How to Create User-Generated Content for Your Brand

User-generated content helps your business to build trust and affinity with customers. People trust the reviews from their peers as much as they trust the reviews of experts, which makes user-generated content an important part of your marketing strategy. Here are some tips for how to create user-generated content.

Ask Customers for Testimonials
Testimonials are a good way to gather content from users and are a powerful way to show how users have benefited from your product and service and how they used it. Video testimonials are the most powerful because viewers can see the actual person talking about their experience and people often dive deeper in a video versus writing a short testimonial.

Give Valuable Incentives for Participation
A smart way to create user-generated content is to create a program where users can tell their story and you offer a reward such as free product. This can help to generate content for your brand as well as new customers.

How to Create User-Generated Content through Contests
Contents are great to use for many types of businesses and can generate content from users. You can offer various types of rewards such as free product, service, or cash.

A contest can even help a brand to find new ways of using its products by asking entrants to submit pictures of how they use the product. Or it can help the brand to find new designs to use for a new product by asking entrants to submit designs.

You can also just encourage customers to post hash-tagged images of themselves using your product.

Schedule Events for Customer Appreciation
Creating a customer appreciation promotion or event is another way to create user-generated content. These events can be either online or live at events such as Meetup groups or seminars. Live events are a good opportunity to record testimonials from people who are at the event.

Create Customer Surveys
Surveying your customers creates engagement and allows you to find out what they think and want. You can also use the results of your survey in many ways such as by creating an infographic or report. You can even use the results as a lead magnet.