Estimated Reading Time: 9 minute(s)
A good marketing strategy is to use your customer to promote your brand or product and one marketing method is user-generated marketing.
But the question comes what is user-generated marketing is? before driving into the definition let’s have an example to you a clear picture of it.
In 2014, Starbucks initiated a campaign. Its name was #WhiteCupContest. The campaign was very simple. All the people had to do was to draw a doodle on the white cup of the coffee brand. The authority announced that the winning white cup’s design will be used to produce a limited version of cups of Starbucks itself.
The contest undoubtedly created a huge amount of excitement among people. That’s because, within only 3 weeks, thousands of cup designs were submitted.
Apart from that, the social media platforms were flooded with the contest’s discussion as well.
Now, why are we talking about this contest? Well, that’s because it’s closely related to today’s topic: user-generated marketing.
If you closely notice, you will see that throughout this whole contest period, Starbucks received enormous attention from the consumers and their sales increased to a great extent during the campaign.
All this happened, but it cost Starbucks almost nothing!
What is User-Generated Marketing?
User-generated marketing can be some sort of marketing campaign or contest or strategy, where the customers themselves will take part in the marketing of a brand or business themselves. They may even create advertisement content as well.
Nowadays, user-generated marketing is actually pretty much common and easy to execute as well.
Since now we all can have access to many types of internet technologies, social media platforms, content sharing tools, etc., marketing campaigns and contests can be initiated without any complication. And they can create a massive thrill among the people as well.
Tools of User-Generated Marketing
There’s a vast collection of tools out there that you might want to use if you are planning for user-generated marketing for your company.
Because, your customers can share their thoughts or ideas, you can simply use comment cards or customer reviews and ratings.
Different online forums and comment threads in blogs can also be utilized to keep your brand’s name alive in discussion sessions.
Social networking platforms are genuinely another great option for user-generated marketing.
There are also UGC (User-Generated Content) tools for aggregation and analytics, UGC content software, UGC display tools, UGC rights management tools, hashtag research tools, and so on.
All you need to do is to get how to apply and utilize these tools effectively and efficiently and then use them in real life!
The Power of User-Generated Marketing Strategy
Believe it or not, user-generated marketing possesses amazing potential. By implementing it perfectly, you can actually do a great job for your brand.
#1. Building Brand Awareness
The way Starbucks did, you can also do the same, using the immense power of user-generated marketing. Get your customers engaged in your marketing campaigns.
Once they get involved, you will see that your brand awareness is increasing dramatically.
People nowadays feel hardly interested in conventional advertisements like TVC, it’s time you do something different. The result? Your brand receives the maximum exposure that you couldn’t have even imagined ever!
#2. Boosting Social Media Reach and Growth
Social media is literally like a boon for user-generated marketing! You can create a photo contest or custom hashtag on Instagram. On Twitter or Facebook, you can create a challenge or ask a question. You might even want to launch a video contest as well.
By doing all these, you will notice a positive outcome very soon. You’ll have a higher follower base, increased brand awareness, extended reach, greater web traffic or page views, boosted social metrics such as comments, likes, shares, retweets, etc.
#3. Gaining Audience Insights
The way customers interact with your brand by participating in the user-generated marketing campaign gives a broad idea and thought regarding audience inside interest around your brand content.
These will certainly help you to redesign your next user-generated content marketing process which can go viral in various places.
However, don’t forget to make sure that your customers, audience, the format of content, channel everything is aligned. Otherwise, some of them might not feel interested in contributing.
#4. Finding Unique Content
One idea is better than the thousands. User-content content marketing campaigns give you plenty of bad ideas apart from that you will be able to get hundreds of good ideas as well.
From those good ideas, you can discuss in your meeting and select 10 to 20 best ideas and do some A/B testing campaigns to understand which will be better for your brand or promotional marketing.
#5. Saving Time and Money
One of the biggest advantages of user-generated marketing is the fact that it hardly requires lots of resources to use. You can save your time and money in this marketing strategy and use them later for some other purpose.
#6. Showing Openness to The Community
It’s a fact that customers always love to communicate with their favorite brands.
However, they hardly get the chance to do that.
So, what is the reason behind it? Simply because most of the marketing or advertisements are one-way types where customers don’t have the opportunity to make interactions with the brands.
By applying user-generated marketing, you are giving your customers scope to communicate with you and your brand which shows openness to your customer base.
#7. Adding Social Proof
The way your user-generated marketing campaign works shows a lot. If you notice that you are receiving a great response from your customers, then you can be sure of fact that you are on the right track.
Your customers love you and your brand. The submitted contents by your customers also reflect that you actually have customers who are willing to spend some time creating content as well.
#8. Making Your Customers The Stars
Another important aspect of user-generated marketing is that it features your beloved customers. They are the stars of the whole campaign.
Their creativity gets exposed to everyone. No need to mention that they obviously love the focus they get through it.
So user-generated marketing strategies are more likely to be successful and bring value for your brand because they provide tons of fun for your customers.
Examples of User-Generated Marketing
Let’s have a look at some brands that have successfully executed their user-generated marketing campaigns:
1. Burberry
Founded in 1856, Burberry is a British clothing company. In 2006, Angela Ahrendts became the CEO of the company.
She decided to initiate a user-generated content marketing campaign as she wanted to change the company’s ageing brand.
For that, she launched “The Art of the Trench” website in 2009. It was a platform, where people not only could upload their pictures of wearing Burberry’s clothes, but also could comment on other people’s pictures as well.
The result? The company’s e-commerce sales increased 50% year-over-year following the beginning of the site.
2. Belkin
In 2013, Belkin and Lego collectively came up with a smart marketing campaign. They developed a new line of iPhone cases.
The specialty of these cases was that the users themselves could customize these cases.
Now the interesting part of this whole campaign was that Belkin also created a social platform as well. People who purchased the cases could upload pictures of their customized cases.
Not only did those people’s creativity got shown there, others who hadn’t bought the cases back then yet could have a look at how simple, fascinating and cool it was to make their own iPhone cases by themselves.
3. Coca-Cola
The name of the campaign that Coca-Cola started to get out of their constantly declining revenues for some years was “Share a Coke”.
The company Coke bottles, in which customers’ names were written on the labels.
The company handed those bottles out to different cities.
The purpose of this campaign was to increase its exposure on Twitter.
For that, they told their customers to share their pictures with their personalized Coke bottles on Twitter and other social media platforms as well.
The first launch of this campaign was made in Australia in 2011, which expanded in the United States, the United Kingdom, and some other regions of the world too.
After this campaign, Coca-Cola received a 2% increase in U.S. sales, before it, the company had been experiencing a decline in revenues for over a decade.
4. Chobani
Chobani is a Greek yogurt company that was founded in 2005.
They decided to use customer-generated content to promote their brand and so began their user-generated marketing campaign.
The campaign was simple and easy to participate in.
What the customers had to do was to only share a story, song, recipe, painting, video, image or anything that shows their love for Chobani.
After receiving these contents from their customers, Chobani then displayed them on different platforms like billboards, websites, social media, etc.
The whole campaign turned out to be pretty amazing, as Chobani’s revenue got an increase of 225.9% between 2009 and 2010.
Conclusion
It’s pretty obvious that user-generated marketing is simply one of the most compelling approaches to marketing that future marketers are going to use. So you better get yourself, perfect, in executing this marvelous marketing strategy and get ready for the increased brand exposure. And if your are still confuse about what is user-generated marketing, then feel free to question on the comment section.
certainly like your website but you need to take a look at the spelling on quite a few of your posts. Many of them are rife with spelling problems and I find it very troublesome to inform the reality nevertheless I will definitely come back again.
I do not even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was great. I don’t know who you are but definitely you’re going to a famous blogger if you aren’t already 😉 Cheers!
Its like you read my mind You appear to know a lot about this like you wrote the book in it or something I think that you could do with some pics to drive the message home a little bit but instead of that this is fantastic blog An excellent read I will certainly be back
This is a fantastic blog post!