User-generated content marketing is the gold-standard for digital content marketing. This is because the content that your satisfied users choose to create about your product carries much more weight in the purchasing decisions of potential customers than anything your brand can possibly say about itself.
However, collecting and using authentic and valuable UGC from across the Internet comes with a few challenges:
- There may not be much UGC out there. Either because your brand doesn’t have an established profile, or whatever you sell is not conducive to spontaneously generated content.
- If your brand is already established, there may be too much content available, so it becomes time consuming to gather all of it and find the best that’s out there.
- The user generated content that’s available is not actually positive and/or useful for your messaging.
- You’re a B2B company. So your customers aren’t on Instagram or TikTok shooting photos or videos with your product (and how could they if your product is non-physical, like software or a service?).
To help you to launch your UGC marketing strategy — whether it has a B2C or B2B focus — this post will look at the following:
We’ll explain how video-based UGC can also be a particularly compelling format for B2B companies and non-physical products — which marketers often ignore as an option. We cover how you can easily get your users to produce UGC video using our platform, Vocal Video (skip to this section).
Note: Are you looking to kick-off your UGC marketing strategy quickly and efficiently or take your UGC campaign to the next level? Vocal Video is an easy-to-use and cost-effective tool to collect video-based UGC content from customers whenever your content strategy calls for it. Sign up here for a free Vocal Video account.
What Is UGC Marketing?
UGC marketing is the process of using content created by users of your brand to market your products and services.
Using UGC in your digital marketing raises brand awareness and provides your products with strong social proof and ultimately with more conversions and sales.
User generated content can be spontaneously created by your satisfied customers and users, and a variety of types of UGC can be gathered from social media and other areas of the Internet:
- Static: Text-based and photos.
- Mentions on social media: Identified through branded hashtags, for example.
- Influencer content: Instagram stories, posts on Facebook channels, tweets, TikTok, YouTube, and other social networks.
- Product reviews and customer reviews: Amazon reviews, Yelp reviews, Google reviews, etc.
- Video-based content: Video testimonials, product reviews, YouTube videos, animated videos, etc.
Read our in-depth guide to User Generated Content and the best UGC platforms.
Why UGC Marketing Is So Effective
UGC marketing is effective in the same way as a word-of-mouth recommendation. It provides excellent social proof for your brand as real people vouch for your brand and increase your credibility.
UGC is far more likely to convert than brand-generated content because 99% of users read customer reviews provided by real users online before making a purchase. This effect also translates to other types of UGC, including text and video testimonials, influencer posts, and other brand shout outs on social media.
The more authentic the user-generated content you use in your marketing efforts actually is, and the more transparent you are about your involvement in it (if you are involved at all), the more successful it can be. If you give social media influencers an incentive for creating a piece of content about one of your products, for example, it should be clear to prospective customers from the outset that the influencer received something in return for their product review.
The Usual Challenges of Gathering UGC
User generated content is notoriously difficult to collect, especially for brands that are just starting out. You may struggle to find mentions of your brand manually if you have no established branded hashtags and a limited online presence.
To make the process easier, there is software available that can aggregate and curate UGC from social media platforms and online reviews, for example, but you can never be sure exactly what has been created, how much, and what you’ve missed.
Due to the very nature of UGC, and because the most authentic type of content is spontaneously-generated by your users, it can seem like you don’t have much control over what is said and created around your brand by the real people who use it. It therefore becomes a challenge to collect genuine, believable, and engaging UGC that is useful for your marketing campaigns, and a challenge to get hold of it when you need it.
These challenges, as we explained above, are worth overcoming because of how effective UGC is to any marketing campaign and how it drives conversions. UGC marketing is a cost-effective strategy because you can direct your marketing budget to areas other than content production, while your users create effective marketing content on your behalf.
Why Video UGC Is Often Left Out of Content Campaigns
(And Why This Is a Big Opportunity for Brands)
Video is a very effective type of UGC that is often ignored by marketing teams because there were challenges of recording and collecting it. Video-based UGC, such as customer reviews and product reviews, is particularly authentic content because prospective customers get to watch real people reviewing your product, and talking about your brand and its benefits in greater depth and detail.
With this in mind, you should consider adding video to your arsenal of UGC content.
However, many marketing teams shy away from using video UGC because they believe it’s a hassle to collect, too big of a favor to ask their customers, and too hard to keep on-brand and on-message. It may not be difficult to get customers to record an Instagram video, for example, but it’s harder to make sure the resulting footage is valuable for marketing purposes.
We built Vocal Video to solve this problem. By using our UGC video recording platform, it’s quick and straightforward to ask for, record, and collect high quality video UGC that you can easily start incorporating into your marketing strategy.
Here’s an example of a UGC video created using Vocal Video for wine producer Martha Stoumen Wines:
As you can see, we pre-edit the video you receive to a professional standard that you can immediately use in your marketing campaigns. The recording and collection process is so simple and easy-to-use for both you and your customers that response rates to requests for videos are consistently high. This makes it easy to get your hands on high quality UGC whenever you need it.
Click here to read our article: ‘How to Use Vocal Video as a User Generated Video Platform and Get UGC When You Need It’
UGC Is Often Ignored in B2B but Can Be Really Powerful
It’s very common to see video UGC used in B2C marketing, since consumers are used to talking about and posting products online. In B2B marketing, however, it’s certainly not as common — although there is some discussion of B2B products and services online (namely Twitter and LinkedIn). As a result, B2B marketing teams forget the value of UGC marketing.
But this is a mistake. As evidence, look simply at the power of software review sites that hold great sway in many B2B SaaS markets: B2B customers also care about what other customers like them are saying about products, whether they be software platforms or a B2B service (e.g. agencies). But software review sites aren’t your UGC. If, instead, your company controlled your UGC, it could be a really powerful marketing asset you could use on your site and in all sorts of campaigns.
For example, if you sell accounting software for enterprise companies, videos of accountants and finance directors explaining how your software has improved processes at their company is very compelling to prospective customers.
Generally speaking, video is an especially effective type of UGC for B2B products and services (software, corporate services, etc.) because they are not usually as simple and visually compelling as B2C products (clothing, make up, kitchen appliances, etc).
When you use video, it’s far easier to get customers to effectively communicate the often complex, non-visual benefits of B2B products, such as:
- Time and money saved
- Employee retention
- Business growth
- Leads generated
- And more…
These types of benefits are best conveyed directly by a real person who has used the product and experienced the positive changes it has brought to their organization. It’s almost impossible to replicate the enthusiasm shown by a satisfied customer or brand advocate using static images or text, so video UGC is a smart choice.
4 Examples of Successful Video UGC Marketing
Recruit Rockstars is a recruiting firm that helps venture capital and private equity-backed startups hire the right employees. The company created a video reviews page by embedding a video-based “wall of love” (all sourced, published, and embedded with Vocal Video), which has the effect of flooding prospective customers’ with positive reviews of their service.
Math and literacy tutoring service Gideon Math & Reading used Facebook to put out a request for UGC videos from their satisfied customers. They posted a Vocal Video link on the post so that users could click to go to their landing page and start recording a video testimonial.
This strategy was so successful that the company managed to collect dozens of videos to create a library, which they could use whenever they needed to post new UGC content.
The Natural Acne Clinic uses a huge gallery of user-generated videos recorded using Vocal Video. The video below is just one example from around 20 posted on the ‘Clear Skin Stories’ page of its website.
Because acne treatment is such a personal service, UGC content created by relatable people about its success makes it particularly compelling.
Digital marketing agency Rytech asks satisfied customers to record videos, like the one below, relating their positive experiences with their SEO, web design, and digital marketing services.
Vocal Video: Easily Use Video in Your UGC Marketing Strategy
We specifically designed Vocal Video so that brands can request UGC from their users — and provide them with an easy way to make it.
As we explained above, the videos you collect with Vocal Video compliment and add value to other types of UGC content, for the following reasons:
- You can take control over what is created, and when, by asking for video content when you need it and framing the questions you ask to get the kind of answers that will be most valuable to your marketing campaign.
- Video is easy to share on social media and is shared more often than static content.
- Vocal Video makes it easy, scalable, and cost-effective to create UGC video; therefore, you’re not blocked by budget and time constraints.
- Vocal Video can also be the basis for generating other types of content. Need written testimonials and photos? Just lift quotes from the transcript Vocal Video provides you with and take stills from the video footage. Just want audio? You can separate audio from video and use just that.
- We also offer 45+ templates for creating videos focused on specific use cases (such as influencers, for example). These give you the chance to ask users to create UGC on your behalf that you can actually use, as compared to Instagram videos that go off on a tangent or fail to make a positive point.
Here’s how you get users to create content for you using Vocal Video:
Use Our Video Collector and Templates
The first step is for you to create what we call a “Video Collector”. This collector will guide your users to record their user-generated video.
To get a full picture of how your users can record a video using our video collector process, read our article on how to make a video testimonial.
In the meantime, here’s a brief description of how it’s done:
- Include the questions you want to ask, or use the suggested questions from one of our 45+ templates.
- Encourage your users to create a video for you by providing an incentive. This can be a giveaway, a prize draw, a donation, or whatever you think is most attractive for your users.
- Write a welcome message or record a short video explaining the video recording process (or use/adapt the one in your chosen template).
- Choose your brand colors and logo. These will be used in the collector and in the final pre-edited video.
- Send the automatically generated link for the video collector out to your chosen users. They will simply click on the link to go to the video collector and start recording.
Click here to find out more about building a video collector.
Edit and Polish Videos to Keep Them on Message (Without Compromising Authenticity)
After each user has recorded their responses to your Video Collector questions, you get an email telling you the video is ready for your review.
When you watch it for the first time, it will already have a series of automatic edits pre-applied, including:
- Text slides with the questions you asked
- Your brand’s logos and colors
- Text overlays with the names and titles of respondents
- Animated transitions between ‘scenes’
- Default background music
- Computer-generated captions
- An automatic transcript of all the speech in the video
- A CTA
You only have to add your logo and colors to your collector once and Vocal Video automatically applies it to every other video collector you create in the future. (This can be changed at any point, if necessary.)
Many of our users are happy to publish their video right after automatic editing has been applied, without any additional changes.
Optionally, you can trim out any unwanted parts of the video — such as pauses or information that doesn’t fit with your message — from each of the videos you’ve collected.
Using our built-in editing tools (which were designed for complete video editing novices to use) this process is really easy and should only take you a few minutes. You can also splice together several of your best videos to create a highlight reel that showcases the best of your UGC videos.
Click here to check out our 7-minute video on how to use Vocal Video’s suite of video editing tools.
Vocal Video Lets You Take Control of UGC Creation — Which Is More Valuable for Your Marketing Campaigns
Vocal Video allows your brand to take control of user-generated video content by giving you the tools you need to:
- Ask your users to create video-based UGC about your brand when you need it, rather than waiting for them to spontaneously create it.
- Give users a simple step-by-step process to make creating video content less complex. This opens up video creation to a greater range of people because they don’t need to have prior knowledge of video production.
- Create well-designed questions by using suggested questions in templates and guide users to provide the content you actually need and can use in your UGC marketing campaigns.
- The entire recording and collection process takes the friction and hassle out of creating user-generated content for both you and your users because it's designed to be effortless.
Note: Are you looking to kick-off your UGC marketing strategy quickly and efficiently? Vocal Video is an easy-to-use and cost-effective tool to collect video-based UGC content from customers whenever your content strategy calls for it. Sign up here for a free account.