Howdy listeners, we’re Alison.

Karin Samelson: [0:19]

And I’m Karin.

Alison Smith: [0:20]

And we love growing CPG brands.

Karin Samelson: [0:22]

We’re the founders of a digital and social media marketing agency, UMAI Marketing, and creators of the Consumer Goods Growth Course, where we’ve helped grow dozens of brands to six and seven figures.

Alison Smith: [0:33]

We’re former in-house marketers turn consumer goods marketing educators who’ve set off on a mission to provide CPG founders and marketers with actionable strategies that drive community and sales. We’re talking real results.

Karin Samelson: [0:46]

If you’re wanting to learn simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies needed to drive real brand growth without breaking the bank or sacrificing your social life, then this is the podcast for you. Let’s get into today’s episode. 

[0:58] Properly utilizing user-generated content is a great and cost-effective way to drive more sales for your brand. In today’s episode, we’re talking about how consumer goods brands can utilize user-generated content the right way to help drive sales. Hi everybody, it’s just Karin on today, and it’s a beautiful day. Well, it’s not that beautiful, it’s a little rainy and gloomy outside in Austin, Texas today, but it’s a great day because we’re going to be talking about driving sales with UGC. UGC is an acronym for user-generated content, and UGC is brand-specific content created by customers or brand advocates. It really is lo-fi, it looks like something very native on your feed while you’re scrolling. And right now, it’s some of our highest performing content and we’re going to give you a few ideas on how to utilize this content to drive sales.

[1:58] First thing you can do is start requesting permission to repost when someone tags you on social. That can help foster community and trust in your brand, which will always lead to more sales down the road. And you can also start sharing as much UGC as you can to your Instagram stories. So when someone tags you on their feed or mentions you in their stories, make sure to share that to your stories and add a link, a link sticker to your product pages on those slides so that you can try and get as many folks as you can to your website. You want to drive traffic to your product pages, you want them to look through your offerings and purchase. UGC is constantly some of our highest performing ad creatives on social as well. So you’re going to want to have a lot of UGC style ad creatives running and testing constantly.

If you want to use tagged content, so if a creator uses your product, tags you in it and you’re like, “Ooh, that would make it a really good ad,” just make sure to always get permission to repost creators’ content and you will have to specify that those are going to be used for ads. A lot of times, creators definitely want to know that. 

[3:11] And so if you’re like, “Cool, Karin, that’s great, that would be really easy if we already had creators tagging us. But what can I do if we just launched or we don’t have a lot of tagged UGC, we don’t have a lot of people using and tagging us?” The answer is ask friends and family to shoot some video testimonials for you. If you have a bit more of a budget, you can even utilize on-website apps like gogander.io to source more custom content from users. Or you can use apps like minisocial or creator.co, which pairs brands with microinfluencer creators who can produce user-generated content on demand and at more scale. So if you have a budget.

[3:55] Other ways you can source UGC is running a giveaway on social, where customers can share pictures or videos of themselves using your product. And as long as you offer a really nice, a really juicy prize to incentivize these folks to enter to win, you might get some really, really good content. Just make sure to have some fine print in there in the giveaway rules that says that you’ll be allowed to utilize those videos for marketing purposes once they enter to win. 

[4:28] So those are a few ways to source some UGC, whether you pay for it or you source it from your community or you just ask your friends and family, because we know that UGC performs and helps drive sales. So the more UGC a brand has the more social proofs and likelihood someone will follow along to learn more and eventually try the product. It’s all about that social proof and UGC really satisfies that in a lot of ways.

So that’s about it. We wanted to make it short and sweet and actionable. So if you have any questions, let us know. But thanks for listening, really appreciate you guys spending some time with me today. 

Karin Samelson: [5:05]

Thanks for listening to the UMAI Social Circle, y’all. We’re here to support you in your CPG journey, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any new podcast episodes. And while you’re at it, please leave us a review on your listening platform of choice. Shoot us at DM at UMAI Marketing on Instagram. If you have any topics you want us to cover on new podcast episodes.

Alison Smith: [5:24]

And don’t forget to access our free masterclass, where we’re showing you how to create a solid marketing strategy. You can access that at umaimarketing.com/masterclass and we’ll meet you back here for the next episode.