Introduction
When we talk about marketing these days, the most vital component for it is known to be the content as the importance of trust and engagement rises among marketing campaigns. Nowadays brands and marketers make huge investments to make their marketing campaigns & activities attractive, interesting, and influential. But the challenge has been to find the content that can help them achieve these goals. User-generated content has emerged as the ultimate solution to these challenges and drives marketing success & growth for brands & marketers. So, what exactly is user-generated content & why should you use it?
Table of Contents
What Is User-Generated Content?
User-generated content or UGC or consumer-generated content is any piece of content that social media and digital media users have created and shared on these platforms. Talking about marketing, user-generated content is when customers create and share content based on their experiences, ideas, opinions, reviews, feedback, etc. that is about or relevant to the brands & businesses. It is shared by real customers based on their actual experiences with a business relating to their investments. This makes the user-generated content highly trustworthy, credible, relatable and reliable. Given these attributes, it becomes the perfect choice for brands and marketers to leverage it in their marketing campaigns and achieve their goals. Here we have listed some of the best reasons why you should use user-generated content marketing.
6 Reasons To Use User-Generated Content
1. Get an Unlimited Stream Of Original Content
As we discussed, content is extremely useful for the success of any marketing campaign these days, especially after the digital media impact is growing among users globally. So, it is essential to have original and fresh content that can help to empower the marketing campaigns. But the challenge that marketers and brands face is constant content creation that is valuable, intriguing and engaging. This requires huge investments in resources such as labour or time but user-generated content is quite different as you can get an unlimited flow of UGC from social media platforms where billions of users share valuable content daily. With UGC, you get an unlimited hub of content that you can collect and curate as per your needs and use in marketing too with minimal resource investment and better effectiveness.
2. Let Users Be Your Trust-Builders
Lately, the components such as trust, authenticity, reliability, etc. have been in the spotlight among brands and marketers as they have realized that promotional brand-centric marketing is less effective and has a short life. 
Also, spammy over promotional misrepresentation marketing has caused distrust and authenticity among the users of the marketing and the brand itself leading to harming the brand image and identity. Thus, user-generated content again provides the best solution as it is shared by real customers driven by their real experiences so which makes it authentic, reliable and trustworthy more than branded content. Trust and authenticity are massive factors in defying user engagement and the results that a marketing campaign will generate from the users.
3. Display Brand Advocacy & Build Desirability
Nowadays there are only a few brands globally for which the customers can take guarantee or credibility for the brand image and its products/services quality. Therefore, brand advocacy being so rare has become extremely valuable among brands & potential customers. 
User-generated content about your brand is like the positive word of mouth that users are sharing with their networks and it hugely influences the purchase decisions of potential customers. This advocacy by customers for the brand about its quality, value, image, etc. leads to causing brand desirability among the customers of the brand where more and more users want to associate themselves with the brand.
4. Build Social Media Reach & Influence
We all know that social media platforms are the primary and most important marketing channels for most brands globally. Therefore, it becomes essential to have a strong brand presence and influence on social media platforms. Building social media presence and influence requires content but not branded content as people tend to disregard such content due to the no value addition of engagement elements. Whereas user-generated content increases engagement as it is more relatable, realistic, and interesting. This leads to more sharing and ultimately more reach and exposure for the brand leading to increased following and brand influence on the users.
5. Give Users Engagement Opportunities’
Engagement is probably the most important and success-defining factor for any marketing campaign be it online or offline. So, it is essential to target user engagement and content is the best way to do so. As we discussed that user-generated content is more relevant and realistic so it will create trust among the users leading to attracting them to engage with content. Also, it will show the brand’s trust in its customers and transparency in marketing. Along with that, UGC marketing will also create a chain reaction where more and more users will be motivated to share useful and valuable content for your brand.
6. Magnify Your Conversions & Sales
We will start with the fact that over 90% of the users trust user-generated content while making their purchase decisions online and social ads with UGC get a 5 times higher click-through rate. Increasing conversions and sales are important goals for any marketing campaign and user-generated content is a perfect way to do so by displaying trustable, authentic, and valuable information that can positively influence consumer purchase decisions. The increasing conversions and sales will lead to boosted revenue generation and more profitable opportunities with added benefits of brand building.
Conclusion
These were some of the best benefits of user-generated content and this valuable UGC is hugely available on social and digital platforms. Not just these but there are many more benefits that you can avail of using UGC in your marketing along with a powerful omnichannel marketing strategy. To get started, you can leverage a tool like the UGC platform to help you create your user-generated content marketing strategy. It will help you in collecting & curating UGC and displaying your UGC campaigns across different marketing channels.
