Building a long-term UGC Strategy

UGC allows brands to meet consumers with realness, authenticity, and a real-world connection in a way that other strategies may not.

Platforms like TikTok have democratized influencer culture by offering everyone the chance to be seen by millions of people. This has led to the proliferation of UGC creators, and major brands integrating it into their social strategies. For these brands, UGC represents a highly efficient way to expand their content strategy, while choosing what is almost always a quicker, cheaper (and better!) alternative to influencer marketing.

For several years, social media users have been demanding more genuine and authentic content from brands and creators. They don’t want the highly edited and professional content from ten years ago, they want content that helps them identify with the brand, and UGC fits that bill.

The magic of UGC is not only its low cost in both budget and effort but its high reward in deeper engagement and brand loyalty. People trust other people. When someone relatable to your audience is using and/or praising your brand’s product or service, the likelihood of part of your audience ending up buying said product or service skyrockets.

The cherry on top? It’s the only content that fuels more content creation. Show your brand’s fans that you value their opinion and the content they create around your brand, and they’ll reward you with even more content (which will lead to more engagement, more awareness, and hopefully, more sales!).

As with every strategy, there are some do’s and don’ts that your brand should be aware of before developing and executing a UGC strategy in social media.

The Do’s:

• Look for creators that share your brand values: Finding creators that share the values, look and feel, and mission of your brand is important. Your audience will be able to say if a creator is truly passionate about your brand or just pretending for the sake of attention.

• Be clear and communicative: Keep your creators informed of all and any updates, address their questions quickly, and make them feel you’re truly putting the effort to foster a long-lasting relationship with them. Having a creator feel they’re being used for a marketing campaign is the best way to ensure the creator will not be engaged with your brand for too long.

• Cover all your legal bases: The fact that you’re using content created by others doesn’t mean you can bypass trademark and intellectual property laws. Music, images, recognizable logos, quotes, and even public landmarks can be subject to copyright protection (remember, the original creator might not be using the content for marketing purposes, but your brand is, so you’re measured differently!).

The Don'ts:

• Micromanage creativity: It's important to provide guardrails and guidance to potential creators so they know how to approach their content, but that shouldn’t mean micromanaging their creativity and trying to get them to follow strict creative guidelines.

• Skip attribution: Paying a creator to use their content doesn’t mean you can skip attributing them for the work and creativity they’ve put into their work. If you’re truly looking to build a long-lasting relationship with your UGC creators, share the spotlight with them.

• Relax on profile vetting: Whether a creator praises your brand, product, or service today does not mean they’re the right person to work with. Before starting to work with them, it's critical to make sure they haven’t talked badly about your brand in the past, that they haven’t shared controversial views, and that they truly align with your brand’s mission.

There are two ways of finding great UGC opportunities.

One of them uses social listening tools to discover creators who have posted content related to your brand. These tools also allow you to check if their posts have generated meaningful interactions and how their audience has reacted to their content. This approach eliminates guesswork, increasing the likelihood of partnerships that resonate with your target audience and deliver tangible results.

A more direct–and cheaper approach uses platforms natively. With platforms like Instagram and TikTok being increasingly used as search tools, their algorithms are primed to show great content for term queries such as:

• "Product" or "Brand" + Review (E.g. Prime drink review)
• "Product" or "Brand" + Worth it (E.g. Coterie worth it)
• "Brand" or "Service" + Experience (E.g. TurboTax experience)
• "Brand" + "vs Competitor Brand" (E.g. Pepsi vs Coca Cola)
• "Software" or “App” + "How to" (E.g. CapCut How to)

You will be amazed at the amount of positive and useful content your brand can find with this simple search.

Now, what if you don't find good content? That means you’ve found an opportunity.

If any of these queries are not returning good results, that means you've just found a content gap that you can fill with your organic content strategy (or encourage your followers to do it for you through giveaways, challenges, etc.).

Many brands see UGC as a way to get quick and cheap content to fuel their content strategy, but what many of them don’t know is that UGC can become their whole content strategy.

7-Eleven is an amazing example of how a well-executed and curated UGC strategy can take over your whole brand’s identity and content strategy in social media.

The 7-Eleven social team used to scale their content calendar by posting user-generated content every now and then. When they decided to try one of their customers' car posts that had a 7-Eleven in the background, they noticed the average engagement of the post was considerably higher than the rest of their content. They tried again and got similar results. They found a content mine: high engagement, low lift, and they were making their customer base and followers feel seen and appreciated.

After several UGC car posts, car enthusiasts ended up on their profile, and their TikTok account grew to 40,000+ followers overnight. This is how #CarsOf7Eleven was born: a plethora of car lovers sharing photos of their cars in front of 7-Eleven stores.

Not only was this strategy generating an ocean of low-lift content for the company, but it was also having a snowball effect: the more content that was posted, the more content that was created by their audience to get noticed and shared by the brand. All these creators were also engaging with each other as they all shared the same interests, consequently raising the engagement rate of the content shared by the company. A win-win situation that any brand would love to see themselves in.