UGC Best practices

What are the top challenges of content marketing?

The top three challenges consistently cited by content marketers are:

Although marketing challenges vary across industries, team sizes, their goals are and how they measure performance, the pressure to deliver results faster is a consistent and growing theme.

Increasing Engagement / Proving ROI

Marketers are expected to justify the cost and investment of their marketing effort with a return of investment directly tied to revenue. Management often use conventional, quantitative metrics to measure results. Most marketers however understand that engagement is a long-term strategy to more revenue and prefer this as a more qualitative metric.

The more users engage, the more likely they are to purchase and turn into loyal customers over time with repeat purchases. Engagement is a precursor to results yet increasing and maintaining consistent engagement remains a top challenge for marketers.

How UGC solves challenges with engagement and proving ROI

Consumers today are digitally savvy, value driven and socially conscious. They have higher expectations and demand more from brands. They respond to content that is ‘real and organic’ over ‘perfect and packaged’ and are happy to engage with brands they believe are authentic. They also expect empathy from brands. 83% of Millennials say it’s important for the companies they buy from to align with their beliefs and values, and 68% of Gen Zers expect brands to contribute to society.

UGC is trusted more than brand-created content and is pivotal in connecting with consumers – social proof validates the consumer-to-product and consumer-to-brand relationship.

Integrating user-generated content across the buyer journey leads to higher engagement across more diverse audiences. Moreover, brands that are prioritising value creation over revenue generation are reaping greater rewards. In particular, brands with a clear purpose that aligns with consumer values are building greater emotional connections with their audiences through user-generated content. Emotionally connected consumers are more likely to purchase, and more likely to become loyal advocates.

Producing high-quality content

Content marketing challenges – producing high-quality content

Marketers are struggling to create content that converts – content that is original, relevant to their audiences and promotes engagement. There is often uncertainty as to what content to create and marketers risk allocating time and resources producing content that doesn’t resonate with their audience and leads to underperforming results.

Consistently producing quality content fast enough, across different formats, is a top challenge faced by marketers.

How UGC solves challenges of consistently producing high-quality content

Millennials and Gen Z are driving authentic content creation by sharing their genuine experiences in more creative ways and across different formats than ever before. 82% of Gen Z trust brands that use images of actual customers in their ads and 62% of millennials say that if a brand engages with them on social networks, they are more likely to become a loyal customer.

90% of consumers want more content from brands and more than 50% of consumers want brands to tell them what type of content to create and share, but only 16% of brands actually do it.

Marketers incorporating UGC in their content strategy spark a two-way dialogue between brands and consumers, capturing content from a diverse range narratives and perspective – unmatched by traditional marketing.

By providing clear directions and marketing with their audience, rather than to their audience, marketers can tap into an unlimited flow of high-quality content that builds awareness, encourages engagement, and promotes trust and loyalty.

Lack of Resources

Content marketing challenges – cost vs quality vs time

Marketers consistently feel like they don't have adequate resources to succeed – citing time, budget, and team size as the main challenges. Reduced budgets and head count lead to marketers having more responsibilities with fewer resources.

While there is an expectation that marketers should produce more engagement and tie it back to ROI, creating and properly marketing engaging content takes time and costs more.

Marketers often juggle multiple roles but are still expected to deliver results and deliver them quickly. This leaves many with the all-too-common trilemma of having to trade-off between cost, quality, and time.

How UGC solves challenges with lack of resources

Consumers seek authenticity form brands - 76% of consumers are more likely to trust content shared by their peers rather than content shared by brands.
The production costs for UGC are significantly lower - sourcing, curating, and acquiring rights to user-generated content is not only less costly compared to creating original brand content, but it’s also considerably faster.
In addition to lower production costs and shorter timeframes, UGC also performs better compared to brand created content. 85% of consumers find UGC more influential than any other form of brand content, yielding better results across awareness, engagement, and conversion KPIs.

Cost vs Performance benefits of UGC compared to brand created content

Marketers that integrate UGC in their strategy can significantly reduce costs whilst stretching budgets by using UGC to supplement branded content.

UGC-centric strategies lead to higher rates of engagement and with UGC offering an unlimited flow of diverse, relevant, and authentic content, marketers can focus on curating rather than creating content and integrating it across their marketing touchpoints faster.

When compared with creating original content in-house or outsourcing to agencies, sourcing, and curating hundreds of pieces of UGC is a practical and cost-effective solution.

UGC marketing platforms such as Buzzspark helps marketers address their top challenges by acquiring diverse and relevant user-generated content and integrating it across their marketing faster to improve engagement and demonstrate ROI.