User Generated Content: how to expand your business, using your community’s full potential

As a business, you use different content marketing strategies to advance your business goals and raise awareness upon your products. These strategies include publishing regular content, using SEO best practices, leveraging digital content, and so on. However, in today’s competitive environment, you have to also add user-generated content to this list.

In the following, we’ll highlight how successful brands have used user generated content to break through a very crowded field.

Time is up for one-way conversation

Today’s users have much higher standards when it comes to content and online marketing. Creating quality content in the current market requires expertise, knowledge, skill, and access to up-to-date and effective resources and methods. However, unfortunately, still 70% of sites that engage in content marketing and social networking do not utilize a coherent, integrated and systematic strategy. Even many big brands continue to use old methods in content marketing, and send repetitive messages through an outdated language to the audience. It is not strange that under current circumstances, many will never be heard and many strategies will not be effective.

As consumers increase their awareness, brand names should also be smarter and more effective and seek to gain a competitive advantage over their traditional rivals. One of these winning strategies is to use User Generated Content as a way of introducing your products.

Why users can be great copywriters

There are many ways to encourage your users to produce effective and useful content. Don’t wait around for people to start talking about your brand. Conversely, you need to create a channel to create a conversation about your brand and also you use the user generated contents to introduce your products to new customers. Any footprint of an audience on your social media and website is a content that he/she generates and can be very helpful to your business. This can be a win-win game for both the customer and the business. This type of content is known as User-Generated Content (UGC) in the content marketing circuits. Proper use of this concept will bring great benefits to your business.

Here are some benefits of user-generated content:

• It helps you recognize your target audience.
• Increases users’ exposer to your brand, and helps making them spend more time on your social and web pages.
• It increases the level of customer satisfaction, through maintaining a dialogue.
• Will make your customers connect with a larger community and thus expand your business as a result.
• The content generated by users can increase the traffic of your website through search engines.
• The content generated by users is generally before being published, has been controlled, reviewed which makes it much more reliable.

Some examples of User Generated Content

Now that you understand the meaning and importance of user generated content, we will give you some tips to take advantage of it.

As we mentioned, UGC is simply any trace of words, video or sound that your users may leave, in relation to your products. This may include comments, testimonials, guest blog posts, etc., and is generally will be published to a general audience. Here are some of the most examples of user generated content.

1. Publish Testimonials

Testimonials are meant to be a costumer’s experience of your products and are used as a marketing tool. A testimonial is a piece of writing that customers write in praising of your services and support. Sharing these posts with other users will prove your credibility and customer’s satisfaction with your services to the newcomers.

Publishing of a testimonial not only helps with your on-page content, but it can bring stability to your business and encourage new audiences to join your customers’ community.

For not-so-big names, testimonials act as effective marketing leverage. Content marketing experts recommend testimonials to be used on the main page through ways, including slider widgets, sidebar, and so on.

2. Use guest writers on your blog

Welcome guest writers to write on your blog, website or social media. Through their posts, you can promote your business, while focusing on other marketing initiatives. One of the ways that allow your users to guest-write on your WordPress website is to use WPForms. Through this plugin, users can write their posts in WordPress without entering the admin panel. You can even accept posts without registration.

However, we recommend that you review them to make sure it’s up to your standards before publishing them on your site.

3. Encourage users to comment

Comments are the most straightforward way to interact with users. So it’s important to review the comments section of your WordPress blog and social media pages and encourage users to post comments under your posts. Ask users to share their experiences with you and other members. Always keep a certain line of communication, and respond as much as possible to comments. You can even hold contests in the comment section and give away prizes

4. Allow users to review

Search engines are obsessed with reviews and ranking systems. They even can show the stars on the search result page for everyone to see. Take advantage of this opportunity and create a way for your WordPress and social media users to review your products and services. This method will give the users an opportunity to engage more with your brand and express themselves straightforwardly.

5. Start social media campaigns and display posts on your website

One of the most successful ways to increase interaction between the audience and brand is to launch targeted campaigns in social media. Use this potential and then publish the selected views of your audience through your website. To start, design a creative campaign and introduce it to your users in simple terms. Then encourage them to participate in your campaign through writing, taking pictures or making interesting videos.

6. Create a small community within your site

Try to create a small community on your site by letting visitors register and interact with your content. Although don’t forget that Rome was not built in a day.

Also, maintaining a community of loyal members and fan clubs has its own challenges and requires a lot of effort to be managed. Be careful that your efforts should be continuous and unified to be effective. A users community belongs to users and they can freely create content as they wish. When there is a space available to users to talk about your brand and other topics, there is a risk that you will be exposed to negativity, destructive views, and even legal troubles. So you need to maintain a certain level of control over these space. You can also choose an experienced manager to be in charge of the community.

Conclusion

Through using user-generated content, expert recommendations, and of course getting help from content marketing specialists, you can create innovative and effective content and provide more reliable strategies to introduce your brand. All these solutions ultimately lead to more visits, keeping current customers and also attracting new customers to expand your business.