When it comes to digital marketing, most people assume that it’s just about content marketing, paid advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), or social media marketing. However, the scope is substantially larger with other less-known branches that are just as important, such as customer relationship management (CRM), programmatic advertising, artificial intelligence marketing, and user-generated content. Each of these categories has its own pros and cons, alongside its best practices, applications, and case studies.
This article will cover one of the least-utilized members of the digital marketing umbrella, which is user-generated content. Read on to learn more on why and how user-generated content will change the playing field!
Builds a Brand Image of Trustworthiness and Transparency
More than 60% of customers think that transparent content is one of the most attractive qualities of a brand. What better way to display transparency than through the honest reviews or content generated by other customers?
As time goes on, customers are smarter and are more educated when it comes to discerning whether a brand’s content is organically produced or is a result of paid efforts. Most customers are now aware of influencer marketing, sponsored posts, and search ads. Hence, they are more likely to trust a review or a piece of content that comes from other non-biased customers. Your user-generated posts are now more able to cut through the noise.
The keys to successfully utilising a user-generated content marketing strategy for your business objectives are to create engaging prompters for customers to share their experiences with your business and to make sure every content is as honest as it can be. This means that whether the feedback from customers is positive or negative, your business is able to maintain integrity and not edit them out.
Creates an Entertaining and Engaging Customer Experience
Around 50% of consumers wish brands would guide them in creating content, which indicates that there is the initial willingness for customers to participate in brands’ online initiatives, but they simply need more guidance or prompts on what to post. A successful application of this can be seen from National Geographic, in which they repost their audiences’ high-quality photos and captions. When done this way, audiences that want to be featured will know what types of content to submit to the brand and are therefore more keen to participate in the initiatives.
By reposting or holding mini online initiatives that customers can participate in, your business creates good customer engagement and experience, which will stick to their memories. This is good to nail because more than 70% of customers will recommend your brand when they have had a good customer experience.
Adds Variety to Your Content Offerings
Chances are if your business is a small-to-medium-scaled business, your content marketing team consists of five or fewer people. For a while, it may seem like ideas are still flowing well, however over time, you may notice a lot of similar things being planned out for your company’s social media platforms.
Involving the audience to generate content will massively add variety to your content offerings. The different demographics and backgrounds of the audience will bring fresh perspectives and out-of-the-box ideas to your doorstep.
Saves Your Digital Marketing Budget
Just like some businesses, you may find yourself lacking the digital marketing budget for a certain period of time. Rather than stressing too hard about it, why not create an online user-generated content initiative for a change? This way, you can reap all the benefits that we have mentioned earlier in this post and save some hard-earned budget for this time period.
An extra tip for when you do have a little bit more budget to spare is to hand out branded merchandise to winners of your online initiatives. Not only do branded merchandise remind customers of your brand, but they also act as an offline marketing tool as well. For instance, if you give a free branded pen to a customer, he or she will most likely take the pen to other places where it can garner more audience, which smoothly creates brand awareness. What a win-win situation!
What Then?
When it comes to planning your social media content offerings, there are multiple ways to go about this, with creating user-generated content being one of them. However, if you find yourself having questions or needing help in creating good quality, engaging content, we at Digital Squad New Zealand, the best b2b marketing agency auckland, are more than happy to help you with content marketing agency auckland, Linkedin marketing auckland , digital marketing agency Auckland, programmatic agency Auckland, SEO company auckland, and others.
Feel free to reach out to us for more information!
