Marketer Crew - How UGC Can Help You Get to $1M+ ARR 🚀

Hey 👋🏼 Chris here…

Happy Monday to the thousands of motivated marketing professionals, startup founders, and business owners who are a part of this community.

In 2022 we have to think about content at scale even if we’re operating with very little resources. User Generated Content (UGC) is one way we can leverage the social platforms for brand distribution without having to create thousands of pieces of content ourselves.

We’ll leave the key benefits of UGC to be explained in another issue. But today we’re going to discuss HOW to stand up a UGC initiative to help you create content for your brand at scale.

Today’s issue takes around 3 minute to read. As always, if you have any feedback or questions I would love to hear. Feel free to send me a text or a DM on TikTok.

Enjoy!

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How to Setting Up a UGC Strategy

In 2017 I was a marketing team of one at a SaaS startup and had $0 budget. In 10 months I generated over $1M in Annual Recurring Revenue through a single channel.

There was a lot of luck and market timing involved in that story. However, a few key decisions we made helped us to capitalize on the success we were seeing…

One of those decisions was to double down on User Generated Content.

Here’s how I did it…

✅ Set Up a Referral Program

Once you have around 1000 customers the benefits of a referral program really start to kick in. Don’t worry, you can still execute a UGC program without referrals… But it’s a huge boost if you already have paying customers to help you get started.

Enable your existing customers to create and share content with their audience and earn rewards as incentives. The key components of a successful referral program are:

• Simple and intuitive onboarding
  • Make it easy for your customers to get involved. Selecting the right referral platform (SaaS, Ecomm) will help tremendously with this.
  • Include your referral program invite in the email or product experience. Invite customers to join your referral program during a key moment of delight like once they’ve experienced your product OR have been a customer for a certain time.
    
• Establish the primary Call-to-Action
  • Set your referral partners up for success by giving them a clear CTA for their audience. Ex — “For every 5 paid customer referrals you send to us you will receive X benefit. Tell your audience to JOIN HERE using this link.”
    
• Set proper incentives
  • For SaaS products it makes the most sense to use free trials or feature unlocks as the key reward for referrals. Ex — “For every 5 paid referrals you send to us you will receive an increase of 500GB of storage.”
  • For CPG or E-Comm it makes the most sense to offer discounts or free products as gifts for referrals. Ex — “For every 5 paid referrals you send to us you and your friends will receive 25% off your next purchase.”

You may be asking, “What does any of this have to do with UGC?”

Here’s the idea — If we have a strong incentive for our current customers to create content and share this content with their audience then we are aligning OUR goals with theirs. Also, we’re creating a scalable system for continuous content creation for each incremental customer we acquire. Finally, it’s the most efficient way to drive new sales.

✅ Use Platforms to Help Scale Content Creation

If setting up a referral program is simply not an option but you DO have a little budget then this is where you’ll want to start…

Scaling UGC has become WAY easier today than it was in previous years. Platforms like #Paid, Pixlee, and Cohley are changing the game when it comes to sourcing content creators for your brand.

For example — With #paid you are able to create campaign briefs, set budgets/objectives, and allow Creators to submit proposals for your campaigns. This allows for a 1-to-many approach to sourcing content.

You can also use platforms like Fivrr and Upwork to accomplish the same objective by hiring freelance creators. Just be aware that the process is not nearly as intuitive or specifically tailored for creator marketing.

✅ Run Challenges and Campaigns

One of the best ways to pump up a feature release, announcement, or sale is to run challenges with UGC. At Soundstripe we ran a Creator Challenge using the hashtag #createmorechallenge, promoted it to our audience, and did a weekly giveaway to incentivize activation. Each participant followed our weekly prompt and then we selected winners.

This challenge led to a record breaking month of new customer acquisition and generated thousands of UGC pieces we leveraged to promote the brand.

If you’ve got an audience try experimenting with challenges and giveaways to get customers involved with the brand.

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UGC is a powerful tool to align our brand with the voice of the customer. Now we have tools and the platforms to harness the real potential this strategy can deliver on.

If you have any feedback or questions I would love to hear. Feel free to send me a text or a DM on TikTok.

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