopping is on the rise, buyers look for real-life experiences of potential users in using a product or service, before investing in something online, and UGC absolutely serves their needs.
Why Should Businesses Incorporate UGC Into Their Sales Strategy?
Before looking into the benefits of User Generated Content, let’s understand why
the majority of the businesses have begun to incorporate UGC as part of their marketing strategy. Here are a few reasons
- Buyers expect authentic user reviews rather than repetitive brand ads.
- UGC influences the buyer’s purchasing decision.
- The majority of the buyers come forward to share the positive and negative feedback about a brand.
- Buyers carefully look for business responses to user reviews.
Creates An Impact At All The Stages of Marketing
UGC influences the customer journey at all the stages of marketing including Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, and Advocacy. With UGC, at the awareness stage, a user comes across a customer’s post telling about your brand. During the consideration stage, a buyer conducts pre-purchase research before making a purchase decision and at the purchase stage, the buyer finally buys the product as they are convinced by user reviews or feedback they found for the particular product or service. At the retention stage, when customers require guidance in using your product or service, they find useful UGC in the form of FAQ, forum discussions, etc in the brand community. Finally, when a customer reaches an advocacy stage, they create UGC by spreading the content about your brand on various platforms.
Get Access to Engaging and Captivating Content
It is always difficult for marketers to create unique, attractive, engaging content about their brands. With UGC, marketers get access to unique, engaging, and captivating user content. With the permission of the user, they can display the UGC on social walls, create shoppable posts, etc. One of the main advantages of UGC is that they maximize conversions and ROI while minimizing the time and effort to create unique content.
Targeted Website Traffic With More Conversions
As said above, buyers willing to purchase a specific product or service conduct pre-purchase research. With the UGC, they find the relevant customer experiences about the product or service they are looking for and come to a purchase decision. Hence, only the people interested in your product or service reach your website and there are high chances that they are likely to convert into buyers.
UGC Can Help Ease Your SEO Efforts
As we all know SEO optimization requires a lot of effort, and UGC makes this task easier. Content from real users is unique. They mention the products’ names with unique descriptive content related to the products and also leave links to it. Hence, your brand looks perfectly optimized for SEO and your website ranking is improved with quality backlinks. With UGC, the brand either has to spend money or put effort into SEO.
Authentic Social Proof To Influence Purchase Decision
Customers trust other customers and they largely depend on UGC to make a purchase decisions. So, try incorporating UGC into your ad campaigns. Instead of showing stock images, showing real-life images of people using your product increases the chances of conversion. Ads that have incorporated UGC are likely to get higher CTRs with reduced acquisition costs and improved ROI.
Final Word
When compared to the average cost of hiring an influencer or the investment to produce brand ads or content, UGC is a cost-effective way to scale your business to new heights. Share a warm relationship with your customers and simply connect with your customers to receive authentic feedback and showcase the authentic UGC to the audiences by giving credit to the original creator. In case of negative feedback, make sure to respond and offer an appropriate solution. This is important as buyers around the world are keenly looking for business responses to user feedback.
