User-Generated Content Marketing Challenges & Solutions
Content Marketing as an ecosystem is quite volatile and creative where marketers and brand relying on many short-term tactics and strategies with rare long-term success opportunities.
Especially with the dawn of digital media and online commerce, the importance of content marketing has become quite crucial as digital platforms are filled with content.
But what kind of content is best and how it benefits the brands?
The answer is simple, it is user-generated content and it is a long-term cost-effective solution but there are challenges and solutions associated with that as well.
The Explanation: User-Generated Content
User-generated content in raw terms is the posts and content pieces created and shared by the social media and digital users on the platforms. The content is hugely diverse and creative as it comes from different demographics and perspectives.
In the business context, user-generated content is content that users or existing customers of the brand share their experiences, ideas, opinions, and reviews about the products and services and the overall brand.
As the content is shared by the real customers based on their authentic experiences makes the content highly realistic, valuable, trustworthy, and credible for the brand.
So, it is highly beneficial for the brands to leverage such content in their marketing campaigns as the UGC fulfills all the needs and requirements if a perfect marketing content for any brand.
Benefits of User-Generated Content For Marketing
Before we move onto the challenges and solutions of user-generated content, here are some of the benefits that will help why it is worth the effort and investments.
1. Trustworthy & Authentic
As the content is shared by the real customers based on their real experiences, so this makes the content highly trustworthy & authentic since it’s coming from reliable sources.
2. Brand Advocacy & Credibility
When you leverage UGC in your marketing, it helps you showcase the brand advocacy and positive word of mouth about the brand through the views of their customers leading to brand advocacy.
3. Valuable Content Stream
Content is most important for marketing campaigns and brands invest hugely in content creation but user-generated content is abundantly available on social platforms and is a cost-effective original and fresh content.
4. Brand Reach & Awareness
Leveraging user-generated content platform in your marketing leads to building brand awareness as the realistic, authentic, and engaging nature of the content makes the users share it more leading to wider reach and broad exposure.
5. Increase Audience Engagement
Similar to the previous point, as the content is reliable and authentic that contains valuable information for the potential customers so it will increase the engagement with the campaigns.
6. Boost Conversions & Sales
As we discussed earlier, user-generated content is highly trustworthy, reliable, and authentic, engaging, and much more that leads to helping the users in making favorable conversion decisions for your brand.
User-Generated Content Challenges & Solutions
Here we have listed some challenges that you may encounter while leveraging user-generated content for your marketing accompanied by the solutions to these challenges.
1. Divided Audience Across Platforms
Social media and digital platforms are filled with UGC shared by target audiences of your business scattered over these platforms so it is a huge challenge to identify and discover the relevant and valuable content.
Now it is a massive task to get all this valuable content into one place as it will require investments, efforts, and resources. This will also save you the immense costs of content creation.
Solution: Using a tool like a social media aggregator can help you discover and curate user-generated content from different platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
You can get your specific content from each platform using your brand hashtag or brand profile or tags or mentions or pages or many more.
2. Raw User-Generated Content
The content that you will collect from the social media and digital platforms will be highly raw and dynamic that might not perfectly relate to your marketing strategy or brand.
As there might be different perspectives or opinions in the content that may not align with the brand message or may be adversely affecting your marketing strategy like negative reviews.
Solution: The perfect solution to manage your raw user-generated content is to moderate it where you can filter the content based on the relevancy, quality, value, etc.
Besides, you can filter it by removing the irrelevant content or remove profane content as social media has such UGC as well. This will help you maintain premium content quality.
3. Improper Strategy
You have just collected the content but there is no strategy yet to your content you just have the content that is relevant and valuable to your brand but it is not into an engaging and creative form.
Since there is no strategy yet so it will be pointless for the consumers, so you will need to make it more branded and into a marketing strategy rather than just content.
Solution: The solution here is to customize and personalize the content into marketing campaign. For that, you can use tools like the UGC platform that will help you customize your UGC campaign.
You can make customizations like themes, fonts, colors, layouts, design elements, banners, and much more. These will help you provide a direction and brand element to your UGC campaign.
4. UGC Rights
Since the user-generated content is created and shared by the users so they have all the rights to the content and it is important to get rights to their content so that you can leverage it in your campaign.
If leveraging the content with the users’ permissions and rights will lead to legal issues and adverse consequences for the brand.
Solution: The UGC platform will also help you with the UGC rights management as well where you can reach out to the users whose content you want to leverage in your campaign.
You can create a rights request personalized for each and every user and send it to them where they can simply approve the request with one click.
Conclusion
User-generated content is the future of marketing that can ensure long-term brand growth and most global brands like Apple, GoPro, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, etc.
These benefits along with challenges and solutions will help you create an immensely effective and influential UGC marketing strategy. The tools like the UGC platform can help you provide holistic solutions to create, customize, and execute your UGC campaign.
Originally published at http://allaboutweb.tech.blog on June 16, 2020.
