10 User-Generated Content Campaigns That Worked
Almost every brand and business has tired of planning out and creating new content to publish on their website, social media account, or even advertising purposes.
Content creation is not only about adding content, but it should be creative, unique, attractive, appealing, and make your readers go wow!
But from where you bring such content every time, it requires many resources, especially lots of time and money.
In such a growing competition, one requires content that builds trust, authenticity, credibility, and generates a conversion rate instantly when used to interact with your content.
Fortunately, there is a fantastic solution!
User-generated content campaigns have made it possible, and there is a universe of user-generated content that you can use in your marketing campaign.
What is user-generated content?
User-generated content (also referred to as UGC), is posted by users on various online platforms like social media and blogs, in the form of articles, pictures, videos, etc.
The original creator of the piece of content can post whatever they want, providing they abide by the rules laid down by the network.
This user content drives the marketing revolution, as it can be anything from an article written by a user to an audio or video track posted by a user.
In the recent past, user-generated content campaigns have started to get attention, mainly due to its ability to drive highly targeted traffic for websites.
So, if a Twitter user creates a post about a new product, the post will become visible to millions of users worldwide, without the need for a third-party review.
The post may link to a blog or a website where the user can make comments, adding to user-generated content campaigns’ overall effect.
But what is user-generated content? Many companies have begun to adopt the trend by using hashtags to help drive traffic.
The hashtag aims to help the organisation by making it easier for people to look up specific topics when searching for something online.
What is a user-generated content campaign, if it isn’t already part of a company’s SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy?
For one, brands today cannot afford to ignore Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. These are the three most popular social media platforms, which rank very high in terms of searches.
By connecting with a large portion of the world via these three platforms, a business can use the hashtags to boost its presence.
This, in turn, can lead to user-generated content such as photo contests, quizzes, the ever-popular honeymoon photos and more.
When using a hashtag, a social media company can post on their website to talk about how their products and services match up to others in the market.
For example, a competitor may have recently used a hashtag, such as #whynotshuffle, which talks about how a competitor’s product does not offer a “why not shuffle experience” for users.
The social media company shows prospective customers why they should choose their brand over another by linking to the post.
With this kind of social proof, a business can show its why it is better. The company can use a hashtag to back up its why is the approach.
A company can also use hashtags to give a sense of relevancy to posts. This is helpful when choosing the right platform to use for a given post.
It can help a company distinguish itself from other brands by providing user-generated content and then finding a way to get in front of the consumer to make it easier for the customer to decide on the business.
These three examples of social media marketing are an excellent way for businesses to advertise. You can also use them to build customer relations and engagement.
A brand can reach out to their customers using social media, giving them the ability to interact with one another on an even deeper level.
Social media is a powerful method for businesses to grow their businesses and reach out to consumers. They need to take advantage of what social media has to offer.
This article will discuss how you can generate user-created content campaigns and use them in your marketing without spending too many resources.
Here are ten examples that worked best for many brands, and they are practising to create new attractive content that is interactive and influential to their target audience.
10 Foolproof User-Generated Content Campaign Examples
1 – Starbucks
Starbucks launched the most participated and popular user-generated campaign in 2014.
Starbucks asked its customers to doodle and make their Starbucks cup in the most attractive design.
More than 40000 customers have posted their pictures within the three-week contest.
With this contest, Starbucks has received an enormous number of user-generated content that is attractive, authentic, and proves to improve the brand’s publicity exponentially.
2 – Burberry
Burberry is a fashion clothing company in Britain, offering a full line of all-season, fashionable clothing to its customers since 1856.
With the growing trend of social sharing, they have decided to launch a social campaign innovatively.
To engage their audience uniquely and interestingly, Burberry launched a website named “Art of the Trench” and allow customers to upload and comment on the pictures of people wearing Burberry’s Trench coat.
One of the most successful social sharing campaigns and companies has grown their sales almost by 50% every year.
3 – Coca-Cola
You may have already heard of the popular Coca-cola social media campaign.
They have launched “Share a Coke” social media content in which they asked their users to give a personalised name on their coke bottle label.
The number of social media posts have been published on the social media channels by customers with their name of coke bottles.
This campaign has gone viral, and many social media posts have been shared on social media channels with excellent customer participation.
4 – Pepsi MAX
Another soft drink manufacturing company, Pepsi MAX, launched a very creative social media campaign asking their customers to share pictures and videos telling why they prefer Pepsi Max instead of other soft drinks in the market.
They ask their customers to share their creative pictures on Instagram and other channels and a mini-website that was specially designed to publish the customer-created content.
5 – Heineken
Heineken found that their customers are looking for another type of draught for their beer and want something new.
Heineken launched Ideas Brewery campaign inviting people from age 60 to 70, who have been retired and have zero stress in their life to share their ideas.
They launched a campaign with the name “Reinvent the Draught Beer Experience”. Customers have the opportunity to share their ideas to experience beer in innovative and exciting ways with images and videos.
6 – Virgin Holidays
Virgin Holidays find social media channels as the perfect platform for their brand advertising to revamp marketing strategies to reach and attract more audience.
In 2016, Virgin Holidays launched a social media campaign with the “Seize the Holidays” hashtag.
They receive much customer-created content which is creative, attractive, and unique.
Not only this, it was so good in quality that Virgin Holidays decided to use it in the brand advertising instead of creating professional content.
7 – Expedia
Expedia wants to run social media campaigns innovatively and wants to do something new that no other brands are doing with their social media campaign.
They started gamification with their social media campaign by launching the hashtag #EyeWanderWin and asking the audience to share creative images and videos in the best quality.
In the three-week contest, Expedia received around 4350 examples of creative content from travellers, resulting in a 50% increase in traffic and more sales.
8 – Belkin
In collaboration with Lego, Belkin introduces social media campaigns to allow the audience to design their iPhone cover cases.
Audiences then post their images on social media networks with their own design of phone case.
With this user-generated content campaign, they received some fantastic iPhone cases design and changed their strategy as per their customer’s demand.
9 – Coffee For Less
Coffee for Less has found that organic traffic is interested in their product and likely to convert more, but they leave before that step.
They found a requirement of some authentic content, so they leverage their marketing with user-generated content campaigns.
They started their social review campaign from 2008 to 2011 that generated 6000 customer-generated reviews.
This helps their brand in improving ranking on search engines and increases trust and authenticity of their brand.
10 – Chobani
It is a Greek company dealing in yoghurt selling and wants to use innovative ways to engage with audiences and boost conversion rate.
They found user-generated content campaigns as one of the best content creators to promote their brand.
They launch social media campaigns to ask their customers to show their love with their product by sharing their images with Chobani yoghurt.
Leverage Your Marketing
Now you may have come to know about some of the success stories of brands with user-generated content campaigns; it’s time to leverage your game-plan and boost sales with user’s social media content.
User-generated content is unique, compelling, alluring, and foolproof to convert an audience into potential customers and push them to make instant purchase decisions.
Almost every brand is trying their hands with user-generated content campaigns and receiving excellent results with it.
So what are you waiting for?
Strategise strong social media campaigns with hashtags and generate lots of perfect content for your brand’s marketing.
