In the ever-changing world of marketing, user-generated content (UGC) is the current trend, and B2B companies are reaping its benefits.
It significantly influences buyers’ purchase decisions and lowers businesses’ customer acquisition cost (CAC).
While UGC is predominantly associated with B2C, it left a trace in the majority of B2B buyers’ journeys.
According to Winterberry Group, 44% of B2B buyers consider UGC in the form of peer reviews.
Table of Contents
What is User-Generated Content (UGC)?
User-generated content (UGC), also known as consumer-generated content, is content produced by customers of a particular product/ service, rather than the brand itself.
UGC is promotional content that can be in the form of text, images, audio, and videos. Examples of UGC include reviews, testimonials, forum discussions, and social media posts. The ultimate goal of user-generated content marketing is to increase the visibility of your product/ service, increase your sales conversion rate, and build trust.
There is a fine difference between user-generated content (UGC) and employee-generated content (EGC). If content is generated and circulated by employees of a particular organization, then it is known as EGC. This act of sharing content to promote their employer brand is called employee advocacy.
A company can build UGC either organically or via paid partnerships with influencers, customers, or fans. However, the organic way of building UGC will influence greater trust and authenticity among the audience, as it reflects genuine user experiences and word-of- mouth recommendations rather than paid endorsements.
User-Generated Content (UGC) Marketing
User-generated content marketing is a subset of influencer marketing in which influencers, customers, or fans generate content on a specific product or service.
While both user-generated content marketing and influencer marketing increase product/ service visibility to newer audiences, there is a distinction between them.
The user-generated content is created by influencers, customers, or fans who have used the product or service before they post a UGC in the form of text, audio, or video.
Influencer marketing on the other hand may or may not use a particular product/ service that they promote. It’s a paid collaboration between the influencer and the brand they promote. Nowadays, user-generated content marketing campaigns outperform influencer marketing campaigns as they emit more trust.
How to Build User-Generated Content (UGC) Around Your Product
As mentioned earlier, UGC can be in the form of reviews, testimonials, forum discussions, and social media posts.
Of these formats, building forum discussions, reviews, and testimonials is organic and autonomous if you have achieved the product-market fit or your users have had an aha moment.
In case you have difficulty getting more reviews from your customers even after you achieved a product-market fit, you can incentivize them using interactive content marketing. Interactive content marketing requires active participation from your audience. Combine interactive content with incentivization to increase the engagement rate.
You can easily implement incentivized interactive content marketing in your GTM with a tool like GoZen Engage.
GoZen Engage helps you create quizzes, polls, calculators, and games, such as spin the wheel, flip cards, and more. By using this tool, you can automate the incentivization part effortlessly.
Unlike the above-discussed UGC formats, the social media UGC needs a manual effort from your content marketing team. Let’s see that one by one.
Building and using the user-generated content (UGC) around your product involves three stages:
Let’s explore these stages one by one.
Setting the Stage
Create a profile on B2B software review sites
Peer reviews have become an important factor in the purchase decisions of B2B buyers. According to G2, the 2023 stats on buyer behavior trends report has revealed that 76% of B2B buyers believe in trustworthy peer review websites.
This emphasizes the importance of creating an account on G2.com, Capterra, and Trustpilot. Just by creating these accounts, you have set the stage for your products
Creating a profile on G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot is completely free since they offer a freemium pricing model. The free plan allows you to collect reviews and customize your profile forever. However, to get an advanced level of profile customization and premium customer support, you need to upgrade your plan.
Build a community around your product
Community building is the new organic channel that marketers are focusing on after the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is not only the organic channel that generates leads but also plays a crucial role in user- generated content marketing. Here’s how.
To get organic user-generated content, you first need to create opportunities for your users.
By building a community around your niche and nurturing those audiences, you are increasing the probability of channeling in more UGC.
A community gives three things to any B2B business:
Any community will thrive based on how much value it is creating.
If your community solves real-time problems and your audience reaps the benefits, they will either become your customer and give you a review (which is a UGC) or do word-of-mouth marketing about your product or service.
Here are a few tips for maintaining a community to get organic UGC:
Basically, you must aim to generate more value and activeness as a moderator.
Apart from that:
All these community management etiquettes will get you more UGC sooner or later.
In short, community building is like setting the stage for your users, providing the tools and environment they need to create and share their user-generated content organically and at regular intervals.
You can create user-generated content without building a community. However, building a community is beneficial in the long term, as each new member could become a valuable advocate for your brand.
User-generated content in social media
For social media traction, your team needs to put in some work, such as:
Create hashtag campaigns
Create engaging hashtag campaigns related to your product or company on the whole and ask your customers to use the particular hashtag to share their experiences about your product.
For example, we can create a hashtag called #zenhead derived from our brand, GoZen. You can even use your community name as a hashtag to get relevant engagement. Hashtag campaigns are a win-win for both parties. You get UGCs from your customers and they get a greater visibility for their brand based on the popularity of the hashtag.
Host a Live Q&A session
Hosting a live Q&A session with your customers could be another way to attract new UGCs on the spot.
By hosting a live Q&A session, you are making it easy for your customers to share user- generated content.
Compared to other channels, hosting Q&A is the most cost-effective way to engage with your audience. So, you can connect with your customers and partners via Q&A sessions without worrying about burning the marketing budget.
Conduct contest
Introduce contests to encourage your customers to create content related to your product and service.
For example, you can announce discounts or additional credits to customers who have shared photos or videos showcasing how they use your products.
Establish partnerships with UGC creators
Apart from targeting your power users, you can also explore paid partnerships and collaboration with influencers in your niche.
It is not something like blind paid promotion in which the influencer promotes the product/ service without hands-on product/ service experience.
Instead, you need to ask the UGC creators to use your product or service for a week or two before creating a review.
Compared to the other methods discussed above, this collaboration could be a game changer for you, if you collaborate with the right UGC creators.
One tip I could give you is to choose the UGC creators based on the post engagement and not on the follower base, considering the shift in the social media algorithm from follower-based distribution to interest-based distribution.
Automate UGC Collection and Leverage UGC
Once you have achieved the product-market fit, taken your users through aha moments, built a community and nurtured the audience, and optimal social media presence, the UGC starts to be acquired organically.
So far, you have only set the stage for UGC accumulation. The next step is capturing those UGCs generated around your product/ service and showcasing them to close more deals. However, the UGC collection and showcase is a time-consuming process. It is essential to automate this tedious task to make room for your marketing team to focus on the GTM strategy.
Let’s see how you can leverage UGC to boost sales for your business:
Create a UGC hub on your website to increase credibility
Create a UGC hub on your website to increase credibility
UGC hub has become an important part of B2B landing pages that plays a major role in converting the MoFu and BoFu leads.
Every business owners and marketing teams know that a website is their digital visiting card and is a crucial purchase point. Hence, they know the importance of embedding testimonials on their websites.
But, the thing is majority of the marketing teams are doing it manually. The process of importing testimonials from multiple sources can be automated easily with the help of tools like GoZen Testimonials.
Compared to the other social proof platforms in the market, GoZen Testimonials can collect reviews from multiple sources, such as Google, LinkedIn, G2, and Trustpilot.
This single platform can be used to collect, manage, and distribute testimonials seamlessly.
Highlights of GoZen Testimonials include:
and case studies
Create and publish case studies for strong social proof
Case studies are another important section that influences conversion rate.
A strategic design and placement of case studies could be a game changer for your business.
But, unfortunately, many B2B landing pages suck either in design or placement.
Case studies can be both an article and a video. Strategic design is essential in creating a featured image for both.
An excellent featured image must contain a clear photo of your customers along with exact numbers, such as reply rate, conversion rate, and revenue generated.
Here’s a sample of how we create featured images in GoZen:
Next, the case studies must be placed on the main homepage, product pages, and solution pages as a section.
If you have mastered the design and placement of case study placements, you will have a greater influence on your website visitors.
Publish as social media posts for greater visibility
Utilizing the UGC content via social media platforms is a low-cost marketing strategy as it promotes the brand without significant investment in advertising.
Not all your leads come via your website, some of them might come from your social media presence.
Engaging with customers via testimonials and case studies can lead to increased loyalty and repeat purchases.
At the same time, you shouldn’t spend time creating social media templates to push your UGCs on social media platforms.
Instead, you can use GoZen Testimonials’ in-built UGC to social media template builder to automate this social media UGC promotion.
Run UGC Ad campaigns
Conventional Google and Meta ads are oversaturated, so they will not usually get users’ attention.
To outplay the crowd in ads, you need to use a technique called pattern interrupt. This can be achieved by leveraging UGC ads. Simple.
You can get 4X high click-through rates (CTR) and achieve a 50% drop in cost-per-click (CPC) with UGC-based ads compared to other type of ads.
This improvement is not only because of pattern interruption but also because of the psychology of people trusting people.
To design UGC Ad campaigns, you can use the assets from your social media hashtag campaigns and videos you get from the UGC partnerships.
Get More Testimonials in Customer Review Platforms
The vendor platform is not the only point of purchase. Times have changed and consumers lose interest in corporate branding and employee advocacy.
This not only applies to B2B SaaS but to all kinds of B2B sectors.
89% of global buyers revealed that they consider customer reviews before they buy a product.
Word of mouth is the new marketing. Consumers prefer to hear from fellow consumers before making a purchase decision.
Hence, any B2B business must create a profile on customer review platforms. Only if you set up the stage, you can accumulate UGCs passively.
Some of the B2B software review sites:
Some of the Non-SaaS B2B review sites:
Take Away
Humans are naturally wired to trust peers over brands due to psychological principles like social proof, empathy, familiarity bias, and the bandwagon effect.
Hence, in today’s “people trust people” era, leveraging user-generated content (UGC) taps into this trust by showcasing authentic experiences that feel relatable and unbiased.
At the same time, collecting, managing, and showcasing the UGCs must be automatic and not a manual task.
FAQs
1. How to collect testimonials from clients?
You can use social proof platforms to collect, manage, and display your testimonials on your websites. These platforms collect your reviews from multiple sources, such as Google, LinkedIn, G2, and Trustpilot and automatically showcase them on websites as wall of love or widgets, case studies, and social media templates.
2. Difference between influencers and UGC creators?
The difference between influencers and UGC creators is that UGC creators promote a product/ service only after gaining first-hand experience and knowledge, which refers to experience and knowledge gained over time.
On the other side, influencers may or may not have firsthand knowledge about the product or service that they are promoting.
