There has been a lot of hype lately around the user-generated content in the digital landscape and the marketers. But why is that?
Well! In recent years, consumers have shown resistance to the promotional one-way communication valueless marketing activities from the brands. They want marketing campaigns that add value and deliver a complete experience.
User-generated content has become the perfect solution to meet these demands of the users by marketers. And this importance of UGC has ignited the growth of UGC platforms as well.
So, let’s dive deeper into the topic and get valuable insights
What is UGC & UGC Platforms?
User-generated content or UGC is basically any form of content be it images, videos, text, or any other that has been created by the users based on their experiences, ideas, feedback, opinions, queries, etc. mainly about a brand or products.
It is the most trustworthy, reliable, and authentic form of content in digital ecosystem and it is so powerful that almost 90% of the consumers tend to shape their online shopping decisions according to UGC insights.
Now, coming to the UGC platform, it is a platform or a tool that helps in discovering, curating, and displaying user-generated content across all marketing touchpoints.
Best UGC Platforms For 2020
1. Knexus
Knexus visual commerce platform automatically delivers personalized & shoppable influencer, UGC & brand content to the right shopper at the key moment – giving shoppers the confidence to purchase.
Knexus is more than a UGC platform. Knexus uses AI to automatically surface, tag & index your content wherever it lives and whoever it’s from; whether that’s your brand, influencers or customers. The platform then automatically matches each shopper to the relevant content – dynamically displaying the content which will best influence each shopper’s buying decisions. No two buying journeys are the same with Knexus.
At the same time as a shopper is consuming this content, Knexus dynamically displays the most relevant product recommendations – creating a seamless transition to customized products. This allows shoppers to gather all the information & social proof they need without having to research elsewhere. By integrating influencer, UGC and brand content into buying journeys, brands have seen an ecommerce sales uplift of 333%.
2. Taggbox
Taggbox is the first and prime UGC platform in the list it is both a UGC platform and social media aggregator that helps the marketers or the businesses to build trust, increase engagement, and grow conversions.
To achieve these goals, it has solutions to perfectly discover, curate, and display all the valuable & relevant user-generated content across all marketing touchpoints.
You can curate content from a diverse range of social platforms using hashtags, profiles, handles, timelines, channels, and more into a single feed. Further, you get exceptional customization opportunities to add branding to the UGC, make it visually attractive, add custom promotional content, etc.
Also, the moderation panel helps you maintain the utmost content quality with restrictions to irrelevant, abusive, and competitors content. Besides, it gets real-time content updates to keep it fresh, unique, and engaging for the users.
Best of all, It has UGC rights management to rightfully acquire users’ content with their permission to avoid any hassles and build strong brand-user connections. There are different pricing and plans available for every users comfort & perfect suitability.
3. Stackla
Stackla is also one of the best UGC platforms that helps in powering all of your marketing campaigns and activities at every touchpoint by leveraging the authentic user-generated visuals.
It provides the functionality to gather user-generated content from different platforms using hashtags, geolocation, keywords, etc. It also offers you the feature to obtain content rights from the users and repurpose the content for your brand campaigns.
Once you aggregate all your required User-generated visuals, you can display it across various marketing touchpoints from the website to ads. It also provides insights into your most active content contributors to fuel brand advocacy and build online communities.
Although, it is a great UGC platform but it focuses highly on the UGC visuals and about pricing and plans there is no particular mention on their website.
4. ShortStack
Not particularly a UGC platform, Shortstack is a platform that enables the brands & businesses to create contests, quizzes, giveaways, competitions, landing pages, and much more empowered by the user-generated content.
Even the tagline says to create contests, send emails, and collect leads from one place. Its aim is to collect user-generated content from social platforms to increase interactions and boost sales.
It also offers the functionality to display your contests or campaigns on websites, landing pages, emails, mobile, or social media. There are various pricing plans listed on their websites with varied features for different scale users.
Why Your Brand Needs A UGC Platform
1. Access To Content Hub
A UGC platform helps in discovering all the relevant user-generated content from different platforms and handpick the most valuable content for your marketing campaigns from a hub of user-generated content across diverse social platforms.
2. Build Valuable Social Proof
With the UGC platform, you can create marketing campaigns powered by authentic and trustworthy user-generated content tha will help in building social proof among the audiences. And social proof greatly influences the decisions and behavior of the consumers.
3. Build Community & Relationships
When you leverage users’ content in your marketing, it works as a reward for the users and getting rights from the users helps you form meaningful relationships for long-term success.
Having this loyal community and relationships is a strong base for customer loyalty, user engagement, and conversions.
4. Increase User Engagement
User-generated content is known to be the most engaging and interesting form of content due to its diversity, creativity, and perspectives from the users. And when you filter the best out of it with attractive customizations, it makes it even more engaging.
Engagement is a key metric that the marketers target through their marketing campaigns as positive enhanced engagement leads to conversions.
5. Grow Conversions & Revenue
Finally the ultimate goal of any marketing campaign – Conversions. The fact that user-generated content helps 9 out of 10 people in their online purchasing decisions and ads with UGC get 5 times more click-through rates are a validation of how important UGC is for marketing.
A UGC platform perfectly leverages users’ content to gain these results that help in increasing the conversions and grow revenue.
Conclusion
In this blog, we listed 3 best user-generated content platforms and 5 best results of leveraging a UGC platform. UGC has been named as the future of marketing due to its effectivity and efficiency.
More and more brands are using UGC in their marketing campaigns such as Apple, Starbucks, BMW, GoPro, Ikea, and many more. If these brands are acknowledging it, then there must be some truth to our content.
Now that you know the advantages of UGC and how a UGC platform can unlock the full potential of your marketing efforts, it is time that you choose the best UGC platform and explore the opportunities for yourself.
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