Who is the best marketeer for your brand? They may not be the colleague with the marketing masters degree. They may not have 10+ years of experience. They may not be in your company, let alone your communications team. Your best marketer isn’t even employed by you.
Your customer base is bursting with potential to advocate for your brand. And UGC is the perfect tool with which to harness that potential. By welcoming the customer in as co-architect and marketer, you not only empower their brand loyalty, you make your job a whole lot easier…
As The Guardian says, “Advertising is failure. Ideally, a company offers a great product or service that its customers love, talk about, and sell to each other. It’s when that fails that you need to advertise.”
More and more brands are turning to UGC to add zest to their marketing campaigns, build meaningful relationships, and create relatable content that customers love. And Covid-19 only accelerated this: the connection and entertainment that UGC offers made it uniquely popular during lockdowns, with 78% of our customers spending more time online.
The Drum agrees: “Brands have been pushed to find alternative solutions to complex studio setups, huge budgets and high production value – all of the traditional expectations for an impactful advertising campaign. A strategy that’s found success is the clever utilisation of user-generated content (UGC) as it taps into a real desire for human connection, strengthens a community and, in this unprecedented time, has transformed what might have once been local content into global content.”
This new form of content has been lauded for its authenticity. Having a product that your consumers love so much that they’d happily promote it to their friends and online connections is a self-sustaining marketing cycle: the more people promoting your product with UGC, the more people discovering it, loving it, and hopefully endorsing it too. And, when 74% of our global insights community said they’d promote a product to their contacts if the quality was good enough, there’s huge potential for your customers to become the next wave of advocates.
So, let’s look at the top ten brands leading in the advocacy and content space. Here are the brands making a difference with UGC – and what you can learn from them.