Your brand needs to get its message out to customers and find the best and most effective way to reach them. How do you reach the greatest number of people and target the right audience at the same time?
Brand accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and even YouTube can be great ways to get the message out. After all, they are the direct line between you and your customers online.
However, sometimes official brand channels aren’t completely effective after all. If you are selling someone on the highlights of your product or service, then customers assume that you are selling. Instead of being a general recommendation, it is a sales pitch and this makes it more difficult to convince potential customers.
Instead, you might want to use user-generated content (UGC). UGC is content created by people, delivered personally instead of a branded account putting out the content.
Often this makes the information more believable because it is coming from an individual while delivering the same message. If the user chosen is being followed by the audience that is most relevant to your business, then UGC can inflate brand visibility like no other marketing strategy. But how?
Brand Advocates
Brand advocates use the popularity of social media to share views about products with a wider audience. A high brand presence on social networks increases the probability that your product or service is at the top of your list for your customers and that they need what you offer.
Trustworthy
It is peer-generated, making it a trusted source of in-house content. This gives it a unique user voice and style choice, and it’s a fan favorite among marketers and the audience in general.
Social Proof
Consumer-generated content, testimonials, and feedback act as social proof, leave a lasting impression in the minds of potential customers and create social trust in your brand. Collecting and showing customer photos creates a reciprocal dialogue with your fans. Creating campaigns that showcase your audience can lead to more traffic and more time you spend on your website.
Linking Through Hashtags
A UGC-specific hashtag is perfect for marketers because it is actionable. Brands use UGC to increase brand awareness and sales because it is one of the few marketing materials that can work at all stages of the customer journey. Not every campaign runs every day but for such campaigns which run a few times a year, they can increase their brand awareness through UGC made by campaign participants.
Who Would You Believe? Who Do You Watch?
Think about who you follow on social media and the people you watch on YouTube. Are they company accounts? Or real people talking about their lives and showing you the products they use either inadvertently through their content or explicitly through reviews and comments?
It’s more likely that you watch and follow individual users and it is more likely you believe them. If a user is giving a positive review, that carries a lot more weight than a brand talking about their own product.
