Posted by Quality content is crucial for the success of any SEO campaign. Your content must aim to educate, answer questions, and offer solutions to your target audience’s challenges.
The quality of your content and the value it adds to your readers is a determining factor for its ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
However, sometimes as a content creator, you may put a lot of effort into crafting a great piece but be met with disappointing results.
The problem could be that you are not creating content that your audience can connect with. And switching to user-generated content can put an end to such struggles.
User-generated content (UGC) is published content that is created by the visitors of a website or customers of a brand and is available for other consumers to access.
According to research, user-generated content has 20% more influence on millennial buyers than other types of content.
UGC can be in the form of blogs, images, videos, and discussions.
Collaborating with your target audience in content creation gives you the ability to publish content that resonates with the needs of your readers.
Data even shows that 48% of marketing professionals believe that content created by their customers helps humanize their marketing. And a mixture of user-generated product videos and official brand authored content increases engagement by 28%.
image: tint
Rather than brainstorming on the best content to create for your audience, UGC enables you to create the content with them. This makes it easy for you to publish content that benefits both the brand and the target audience.
With that said, below are five simple tips on creating user-generated content.
#1 Organize Contests
Research reveals that 34% of new customers are acquired during contests.
Organizing contests is an effective way of making your readers share your content across various social media platforms and tag their friends to engage with the content. In fact, the conversion rate of contests is 34%, which is higher than any other content type.
Contests usually involve very minimal action. You could have participants tag a friend, and the person with the highest number of tagged friends wins the contest, or it could be a contest that encourages the audience to creatively contribute to your brand for a prize.
Contests help your brand and the target audience to connect on an emotional level, leading to an increase in engagements and a boost to your organic reach on social media.
Hosting a contest will increase the chances of your posts being shared and liked. The numbers show that 94.46% of the time users share a promotion after they participate in a contest, there’s an increase in brand awareness.
Contests that entail people signing up or subscribing is a brilliant way to increase your email list and enable you to collect adequate data on your target audience.
#2 Turn Customers Reviews into Stories
The importance of customer reviews and testimonials can not be overemphasized. The success of every user-generated content strategy hangs on it. If a brand is overly self-promoting, 45% of its followers will unfollow it on social media.
So reach out to satisfied customers and get them to write unbiased reviews about your product or service as 70% of consumers will consider UGC reviews before making a purchasing decision.
Don’t succumb to the temptation of writing fake reviews and testimonials. People can easily spot fake reviews, and this will cause them to lose trust in your brand.
Copying and pasting customer reviews will seldom produce the desired result as well. Turn the testimonials into stories or craft creative posts out of them.
If you come across a customer whose review is very detailed and written like a story, you can reach out and get them to make a video using the product or give a review.
Getting unbiased reviews and stories from customers makes your product more trustworthy to prospective customers than when the reviews are from paid advertising companies. 92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people, including people they don’t know.
You can also get employees to write reviews or add behind the scene pictures and videos of other workers working on the product, and sharing their excitement and concerns about the product.
Content shared by employees gets eight times more engagement than content shared by brands as an entity. Getting your employees involved in the brand’s storytelling gives the target audience a powerful feeling of connection to your business.
Also, take advantage of negative reviews and comments. Instead of lashing out or deleting negative reviews, take the time to study them and discover what aspect of your product needs improving.
#3 Create Engaging and Shareable Content
You always want to ensure that you include shareable links to the content you create. This makes it easy for your followers to share your piece as content with thumbnails to social media platforms like Facebook have more shares than those without.
Image: optimonster
To create engaging and shareable content, you need to carry out competitive research. Quality research will help you know the trending topics in your industry and what your competitors are focusing on at the moment.
Using these insights, you can create content around the topics and keywords that your customers are most likely to use in search engines as well.
The benefits of creating educational, informative, and engaging content are multifold, and can significantly help with your SEO efforts.
For example, your customers will be more inclined to share content that they find valuable and helpful. They can also use your brand’s unique hashtag, which will help you boost brand awareness.
Moreover, it will be easier to promote that piece of content and get valuable backlinks. Your user engagement and the number of blogs linking back to your content are powerful signals to search engines that your content is relevant, and it will be rewarded with higher rankings in SERPs.
You can also stir up controversy by going against popular opinion smartly and tactfully and create content to support the opinion of your target audience.
Tell a story with your content. Let the story be something that your target audience can relate to on a day-to-day basis. Ensure that every piece has a clear beginning, middle, and ending with a straightforward call to action to share it.
#4 Host an Event
Going the extra mile to organize an event can have a positive impact on your business. According to Statista, 79% of US marketers use event marketing to generate sales, and 70% of users start to regularly patronize a brand after an experiential marketing event.
The event could be a product launch, a seminar, a conference, or even a meet and greet. As far as it adds value to your target audience, they will attend. Plus, 65% of event attendees have a better understanding of the brand after attending an event hosted by the brand.
You can ask guests at your event to share pictures and videos of the event online with relevant hashtags. You can also create a special photo booth advertising your brand where the guests at the event can take pictures.
Asides asking the guests to post pictures of the event on their social media handles, you can reward those that tag your business social media handle or share relevant hashtags.
When they upload these pictures with the hashtags, make sure you like or comment under the picture as it will enable you to answer any question asked in the comment section regarding the event.
Also, ensure that you follow up the guests by sending them emails with a clear call to action aimed at increasing the awareness of your brand.
#5 Offer Incentives
A recent survey showed that 45% of consumers made 1-3 purchases because of incentives.
Offering rewards to loyal customers is a surefire way of igniting an organic and spontaneous response to your brand. This is very effective in boosting awareness as 62.2% of respondents in a survey list increasing brand visibility as one of the greatest benefits of social media giveaways.
Image: easypromosapp
There’s more: 32.5% of brands organize at least one giveaway every month.
Image: easypromosapp
You don’t need to break the bank to offer rewards to your customers. Incentives as little as a discount on the next purchase, a gift card, free shipping, or even posting the content of the customer on your website, is enough to make them feel appreciated. And also lure prospective clients to your brand.
The results?
After receiving a reward, 75% of consumers made another purchase, while over 50% discussed their experience with others, and 35% left a positive review.
Conclusion
As stated earlier, creating user-generated content is an excellent way of increasing the visibility and awareness of your brand. Incorporating some or all of the five tips examined in this article in your content marketing strategy will do your brand a lot of good.
Have you used any of the tricks examined in this article? Did it have any positive impact on your brand? Kindly share your experience in the comment section below.
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