Creating all of the content needed for a marketing campaign yourself can be incredibly time-consuming – but what if there was an easier and more effective way to use content from other people instead?
Consumer-generated content is a great way to help boost your brand and ignite a campaign, while also reducing your own workload. Word of mouth and recommendation are, after all, two of the biggest reasons people decide to choose a particular brand so why not include it in your content.
1. Go for the Super Fans
Use your super fans for consumer-generated content. Check out the ones who are active on your social media and responsive to the emails you send and approach them first. They will be people who have already engaged with the brand and enjoy it, so you should start there.
These customers will be ready to give you their honest opinion on your product or service and they will be prepared to create content for your marketing campaigns such as videos, articles, advertisement, etc.
Make sure that you reward these fans that create for you with money compensation, gifts, discounts or anything else that you might find appropriate. Keep in mind that leaving them without a reward will result in your brand image being ruined in their minds and they will move on from your brand.
2. Ask Fans to Commit and Then Reward Them
Remember you are approaching busy people to help you. Initially try getting them to make a verbal promise to help you with your campaign and emphasize the importance of them taking part. Get them to sign an agreement and publish details of their participation on your website.
Also, make it worthwhile for them to take part by giving them recognition for their role and perhaps giving them some kind of financial or gift incentive, as appropriate.
3. Only Ask Followers to Do What They Are Comfortable With
If your followers really don’t want to appear on camera, but are happy to give a quote to be used in written marketing material, then accept this – don’t try to force them into something they really don’t want to do or you might end up alienating them and losing their support altogether. If they want to help but are not confident about writing for you, you can put them towards some helpful writing tools like SimpleGrad, Writing Populist and My Writing Way.
4. Make Sure the Content Is On Brand
You will need to check any generated content provided, particularly written content, to make sure it is on brand, contains the right campaign messages and is error-free and accurate. You can use some free editing tools like BigAssignments and Essayroo.
Some customers will sometimes – not intentionally – convey the wrong messages, so it's your job to guide them towards creating appropriate content.
5. Measuring the ROI of Consumer-generated Content
“Once you have a consumer-generated campaign up and running it’s really important to measure the effectiveness of the content so you can assess the return on investment being delivered as part of the overall campaign. There are a number of elements which need to be measured to prove ROI,” said Sarah Sandhurst, ROI Manager from Academized.
6. Better Conversion Rates
You need to measure the conversion rate – how many of the people who read your customer-generated content convert to paying customers. With a website you can track how many people clicked from the content through to make a purchase using tracking codes, which makes it easy to measure. Research has shown that content generated by customers can actually increase the conversion rate up to two times because buyers tend to trust people who have bought the product.
7. Increase In Orders
It’s good to track how much your average order value has increased since using user generated content, to get a really good feel for the value of the campaign and put solid numbers against it.
If you use, for example, a gallery of images and video from real customers about different products, you can measure how many people clicked on those media to then go through and purchase the products. Add up the orders made during the campaign timeframe to see if there was an increase compared with the average order value before the campaign started.
8. Bigger Audience Reach
You can also use the content to help improve the reach of your brand by asking customers to share the content and encouraging other customers to write about your brand and share their views back with you.
“Doing this encourages a community feel and helps to raise brand awareness among potential new audiences. You can measure it by calculating any increase in followers to your own social channels, but also by looking at the number of followers your content has been shared with,” says Jane Jones, Marketing Manager at Boomessays.
9. Longer Time Spent On Website
Use your analytics to track how long people are spending on your website now that the consumer-generated content has been posted, and compare it with pages that don’t have this content on them.
Research has shown that this type of content can greatly increase the time people spend on a site, making it more and more likely they will end up buying from you, or coming back to the site as a repeat visitor.
Using super fans to create content for you can be a great way to boost a marketing campaign and increase ROI, as well as growing your sales figures. Make sure to measure the success of the campaign so you can prove its worth.
Conclusion
There are a lot of great ways to create the best content for your marketing campaign – and using consumer-created content is certainly one of them. This gives your most faithful fans a chance to provide some value for your brand. This way the customers can see that people are pleased with your product or service and decide upon the purchase much easier. This gives them a much clearer and better testimony of your product's value than your own words. So roll up your sleeves and reach out to your most loyal users to let them have a say in your marketing campaign.
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