Marketing: What is “UGC”? Explanations.

If you follow marketing trends closely, you may have heard of “UGC” without knowing what it means. It’s time to shed some light on the subject with this article to fully understand the ins and outs of this new marketing method.

What does UGC stand for?

UGC is an acronym for User Generated Content. Users is a broad term which, depending on the context, can include employees, customers, partners, etc. It all depends on the audience you’re targeting.

It’s a method of content creation that doesn’t call on professionals or experts in the field of audiovisual creation, but on the users directly concerned by your products or services.

User Generated Content has been democratized with the arrival of new communications technologies such as social networks, enabling information and media (photos and videos) to be exchanged much more quickly, and good quality images to be captured thanks to improved cameras built directly into our phones.

With this method, you can recover a very large quantity of content, because you’re potentially calling on dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people to produce content for you. It’s a new way of looking at content marketing, where we rely on our users to offer something that’s more relevant to our end-users.

But of course, there are pros and cons to using UGC as a content creation method.

The benefits of UGC

The advantage of User Generated Content is that you can reach out to a large group of people and ask them to send us lots of image content for us, without having to pay them.

This means you can communicate all year round without having to spend a fortune with an agency.

The other advantage of UGC is thatyou get authentic content, which is closer to reality than brand-created content. Your audience, and especially your prospects, will identify much more easily with content created by people who look like them.

Last but not least, you’ll be surprised by a wide variety of content, some of it unexpected.

By appealing to a large sample of people, you increase the diversity of your communications, with the chance to come up with ideas you’d never have thought of before. You draw on the creativity of your community of users.

The disadvantages of UGC

But not everything in the UGC is perfect.

First of all, there are a number of prerequisites before embarking on this method.

You need a community around your business. In other words, a large enough group of people you can call on to create content for you. If you’ve just set up your business and you don’t have any customers…you won’t be able to do UGC! If you want to make a UGC corporate presentation film, you’ll need a team big enough to make UGC work. It’s impossible to do this in a company with fewer than 5 employees.

And don ‘t expect your content to be of the highest visual quality. It’s important to remember that this content is generally created using smartphones, and that the image quality can’t be compared with that of a professional team. In reality, the cursor of quality must be placed on authenticity. In other words, the quality of your collected content will depend on its authenticity, not on a technically flawless image or audio file.

Finally, you’ll need to be patient and convincing. The people you hire will probably have other things on their minds than producing content for you. The first step is to use the right arguments to motivate them to record and send photos and videos for your company. A reward, for example. And secondly, regularly follow up with people who haven’t replied or who have forgotten to do so.

Conclusion

Despite the few obstacles to UGC implementation, it remains a method that should be integrated as a priority into your content strategy.

The benefits far outweigh the few difficulties.

Your customers will feel valued, you’ll save money and you’ll convert more new prospects.

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