When you are to make a buying decision, who will you trust more – the advertisement of a brand or the advice from a genuine buyer? A human relies on the opinions of colleagues, friends, or relatives who have used the product more than unfamiliar models advertising it. The principle of the user-generated content is based particularly on this concept. This all is about letting your customers do the whole advertising for you. Anyway, the social proof of authenticity is not the only benefit of UGC. There are other ways you can use user-generated content in the benefit of your brand and right now, at InstaBF, we are going to discuss them on the example of several big brands’ success.
SEO Benefits
Positive reviews you get from your customers can significantly improve the SEO rankings. According to the statistics, around 25% of the search results counted on the 20 largest brands of the world are links to UGC.
Boost Instagram Reach and Growth
IGC is tightly connected with social media and Instagram in particular. A happy and content customer ends up tagging friends in UGC and that automatically leads to outreach and the growth of the brand’s following.
Acquire Audience Insights
For a smart brand, UGC can be a real gold mine of data. Having a huge bunch of opinions and feedback by real users of your products, you can get precious insights about what to drop or improve in your services or products.
Big Brands Using UGC to Get Inspired
Some big brands are reaping the benefits of user-generated content. You, as a small Instagram brand, can learn much from them. Let’s go over some of them so that you get a better picture of what to do yourself.
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Starbucks
This brand perfectly knows how to make customers promote the brand. Let’s take the popular #RedCupContest launched every December. The brand asks its fans to submit images of their coffees to win a gift card by the brand. And their customers always look forward to participating in the contest. Starbucks garners around 30k photos of red cups with coffee during every contest. All this leads to brand exposure and a boost in sales after all participants have to buy red cups from Starbucks to take a photo.
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Delaware North
Delaware North is a global food and hospitality company. It publishes a huge number of UGC-powered hubs with amazing content from their outdoor enthusiasts to encourage fans to book more outdoor adventures while integrating social depth among its websites. This company uses its consumers as brand advocates and capitalizes on the authentic UGC that they get from customers worldwide. For sharing their best vacation photos on Instagram, the brand’s fans have such hashtags as #LizardIsland, #EIQuestro, #TenayaLodge, etc. In only several months, the brand received over half a million social wall views across the websites.
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BMW
There is a special hashtag existing (#BMWRepost) that perhaps every BMW owner on Instagram is aware of. They use it to share Insta posts of their rides on BMW cars. Creating the hashtag is a mutually-beneficial step as BMW fans get a chance to show off their rides while the brand gets tons of free advertising. Adhering to BMW’s example, you can create an avenue on Instagram for your consumers to brag about your brand and products.