What is User Generated Content and Why is it Essential for Brand Trust?

Why is UGC or user generated content so important to building brand trust online? If you’re not familiar with UGC, read this.

Marketers have long understood the importance of User-Generated Content (UGC) for marketing purposes. UGC comes in many different forms like reviews, ratings, blog comments and so much more. One of the biggest hurdles for small businesses is understanding how to use user-generated content to build trust and authority online.

Since social media has become an integral part of digital marketing for its massive user base, it has become an essential component for UGC; which is why it serves to be one of the best marketing tools for brands.

The key to establishing trust with UGC is to bridge the gap between all of your online channels so that your brand can connect with your users and potential audience as well.

If you’re a little lost in regards to this topic, let’s back track a little and talk more about what UGC is, then we’ll talk about how you benefit from it.

What is User-Generated Content?

 

Any form of content created by a user in favor of a product without any kind of paid promotion involved can be defined as User-Generated Content (UGC).

This content should be publicly available on social media. The content can be in the form of images, videos, blogs, audios, testimonials, tweets and everything else in between.

With the increasing use of social media, UGC seems to be spreading like wildfire. It has already started taking over digital marketing and the day is not far when UGC will be ruling the digital marketing industry. It possesses so much power due to its genuine and trustworthy nature.

As I mentioned earlier, it is an unpaid form of promotion, and nobody would do that until and unless they actually liked the product. This is exactly why it convinces new users to go ahead and give the product a try for they might actually like the product as others did.

Why Marketers Trust User-Generated Content?

When it comes to marketers, their primary goal is to reach a target audience in a manner that they are persuaded to buy a product.

What better way to do that than UGC?

UGC is effective because it serves the most needed aspects of a marketing strategy may it be user engagement, decrease bounce rate, higher sales or brand trust.

• User Engagement and Audience Reach

While your users post about your brand, their followers get aware of your presence in the market. This widens your potential audience and targets a large number of people. It also increases the probability of other people posting about your brand too, which will eventually spread your brand awareness.

You can encourage users to post more about your products by featuring their posts on your brand page or website as well. They might even start posting to get featured in your posts.

• Reduces Bounce Rate and Increases Sales

As I mentioned in the above point, UGC helps spread brand awareness. The more people are cognizant of your brand, the more people will want to buy your products.

User generated content has the unique ability to communicate your brand story more effectively.

• eCommerce clients who interact with a user generated customer photo on a site are 9.6% more likely to convert.
• 63% of shoppers spend more time engaged with customer photos.

• Increases Brand Trust

UGC being an unpaid form of promotion is the biggest factor here. It depicts that the users who are posting about your products genuinely mean what they post. Otherwise, they would not have spent their time to post something they don’t mean.

Along with this, UGC persuades customers to engage, because the content is viewed as unbiased.

• 63% of shoppers trust customer photos more than brand or retailer photos.
• Featuring UGC at the point of purchase increases sales conversions by 7%.

• Works as customer reviews and ratings

Apart from the fact that they’re actually customer reviews and ratings in a new form, they work well to influence people. Studies show that 92% of people consider reviews and rating before making a purchase and UGC can help influence their decision very smoothly. By showing the product in use as well as mentioning how good the product is, users make the buyer’s decision a no brainer.

• Builds a community

The group of users that are posting about your brand and using your products get a platform to connect and inspire each other. This creates a sense of community. This adds credibility to your brand attracting more users to be a part of that community.

How UGC benefits E-commerce platforms?

E-commerce platforms are always worried about the cut-throat competition they have to face. They are always thinking about what different can they do to get ahead of their competitors. UGC is the answer.

As I have already mentioned that UGC can help a brand in various ways, e-commerce platforms can take advantage of that. The latest trends among the e-commerce industry is shoppable posts, using UGC for creating shoppable posts can work wonders for you. It can help you transform your conventional e-commerce to a social commerce platform.

Using UGC for your social commerce platform can create social proof for your brand, showcasing how much people love your products. It can also display the product in action with real-life backgrounds which makes it easier for the buyers to make their decision about the purchase. You don’t have to worry about customer reviews and ratings as well, those posts themselves will be giving away how much users like it.

Integrating social via embedding a feed on your website is a great way to easily increase visual engagement and unify your brand channels. If there is no good content, visitors can always switch to some other website in seconds. Giving them dynamic content with UGC can give you an opportunity to increase their dwell time which will be good for your SEO too.

Take Away

Using UGC for your brand can result to be highly valuable and beneficial for your brand. Along with all those points I mentioned above, I can tell you that it can be the best way to get into the e-commerce market with a bang. Presently UGC is the most genuine and trustworthy way to showcase your products and their reviews. It adds credibility to the brand and helps to acquire and recognize loyal users of your brand.

You can use UGC for your brand by creating a social media wall through social media aggregator tools. They can collect content from different social media platforms and combine them to form one unified social wall. You can embed this wall to your website which will not only make your website more engaging but more attractive and aesthetic as well.

So what are you still doing here? Go integrate UGC with your brand without any more delays.