User Generated Content

UGC to Sell More Online – Talk Like a Marketer Series

This is part of our “Talk Like a Marketer” Series. Marketers (like any industry) throw around acronyms. This time we’re talking about UGC—User Generated Content.

Hey there. In this episode of our Talk Like a Marketer series, we’re talking about UGC. Now what is UGC? It stands for user generated content.

Reviews

Now, this has become an important aspect of websites to add on information that the, it’s not you adding, it’s customers. And a lot of the time this takes the form of reviews. So, I don’t know if you’re like me, but when I’m shopping online and especially if I’m looking at electronics, I am definitely checking out reviews. I want to know when people got this piece of equipment home, how well did it work for them. What were the great things about it? What were the bad things? I want to know as much as possible before I purchase that piece of equipment. And so reviews are a great way of doing that, and that really is a form of user generated content.

Photos or Videos

You’ll also see where websites might have the ability for customers to add pictures or videos. I do have that on my website. It’s been actually pretty popular. I wasn’t sure how it would go. Before that, I had a call out to everyone. I’d put it up on my website to say hey, please send us your pictures, or you know, please send us your videos and we’ll post it, and the response was dismal. Even tried it on Facebook a little bit, and still just not a lot there. But when they’ve got a dedicated space to do it, I don’t know what the difference is, but it’s been far more popular for my customers to do that. The software I happen to use is called Rivet Works and it’s all integrated in, and they automatically send emails to my customers. But there are a lot of other pieces of software out there that will allow you to add user generated content to your store.

There’s a couple of things that make it really good. I mean, obviously when another customer looks at your website, they can see there’s that validation from true users about you doing a good job. Google also likes it because it’s fresh content for one thing, although we don’t know all of the factors that Google takes into consideration when they’re looking at a website. One of them is how often it’s updated, so having updated content on your website is always going to be a plus in your favor.

So those are a couple of things about UGC and user generated content. And if you liked this video, check out the other videos in this series. I’m doing a whole series of Talk Like a Marketer so we can learn these terms. And if you like what I’m doing, please subscribe to my channel, and I’ll look forward to seeing you next time.