What Is User-Generated Content and Why Does It Matter?
Digital Marketing
Dec 11
Users’ willingness to engage with brands online depends largely on whether they perceive brands as reflecting their values, priorities, and preferences. When these align, customer loyalty often takes the form of user-generated content (UGC) — unbiased advertising for your products or services capable of reaching entirely new audiences.
Here’s a brief dive into what UGC looks like online, how brands can better encourage audiences to create it, and the advantages a strong UGC presence can have on brand growth.
What Are the Advantages of UGC?
The phrase “user-generated content” refers to any form of content created and shared by consumers about a brand or its products. These commonly take the form of text and video reviews, blog posts, unboxing videos, or even images of a product in use marked with a hashtag (more on this later).
UGC bears the advantage of coming from unbiased sources that ground branded products in the “real world” through authentic (read: non-sponsored) content. This user-built content effectively becomes a powerful form of social proof, demonstrating to potential customers how others are using and enjoying a brand’s products.
Developing a strategy to encourage greater UGC generation can also benefit brands in the following ways:
UGC is extremely cost-effective. User-created content showing your products in action and vouching for them as a worthwhile purchase can be repurposed across your brand’s marketing channels without worrying about overly-polished production quality — if anything, the popular home-video style smartphone review serves as a mark of authenticity.
UGC’s social proof drives engagement and conversions. Potential customers are more likely to engage with, comment on, and share content from real-world users compared to brand-sponsored content. UGC is reportedly 8.7 times more powerful than influencer content and 6.6 times more influential than branded content when it comes to making purchase decisions.
UGC acts as a powerful community-builder. Encouraging UGC creates a community around your brand, strengthening brand loyalty and increasing the chance of repeat business. People enjoy being part of something larger, and UGC lets them connect with your brand. Additionally, it sparks dialogue between you and your customers, fostering a deeply engaged community.
How Brands Can Motivate Audiences To Create UGC
UGC is valuable, but marketers can strategically influence its creation for better outcomes. Here are five ways today’s marketers can encourage more UGC for their respective brands:
Feature UGC Everywhere You Can
There are plenty of tactics available to marketers for encouraging UGC, but perhaps none are as powerful as simply providing user content with a platform. Regularly featuring user content on your brand’s social channels, website, and even large-scale marketing campaigns shows customers their content has a real opportunity to be recognized and appreciated, and encourages others to follow suit.
Host Contests or Giveaways
One of the oldest UGC strategies is encouraging customers to post photos or videos with your product by offering them a chance to win prizes—like giveaways or discounts. And for good reason. It’s a reliable way for marketers to boost conversations and share about new products. Few approaches to expanding visibility through UGC are as effective as a well-executed promotional giveaway.
Create a Branded Hashtag
Hashtags have experienced occasional shifts in their perceived effectiveness over what’s now been several years of social media’s evolution. But if you’re a seller on Instagram, TikTok, or X, hashtags remain among the best ways to be discovered by new audiences. Encouraging customers to share reviews or experiences with your products alongside a clever branded hashtag makes it easy for users to quickly build UGC — and for your brand to track and showcase the content.
Leverage Micro-Influencers
Brands are finding that content from influencers is consistently more effective than their own. This is largely because consumers view influencer content as genuine, whereas they often see branded content as biased. Investing in micro-influencer partnerships is thus a viable tactic for boosting UGC development — through micro-influencer collaborations, new pools of potential UGC creators are exposed to your brand, shown the benefits of your products, and encouraged to make content of their own.
Be a Good Conversation Partner
As with any marketing activity requiring some action on the part of your loyal customers, being active across social channels through branded accounts goes a long way. Engagement is a two-way street; by actively engaging with users who create content about your brand through likes, comments, and shared posts, brands show users they are heard and considered an important part of the ongoing conversation.
UGC is any content about your brand created and shared by consumers. This user-built content is valuable because it comes from unbiased sources, showcasing your products in real-life settings. This authentic content serves as social proof, showing potential customers how others enjoy and use your products. Encouraging more UGC can greatly benefit your brand, and with the right strategy, you can guide its creation to boost your marketing efforts.
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