Infinite Content At Your Fingertips
Your in-house marketing team creates posts, videos, and ads for each campaign, and they might even perform well. But the same content in your customers’ feeds gets stale and boring, and your sales start to take a nosedive. You don’t want to create multiple sets of posts for the same campaign when you can put resources into your next launch. So how do you get constant streams of creative, engaging content with little to no effort on your part?
The answer to this puzzle is User-Generated Content. Also known as UGC, user-generated content is what your social customers and influencers post on their feeds about your products and services. Content created by users, including influencer content that your network creates, can be saved and repurposed by your brand and posted to all your social media channels. UGC is a primary reason it pays to work with influencers and nurture your relationships with your social customers. Since your investment in this type of content is low but the return can be exceptionally high, if you’re not using UGC in your marketing strategy, you’re leaving money on the table of every campaign you run. If you want the best results, it pays to plan, and that’s what you’ll be doing in today’s article. We’re going to walk through choosing and using UGC and influencer content from your initial campaign to repurpose into evergreen content as well as converting this content into ads. You’ll discover which types of content are best to reuse and how you can change the format of your UGH and influencer content to fit different platforms. Let’s get started.
Who are your rockstars?
When you’re considering repurposing content, consider only your best creators as candidates. Those whose content gets the most engagement, clicks, and conversions create posts that resonate with their audience, which are your target customers. When you repurpose UGC and influencer content, make sure you amplify content that's proven to get great engagement rates and conversions, as reusing content that performed poorly the first time around isn’t likely to do any better with repetition. That's why you should only repurpose the content from social customers and influencers that you already know will perform well.
You can use an influencer marketing analytics tool like Hubble to see which of your influencers are your best performers to get started with your UGC and influencer content repurposing strategy. Your KPIs are your best indicator for which content is going to amplify your message, so track your KPIs to find your best creators. If a creator’s content has already gotten good KPIs, this is a solid indicator that their content is ripe for repurposing since their posts are generating significant engagement. After you've got a few influencers in mind for your repurposing strategy, browse their content for a closer look at which formats, products, and messages work best. These details will give you a much better idea of which content elements you want to share across platforms, and where certain types of content will perform best.
Are you allowed?
Repurposing UGC and influencer content usually happens after all elements of the campaign have launched. Because of this, you’ll want to think about whether you might reuse content even before you start working with your influencer network. When you discuss content rights, make sure to discuss repurposing content and any limits they might have on their posts for future use. You’ll want to talk about how their content might be used after the initial campaign is over, like creating ads, cross-posting in other social media platforms, on your brand’s website, etc, and if they would require additional compensation for their content to be reused in any of these ways. Having solid expectations from the outset will keep everyone happy, and understand that it’s fair to pay your top performers more when they produce exceptional results. Consider adding language to that effect in your influencers’ contracts.
If you didn’t plan for this in the beginning, that’s OK too! Chat with your influencers and social customers to get persimmon to reuse their content…and make sure to get it in writing, just to be safe. It’s always best to be upfront with your network so you can continue to have a great working relationship for future campaigns.
When planning your campaigns going forward, consider these questions and discuss them with your top performing influencers:
- How many posts and videos will we want to repurpose?
- Does permission to reuse content expire at any point?
- Which social media networks will content be cross-posted to?
- What usage rights are agreeable?
- What is the pay structure or bonus incentive for repurposed content?
Will the influencer be whitelisted to run content as ads on their social media account?
Everything old is new again.
As soon as you've chosen your best creators and picked out the best influencer content you want to incorporate into your marketing, it's time to figure out how exactly you'll use it. Keep in mind that repurposing isn't just reposting the same content everywhere. You might think about using written content and visual content differently on another channel. Maybe you can cut down a YouTube unboxing video into Reels for your brand's TikTok or Instagram pages? Why not use a quote or image from the unboxing video in your email marketing or on your store's product page? To transform UGC into a new, exciting format, you can use still images, video clips, and quotes. You're only limited by your imagination!
Your repurposing strategy should center on sharing the influencer's authentic message in their own words. Content from influencers does so well because of their own unique personality and style. They're real people sharing their real life experience, as opposed to content put out by the brand specifically for marketing. Your customers are far more likely to trust content written by real people than it is from a brand's marketing team. The numbers show this truth: according to Tint, 62% of customers click on content with customer photos instead of brand images. Using pictures and videos to feature your influencers throughout the customer journey is a great way to drive increasing sales.
(Content) Marketing is King
Content created by influencers can be part of your evergreen marketing strategy, not just a campaign that expires after the product launch. Your brand can use influencer photos for its organic social strategy, newsletter content, website testimonials, and product pages as a refreshing change from stock photos or professional product photography. How about using an influencer's testimonial on the homepage? What about putting a video from a creator's how-to reel on the product page? How about a newsletter or blog post made out of an influencer's video of curated items under $50 dollars? All these ideas can help you convert more customers for your brand by harnessing product recommendations from your influencers. Be creative! Let your influencers guide your inspiration on the myriad ways you can repurpose content to authentically connect with your audience.
Optimizing your influencer-generated content for paid ads should be a key component of your repurposing strategy from the planning phase of each campaign and influencer outreach effort. If you use UGC in your ads, they're 100% authentic, so they're more likely to convert both new customers and those who already love your brand. Salesforce reports that ads with UGC get 5x as many clicks, which when you think about it is a huge ROI. By using authentic UGC and influencer content, you'll get better-performing ads and reduce your overall cost-per-acquisition. Bonus, you'll be saving money on ad generation if you reuse video and images from UGC in your paid ads. You can’t go wrong!
Want to amplify your impact? Set up influencer whitelisting to get the most out of your ads. Through this process, brands can run social media ads on influencers' social media accounts. Schedule, fund, and track ads as usual for your brand, but the ads will appear as content from the influencer's profile and on customers’ feeds. This allows brands to repost a top-performing piece of influencer content directly from creators' social media accounts in an optimized ad format with a clear call to action like a 'buy now" button. Social media ads that use this tactic help brands target and convert new audiences more effectively. UGC and influencer content is easy to save, convert format, and repurpose through the Hubble platform. You don’t have to wonder how to save video clips and repost them, let alone keep clips organized or get into video editing. That’s what you have us for. You can archive and repurpose UGC using your Hubble browser extension.
