What is User-Generated Content? | A Complete Detail Guide

Content posted about a brand by the people due to a positive admiration towards that brand or some motivation is known as user-generated content. 

User-generated content is generally associated with social media platforms.

Because on social media sites people can post content about the brands which they endorse and admire.

Although other forms of user-generated content do exist they are not that significant as social media user-generated content. These could be blog posts reviews about a brand, user comments, and reviews, etc.

A few examples of that are like a user posting about a brand in the comment section of a blog post. Or a blogger posting an article about a brand to express his happiness about the brand. Also publishing positive reviews could come under user-generated content as well.

An Example Case of user-generated content:

For example, Mohan is learning how to start a blog. He is a loyal Go daddy customer and hence he bought a web hosting package during the Sunday sale event at Go daddy.

Mohan was delighted because he was able to set up his web hosting without much technical difficulties and problems.

Also, Mohan was happy with the customer support team which helped him a lot throughout the process.

So, Mohan decided to publish a post on Facebook about his positive experience of using Godaddy’s web hosting services.

From a brand perspective, this helps Go daddy to build a positive trust and influence among many of Mohan’s friends and followers on Facebook.

As you know obviously when  Mohan publishes an FB post about Godaddy it would reach many of his friend’s news feed on facebook.

And this will also encourage other friends of Mohan to consider Go daddy products while they think of choosing a hosting package.

In user-generated content, the customer or the user will start to endorse and promote a brand.

This helps the brand to get a lot of attraction, attention, positive word of mouth influence in its market.

By leveraging user-generated content the brand will be able to build lots of trust with the audience.

Basically by leveraging user-generated content strategies a brand/ business would aim to make their happy users or customers as the promoters of the company. 

The biggest advantage of leveraging user-generated content is that brands will be able to attract and acquire new customers without spending a lot of marketing budget and resources. 

Many brands do self-promotions on the internet.

We come across brands that just keep on talking about their products and services proclaiming that “by using their best products people will get benefited greatly!”.

But the case with user-generated content is that people themselves will start to speak about a brand that they admire positively.

When so many loyal customers and people all over the internet start publishing a User-generated content strategy to express their happiness about a brand, it eventually leads to an enormous amount of growth for the brand.

Here the customer is at the center focal point of all the marketing objectives.

A User-centric marketing strategy mainly aims to make the customer happy and build loyalty with them.

This encourages customers to express their happiness by publishing user-generated content about a brand.

Hubspot’s Flywheel Concept

Hubspot also has started to make a transition from the funnel model to the flywheel model.

In the funnel model, the marketing objective and marketing team’s efforts were to achieve sales and loyalty by taking their audience through various multiple stages namely awareness, engagement, consideration, and conversion.

But in the flywheel concept, the whole marketing team. Sales and support teams’ objective is to delight the HubSpot users and make them as the promoter of the Hubspot company.

So, for this purpose all of HubSpot’s development team, marketing team, sales and support team started to work by keeping their Users at the center of their target.

Tactics to Leverage Content Generated By The User.

Planning is very crucial for developing a great user-generated content strategy.

Prior to launching the user-generated content campaign The timing, sequence, and coordination of the entire user-generated content campaign must be recorded and planned properly.

The marketing team must come with a proper crispy event idea. It should motivate the people and loyal customers/users to take action in the user-generated content Campaign event.

The concepts of social media contests, giveaways, Q&A, Quiz, Rewards, hashtags could be utilized effectively for the user-generated content campaign.

Cadbury User-Generated Content Case Study:

Let’s now understand about the Cadbury dairy milk #SayItWithSilk User-generated content strategy.

The idea of this SayItwithSilk campaign was that the couple would reply to Cadbury on twitter by tagging a photo. And they would be saying how they are planning to celebrate Valentine’s day. Also, the couples would have a chance to express their love about their partners.

The objective of Cadbury was to acquire new consumers for dairy milk silk chocolate and connect with people.

Basically, as you know for Valentine’s day couples would have booked a party and dinner.

Couples are in celebration mode on Valentine’s day.

So, one week before launching the campaing the Cadbury marketing team made a cool video. The hands of a couple together expressing their love and bonding was shown in the video.

This created a lot of buzz in the internet world and many people start to copy and do it in their real-life as well.

Cadbury launched a twitter campaign to leverage the User-generated content strategy.

For campaign purposes, Cadbury provided all the cool images, graphics, and fonts for the couples. This helped the pairs to show and express how they were celebrating Valentine’s day.

Cadbury used the hashtag #sayitwithsilk.

So, couples would reply back to the Cadbury handle with #Sayitwithsilk and tag a picture of their Valentine’s day celebrations. In the tweets, the couples would express their bonding and affection towards their partners.

The picture posted by the couple contained the Cadbury Sayitwithsilk campaign theme and the chocolate product theme. Cadbury Sponsored the design of a few images. Those images contained the brand logo, themes, and icons of Cadbury.

And so a lot of new people started to follow Cadbury on twitter.

More people started to tag their valentine’s day celebration photos to the Cadbury Twitter handle with the hashtag SayItwithSilk.

This created a lot of buzzes. Eventually, Cadbury got a lot of new customers for their brand.

I’m sharing a small overview of this case study published by an author on medium in this link. You might find it helpful.

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