As Co-Founder and CCO of Mavely, Peggy O’Flaherty created an entire company around helping everyday women tell their stories and build their brands. One of the ways she accomplishes this? Through user-generated content (UGC).
In her recent talk at 2021’s Traffic & Conversion Summit, O’Flaherty shared her tips and strategies for helping businesses grow through UGC, including 10 steps to take to start activating creators to generate content, raise awareness, and drive conversions.
The Impact of Influencers and Creators
Influencers and creators have disrupted how people interact with brands. Not convinced about just how much UGC can do for your business? These statistics speak for themselves.
- The creator economy is 50 million strong and the fastest-growing small business
- 83 percent of individuals make purchases based on friends’ recommendation
- Top D2C companies have raised $2.32 billion, but spent 50 percent of that on customer acquisition
- VC firms invested $2N into creator-focused startups in 2021
Meanwhile, social media platforms are increasingly “shoppable,” and devising new technologies to support the influencer-brand relationship.
As customer acquisition costs continue to rise and given the comparatively lower cost of UGC, the takeaway is clear, according to O’Flaherty: “Influencer marketing is a long-term play.”
The Power of Everyday Influencers
While there are alternative options like macro-influencers and passive customer referrals, O’Flaherty recommends focusing on one group, in particular. Everyday influencers.
Why? For starters, they’re less expensive than macro-influencers and more effective than passive customer referrals.
They’re also the most authentic group, and can be especially successful when it comes to raising brand awareness and driving conversions.
10 Steps to Make the Most of UGC for Your Brand
O’Flaherty recommends taking these steps to start getting creators to generate UGC for your brand at scale:
- Design an activation plan based on key objectives
- Define your target creators and social persona
- Curate an ideal creator for your brand
- Identify the best social channels
- Connect with creators on a live training
- Gift products to make it easy as possible to get things into the hands of your influencers
- Measure results in real-time to adjust and correct
- Improve your Net Promoter Score (NPS) through feedback
- Conduct post-campaign wrap reports
- Re-activate top performers
The Outcomes of UGC
When you take these steps, you can look forward to getting powerful results, including:
- The rights to all the UGC for your brand
- Driving new customers
- Growing brand awareness
- Igniting social buzz
- Increasing the reach of new audiences
- Building long-term brand advocates
One last word of advice shared by O’Flaherty?
The potential gains with everyday influencers and UGC are massive — if you know how to leverage them to your advantage.
If you don’t have someone on the inside with the knowledge and experience to activate everyday people to tell your brand story for you, companies like Mavely can help.
