What Does User-Generated Content (UGC) Mean?

What does UGC stand for? User-generated content can be content of any type and usually comes in the form of images, videos, social media posts, reviews, or testimonials. 

When Coca-Cola brought out their personalized coke bottles, the world went crazy for them. Dubbed the “Share a Coke” campaign, this personalization craze took off all over the world with bottles named after people in every different destination.

To keep the momentum going, customers were asked to share pictures of themselves enjoying a drink with their personalized coke bottle on social media channels. The result? Coca-Cola’s customers stepped into the role of the advertiser.

This wasn’t just a one-off campaign or a fancy fluke.

Instead, it is one of the thousands of UGC campaigns that brought the business it promoted millions of revenue and a whole new image.

“The next wave of the Web is going to be user-generated content.” –
John Doerr, Venture Capitalist.

But what is UGC (User-Generated Content)?

User-Generated Content is defined as any type of content that has been created and put out there by contributors, users, visitors, guests, customers, brand fans, even creators. UGC can refer to pictures, videos, reviews,  testimonials, tweets, blog posts, and everything in between and is the act of users promoting a brand rather than the brand itself.

So, UGC sounds like another one of those marketing buzzwords, right? In fact, it isn’t a fad at all. It’s been burning brightly for a while (well, a while for the fast-paced world of the internet).

Let’s take it back a few years for a moment to Burberry’s Art of the Trench UGC campaign. At that point, brands were adopting the idea of their fans promoting their business – because word-of-mouth referrals are the best kind of referrals, even in the digital age.

Burberry asked its loyal fans to upload pictures of themselves and their friends wearing the brand’s iconic trench coat. All Burberry had to do was curate the best submissions, which they showcased on a dedicated microsite and their Facebook page.

When you consider that 86% of millennials  (Trend), and 68% of social media users between the ages of 18 and 24 take into account information shared on social media when they make a purchasing decision (eMarketer), it’s easy to see why UGC is so powerful.

What makes User-Generated Content Successful (and Why You Shouldn’t Ignore it)

Obviously, UGC campaigns have been a constant player in the marketing world because they are so successful (see Share a Coke campaign).

But why are they so successful? Why are brands turning to their audiences to share their products instead of crafting their own ads?

UGC Puts Customers Front and Center

Customer-orientated businesses are on the rise because companies constantly have to keep up with the changing trends of their audiences. In this fast-paced, digitally-run world, attention spans can be snapped away with the click of a finger. If brands aren’t catering solely to their customers, their customers will simply find another brand that is.

Online users are becoming increasingly savvy in knowing which companies are using slimy marketing tactics, and which ones are being authentic and transparent.

People Don’t Trust Marketers, They Trust Real People

This brings us to the next point. In the past ten years, the idea of the sleazy marketer has risen to unprecedented heights. The average Joe in the street is no longer impressed by pushy sales tactics.

Instead, they crave stories, they crave connection, and they crave interaction with other humans, with real people (a byproduct, perhaps, of the increasing amount of time we spend in front of a computer screen?).

In reality, we’ve been buying into UGC for centuries, but there are now social media platforms to make it more accessible across the globe. And, when you discover that a whopping 92% of people are more likely to trust a recommendation from another person over branded content, it’s clear to see how far the trust between people and marketers has stretched.

User-Generated Content is Authentic

In a study run by Cohn & Wolfe, 63% of consumers said they would rather buy from a company they consider to be authentic over a competitor.

Authenticity is so important in today’s online world. Customers are no longer passive consumers led by TV commercials and billboards. Instead, they’re active choosers of their own fate and want a say in who they do and don’t buy from, even ambassadors for marketing brands they care about.

But how do they choose who to buy from? They opt for brands that have the same values as them, brands that they can connect with on a human level, and brands that “get them.”

UGC Creates Community

UGC brings audiences together. Instead of it being an “us” against “them” situation, where brands are constantly trying to win consumers over, UGC brings everyone together in one big happy family.

People like to feel a part of something. In a 1986 theory penned by MacMillan and Chavis, there were four things that encouraged people to feel like part of a community.

1. Membership
2. Influence
3. Integration and fulfillment of needs
4. Shared emotional connection

Points 2 and 4 are of particular interest to UGC. Influence has to work both ways – members also have to feel like they have influence over the community, an element that UGC puts on the table.

Shared emotional connection is pushed through UGC, too. MacMillan and Chavis stated that healthy communities have a story, and this is what brings them together.

UGC is Cost Effective

UGC is all about the users creating content. In most cases, they’re unpaid and do it for a number of reasons, whether it’s to share their experience, build a connection with like-minded people, or have a chance of winning something.

This, obviously, is considerably cheaper than forking out thousands – or even millions – for prime-time TV commercials and Times Square billboards.

The beauty of UGC is that the users run the show, while marketers don’t have to empty their pockets on campaigns that may or may not perform well.

UGC ROI is High

According to ComScore, brand engagements rise by 28% when consumers are exposed to a mixture of professional marketing content and user-generated content.

Take the Starbucks’ White Cup Contest as an example. Customers were encouraged to doodle all over their white Starbucks cups and post their images as entries for a competition to find a template for a limited edition Starbucks cup.

Nearly 4,000 customers submitted entries in just three weeks, showing that people were ready and willing to engage with the brand.

Where Does User-Generated Content (UGC) Come From?

Knowing that user-generated content can be used from the very start of your marketing strategy to the end (even after your highest tier conversion), the question becomes: where and how do I get UGC?

Since UGC comes from your fans and customers, it’s a matter of finding their promotional content and organizing it to find the best content based on what you need it for. You can either find UGC (usually using social media) or create a direct submission where customers can send content to your brand during contests and campaigns.

TINT’s User-generated content platform can collect, organize, and find the highest quality UGC to use in your upcoming campaigns. Discover all the UGC available and  easily find quality content to use in certain parts of your marketing funnel or differing campaigns. Without a platform like TINT, finding UGC can take hours and your cyberstalking for customer content isn’t promised to end in results. You might be able to find some content based on brand-wide hashtags, but you’ll end up leaving a lot of UGC on the table that isn’t explicitly tagged with your branding.

Three ways to get customers to create user-generated content:

1. Motivate customers to create UGC during certain parts of the buying journey
2. Create beautiful experiences, physical spaces, and unboxing events that people are more likely to share
3. Ask customers to create UGC in return for a prize

Let’s take a look at these to understand when to use them.

Motivate Customers To Create UGC, or “Customer Generated Content”

Think of customer generated content as the part of your marketing strategy that you always want to be turned on. You always want customers to promote your products as they receive them and use them. The key is making sure that you’re helping your customers create UGC.

More than half of consumers (50%) wish that brands would tell them what type of content to create and share. Take a look at the most exciting parts of the buying journey and create a call to action for your customers to take UGC. Here’s where to start:

1. Immediately after purchase
2. When they receive their product/service
3. After they get the results from their product/service

Motivate customers to create UGC by giving them an easy tweet on Instagram Story to share after they’ve made a purchase. For eCommerce brands, add a note with the shipped product that tells customers to share their unboxing experience – and send them an email a few days (or weeks) after receiving their product asking them to share their feedback on social.

These are just some examples of how you can get customers to create UGC, but depending on your brand you can come up with the specific strategies that work best for your customer persona.

TINT can help you find and request rights to content your users and customers are creating about your brand.

Ask Customers To Create UGC In Return for a Prize

This is an important part of your UGC marketing strategy. When you run UGC contests, you’ll be in full swing asking customers to share their content in a specific way with the hopes of winning a special prize from your brand.

For example, Chipotle created a UGC campaign on Tiktok with a prize of 1 year of free Chipotle. They asked their audience to participate by making a TikTok video explaining why they should win the free year of Chipotle with the hashtag #ChipotleSponsorMe.

This isn’t a campaign that runs every day—this is the type of campaign to run a few times a year to increase brand awareness through the UGC created by campaign participants. You can run prize campaigns simultaneously alongside your ongoing UGC strategy.

Where Does User-Generated Content (UGC) Fit Into Your Marketing Strategy?

UGC is truly omnichannel and can be used from top-of-funnel to bottom-of-funnel content. Brands use UGC to increase brand awareness and sales because it’s one of the few marketing materials that work well at each stage of the customer journey.

Forty-eight percent of customers claim user-generated content is a great method for them to discover new products and there’s a 29% increase in web conversions when websites featured user-generated content.

It’s these statistics that motivate brands like Coca-Cola, Burberry, and Starbucks to focus on user-generated content campaigns—the more they can get their customers to do the promoting for them, the higher their sales. Better yet, the less time and money they have to spend on advertising campaigns.

When you have customers creating content for you (that you can use in your content marketing strategy, social media strategy, email strategy, etc.), you don’t have to pay for huge product shoots and campaigns, and the teams necessary to help them run smoothly. Campaign costs take a steep downward turn and brands can allocate those resources towards getting their UGC seen by a larger audience that wouldn’t have been available if they’d had to spend more than half of their marketing budget on campaign shoots and teams.

What about content generated by employees?

User-generated content isn’t just for B2C brands—B2B brands also see success with UGC in their marketing strategies. We can see this in the personal brand revolution that has taken over content marketing. Employee-shared content gets 8 times more engagement than content shared by brands.

Employees may get up to 10 times more followers than a brand’s corporate account and get more organic social engagement. These are the numbers that turn B2B marketers’ heads—customers want to see the faces behind the brand, including customers or employees.

What about content generated by UGC creators?

Aside from improving brand awareness, engagement, and sales, user-generated content also fits in post-conversion. After a happy customer has made their purchase, getting featured on a brand’s Instagram feed or retweeted builds the post-purchase relationship between the brand and the customer. It’s this interaction that furthers future customer loyalty, as they get to interact with the brands they love so much (instead of admiring them from afar).

When you open up your Instagram feed to UGC photos or see brands retweeting their customer’s tweets—it’s not an accident. It’s a strategic move to increase brand awareness, trust, and sales while decreasing how much money needs to be spent on content creation.

After all, everyone is an influencer.

How User-Generated Content (UGC) Changes Influencer Marketing

UGC utilizes influencer marketing to create micro-awareness moments for your brand that compound to increase conversions. When we say “influencer marketing,” we don’t mean spending your entire marketing budget on getting a Kardashian to promote your brand. The focus isn’t necessarily on huge mega-stars—it’s on the nano and micro-influencers that have engaged audiences. These are the average people deemed more trustworthy than celebrities turned brand ambassadors.

A nano-influencer can be a student with 1,000 Instagram followers that are only their friends, family, and acquaintances. When this student applies to a university and gets in, they become an influencer when they post an Instagram story holding their acceptance letter.

That Instagram story is user-generated content. All influencers technically create UGC and everyone that creates UGC is technically an influencer. With seventy percent of consumers trusting online peer reviews and recommendations more than professional content and copy—the use of influencer marketing is becoming less of an option and more of a necessity.

For example, when Delta promotes a happy customer’s tweets talking about their new safety regulations while flying during COVID-19, consumers are keener to see the customer talk about it than Delta itself.

You can also use professional influencers to promote your products. These are people with influence in a specific niche and a highly engaged audience (7% engagement minimum). 

A micro-influencer has 10,000 to 100,000 followers and has most likely worked with brands before. The benefit of working with these influencers is their expertise in the space. They’ve built an engaged audience and they’re able to leverage their social platforms as a channel for advertising. It’s their job to showcase new, relevant products to their audience that they would be interested in too. Using micro-influencers, you can create more brand awareness for your products, conversions, and user-generated content from the influencer that you can continue to use in marketing materials in the future.

A nano-influencer has 10,000 followers or less. They’re generally a tastemaker, a community expert, or a social butterfly, and that’s what has garnered them an audience. The pro of working with nano-influencers is that they might not consider themselves an influencer. They might just feel like a normal person who happens to have grown a decent social media following, and this means their profile is less of a channel for advertisement and more of a channel for entertainment. With nano-influencers, even though their following might not be that high, they tend to have higher engagement than micro-influencers or mega-influencers—which can result in more conversions.

It’s these influencers that brands can use, getting the influencer to review their products instead of creating a fancy promotional video that does it themselves. Seventy percent of consumers trust online peer reviews and recommendations more than professional content and copy.

Types of User-Generated Content (UGC)

With an understanding of where UGC fits into your marketing strategy and where it comes from—it’s time to look at the types of UGC available. There are three types of content that you want to focus on as you increase brand awareness and sales:

1. Visual UGC (Photos and Videos)
2. Testimonials and Comments
3. Reviews

Let’s take a look at these three types of UGC.

Visual UGC (Photos and Videos)

Visual content is the most common type of UGC and also the most engaging. For example, when Chipotle asked their customers to create TikTok videos explaining why their customers should be sponsored by them, they created a lot of engagement and a lot of visual content.

When a customer shares a photo or video of their new product on social channels, they’re creating visual UGC. Similarly, when a guest takes a photo of the sunset from the pool at the hotel they’re staying at, that’s visual content, visual UGC.

With TINT, brands are able to collect all of the UGC created by happy customers and use it in the future as needed.

Testimonials and Comments UGC

Testimonials and comments are generally going to come post-purchase when the user has received their product or the benefits of the product. For example, a class or program is going to want to get as many UGC videos of their happy students as possible so they can continue to promote their program.

Users with happy customers on comment-friendly platforms (like Twitter or Facebook), can use customer comments in their marketing materials. The key to using testimonials and comments is to ensure that you’re sourcing the most helpful for your future and potential  customers.

Reviews UGC

Reviews are left on product pages or business pages and are a huge part of product success. Seventy percent of consumers will consider UGC reviews or ratings before making a purchasing decision. Reviews are best left below products on their product page, where somebody at the bottom of the funnel can read the review so they can feel knowledgeable and ready to make the purchase.

You can also use reviews in your top-of-funnel strategies to create awareness for the quality of your products or services, but ensure all relevant reviews make their way as close to the buy button as possible.

So what’s the best type of UGC to ask your users for?

The answer is all three. You always want an incoming stream of new user-generated content that can be used in future marketing materials. Since those materials will require different types of UGC—having plenty of options for each type of UGC will be massively beneficial to all future campaigns.

User-Generated Content (UGC) Best Practices

Just like having all three types of UGC on hand is best practice, there are a few more best practices to be aware of as you start your UGC strategy.

Choose the most effective social network for your brand

Brands don’t need to create content on every single platform available to them. Instead, they need to focus on the platforms where their customers can be found. 

For example, a clothing boutique doesn’t necessarily need to put its time and resources towards having a Twitter presence—that time is better allocated towards Instagram. 

You don’t need to be everywhere. The best practice for choosing the best channels for your brand is to go with the obvious channel first and prioritize it. Then, add in other channels as your time and resources are able to prioritize secondary channels. Give each channel set metrics it needs to pass to be deemed successful. If it passes them, then continue growing on that channel. If it doesn’t, then look for other channels to test your content on.

Use different types of UGC on specific channels

Each type of UGC is going to serve a purpose in specific parts of your marketing strategy. For example, a UGC photo of a customer enjoying their stay at your hotel is going to work great on your Instagram and website pages, but a review is going to be ideal under your booking or product pages.

The key to a successful UGC strategy is figuring out what platform each type of UGC is going to work best on. Generally, you can assume that the platform the UGC came from is a good platform to continue to use. For example, if you get an Instagram video from a happy customer—with the right legal permission you can use that video on your Instagram feed.

With that said, the highest use case for UGC is to incorporate beyond the original platform and use it on your website, screens, email, other social media platforms, and even in print. UGC works well because it’s not company created, so as your marketing team works with UGC and adapts it to other platforms (email, websites, screens, events, etc.), they can leverage that same authenticity that made it work so well in the first place. 

Use UGC in content marketing campaigns

While UGC can be used across all of your marketing campaigns (traditional and digital), there’s a big opportunity to leverage it in your content marketing campaigns. This is because UGC is content. All you need to do is keep repurposing it so that it can be seen by a larger audience and increase your brand awareness.

This is where TINT becomes really useful. Instead of having to find UGC and sift through to find the highest quality—you can use TINT to have all of that work done for you. As you, or your marketing team, pull UGC to use in your content marketing campaigns you’ll be able to find exactly what you need.

When you use UGC in your content marketing strategy, don’t forget that each piece of UGC can be used for a different purpose. One customer might have done a great job of creating UGC that’s perfect for top-of-funnel awareness, while another customer has the perfect video for bottom-of-funnel conversions. Figure out what pieces of UGC fit into specific parts of your funnel so you can make sure to use them at the right time.

User-Generated Content Marketing vs Traditional Marketing

Consumers are considerably less passive than they used to be when it comes to advertising. They’re now more active in the decisions they make, who they “social listen” to, and who they choose to buy from and engage with.

These days, buying traditional ads both on external media and online is a competitive game (and, even if you pull out the big bucks, you still might not catch the attention of your customers).

Add that to the fact that consumers are actively choosing to bypass ads (take pay-to-play streaming platforms like Netflix and the rise of ad blockers) and are more likely to click through to a site if they see a friend recommend it, and you have a solid argument for UGC to augment traditional marketing efforts.

UGC works as social proof, too. One study shows that 79% of consumers admitted to trusting online reviews as much as in-person recommendations. That’s a huge metric.

Think for a moment about the ALS Association Ice Bucket Challenge. The charity challenge went viral for a few months, increasing awareness of the ALS Association (which not many people knew about beforehand) and bagging the company $100 million in donations. No small feat.

However, it’s also important to acknowledge the risks of UGC marketing. The most critical of which is properly managing the legal rights to photos. A couple of high-profile cases demonstrate the potential damage that mismanagement of UGC can cause to both the bottom line and to a brand’s image.

The Best User-Generated Content Examples from Brands

Let’s pull this all together by diving into some brilliant UGC campaigns.

Lululemon #thesweatlife UGC Campaign

Yoga clothing brand Lululemon wanted to bring their audience together and create a community around their business. They came up with #thesweatlife campaign, which encouraged their customers to post pictures of themselves in Lululemon gear on Instagram.

“We created the program as a way to connect with our guests and showcase how they are authentically sweating in our product offline,” says Lululemon brand manager Lesia Dallimore. “We see it as a unique way to bring their offline experiences into our online community.”

In the first couple of months, the brand notched up over 7,000 photos of its customers (or “brand ambassadors”) on Instagram and Twitter, and the unique #sweatlife gallery which was created especially for the campaign received more than 40,000 unique visitors.

Chipotle Cultivate Festival UGC Social Wall

Chipotle’s branded festival used UGC to bring its crowds together and promote the different elements of the brand and the festival.

They pulled together social shares, images, and videos onto a single page, where visitors to the festival could scroll through and relive their memories after the festival had ended.

Throughout the weekend of the Chipotle Cultivate Festival, which took place in San Francisco, the brand racked up more than 1,200 social posts and a whopping 3 million impressions. What’s more, over 37.5% of the visitors scrolled through the TINT social wall to load more content from the weekend.

Belkin Lego iPhone Cases UGC Campaign

Belkin ran a UGC marketing campaign that included people’s favorite gadget – the iPhone. Partnering up with Lego, they asked customers to create cases for their phones using customizable Lego blocks.

They then posted the images onto Instagram using the hashtag #LEGOxBelkin. This is the perfect example of customers doing the selling for the brand because this simple but effective marketing method showed potential buyers just how cool, diverse, and trendy Belkin cases could be in an organic and authentic way.

NASDAQ Omnichannel UGC

NASDAQ is a strong supporter of UGC content, using it across many of its brands including Virgin America, ETSY, Zebra, and Biogen. They use it to accumulate and bring together social content at social events and other important calendar dates.

NASDAQ uses TINT across a number of different channels when they’re running a big event, meaning the social shares get seen on large screens in Times Square and TV monitors all over the world.

“What makes TINT the best is it allows us to easily approve content on the go from the app,” says the Director of Integrated Marketing at NASDAQ, Joshua Machiz.

And that’s another reason UGC is so important. In such a fast-paced, constantly changing online landscape, content needs to be quick and on-trend. Instead of spending months and millions coming up with an advertising campaign that might be out of date by the time it finally airs, UGC marketing allows brands to stay on the ball and stay current with their customers.

Brands can constantly be in touch with their audience, which means they stay at the forefront of their minds.

The power of UGC is easy to see, and there’s no doubt that we’ll be seeing much, much more of it in the coming years as brands tap into the power of their audiences and take a step back from pushy sales tactics.

Want to learn more about how to maximize your ROI with user-generated content? Get a free strategy session with our team here.

The post What is User-Generated Content: Complete Guide to UGC appeared first on TINT.

People prioritize other people’s opinions before making a purchase.

And these people don’t have to be friends or family members. People trust ratings and reviews from strangers and base their buying decisions and brand sentiment around them.

In 2023, the trust consumers have for ratings and reviews is only increasing. Our 2023 State of User-Generated Content Report found that buyers want to see authentic reviews.

What’s an authentic rating and review? Let’s dig in.

The Statistics Behind Consumers Wanting More Ratings and Reviews

People read ratings and reviews before they buy products. Those reviews can live on the website’s product page, in the comments section of their social media platforms, or on their Google business page. 

Our 2023 State of User-Generated Content Report found that 79.69% of consumers check ratings and reviews before making a purchase.

But here’s the thing– 75% of people surveyed said they were aware when they were being advertised to. When marketers use too-good-to-be-true reviews or show only 5-star reviews on their products, buyers don’t budge. There is a science to picking the best reviews to showcase. 

The key is in authentic ratings and reviews that come directly from customers and are as personalized as possible to the buyer.

Marketers recognize the importance of ratings and reviews in driving conversions, with 69.08% stating that they are crucial to their strategies. Yet, they’re struggling to find the correct reviews. Marketers are hunting down reviews from their buyers instead of looking for organically posted reviews.

Only 35.75% of marketers regularly incorporate user-generated content (UGC) into their campaigns. Marketers must help buyers feel confident in their purchasing decision by leveraging ratings and reviews that speak to buyers’ objections and hesitations. 

Examples of Ratings and Reviews

In the 2023 State of User-Generated Content Report, we explain, “highlighting happy customers across marketing channels saves marketers time required to create trustworthy content; it’s genuine feedback brands can not only re-share to strengthen the connection with their audience but also allows brands to understand market sentiment and iterate faster.”

What do great ratings and reviews look like? They are authentic user-generated content from your fans, audience, and customers. User-generated content is a photo, video, testimonial, comment, rating, or review. Brands leverage UGC to create ratings and reviews for their brand and specific products. 

Use Your Community to Create Personalized Recommendations

Sephora’s Beauty Insider Community has over 5 million members. Inside the community, they featured user-generated content from happy customers using products they purchased from Sephora. They break down UGC by category (e.g., nails, gift ideas, fragrance) to make it easy for their buyers to find exactly what they’re looking for from precisely who they’re looking for.

Sephora’s buyers can see how an eye shadow works on someone with similar color eyes or how a skincare product works on somebody’s similarly dry skin. They can see if a highlighter is a color they like or if the latest curling iron gives the right size curl.

These UGC reviews are precious to Sephora because it does something their campaigns can’t. It personalizes the buying experience. UGC reviews bring a level of personalization that’s almost impossible to create in marketing campaigns with a big budget. With UGC, brands like Sephora can show their customers people with the same skin tone, eye color, skin type, and hair type using specific products. 

Share Your Data with Buyers

Abercrombie and Fitch is leaning heavily into ratings and reviews as well. Instead of making their prospective buyers scroll through hundreds of reviews to see if a product is a good fit – they generate a data-driven report from their reviews and show a specialized summary of that information.

They show:

• How many total reviews
• Overall rating
• Percentage of buyers recommending the product
• Average customer ratings based on fit, appearance, comfort, and product quality.
• User-Generated photos

And below this summary, they have the entire list of reviews with personalized questions to help buyers find their size and style.

Use Your Ratings and Reviews as Content

If buyers like to see user-generated content more than brand-created content, does it make sense to fill your marketing channels with only brand content?

Based on the consumer trends we’ve watched for the last 4 years, our 2023 State of User-Generated Content Report points to the importance of highlighting UGC across marketing channels.

Brands should post UGC to their in-person and online channels as a form of content.

• Brands like Nike use digital signage in their stores to feature UGC.
• Conferences and events share a digital wall of incoming UGC content to promote more UGC (and promotion of their event!).
• Airlines like Delta share UGC on their in-flight pamphlets.
• Hotels like Marriot repost UGC from happy customers on their Instagram accounts.
• Restaurants like Chipotle dedicate their entire TikTok feed to UGC.

UGC fills in-person and online marketing channels at a lower cost than average campaign production. And it does all of this while getting more engagement and conversions than brand-created content.

6 Other Trends Shaping Marketing in 2023

Ratings and reviews are coming into maturity in 2023. We’re seeing more brands lean into giving buyers what they want and, in turn, hosting communities, sharing their review data, and prioritizing sharing UGC.

The maturation (and continued rise) of ratings and reviews is only 1 out of 6 marketing themes we discovered in our research.

Download a free copy of the State of Social & User-Generated Content Report to see the seven themes that will define marketing in 2023.

The post Consumers Want Authentic Ratings and Reviews appeared first on TINT.

Consumers love seeing brand communities and customers share their experiences. They’re asking brands to post UGC – and scrolling past brand-created content at a, seemingly, faster rate than ever.

Each year, we compile a list of user-generated content statistics (and a few supporting stats!) that help marketers plan their campaigns and overall strategies. These statistics come from our State of Social & User-Generated Content report, as well as past reports, and statistics from other sources.

Check out the need-to-know UGC statistics leading marketing trends, and make sure to read the last section to get advice on how to take action.

Key User-Generated Content Marketing Stats to Remember

1. Consumers rank authentic UGC as the most trustworthy content. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
2. 69.08% of marketers feel ratings and reviews are important to their conversion rates. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
3. Only 23.03% of marketers always request rights to other people’s content – which means the remaining 76.97% could do a better job at doing this. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
4. 78.51% of marketers are investing in video content in 2023 which isn’t surprising considering the 3 platforms marketers plan to increase activity on are TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
5. 54.17% of marketers feel their team has the methodology to know what visual content will convert across marketing channels. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
6. Only 19.52% of marketers feel like they have the resources and team to create visual content. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)

UGC and Social Media Marketing Stats

1. 75.78% of consumers have used social media to search for or discover products, brands, and experiences. Get ready, social media is turning into a search engine! (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
2. 68.75% of consumers have purchased something they saw on social media. (State of Social &  User-Generated Content 2023)
3. Overall, consumers mostly use Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube (in that order) to search for new products, brands, and experiences. However, Gen Z and younger millennials (18-34) prefer Instagram for search. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
4. 68.2% of marketers agree social contests and campaigns boost engagement and conversions. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
5. Marketers are most active on Facebook, Instagram, and Linked In with Pinterest beating out TikTok for the fourth spot (TikTok is #5 most active platform). Marketers are the least active on YouTube. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
6. Marketers plan to increase activity on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube in 2023. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
7. The top 3 challenges marketers are facing when producing social and visual content are budget, time, and engagement (in that order). Compared to 2022, time has replaced content quality as the second biggest challenge for marketers.(State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)

User-Generated Content for Email Marketing Stats

1. Email click-through rates can increase by about 73% and produce more conversions when they include user-generated content.
2. Email is the preference for buyers over 45 years old in comparison to social media and other marketing channels. (State of User-Generated Content)
3. Email or social media? 4 out of 5 marketers said they’d rather give up social media than email marketing.
4.  A 760% increase in revenue has been seen when marketers use segmented email campaigns.
5. Marketers are mainly publishing UGC to social media, advertising, and email marketing channels right now. (State of User-Generated Content)

Digital Advertising Meets User-Generated Content

1. 62% of consumers report that they are more likely to click on content like ads, websites, social posts, or emails, that feature customer photos rather than an image created by the brand. (State of User-Generated Content)
2. Buyers admit to being 4-6X more likely to buy from “purpose-driven” companies and advocate for them (through UGC and word-of-mouth referrals).
3. Cost-per-click has been seen to decrease by 50% with the addition of user-generated content in social media ads.
4. 65.6% of consumers believe there is a difference between influencers and creators and 72.59% of marketers agree there is a difference between influencers and creators (here’s the difference).
5. 53.73% of marketers agree influencer content converts higher than brand content. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
6. 6 in 10 marketers report that their audience engages more with UGC in marketing and communications channels than branded content. (State of User-Generated Content)
7. Only 18.2% of marketers always measure the performance of their content across marketing channels – which means the remaining 81.8% could do a better job at doing this.  (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
8. 59.87% of marketers rely on stock video and photography for visual content even though 80.47% of consumers prefer seeing photos of real customers. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)

User-Generated Content and Web Content Stats

1. The #1 marketing channel used is social media with a brand’s website as the #2 most used marketing channel.
2. In 2021, marketers took SEO more seriously with 69% of marketers investing in their strategy.
3. When websites feature UGC, they can see an increase of 29% in web conversions, a 20% increase in return visitors, and a 90% increase in time spent on-site.
4. 79.69% of consumers look at ratings and reviews before making a purchase. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
5. 69.08% of marketers feel ratings and reviews are important to their conversion rates, but only 35.75% of marketers often or always use UGC in their strategies. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
6. 57.03% of consumers feel stock photography should be replaced with the diversity of real customers and teams. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
7. Only 18.2% of marketers always measure the performance of their content across marketing channels – which means the remaining 81.8% could do a better job at doing this. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)

Brand Marketing Stats

1. 66.41% of consumers believe that brands that use video and audio stand out more than those that don’t. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
2. Inconsistent brand messaging is a frustrating experience for buyers.
3. Only 35.75% of marketers often or always use UGC in their marketing strategies. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
4. 44.3% of marketers are investing in audio in 2023. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
5. The top 3 reasons marketers use social listening are to understand their audience, analyze trends, and conceive new ideas. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
6. In 2022, the number one challenge marketing teams faced when creating social and visual content was budget related. Yet in 2023, it looks like that challenge continues with 35% of marketers saying their budget stayed the same over the past year. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
7. 60.97% of marketers feel they don’t have enough resources for the amount of content they need. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)

eCommerce and Social Commerce Stats

1. In 2023, online purchases are predicted to reach 20.8% of sales. This could be due to the 5-year acceleration in online shopping that experts predict the pandemic caused. 
2. Currently, eCommerce websites contribute 22.3% of total retail sales.
3. Purchases made on smartphones were predicted to take up 6% of the total retail sales in 2022.
4. It’s predicted that online retail sales will reach $6.51 trillion by 2023.
5. In the US, 20% of online shoppers said they took part in live commerce. 
6. Buyers have said that they’re about 4x more loyal to eco-friendly businesses in comparison to non-eco-friendly brands.
7. 75% of consumers claim they know when they are being advertised to. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
8. 77% of shoppers are more likely to buy from brands that personalize their shopping experience. (State of User-Generated Content)
9. The majority of buyers surveyed by PayPal, 57%, said that they shop from international brands (almost 2 in 5 survey respondents had made an international purchase in the last quarter).

Travel, Tourism, and Hospitality Stats

1. The majority of millennials, 66%, book their travel trips using their smartphone. A higher majority, 74%, said that they use their smartphone for research related to their travels.
2. With an $8.9 billion value, Booking.com is the #1 most valuable travel and tourism brand in the world.
3. In 2023, it’s predicted that 2,934 hotels will open in 2023.
4. 2023 sees a rise in the return of meetings and events with 86.9% of meetings and events predicted to start back up this year.
5. 89% of global business travelers have said they want to add personal holiday travel to their business trips in the next year.
6. 42.98% of marketers experienced the most success with in-person events. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)
7. 42.98% of marketers plan to host or sponsor more in-person events in 2023 and  20.61% plan to host virtual or sponsor events. (State of Social & User-Generated Content 2023)

What Do These UGC Marketing Stats Mean For Your  Strategy?

Statistics tell you which direction to look – but they don’t give you the map to find your destination. Looking at the macro landscape tells us that there are some major trends to tap into that will increase your engagement and conversions. Better yet, it can build a stronger bond between your brand and community.

Here are some actionable tips for adding these statistics to the micro parts of your marketing strategy.

Social Media Content

As social media grows into a better search engine, it’s up to marketers to create searchable content. Add in buyers requesting user-generated content along their buying journey and all signs post to creating UGC with clear value propositions (that can get picked up by the social media algorithms!).

Email Content

Personalization in email is winning. Subscribers want less of everything you do and more of what they care about. Use lead magnets, contests, and specific ad campaigns to segment subscribers as they come into your list to ensure you’re only talking to them about what they care about. For people already subscribed, send out a quick “What do you want to see from us?” email with links that automatically segment the subscriber when clicked.

Digital Advertising

The shift to video is here. It’s no longer on the horizon – something to worry about later. Marketers need to create video and audio content that meets the latest in consumer trends to meet their community where THEY are. To get a boost on video content, use TINT to find and get the legal rights to the videos your community has already posted.

Web Content

Your buyers want to read and see reviews from other customers just like them. By adding visual reviews to your website and product pages (alongside user-generated content), you’ll create the feedback loop that your audience is looking for. You’ll also warm up buyers to leaving their own reviews after purchase. 

Brand Content

Consumers are asking for video and audio content, but that doesn’t magically make time appear for it on your to-do list. Avoid putting off this necessary shift in content and add UGC to your marketing channels to publish high-quality, highly converting content that your buyers are already asking for.

Let these statistics serve as a compass that can show you the way to create a high-performing marketing strategy. Start to build out your brand’s UGC strategy with TINT’s User generated content platform. We help brands like Canon, Nestle, and more connect with their audiences through the power of social media and UGC.

Schedule a demo to see what TINT’s all-in-one social content platform and UGC strategists can do for you.

The post Top User-Generated Content Statistics to Watch appeared first on TINT.

It’s simple: stop looking at what everybody in your industry is doing and instead look outside of it.

The whole point of marketing is to stand out from the competition and attract the right buyers. But, it’s dangerously easy to get caught up in the same tactics and strategies your competition is deploying. We get wrapped up in what we “should” be doing and forget to innovate. Ads start to sound and look the same and consumers’ eyes begin to glaze over after reading their hundredth rendition of the same copy.

Let’s follow Jay’s advice and think outside of the box.

What are marketers in other industries doing that you can get inspiration from?

Change your perspective by seeking POVs outside of your industry with these examples.

How Brands Across Different Industries Use UGC 

There are certain marketing tactics that work universally across industries. One of those is user-generated content. Buyers always want to know what customers have to say about your products regardless of your niche. Sixty-two percent of consumers report that they are more likely to click on content like ads, websites, social posts, or emails, that feature customer photos rather than an image created by the brand.

• Selling wood to contractors? They’d love to see ratings and reviews from happy customers.
• Selling baby accessories to new moms? They’re looking for UGC to make sure it’s worth the money.
• Selling office equipment to Fortune 500 companies? They want customers to prove that you’re delivering high-quality products.

The foundation of user-generated content traverses industries but the execution is where things get interesting. From travel and hospitality to beauty and fashion — brands are using the voice of their biggest fans to stand out from the noise.

Here’s how they’re doing it.

#1: UGC Inspiration for the Travel Industry

Delta’s goal is to get flights booked. Luckily for them — travel influencers have infiltrated Instagram. The airline can repurpose user-generated content to share special experiences on its social media channels. UGC shows real people traveling around the world and taking frame-worthy photos.

Delta uses user-generated content from influencers to show the after state they’ll experience from buying a Delta flight to Iceland. 

#2: UGC Inspiration for the Tourism Industry

Travelocity’s #IWannaGo contest turned into a user-generated content magnet. They offered a dream vacation to their lucky winner. In return, they asked for UGC on Twitter, Instagram, or Vine from participants explaining where they wanted to go and why. 25,000 entries later and Travelocity had their winner…and an endless library of user-generated content.

Travelocity strategically asked for UGC across multiple social media platforms creating native content to repurpose in the future.

#3: UGC Inspiration for the Hospitality Industry

Sometimes hospitality brands can’t go all in on user-generated content. There’s specific brand-created content that needs to be displayed on social media channels (like a fancy drone shot of their hotel). For hospitality brands that want to feature high-production images and videos yet still garner the benefits of user-generated content — a mix of UGC and brand-created content is ideal.

The Marriott shares user-generated content with just a few brand-created images across their social media channels to maintain that high-production feel while still connecting happy customers with potential customers.

#4: UGC Inspiration for the CPG/FMCG Industry

MUD/WTR entered a competitive market when they decided to open their beverage company. They knew they’d need to stand out amongst a crowd of legacy competitors. Their strategy? A brash brand voice that inspired customers to share their brand experience online. From emails to packaging — MUD/WTR creates a sharable experience through the entire customer journey (including post-purchase!).

CPG/FMCG products used daily have an opportunity to collect massive amounts of user-generated content when your customers feel connected enough to your brand to continue to share their daily habits online.

#5: UGC Inspiration for the Food and Beverage Industry

Dunkin’ realized quickly that user-generated content drove growth, engagement, and conversions. In their strategy to win over Generation Z the legacy coffee and donut house started featuring their customers’ voices across their social media channels. Their TikTok is dedicated to user-generated content. More interestingly, they’ve started to turn their employees into nano-influencers for the brand.

They’re actively pursuing employees who are interested in sharing Dunkin’s products throughout their work shift. The mix of user-generated content and employee-generated content gives Dunkin’s TikTok an authentic and genuine feel that platforms the customer’s voice instead of the brand’s.

#6: UGC Inspiration for the Fashion Industry

Don’t wait for user-generated content to come organically. Add requests for UGC within your customer journey, as Quince has. Quince sends an email requesting reviews and testimonials a few days after a buyer receives their order. The email strategically only has one call-to-action — leave feedback. 

The fashion industry thrives off of user-generated content but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to get. Inspire your customers to leave UGC through strategically timed emails, discounts, and giveaways.

#7: UGC Inspiration for the Health and Beauty Industry

Health and beauty brands, like NYX Cosmetics, are prioritizing user-generated content on their product pages. Every product has a huge below-the-fold section dedicated to reviews and star ratings. Website visitors can navigate through reviews by choosing the star level they want to read (ex. 3 star reviews) and seeing the average customer ratings. The reviews are almost more detailed than the product descriptions!

The more reviews and testimonials you can feature — the better. Customers want to know if a product is a great fit for them and these reviews create personalization that brand-created content just can’t.

#8: UGC Inspiration for the Retail Industry

If you’re going to trust a marketing strategy in the retail space…it probably should be Amazon’s. As the online retailer moved into brick-and-mortar stores, they brought user-generated content with them. Ratings and reviews of books were strategically placed on shelves to give people the online shopping experience in-person. Notice how they showcase highly rated books and personalized reviews per book below?

Retailers can take a page out of Amazon’s strategy and move user-generated content across in-person and online platforms for the ultimate impact.

How To Get Customers To Create UGC (Actionable Steps) 

Even if you don’t realize it — your customers are creating UGC for your brand and products. It’s slipping through the cracks as your marketing team focuses on brand-created content. How often do people take a photo or quick video as they walk into the beautiful lobby of their vacation hotel? How much do we love to post our dinners (even if it’s McDonald’s!) to social media? Sixty percent of consumers wish that more brands would tell their fans and customers what type of content they want them to create!

To snag the UGC promoting your brand that already exists use our machine learning technology inside of TINT’s UGC Studio. 

If you need to generate more UGC or UGC for a specific product or campaign — here’s how to motivate your customers to post that review.

#1: Host a Contest or Giveaway

Don’t wait for your audience, fans, and customers to create user-generated content. Ask them for it! Contests and giveaways are a great way to inspire your fans to create user-generated content. Just make sure you’re extra clear about what you’re looking for.

• Do you want them to talk about a specific product?
• Do you want them to leave a review on Google or Instagram Stories?
• What does your ideal piece of user-generated content look like?

The more clear you are about the user-generated content you’re looking for the better the results will be.

#2: Ask for UGC Throughout the Customer Journey

Your buyers are moving through your customer journey. They see your social media content, read your emails, and browse your product pages. These are all ideal places to put user-generated content and ask for it. Ideally, you have UGC that promotes specific products by strategically moving buyers through the customer journey. Your UGC can target cold leads, warm leads, and hot leads.

The best place to collect this UGC is during the buying journey. Add guidance to your emails, social media posts, packaging, and websites asking your customers to create UGC while they’re in that stage of the buying journey. Ask them to share their package on Instagram Stories with a cute note inside their delivery. Or ask your social media followers to share their favorite products through your Instagram Stories and repost their responses.

#3: Keep Your UGC Organized and Easily Accessible

The best marketers are prepared. When your team decides to launch a new campaign — you can plug right into your UGC Studio to grab the necessary assets. Let’s say your team asks you to create more UGC around a specific product. You’ll hop into your UGC Studio and find existing UGC of that product and share it across your socials as you run a contest or giveaway to request more UGC from your audience.

The goal is to build out a library of content spanning from someone sharing their excitement when they booked a trip to your hotel to the moment they leave and sharing what a great experience it was. Your UGC Studio keeps all of that content organized and ready to share.

Which Industry Inspired You The Most?

Seeking inspiration outside of your industry is the name of the game if you ask Jay Abraham. He’s always on the lookout for how different sectors are using strategies and tools to garner results. To become an A-player marketer like him — you just need to follow his lead.

Which examples of UGC felt like they could be tweaked for your brand?

Send them to your team (in this moment of inspiration) to see how they can creatively play on those ideas. Who knows…this could lead to your best-performing campaign ever.

And don’t forget to stay organized. A Google Drive folder won’t cut it when it comes to quickly accessing UGC as needed. 

Easily collect, curate, request rights, and distribute reviews and testimonials with TINT.

Schedule a TINT Demo to see the magic you can create with UGC.

The post How Different Industries Use UGC appeared first on TINT.

What is employee-generated content?

Employee-generated content is a photo, video, social post, or article shared by a current, former, or prospective employee about a brand or its company culture.

You can learn more about employee-generated content in our comprehensive guide.

How can we get employee-generated content if our employees do not use social or are hesitant to share company content on their personal accounts?

Aversion to social media or hesitancy to use their personal accounts is not a major obstacle to getting amazing employee-generated content. You should always provide multiple channels for employees to contribute. This could be “off-network” like email, SMS, Slack channels, internal message (BBS) boards, or even a shared folder on a communal drive.

Once you have a collection process in place, you can start trying to understand the reason people are not on social or do not like sharing company content. It could be generational issues. It could be a work-life balance concern. It could simply be fear of posting the wrong thing and getting reprimanded.  

Taking the time to diagnose the cultural concerns will show your teams that the employee advocacy initiative is not just about content creation and distribution. It is part of an effort to be inclusive, innovative, and provide opportunities for all staff to contribute their voice to the brand narrative. 

What is the best way to collect employee-generated content?

The first question you should ask yourself is, “what am I trying to accomplish with these employee experiences?”  The answer to this question will help guide the collection channels for your employee-generated content. 

Often, the easiest way to collect content is by creating a dedicated email, slack channel, SMS number, or microsite where employees can submit content. Many organizations have found that deploying a tool, like TINT, significantly helps with the collection, organization, and reuse of content. 

Sometimes, the best employee-generated content lives off-site. This could be company reviews from current or past employees on job sites like Glassdoor.

Be specific when asking for content to ensure that it aligns with your needs. Then leave enough room for employees to be creative. 

What is your best tip to get employees on board with advocating for their company?

The best way to get employee buy-in is to make the contribution meaningful. Help employees understand why they are advocating for the company and how their contributions are being used.  The best employee advocacy initiatives are strongly rooted in company culture.  Those brands and organizations with a strong culture will find the easiest path forward. 

If there is not a cultural component to lean on, then share specific outcomes that are expected from the employee advocacy program. Some staff will always prefer the hard numbers to fluffy cultural pieces.  How much time will it take? What is expected of people? How will it help with recruitment, retention, sales, or branding?  How will success be measured?

Beyond that, make the process easy. People will immediately lose enthusiasm if it is difficult to participate. Tools like Hootsuite Amplify make it easy for employees to safely share your content and extend your reach. 

What are some of the reward ideas for employees who become ambassadors?

Start with simple and easy rewards. Give shoutouts and public accolades to employees who consistently share. Gift cards and branded swag is often an effective incentive.  Then, as you develop champions across departments, get their feedback on what would be good big-ticket rewards. These could be things like technology (airpods, microphones, or speakers), experiences (meals, travel), or opportunities (conferences, other professional events).  

Harvard Business Review shares that “a little recognition can provide a big morale boost”.  There are plenty of effective non-monetary motivators that can be implemented as part of your rewards system. 

How can the organization maintain a unified voice with multiple content publishers not in the marketing or communications department?

Employee-generated content is a content creation and brand-building tool. It does not mean that all employee content gets automatically distributed to all channels all the time.  As content comes in, marketing and communications still play an important role in the distribution process. Rather than spending time creating content, these professionals get to spend (less) time selecting the best pieces of content, essentially passing them through the lens of the brand before the content goes public. 

As more and more employee-generated content, and other externally-generated content, is produced, it is the role of the marketing team to deploy technology that will expedite the process.  TINT Attention Score gives you a look behind the eyes of your audience to ensure that your content is attention-grabbing before it is published. 

Do you ever worry about UGC or EGC posts being on-brand (appropriate and high quality)? 

It is okay for UGC or EGC to be less than perfect quality. If anything, that shows that the content is authentic. The TINT State of User-Generated Content Report 2022 and Hootsuite Social Trends 2022 report shows that consumers are increasingly skeptical of marketing content. They do not trust overly photoshopped or manipulated photos.  

Consumers want to see the rough edges. They want to know what the real experience is buying, engaging, and working with a specific brand. That gives you permission to have a photo that isn’t perfectly centered or has a slightly soft focus.  

That doesn’t mean sloppy is permitted. It means authenticity should take priority over polish, and incorporating non-brand voices should become a cornerstone of your marketing efforts.

How do you recommend small businesses promote employee-generated content, given that there are so many fewer voices to be shared?

Launching an employee-generated content initiative may actually be easier in a small business. There is less bureaucracy and organizational inertia, allowing you to move quickly and iterate as necessary. 

Don’t overcomplicate it. If you have a small team or are working in a small business, then lean on the technology that is available. It is likely that everyone has a mobile phone. Let employees text photos of interesting happenings to a dedicated number. Give specific guidelines for the types of content you’re looking for.

Having fewer voices also means that your customers can build connections with you and your staff in ways that would be much more difficult at a larger company. Spotlight the bartender who is mixing drinks this week or the chef who created the special. Share the people who make the business possible and give a peek behind the scenes. You’ll quickly discover what content works, then you can provide additional guidance to source more of that type of material.

How do employee advocacy and employee-generated content fit into governmental, municipal, or civic marketing and communications?

First, always think about the outcomes you’re seeking. Governmental employee-advocacy typically falls into two broad categories: amplifying messaging and sourcing content.  

Amplifying messaging can be a little tricky, particularly as many public information officers have started to use personal social accounts to echo the messages they’re disseminating to public channels.  This is where a tool like Hootsuite Amplify is likely going to provide enough guardrails to ensure that staff messaging is accurate and appropriate 

Sourcing content is an exciting opportunity that governmental agencies are starting to awaken to.  You have a massive community to collect content from; not just employees but citizens.

Finding the right hashtags and geotags for your community is a useful first step. You can also run contests or other social gamification to drive content creation. Then, start sharing this community-created content across your social channels. 

Request a demo to see how TINT can help governmental and civic organizations source employee and citizen content safely, responsibly, and legally. 

Can employee-generated content be created in an entirely virtual workspace or work from home model?

Yes. The lack of a physical office doesn’t mean that your team can’t be part of a social conversation. If anything, encouraging them to create content can strengthen their connection to the company and showcase the value of remote work culture.  

A great example is Cisco. While employees transition to work from home, their social team created new content opportunities using #WeAreCisco. Their content shifted from highlighting the happenings of their global offices to showcasing how their technology empowered people to work from anywhere.  This content strategy drove a 28% increase in blog views and a 42% increase in new visitors to the #WeAreCisco blog. 

Learn more about how Cisco used employee-generated content to create storytelling through the voice of their employees.

How Cisco uses EGC to amplify culture narrative, engage employees, & attract new talent

How do you let associates and frontline employees know it is okay to share or create content as part of their job? 

Content empowerment comes from the top down. Start with encouraging content from leadership. Then find champions who will be shining examples of internal creators. There is always a little inertia to starting the employee content engine. But that will fall away as frontline staff start to see others in similar roles celebrated for their contributions.

How do I encourage content creation in a multigenerational workplace where people have strong preferences on social platforms (or lack of social)?

With the vanguard of Gen Z graduating college and entering the workforce many companies may have four generations present in the workplace. This may lead to disagreements or frustration around what platform to emphasize for your employee advocacy and employee-generated content initiatives.

The best solution is to provide multiple channels to submit and distribute content. Text messaging, SMS, and email are effective content submission channels for the socially averse. Branded hashtags and lists are available for the socially active. 

TINT helps organizations collect employee-generated content to enhance recruitment, retention, and engagement. See why internal communications and HR teams choose TINT.

What’s the best way to facilitate an intern or junior staffer social media takeover? 

Intern or staff takeovers of social platforms can be great ways to give authenticity to your social presence and provide a look inside of a company. 

First, be sure to spend time promoting the takeover. Build excitement and anticipation for the takeover. This should be at least a week of advance lead time. 

Then, spend time planning what the takeover will look like. The best takeovers have the feel of spontaneity, but there should be enough structure to the day that the narrative of the takeover make sense. It should not be overly scheduled, but there should be “milestones” like speaking to certain staff, going to lunch, an office tour, AMA, and a happy hour. 

Finally, cross-pollinate the content. The live can go out through Instagram, TikTok, or other platforms. Was there a great talk about your product? That could be a clip that you reuse elsewhere.  Did they interview the CEO or a company leader? That could also be repurposed.  Think about different ways that the takeover can be used to create content that contributes beyond the single day. 

Who are the best people to have on an “employee social council” or other employee advocacy group?

It is best to start with two or three key stakeholders. In larger organizations, this will often be representatives from marketing, human resources, and internal communications. Once the structural members are in place, you can begin adding departmental champions to the committee.  

Keep the committee small for the first few iterations of your employee advocacy program. Sometimes, too many voices can “committee” the initiative to death. Start with the smallest possible group that is able to make meaningful progress, then grow organically as the program develops. 

Do you believe employee-generated content is applicable to any demographic and industry?

Yes. Regardless of industry, marketing and communications teams are expected to service more channels with more content, often with less staff. Brands are focusing on omnichannel marketing, and that requires a significant investment in content.  

Outsourcing content creation can be expensive and requires extensive guides so that the content received aligns with brand voice and perspective. Instead, consider looking inward to the people who are most familiar with your brand; the folks who work there. With the proper motivation and incentivization, there will be a wellspring of ideas and content. 

Brands using employee-generated content currently include telecommunications, energy, nonprofit, governmental, professional, culinary, creative, and more. There is a high possibility that a brand in your industry or space is already running some sort of employee advocacy or EGC initiative.  Check out our case studies for some creative examples from many industries.

What is the best way to streamline how employees submit content for social? 

The best way to streamline the employee content submission process is to implement a technology solution that will help collect content from multiple sources, curate that content, make it easy to sort and display, and analyze content quality.  TINT makes employee-generated content easy with multiple tools and integrations designed with marketing and communications teams in mind.  Logging of submissions and terms of service opt-ins will keep your human resources team happy too.

Sign up for a demo of TINT to learn how the world’s top brands are incorporating EGC into their brand building, and how you can, too.

The post You Ask, TINT Answers: Employee-Generated Content FAQs appeared first on TINT.

Celebrity endorsement was once the “it” thing.  Brands like Coca-Cola thrived off these partnerships, and they worked. Actors, musicians, athletes, and celebrities of all stripes fought to get those brand deals. Fans were quick to consume cereal, beverages, and content that featured their favorite star.

When social became part of our everyday lives, a new type of influencer endorsement emerged. These newfound social media influencers had 100,000+ followers and a newsfeed with perfectly placed products—and it worked.

But then, we saw the rise in another new type of influencer that doesn’t have a six-figure following. These influencers are people with hundreds or thousands of followers who likely don’t even consider themselves ‘influencers.’

Marketers used to agree, but this year, they’re no longer thinking that way. In our 2022 State of User-Generated Content Report, we surveyed boutique to enterprise businesses to see how their marketing did in 2021 and their plans for 2022.

Marketers are happy to work with mega-influencers who have the engagement to back up their following—but they’re also focusing in on the influencers that used to get passed by for brand deals.

Here are the 3 types of influencers to leverage in 2022.

3 Types of Influencers That Can Promote Your Brand

“Brands are realizing that overproduced content is always going to perform less than content that feels more organic, natural, and human-centered. That’s why you see platforms like TikTok working so well – because on TikTok, you might see an ad and not even know it’s an ad.”

 

Jayde Powell, Head of Social, Sunwink

Customers

Mega-influencers with 100,000+ followers can make a great video about your product (after signing a contract with your brand). The problem is consumers trust content created by people more than brands: 72% of consumers believe that reviews and testimonials submitted by customers are more credible than the brand talking about their products (SOUGC)

As soon as a viewer sees #ad or realizes this influencer was sponsored to talk about this product, the content becomes branded. 

When happy customers create organic content because they’re excited about their product—there’s no brand involved. When someone sits down to eat at their favorite restaurant and takes a photo of a volcanic dessert, unboxes their new king-size mattress from a deceivingly small box, or shows the backend of their new software tool, they create user-generated content. This UGC leads to higher engagement and conversions and is exactly the content marketers are seeing consumers trust over branded content.

Nano-Influencers

Nano-influencers have 1,000-10,000 followers and used to be looked over for brand deals. Brands focused on the more glamorous types of influencers: big-name celebrities or mega-influencers touting 100,000+ person followings. In 2021, we’re seeing leading brands realize the power of the nano-influencer. 

Seventy-five percent of marketers are currently working with small (less than 1,000 followers), nano- (1,000-10,000 followers), and micro-influencers (10,000 to 25,000 followers).

Not only are nano-influencers more cost-effective than celebrities and high-profile influencers, but marketers are finding they have a stronger connection with their audience. Nano-influencers can get more engagement (by percent) on a post than an influencer with 10x the following. These influencers have more pull with their audience and, because they have more of a niche following, can connect with brands they know their followers are interested in.

Employees

In recent years, we’ve seen a few brands start to place their employees as influencers for their brand. More companies began to talk about who was behind-the-scenes, even giving their employees time to shine through company-generated content. Our 2022 State of User-Generated Content Report finds that 52% of communications + HR teams regularly use employee-generated content (EGC) in communications channels.

EGC is re-shared up to 24 times more when distributed by employees instead of a brand and can get 8 times more engagement than brand shared content. We’re finding that employees can get up to 10 times more followers than a brand’s corporate account and get more organic social engagement. Employees can establish more marketing channels and touchpoints for consumers to connect with brands they love.

Check out Guide to Employee-Generated Content for more.

Guide to Employee-Generated Content: What Is It, Why You Need It, and How To Do It

These are the 3 types of influencers brands can leverage in 2021 to increase engagement and conversions. Nano-influencers can get paid to create content for your brand and you can ask your employees to create behind-the-scenes content or to share your content across their social platforms. How do you get customers to create content for your brand?

How To Get Customers To Create Content You Can Repurpose

Tell Your Customers, Fans, and Employees What To Create

More than half of consumers wish that brands would tell them what type of content to create and share. Brands that clearly define what content to create, when to create it, and how to share it can turn their customers into genuine brand advocates.

Encourage customers to create UGC by asking them to post on Instagram as they unbox their product, to share their new purchase as a Tweet, or show themselves using your product and, of course, use your custom hashtag strategy to tag it. 

Incentivize Customers To Create UGC

Another way teams can obtain more UGC is by running campaigns and contests that reward fans and customers for creating and sharing their best content.

If you’re just starting and don’t have any UGC examples to show them, create your own so your customers know exactly what you’re looking for. By featuring UGC across your marketing channels, you’ll inspire more of the user-generated content you’re looking for by modeling the exact sort of behavior you’re looking for.

Influencer marketing in 2022 is changing. Celebrities and mega-influencers are not the only influencers, and sometimes they’re not even the best fit for your products. By using customers, nano-influencers, and employees as influencers for your brand—our State of User-Generated Content Report shows that you’ll be increasing content engagement and conversions.

The State of User-Generated Content report cross references survey results from both marketers and consumers. Get the need-to-know insights on your audience to improve your marketing strategy. Download here.

If you don’t have a way to find, collect, organize, and redistribute UGC and organic influencer content across your digital and in-person marketing channels, schedule a demo with a TINT team member today.

The post Influencer Marketing in 2022: 3 Types of Influencers To Focus On appeared first on TINT.

“The Great Resignation” became a household term defining this employment shift. More people than ever have begun to question if their jobs, and careers, are worth the sacrifices they used to make without a second thought. Commutes, bad managers, lack of benefits, and other employee hardships are weighed against the opportunities the Great Resignation has created.

The increase in job openings has put the power into the employee’s hands. People are pickier about which company they choose to work with and how that impacts their lifestyle and mental health. They’re walking into job interviews expecting answers to questions like:

1. How does your company prioritize mental health for your employees?
2. What extra benefits do you offer employees to set them up for long-term success?
3. How realistic are your workloads and conditions?

And they don’t necessarily need the company to answer these questions for them.

Our 2022 State of User-Generated Content revealed that 52% of communications and HR teams regularly use employee-generated content (EGC), a form of user-generated content (UGC), across communications channels. They’re using UGC to show the talent pool that their company is the best option and the proof is in their employee sentiment. 

Just like when you’re marketing products and services, you don’t only want your brand to tell people how great you are. You also want your customers, or in this case, employees, to share their positive experiences, inspire each other to build a sense of pride,and attract more talented professionals just like them.

There’s only one way to do this—with employee-generated content.

What is Employee-Generated Content?

Employee-generated content is content, such as photos, videos, social media posts, or reviews, created by a current, former, or prospective employee about a brand or its company culture. EGC increases brand awareness, receives more engagement than brand-created content, and highlights the experience of working for your company. 

For example, a LinkedIn post with a photo of someone’s first day at your office is EGC. Or, EGC could be a GIF created from your team’s Zoom meeting. Here’s an example of employee-generated content that Alicia Raeburn posted when she proudly joined the Asana SEO content team.

The Great Resignation and increased job openings prove that people aren’t willing to settle in their jobs or careers like they were previously. Today, employee-generated content is more than a nice-to-have.

It’s a must-have. Here’s why.

Why is Employee-Generated Content so Important?

Employee-generated content is more important than ever because it sees 10x more followers than brand accounts and 8x more engagement. Consumers trust content created by people more than brand-created content. With EGC, brands can build trust with customers and prospective employees.

Cisco uses employee-generated content campaigns that highlight the experience of working at Cisco and inspire prospective talent through unique stories from existing employees. Here’s what their Brand & Social Media Lead had to say about EGC:

“Employee-generated content is what has put the @WeAreCisco team on its path to success, with the metrics to prove its value.” 

Their campaign results highlight the power of focusing on employee-generated content moving forward:

In the 2022 State of User-Generated Content Report, we discovered 3 reasons why EGC is so important, based on the latest consumer trends.

#1: People want to form connections with brands and share their brand moments

Fifty percent of people surveyed wished that brands would tell them what type of content to create and share. By sharing employee-generated content across marketing channels, brands show employees the type of content they’re looking to post. Their audience, fans, and customers can get inspiration and start creating content the brand can repurpose using TINT’s UGC Studio.

Condé Nast posted this EGC from an employee impressed by their lunch while visiting the office. This EGC shows Condé Nast’s Instagram audience the type of content they want to post, essentially giving their following a brand guideline that leads to getting their photos published to the Condé Nast Instagram account.

#2: Employee-generated content gets more engagement and followers on social media

People are 3x more likely to engage with a brand’s social media content over any other type of media they create. That number becomes supercharged when employees post content. Employee social profiles see 10x more followers than brand accounts and 8x the engagement. More engagement cultivates brand relationships while driving brand awareness for recruitment and products.

#3: EGC is more trustworthy than brand created content

People trust user-generated content more than brand-created content—and the stats show it. With EGC, brands see more engagement and followers leading to increased brand awareness and stronger relationships with their audience, fans, and leads. Employee advocacy programs with at least 1,000 active participants can generate $1.9 million in advertising value and new job applicants consider current employees to be the most trustworthy when considering a potential employer.

Kristina shares her excitement to join The Bar Method team and have her first day in the books. In place of brand-created content from The Bar Method talking about how they train each of their instructors in a 6-month certification, this EGC post is more authentic showcasing a real person experiencing their program and loving the experience.

Employee-generated content clearly can have a major impact. But, what’s the right kind of EGC to collect and publish?

What Can Employee-Generated Content be Used For?

Employee-generated content, like user-generated content, has various use cases based on your company’s goals. For example, if you’re experiencing hypergrowth and looking for as much talent as possible—employee-generated content is part of your hiring strategy. But recruitment isn’t the only use case for EGC.

Here’s what companies use employee-generated content for.

Brand Advocacy:

Employees can advocate about the experience of working at your company, the quality of your products, and the integrity of your brand. Instead of your brand talking about how great you are—with EGC, your team acts as brand ambassadors sharing your work culture, products, and brand message with their friends, families, peers, and followers.

“EGC works well with social selling as it requires a high level of authenticity and trust, and employee-generated content provides that necessary confidence. EGC reduces costs and increases sales while creating more motivated and engaged employees.”

– Agnieszka Goulin, Head of People at Spacelift

Check out how Andrew Nusca, former Digital Editor of Fortune Magazine, advocates for how much he believes in the future of Morning Brew in these tweets that announce his new position as Executive Editor at the Millennial-focused media company.

Employee Engagement and Retention:

When employee-generated content is shared and celebrated around the office, it makes the team feel like a team. And when people feel like they’re on a team they’re more motivated. Even if they’re facing big challenges, the psychology behind knowing you’re doing it with others drives action. EGC on screens around the workplace, in LinkedIn updates from colleagues, or simply on a Slack channel reminds employees they’re part of a team with a mission and it inspires engagement and retention. In the age of the Great Resignation, if people feel disconnected from their team members or like they don’t have a shared goal—they’ll leave.

Akshay Kothari shares a new feature that his team at Notion was working on, and ensures his team members are tagged in the exciting news. This comradery around reaching goals is exactly what drives team engagement and retention.

Recruitment: 

Just like user-generated content outperforms brand-created content, when employees vouch for the positive experience of working at your company it speaks volumes in comparison to your recruitment promotions. Employees can act as recruiters connecting your company to an aligned talent pool.

“Focusing on content created by existing employees gives a real insight into your culture and what working at your organization will be like and acts as a great showcase for promoting you as a destination employer that people want to work for. At a time when recruitment is increasingly challenging, it is an excellent way to attract top talent to your brand.”

 – Wendy Makinson, HR Manager of Joloda Hydraroll

After working at Stir for a few weeks, Eli Badgio was already helping recruit new talent to the team by sharing this Twitter post.

Types of Employee-Generated Content

Employee-generated content takes many forms. It can be an exciting social media post from a new employee talking about how excited they are to work for your company or it could be an internal newsletter with company updates. 

Different types of employee-generated content include:

• Social media posts
• Reviews
• Articles
• Blog posts
• Photos
• Internal training videos
• Knowledge share programs
• Internal newsletters
• Bulletin boards
• Case studies
• Recruitment videos

For example, Dell Blue, a creative agency for Dell, shares a team video on their About page to showcase what it’s like to work at the agency and introduce their Dell Blue Crew. This video is great for recruitment to show company culture and attract talent to their team.

Michael Alexis, CEO of TeamBuilding, creates EGC of employee case studies. Here’s his suggestion:

 “Work with employees to create case studies about their roles and careers, or testimonials about their experience with the organization. The reason materials like these are so effective is that it shows readers ‘someone like you trusted us and had an experience like this.’ These materials can help you attract more candidates that are better qualified, as well as successfully hire and retain talent.”

Examples of Employee-Generated Content

Employees are happy to make content because they’re also looking to share their brand experiences online. When leadership buys into EGC and creates a safe environment where employees aren’t fearful of posting about their experiences, employees spread brand awareness, generate engagement, and help recruit talented team members. 

Google Canada hosted a Google Photo day with fun props to inspire employees to share EGC across their social channels.

Some more examples of employee-generated content would include:

• Tweets from employees about a work event they attended
• LinkedIn articles by company leadership explaining an emerging topic in their industry
• Instagram stories showing behind-the-scenes of a workday
• Reviews on Glassdoor that describe the interview process
• Photos submitted to a contest and shared on office signage or newsletters
• Social media comments talking about positive employee experiences at your company

Employee-generated content can reach every channel in your company (from internal to external!). And it should. EGC is meant to showcase brand advocacy, increase employee engagement, and help with recruitment—so the more EGC you can get the better. But where does all this employee-generated content come from? ANd how do you get more of it?

How Do You Get Employee-Generated Content?

If your employees aren’t creating EGC organically—it’s not because they don’t want to. Chances are, they’re not sure if they’re allowed to or what requirements their EGC needs to meet. Getting employees to create employee-generated content won’t come from a quick Slack message requesting it. It’s important to show what you’re looking for while not appearing too stringent on quality expectations.

Morning Brew co-founder Alex Lieberman shows leadership buy-in to employee-generated content by simply retweeting employee-generated content from a new employee. His retweet also sets clear expectations of the kind of content he wants to see from his employees online making it easier for the Morning Brew team to know what to post.

Like Alex has figured out, you need to strategically get your employees on board to post EGC.

“Identify employees that are highly engaged and eager to share their experiences with the public to get started with employee-generated content. Give them guidance and pointers to assist them in producing the ideal content that is accurate and honest. Consider sending out a company-wide outreach inviting others to contribute if they desire to encourage more employees to participate. Allow them to choose a topic that truly resonates with them so that the content they create is an accurate expression of their true feelings,”

– David Bitton, co-founder and CMO at Doorloop

There are 4 ways to get employee-generated content:

1. Create a brand-specific hashtag (or multiple).

   No, hashtags aren’t dead. With hashtags, your employees can find other EGC, get inspiration for their posts, and feel comfortable hitting publish for the first time. To organize EGC and make it easier for your employees to find what they’re looking for, create multiple hashtags. For example, you could have a hashtag for marketing content and another for posts related to culture.

2. Set clear expectations of the kind of content you want to see.

   Publish and re-share UGC and EGC that you like. What you post is a direct signal to your employees as to the EGC you hope to get more of. Think of your feed as a Brand Guideline that’s exemplifying exactly what you’re looking for  in terms of content from your audience.

3. Show leadership buy-in.

   If leadership isn’t posting EGC, your employees will feel hesitant to push the publish button. Leadership has to show their buy-in to EGC by creating their own and engaging with their employee’s content internally and externally. Leadership buy-in sets the example and shows transparency and relatability of the brand’s leadership.

4. Host a contest.

   This is a great option to create EGC if some employees don’t want to post to their own social channels. With a contest, you can ask employees to send their photos, videos, and testimonials directly to your contest page. Organize it with TINT and easily republish relevant EGC across marketing channels.

The key to employee-generated content is not letting it sit idly on the sidelines. With your employee-generated content library filling up, it’s time to repost it across your internal and external marketing channels to get all the benefits. Here’s where it could go.

Where to Share Employee-Generated Content?

Once you have employee-generated content, you want to make sure it gets seen. Just like user-generated content, you want to have a place like TINT to collect it, organize it based on product, team, or event, and repurpose it for future marketing campaigns.

Jen Burns, social media manager at Cisco knows how challenging it can be to collect EGC:

“Maintaining an employee-generated content (EGC) repository can be difficult without the right platform in place to ensure proper permissions, tagging, and overall organization. With TINT, we don’t have to worry. We can quickly aggregate and leverage employee content to tell the story of what it’s like to work at Cisco.”

TINT has features like dynamic search, visual search, and object recognition to make it easy to organize UGC and EGC.

Once you receive employee-generated content from the various channels listed above, you can reshare it onto:

1. External emails
2. Internal emails
3. Digital signage
4. Brand social media accounts
5. Brand blogs
6. Ads or job postings
7. Events
8. Recruiting efforts
9. Job fairs
10. Career pages
11. Screens in the workplace

Employee-generated content is meant for sharing. Don’t let it get posted once and make its way down into the depths of the newsfeed. Collect all EGC and continue to use it for brand advocacy, engagement, and recruitment. You can even continue using the same content for years. By keeping your EGC organized, you can hop in and grab what you need depending on campaigns, recruitment, and company announcements.

That leads us to our next point. Now that you know what EGC is, where it comes from, and where you can share it, how can you actually use it? 

How to Include Employee-Generated Content In Your Marketing

As you know by now, employee-generated content is used for brand advocacy, employee engagement and retention, and recruitment. It can be shared on digital signage, emails, and a number of other channels. But how do you connect those two dots? How can you put it in action and use it seamlessly as part of your marketing or internal communications strategy?

If you’re stuck on how to use employee-generated content, here are a few ways to include it in your marketing:

1. Highlight employee knowledge. Choose a day of the week or month to dedicate to sharing content from an employee explaining something they have expertise in. This might be an internal knowledge share Zoom call, a LinkedIn article, or a video that they post to their own account and you re-share on the brand account. This can be used either for brand advocacy, boosting employee engagement, or helping with recruitment.
2. Replace the internal newsletter. Instead of asking for announcements via email and compiling them into a newsletter, create a space where employees can post their own announcements, funny videos, updates, and requests, and display them for the office to see. This might be on digital signage, like Condé Nast uses, or simply on a Slack channel. This can be used for employee engagement.
3. Broadcast your culture online. When employees share photos to your contests or with your brand hashtag, make sure to reshare them on your brand social media channels. If you have great reviews on Glassdoor, don’t be afraid to screenshot them and post them on Twitter, LinkedIn, or career pages, or quote them in job listings. This is a great way to show off your company culture and support your employees, and is great for engagement and recruitment.
4. Leverage your employees for amplification on LinkedIn. Let’s say your company launches a new podcast. You could simply post about the new podcast on brand channels, or you can add posts to something like Hootsuite Amplify, so that every employee can easily reshare the post onto their own social media accounts. This would increase your reach exponentially. TINT even has an integration with Hootsuite Amplify so that marketers can gain legal rights to employee social content and then in turn create Amplify posts directly within the TINT platform. This is great for brand advocacy.

Employee-generated content is everywhere these days. And the biggest companies in the world know it’s an integral part of their marketing strategy moving forward.

Employee-Generated Content Your Marketing Strategy 

People are creating user-generated content and employee-generated content every day. After decades of brand-created content, people want to relate to the customers, fans, audiences, and employees of brands that showcase their experience with a brand. This relationship to people-created content drives engagement, following, and conversions. While this is great for brand advocacy and recruitment, it’s just one side to employee-generated content.

During the era of The Great Resignation, EGC is more than just for advocacy and recruitment, but also for retention. When employees have options, it’s up to corporations to show people why their company is the best place to work. If they don’t create the comradery and collective mission, people will start looking elsewhere. 

Employee-generated content is shaping marketing as we know it. But, it’s only one of seven trends we discovered in our 2022 State of User-Generated Content Report changing the marketing landscape.

You can read the other 6 trends shaping UGC and marketing here.

The post Guide to Employee-Generated Content: What Is It, Why You Need It, and How To Do It appeared first on TINT.

So, it’s no surprise that even more marketers plan to use UGC in their marketing strategy in 2022. But many brands count themselves out of UGC, thinking their audience and customers aren’t posting about their brand or it’s too large of an ask from their users. If only they knew the untapped potential they’re missing out on and the impact user-generated content can have.

If you aren’t yet sold on the significance of UGC, here are 4 concrete ways user-generated content impacts businesses in 2022.

What Are 4 Ways User-Generated Content Impacts Businesses?

As a little recap, user-generated content is a photo, video, testimonial, post, or comment your audience or customers create about your brand and products. It’s the happy unboxing video they share to their Instagram Story when their package arrives, the tweet that says they’re so excited to be accepted to their dream university, and the TikTok of their burrito order at Chipotle.

It is created every single day, as people (you included!) share your life online with your friends, family, and followers. Instead of letting that UGC float around aimlessly on the web, you can capture it and use it to market your products and services.

The best part? UGC has many tangible business impacts. It helps get more engagement than brand-created content, is more likely to get people to hit the buy button, saves time and resources, and increases the likelihood of more UGC so you can see even bigger and better results.

1. UGC Engages Your Audience
2. UGC Makes Consumers More Likely To Purchase
3. UGC Saves your Marketing Team’s Time, Budget, and Bandwidth
4. UGC Increases the Likelihood of *More* UGC

#1: UGC Engages Your Audience

While your colleagues may not always agree that getting engagement should be a key objective, marketers know all too well the business impact that engagement has. It indicates if your content is resonating with your audience and whether or not it’s pushing them further down the funnel. It can also be an indicator of whether or not your audience trusts your content. As we discussed in How to Increase Engagement and Boost ROI in 2022, the pathway from engagement to ROI usually includes trust, connection, and relatability. Those three elements can be the difference between an attention-grabbing ad that a consumer looks at but scrolls past, and a scroll-stopping ad that actually gets clicks.

In our 2022 State of User-Generated Content report, 60% of marketers said their audience engages more with user-generated content than brand-created content. Why? Perhaps it’s because their audience finds it more credible and trustworthy. 72% of consumers believe that reviews and testimonials submitted by customers are more credible than the brand talking about their products.

UGC is more trusted by consumers than brand-created content, which represents a huge potential for improving the sought-after engagement that brands want. So, how can your brand cash in on this untapped potential of high engagement? Here’s one way.

Get Your Audience to Engage by Making Them Feel Included By Your Brand

One way to engage your audience is to make them feel included, and one way to make them feel included is to showcase people that they relate to. People want to hear real stories from company leadership, happy users, and diverse voices to feel that they can connect with brands. Consumers want to buy from brands that reflect their own values and worldviews. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are incredibly important to today’s consumers.

Take Chipotle for example. Chipotle recently won a Shorty Industry Award for Best Overall TikTok Presence. Here’s the thing—their TikTok strategy is centered around sharing user-generated content. By making their audience feel included in their brand, by resharing customer TikTok’s to Chipotle’s account, they’ve garnered 1.7 million followers and 34.9 million likes on TikTok.

#2: UGC Makes Consumers More Likely to Purchase

Of course, the Key Performance Indicator that your leaders care most about is revenue. Engagement is great, and user-generated content is great, but does it actually bring in revenue and close sales? Thankfully, the research indicates “yes”!

When consumers engage with content they trust and find credible, they’re more likely to purchase:

• Consumers are actually 62% more likely to click on customer content rather than branded content.
• 76% percent of consumers have purchased a product because of someone else’s recommendation (even a stranger’s!).
• 77% of shoppers are more likely to buy from brands that personalize their shopping experience (which UGC does!).

People trust…people. When somebody they relate to, either through age, demographics, ethnicity, job title, etc. recommends a product or brand, that testimonial feels more believable than a brand-created commercial with the little words, “paid actor.” 

Consumers are looking for shopping experiences that signal that this product works for *them*. Personalized shopping is becoming a bigger part of the customer journey—and with UGC it doesn’t require complex CRMs.

Related article:

Social Commerce – The Definitive Guide to Selling More Online with Social

How can your brand cash in on this untapped potential of more purchases?

Personalize The Shopping Experience with UGC

Personalized shopping experiences don’t have to come with a stack of data about every single one of your prospects and customers. With UGC, you can personalize the shopping experience by showing your audience, prospects, and repeat customers how other customers have liked your products. Kora Organics links customer reviews to their product pages to create a personalized shopping experience.

With this review, an online shopper with ‘combination skin’ will know this product works for their skin type. That’s personalized shopping…without the need for an intricate CRM platform.

#3: UGC Saves your Marketing Team’s Time, Budget, and Bandwidth

Making your own content takes time, money, and team resources. Instead of planning a product shoot, spending tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) on deliverables, and spending weeks editing them for publishing—you can grab the content your customers are already creating. Better yet, this content gets more engagement and conversions than brand-created content!

With UGC, you’re saving the time it takes to plan, shoot, and edit your own content, 5+ figures of your budget, and giving your team more time to focus on their compounding to-do lists. From buying a new grill to seeing blue whales on a tour, UGC for your brand exists. It’s a matter of tracking down that content, organizing it, and repurposing it across your marketing channels as needed. How can your brand cash in on saving time and bandwidth?

Use Content From Contests to Fill Your Social Calendar

To get the ball rolling with UGC, launch a contest asking your audience and customers to take photos and videos for your products and brands (69% of consumers report that they have participated in a brand contest or giveaway). Be clear about what you’re looking for, tell them exactly how to submit their UGC, and add a prize to sweeten the deal. GoPro has been running social contests for years, asking their customers to share their photos and videos with hashtags and submissions to win money, gear, and exposure on their marketing channels.

Seventy-three percent of consumers agree they wish more brands would run contests or giveaways. With TINT’s Experience Builder, you can launch social contests and campaigns within minutes.

#4: UGC Increases the Likelihood of *More* UGC

By now, we’ve learned that UGC increases engagement, makes consumers more likely to purchase, and opens up your team’s time, budget, and bandwidth for other projects. With more and more UGC, these results increase. Thankfully, UGC leads to more UGC.

Sixty-four percent of consumers agree when brands they like re-share content by customers, they are more likely to share content about the brand or its products. UGC is a flywheel—ask for UGC, post-UGC, get more UGC. We can see this from the rise of micro and nano-influencers, who will happily share their favorite products and brands with their small audiences (and even have higher conversion rates than mega and macro-influencers!).

Remember Nathan Apodaca, the micro-influencer who took a video of his commute to work on his skateboard drinking Ocean Spray? His video went on to garner 84.4 million views, get promoted by Ocean Spray, and spark a trend of replicated TikToks. There’s an influx of UGC as content creation has opened up to the masses and more people feel comfortable sharing their experiences with companies. By publishing moderated, on-brand UGC, you’re telling your audience exactly what you’re looking for—just like Ocean Spray did with Nathan’s TikTok (feeding into the viral trend of copying his video and adding a twist). How can your brand cash in on the untapped potential of more UGC?

Ask Your Audience and Customers For The UGC You Want

All user-generated content isn’t created equal. Some UGC comes with too many typos to reshare on your brand accounts or the lighting just doesn’t suit your Instagram feed. Show your audience and customers what UGC you consider “brand-worthy” by publishing the kind of photos and videos you’ll proudly put on your platforms. If you’re struggling to find brand-worthy UGC, tap into the power of TINT’s UGC Studio to do the hard work for you.

TINT helped TechCrunch’s Disrupt event marketers inspire UGC from their attendees through digital signage that shared their tweets on large screens. By showing attendees what other attendees were tweeting, TechCrunch showed their audience exactly what they were looking for from UGC that could make it on the big screens.

TINT’s Digital Signage also strategically promoted how people were tweeting about the event, inspiring TechCrunch’s Disrupt attendees to make their own UGC sharing their experience. 

How is User-Generated Content Impacting Businesses in 2022?

It has been impacting businesses for several years. The only difference between the past and present is the amount of UGC brands have available and how well aligned UGC is with consumer trends. Consumers are asking for:

1. Personalized shopping experiences
2. Deeper connections with brands that share their values
3. Testimonials from customers over brand-created content
4. Diversity, equity, and inclusion
5. Social media to spark their brand relationships

UGC is the perfect way to personalize the experience, deepen connections, share testimonials, embrace DEI, and spark relationships. Meanwhile, your business will be getting more engagement and purchases while freeing up your marketing team’s time, budget, and bandwidth. All the while, it will inspire even more UGC, creating a continuous cycle of positive business impact and a happy audience.

We covered these 5 consumer trends of 2022 and the 7 marketing themes that will impact every marketing strategy (from retail to digital) in our Annual State of User-Generated Content Report.

Download the report here to learn what’s on the marketing horizon for 2022.

The post 4 Ways User-Generated Content Impacts Businesses in 2022 appeared first on TINT.

In 2020, the biggest challenges for marketers were time and team size, likely due to COVID-related layoffs. Now that companies have recovered and marketing teams have grown, here are the biggest challenges faced by marketers today in 2022, according to the State of User-Generated Content report:

1. Lack of an ideal budget
2. Publishing high-quality content consistently
3. Getting engagement from their audience
4. A never-ending time crunch.

Every year, as more content channels come onto the horizon, marketers add more and more to an already full plate, and 2021 was no exception. Unfortunately, most teams don’t have the time or budget to keep up with content quality and engagement.

So, what’s the solution?

Let’s take a closer look at the top challenges faced by marketers today and ways to solve them.

Challenges Faced by Marketers Today

In the midst of the pandemic, marketers struggled with time and team size. Talented marketers lost their jobs and the ones that kept working felt the pressure of a smaller team, yet an increased focus on more content, engagement, and larger ROI.

Since then, many companies have recovered from COVID-related budget cuts and nearly half of the marketers we surveyed increased their teams in 2021. For others, the problem is: they can’t hire fast enough. With 20 million people leaving their jobs during the Great Resignation of 2021 and unemployment at an all-time low, hiring is difficult, competitive, and slow. But it is happening. 

Meanwhile, now that teams are bulking up and there’s slightly more time on marketers’ hands, their top challenges are budget, content quality, engagement, and time.

1. Budget

55% of those we surveyed said their organization’s marketing budget did not increase in 2021. They’re having to navigate the challenges of getting more engagement and more ROI, on more platforms, using new media, without more money. This is their biggest challenge.

2. Quality of Content

The second biggest struggle is publishing high-quality content consistently. 60% of marketers take the time to format content for all screen sizes and social media platforms. If it’s not optimized, they’d rather not even post.

3. Engagement

60% of marketers feel pressured to continually produce greater amounts of content at a high frequency. This could be to keep their engagement rates high and stay relevant to their audience.

4. Time

47% of marketers agree that it takes their team too long to create content. This lack of time to do everything that they need to do is their fourth-biggest challenge.

Despite shifting challenges over recent years—UGC remains the constant. It’s what continues to solve the biggest challenges faced by marketers today.

3 Consumer Trends That Help Solve Marketers’ Biggest Challenges

In our State of User-Generated Content Report, we asked consumers how they engage with brands and discovered 5 consumer trends. We found 3 places where marketers’ challenges and consumer trends align, relieving you and helping make your job easier. 

Here’s what can help solve three of the biggest challenges faced by marketers today, while providing consumers with what they want most.

(Looking for how to increase engagement based on consumer trends? Check out “How to Increase Engagement and Boost ROI”)

No Budget? No Problem. People Want Personalized Shopping Experiences

Consumers want personalized shopping experiences. 

We know what you’re thinking. That sounds like a lot of work, which is the last thing a maxed-out budget can handle.

But wait a second. When your audience asks for personalized shopping experiences, what they mean is photos and videos of your products ‘in the wild’, and a chance to see what prior customers have to say about your brand. It’s personalized because it’ll show how people just like them interact with your product or how it looks on bodies like theirs, in environments they’re familiar with, with real lighting.

All of this is available to marketers, without the need for a massive budget or CRM platform keeping track of each customer’s interests and purchases.

The Solution:

You can create a personalized shopping experience through user-generated content. With UGC, your customers can share their experiences with your brand and products, and you can highlight their voice across your platforms. When a happy customer leaves a review on a pair of jeans they loved—you can show that review to prospective customers interested in the same product.

With UGC, your brand isn’t spending money on expensive photoshoots. You’re just gathering the content your customers were happy to make for you—and repurposing it on specific channels to create a personalized shopping experience.

How to Take Action:

Send follow-up surveys and requests to leave reviews on products. Your chances of getting a response are strong: seven out of ten customers are likely to post on social media after having a positive experience with a brand. 

Read more on how you can incentivize your customers to send over UGC.

Example:

Abercrombie & Fitch personalizes their shopping experience by sharing UGC reviews on product pages. As customers online shop, they can read through reviews to find UGC from somebody with a similar height, weight, and waist size that can attest to how well these jeans fit. How much more personalized can online shopping get?

Need More High-Quality Content? Great! People Want to Connect More with Your Brand

Consumers want opportunities to engage with brands they love. In fact, 60% of consumers wish that more brands would tell their fans and customers what type of content they want them to create.

The more that brands ask for UGC, the more that consumers will provide it. 

The more that consumers see brands sharing UGC, the more likely they are to share something themselves.

Does it take time to find and engage with this content? Sure. But it results in thousands of pieces of UGC that you can use to fill content calendars on the various channels that they already exist on, which saves you from having to create the content yourself later on.

“But they’re not high-quality,” you say. It may be time to rethink the meaning of quality. Quality does not need to mean high-definition photos from a professional photographer. Quality means what will help you build trust, grow engagement, and increase sales. And that’s UGC. Videos taken on a smartphone still garner more engagement than a $100,000 branded product shoot.

The Solution:

Photos, videos, testimonials, comments, and feedback are all over the web regarding your products. Use them. Consumers want to create connections with brands they love, and with Rights Management, you can automate asking customers for rights to their content so you can use it on your own channels. (We told you, each of these consumer trends removes tasks from your to-do list). Not sure where to start with implementing all the UGC you have? We can help! Book a demo with us.

How to Take Action:

Take social content from your community and embed it in your own channels. Find a platform where you can see all the content created about your brand in one place, make sure they suit your branding, and automatically repurpose them across your marketing channels. 

Example:

New York Times Bestselling author Ramit Sethi strategically posts user-generated content reviews of his book I Will Teach You To Be Rich. His strategy of amplifying his happy customer’s voices has garnered his brand 211,800 followers on Twitter.

More content, with less work—it’s like we can hear you breathing a sigh of relief.

No Time to Produce Ads? Great. “The Informed Consumer” Doesn’t Want to See It, Anyway.

The informed consumer isn’t sure if they trust paid ads and influencers. At this point in advertising, most people know when a brand is trying to sell them something. Six out of ten people feel neutral or don’t trust paid ads and 78% of consumers feel that they can tell when a brand is advertising to them.

This sounds like bad news for marketers. It means you have to work *way* harder to get your audience to trust you, right? 

That’s certainly an available strategy, but it’s guaranteed to eat up your budget and have you working late nights. Instead, we suggest looking at what consumers are really saying. It’s something along the lines of, 

“We don’t trust your paid ads. We want to see real people talking about your brand and products.”

The Solution:

Let your customers build trust and ad content for you. User-generated content saves you the time spent researching and writing copy, reformatting graphics for various platforms, and the budget of not paying for staged content shoots, and it’s far more likely to convert than your brand-created content.

How to Take Action:

 If you haven’t already created a snowball effect of UGC coming your brand’s way, use incentives to get your audience to make content about your brand and products. Once you have the rights to it, you can use it in paid ads in addition to organic content.

Related: How to Get More UGC From Instagram

Example:

Chipotle built their entire TikTok presence on repurposed UGC. The food chain currently has 1.7 million followers and has even won two Shorty awards (which honor ”the best of social media and digital”): the Shorty Industry Award for Best Overall TikTok Presence and the Shorty Industry Award for Best Consumer Brand. And all they do is repurpose their customer’s content. 

Bonus Example:

Canon Europe, a subsidiary of Canon Inc. used TINT’s Experience Builder to run a contest to engage “a younger generation of storytellers that mainly used their phones to share stories on social platforms.” Canon’s goal was to promote their products to Millennials and Gen Z with the hope of showing them how to tell stories with cameras, instead of just smartphones. Through the contest, the Canon team was able to get:

• 67% of entrants under the age of 30.
• 43% of entrants opted-in to future marketing from Canon
• 22,000+ page views on the entries featuring Canon products and information.

All while collecting 20,000 UGC photos that can be repurposed across their marketing channels indefinitely.

“TINT has made it really easy for our Social Media Managers to curate locally relevant UGC. This means they use their own language for the outreach and include country-specific T&Cs. Not only does this help Canon with governance and GDPR compliance, but it also protects the users’ rights and privacy.”

— Thessa Heijmans, European Social and Media Relations Specialist, Corporate Communication & Marketing Services, Canon

Solve Your Biggest Marketing Challenges With UGC

Marketers are struggling. Thankfully, there’s a way to fix the biggest challenges faced by marketers today.

Better yet, there’s a way to ease marketers’ job obligations and align with consumer trends to create a win-win scenario. The photos and videos your audience and customers are taking garner more engagement than the brand-created content that took 10x the amount of time, effort, and budget to put together. And it’s what consumers prefer to see.

The challenges that marketing teams are facing is one topic that we cover in The State of User-Generated Content 2022 report. To see even more consumer trends, marketing themes, predictions for 2022, and tips on how to use UGC, download the report.

The post What Can Solve the Biggest Challenges Faced by Marketers Today? appeared first on TINT.

In 2021, however, there’s a new key performance indicator (KPI) rising in importance. When we asked marketers what KPI is the most important to their role, for the first time, engagement was nearly tied with return on investment (ROI) for the top spot. Engagement won by only 1%, as reported in our State of User-Generated Content report. Take a look at the results, below.

Marketers know that engagement is key, but ROI is now just as important. So how do engagement and ROI relate to each other, and what are some action items you can take to increase both?

With the right strategy, you can boost both of your top KPIs.

The Path From Engagement to ROI

Engagement creates a return on investment, but not by nature. As Maggie Lower, CMO of Hootsuite, explains:

“Engagement provides insights that help determine whether people are paying attention. Much of that engagement then paves the way to trust, from there it’s a clear path to the conversion side which ROI is well-positioned to track.”

Only when engagement is increased *the right* way does it create the return on investment all marketers seek. So, what’s the “right way”?

It’s what your audience and customers are asking of you. In the State of User-Generated Content report, we narrowed down 5 consumer trends that will directly impact marketing in 2022. The report centers around these trends because listening to and learning from your audience allows you to form better connections, amplify their voices and experiences, and nurture a long-term relationship.

Here’s how you can leverage 3 of the trends to boost your top KPIs.

How to Increase Engagement And ROI Based on 3 Consumer Trends

If you’re a marketer, then the answers you’re looking for are found in your audience. They’ve told us loud and clear what they want to see.

Consumer Trend #1: People Want to Connect With the Brands They Love

In 2022, marketing is required to be a two-way street. Brands can’t think that a billboard with brand-written copy talking about their features will be the reason they reach their KPIs, stand out in their industry, and get a billion impressions. Brands need to weave the power of user-generated content (UGC) into their narrative in order to better connect with their audience. Consumers even want to interact with brands, both online and offline.

What is UGC and why is it important?

Unboxing videos, a reply to your tweet, sharing your Instagram post on their story, taking a photo of their hotel room, and posting to Facebook—customers are constantly giving brands opportunities to engage with them. Each time a happy audience member or customer posts user-generated content, it’s up to the brand to return the high five.

Brands that leave user-generated content floating around aimlessly on the web, hoping it leads to referrals and sales are optimistic.

We prefer the strategic approach: if people love creating brand-related content, let’s make it a positive experience each time they hit publish.

How to Take Action: 

When followers and customers provide opportunities to connect—do it. Return the high five they initiated (because nobody likes to be left hanging), and interact with their experience.

• Are they loving their hotel room? Reply to their Instagram post and let them know how dreamy their room is.
• Did they share a photo of their empty burrito bowl, captioned “so delicious—forgot to take a pic before I ate lol”? Let them know you’re launching an upcoming contest to win a year of free burritos and to keep an eye on your socials to partake.
• Is someone sharing their excitement about arriving at your hybrid event? Reply by letting them know where they can meet the other attendees.

Brand connection surpasses a quick like on their content. Real brand connection, which leads to an increase in social media engagement and an ROI, continues the conversation your audience or customer initiated. Here’s a great example from the Levels team where their brand account tagged their cofounder to answer a question from a curious customer on Twitter.

Instead of just liking the original tweet, or even replying with a quick, unthoughtful response, Levels cofounder Josh Mohrer connected with this happy customer and gave them insight into Level’s thoughts on crypto in the future.

Where can you level up the interactions your audience and customers are having with your brand?

Consumer Trend #2: People Expect Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

For the past few years, we’ve seen people ask for more and more diversity across brand images and videos. At the same time, we’ve also seen people more than happy to create user-generated content and be more than willing to let brands use their images, videos, and feedback across their marketing channels (because they want to be connected with the brands they love!). 

65% of consumers agree it’s important to them to see brands channeling diversity.

The 2022 State of User-Generated Content (SOUGC) report found that 65% of consumers agree it’s important to them to see brands channeling diversity because consumers want to buy from brands that reflect their own values and worldviews. Consumer sentiment has become an increasingly important part of marketing strategies.

And it’s best highlighted through the diverse voices of your customers. With user-generated content, brands can focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion through organic and paid user-generated content that gives their platform to their customers and marketing partners. 

How to Take Action:

Seventy-two percent of consumers believe reviews and testimonials submitted by customers are more credible than the brand talking about their products (Source: SOUGC). With a diverse array of user-generated content, customers can see people that look like them using and loving your products—growing the trust and relatability of your brand.

For example, user-generated content lets retail brands showcase their clothing on models of all shapes, colors, and sizes. With UGC, your customers become your models. They’re the ones saying, “I love this product enough to share my experience with it.” And that’s powerful. 

Consumers love seeing what a product looks like on someone of their skin color or body type, and it shows that they’re included.

Brands like Target are well aware their loyal customers (and fanbase) are posting user-generated content constantly. To help capture this UGC, Target asks their customers to “Share what you got” with the hashtag #TargetStyle and a @Target tag in their Instagram captions. Then, they display the photos throughout their website and product pages.

Using TINT’s UGC Studio, you can search through the UGC photos and videos from your customers to filter for specific products. You can also automate asking your customers if it’s okay to republish their content across your social channels with TINT’s Rights Management. That way, you can repurpose a cute Instagram post that you know gets engagement onto your emails and product pages.

How can you amplify diverse voices and images to make your audience feel seen and included?

Consumer Trend #3: People Prefer Social Media to Engage with Brands

Consumers are nearly 3x more likely to engage with a brand’s social media content than any other type of media they create. As marketers, this is our blinking neon sign telling us that social media is the right path to be on.

As we talked about in the past two consumer trends, with user-generated content, social media doesn’t have to dry up your resources or eat up the entirety of your team’s time. With UGC and EGC strategically repurposed across marketing channels, you can create a pipeline of content that comes from the diverse voices of your audience.

But what if you’re struggling to get engagement, UGC, and EGC in the first place?

That’s when it becomes time to get creative through proven marketing strategies like contests. Contests and social media work incredibly well together to boost brand engagement, ROI, and UGC (and EGC if applicable).

Brands like Canon have increased their engagement and UGC through contests set up on TINT’s Experience Builder. It lets brands create easy-to-enter contests both on social media and off. If you follow our tips in the first trend, you’ll connect with each entry. More relationships with your ideal customer? Yes, please.

How to Take Action:

Create contests, particularly social media contests, that spark your audience to make user-generated content your fans will engage with and that you can republish across your channels. This means contests not only help you gain a plethora of UGC that can be organized in your UGC Studio, but it’s also helping your content and products show up in your fan’s newsfeeds.

Here’s a genius example.

The My First Million podcast recently launched a TikTok contest, giving a prize away to a few participants who clipped their video podcast and turned their content into TikToks. Not only did the My First Million Podcast incentive their podcast listeners to interact with them on social media (which means they got them to move from interacting with them on one podcast platform to a social media platform too!), they also created hundreds of UGC videos they can repost to promote their past episodes…

… on top of getting impressions, views, and engagement on the TikTok videos their audience posted. The two hashtags used for the campaign, #mfmclip and #mfmclips have a cumulative 31.3 million TikTok views.

What creative social media contest can you run that asks your audience to interact with your brand, create user-generated content, and promote your products?

The Right Strategy Will Boost Both of Your Top KPIs

If you’re one of the majority of marketers asking how you can increase engagement and ROI in 2022—you’ll need the right strategy. We’d argue that the right strategy IS consumer trends. The most impactful marketing strategies are built around giving your audience and customers what they want, and this year we have very clear requests:

1. Reply to your customers through thoughtful responses that nurture your brand-to-customer relationship.
2. Highlight your customer’s voices to ensure diversity, inclusion, and equity across your marketing channels. Your customers care what your other customers and employees have to say more than what your brand-created content says.
3. Get your customers involved with your content by incentivizing UGC that sparks an initial interaction with your brand, creates UGC, and promotes your products.

Consumers want genuine, authentic, and trustworthy content. When you give them what they want, they will not only engage, they will convert. They won’t only convert, they will become brand champions.

This battle between engagement vs. ROI is one topic that we cover in The State of User-Generated Content 2022 report. To see even more consumer trends, marketing themes, predictions for 2022, and strategy tips, download the report.

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