Why investing in User Generated Content is Important?
HelloMeets recently organised a workshop with Bhawna Grover Bagai, Head of Content at Goibibo, where she talked about User Generated Content (UGC).
Let’s first understand what UGC is!
UGC also called Consumer Generated Media (CGM) is:
Content that is created or shared by unpaid contributors.
Can be in the form of text, images, blogs, videos, tweets, FB posts, infographics, reviews, testimonials.
Produced by end-users online and is publicly available to the community to be viewed, consumed or shared.
Most popular websites today, rely on UGC.
We are all using these every single day without even realizing that we ourselves are creating free content for someone else! 😯
- Youtube
- Quora &
So what’s Goibibo’s strength when it comes to UGC?
It’s the Reviews & Ratings by real customers!
You may like it or not but reviews can make or break your brand image.
Did you know?
- More than 85% online shoppers (any industry) look at reviews to make a buying decision
- Positive reviews will improve your brand’s trust & credibility
- Negative reviews will cost you potential customers
- Online reviews also boost your SEO & they impact conversions directly
For example: While booking a hotel or a holiday what do you do?
Also, when making a buying decision, are you more likely to trust a brand’s digital ad or a fellow customer’s review who has used the product or service?
According to Bhawna, most people will agree that recommendations of family & friends have an upper hand!
Customers are moving away from digital ads. Instead they crave real stories and connection.
Here are some travel industry specific facts & figures regarding UGC:
- More than 80% travellers read at least 5–10 reviews before making a booking
- Almost 70% travellers search for hotels with an average rating of 3.5 & above
- As many as 90% travellers say they won’t book a hotel which has zero reviews
- At least 70% travellers say they are willing to pay more for hotels with better ratings & higher reviews
Some popular UGC campaigns Bhawna discussed about at the workshop:
- Lays Do us a Flavor Commercial (Outside of India)
In this commercial, Lays reached out to its customers to come up with a flavor of their choice. All they had to do was think of a flavor they want as Lays chips and submit it online.
After this campaign, they ran another campaign Do us a Flavor Finalists wherein they put four final flavours in stores for people to buy, taste and vote.
Thus, their community ended up choosing the next flavor the company would launch. This helped Lays come up with a new flavor that the people already loved, leaving no room for the campaign to fail and created immense engagement, besides other benefits.
2. Go Asli Photo Campaign Goibibo
Through this campaign, travellers were asked to post real hotel pictures and in turn stand a chance to win goCash+. It is seen that travellers prefer looking at pictures of fellow travellers as against professional images posted by hoteliers themselves. Which is why, the campaign was a hit.
Despite the massive content explosion, the beauty of UGC is that it is the content that audiences TRUST.
Goibibo reached Several Million reviews in less than 3 years and Bhawna focussed on using some of the below to grow UGC!
- Target Credible Users
- Focus on timings of Notifications
- Gratification: Monetary & Social
- Leverage Whatsapp as medium since almost 90% of the users use whatsapp and it doesn’t require a second level of training
Why should you invest in UGC?
- Creates a lot of attention about your brand
- Cuts through the content clutter
- Saves your organisation from financial resources and time
- It’s authentic with a fresh & unique perspective
- It boosts SEO value
- It plays a major role in having a two-way network effect
- It creates a COMMUNITY!
Towards the end, Bhawna quoted: “If you want your content to be great, get the community to participate!”
Thinking of giving User Generated content a shot? Share your ideas in the comments section below.
Thanks to Bhawna for sharing her valuable learnings with the Community.
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