How to Leverage User-Generate Content in Your Marketing Strategy

User-generated content helps build trust and credibility with your audience by harnessing the collective knowledge of your brand community. Here's how to integrate UGC to help your brand achieve marketing success.

These days, the phrase "content is king" still holds true (to an extent). But the rules surrounding content production as well as our understanding of it as marketers has changed. No longer is it about having content in spades, it's all about quality.

Having one great piece of content is always going to be better than 10 second-rate pieces that don't add any value for readers. However, if you can consistently produce great content on a regular basis, that's enough to dominate the online marketing realm.

Unfortunately, about 70% of marketers still lack an integrated or consistent content strategy, based on research from Altimeter. Creating great content is hard, and many marketers still don't have sufficient knowledge or adequate resources to produce high-quality content on a regular basis. Some produce generic content, which is akin to replicating a cola brand. You're not innovating and it'll never be as good as Coke, in which case no one's going to buy/drink it.

Let's face it, most brands don't have the resources or expertise to compete with larger, more established companies with bigger marketing budgets. So how can they create high-quality content at scale?

Well, one great way is to crowdsource. No one knows your readers better than they know themselves, and you simply can't compete with the collective knowledge of an entire audience. In this article, we'll focus on why brands should let their users help create value in content.

How to Leverage User-Generated Content Owned Media vs. Earned Media

Different types of media can be utilized to improve your organization's value creation initiatives. One type is "owned media." This refers to the content that your organization has 100% control over, including your company's official website, company blogs, and your official social media pages.

Owned media may also come in the form of case studies, whitepapers, and ebooks. These types of media are not only controlled in terms of production, they're also controlled in terms of distribution, because much of it is "gated". The primary goal of owned media is to provide value to provide value through content marketing to generate and nurture leads.

Though there are many advantages to having complete control over your content, it doesn't always work well to build trust with your audience because it isn't "peer reviewed". In some cases, owned media can also end up being over-technical, product-centric, and self-serving, hence the lack of appreciation from users. There's only so much a brand can achieve if all their conversations and interactions are one-way.

The media type at the opposite end of the scale is "earned media." Simply put, this refers to the media exposure earned by your brand through word-of-mouth. This exposure could stem from your own SEO efforts, high-quality content you publish that goes viral, great customer experience delivered, or pretty much anything else your brand does that compels individual users to create content with your brand's name on it.

As the title suggests, "earned media" is the type of media or exposure your brand has earned by doing something positive or negative. These also come in various forms, including reviews and feedback, recommendations, press coverage, and articles, amongst others. The reason earned media works so well to build relationships is because it places users into your media channel, turning attention away from your brand and onto your audience.

In terms of building awareness and trust, earned media can be a gold mine. It helps build your community through social proof, and provides you with user-created value that leads to more opportunities for engagement. Not only does it facilitate improved ways to learn about your prospects/customers, it opens up a dialogue for two-way conversations so users can interact with your brand.

Oh yeah, it's also free.

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