Thunderbolt Digital is a trusted Surrey digital agency offering professional services to local SMEs including web design and development, hosting, SEO, SMM online marketing Farnham, and more. As many marketers will tell you, it’s getting harder and harder to get noticed by consumers online, let alone to get them to engage with your brand! However, this doesn’t mean that it’s a lost effort – sometimes you just need to approach things a little differently, and user-generated content is something that could help your online marketing approach more than you’d initially think!
Utilising user-generated content can give you access to another form of influencers, which can net you more traffic, leads, and customers in a similar vein as recommendations and word of mouth, which are often viewed as a more trustworthy form of advertising. On top of this, user-generated content is 35 percent more memorable than any other media, lending you longevity that you may not get elsewhere.
It must also be noted that user-generated content, especially reviews and recommendations, can help lend your brand ‘social proof’ where new customers are persuaded to give something a try based on popularity (i.e. “I’ll have what they’re having”). Along with a tendency to follow the crowd (or actively rebel against it, depending on the demographic and message communicated) user content often appears less fake or staged than content created by a brand, which is something not to be underestimated when genuineness is something highly valued by the average contemporary consumer.
It’s important to remember that people love having their content shared and effort recognised, which is not only incentive for customers to make content for you, but can also lead to the development of brand loyalty once you share and validate a user’s content. This can actually help build a connection between company and customer – after all, people will always feel more warmly towards a brand who has shared, liked, or retweeted something of theirs than one that hasn’t!