What is UGC Content?

UGC Content or User Generated Content is one of the best marketing tools available to any company. This is content where a customer speaks about the product or service and it is then used in the company’s marketing. Effectively, this turns customers into brand advocates and you get a secondary layer of validation about your product or service.

When a customer is speaking about your company and it’s coming directly from their experience, it helps legitimize and qualify your business or service.

This type of content is some of the best content that I’ve used in paid advertising as well.

This type of content is abundant in online advertising and comes in many forms. Often times it’s also called a “testimonial”, but in the marketing world, we refer to it as user generated content or UGC.

This type of content actually does 3 things.

1. Gives you a chance to interact and chat with your customers directly
2. Understand the issues and problems in your business
3. Allow for a video snippet to be used as a marketing promo

Now, a casual, intentional, conversation with a customer is important, however, if you want to use this in ANY form of advertising, it’s super important to get the customer’s sign off on it. This is typically called a “Content release” form and it usually comes prior to the interview.

In the context of UGC, there are a list of top customer interview questions that you need to be asking your customers. A lot of these questions go through the customer’s own hero’s journey and help frmae the discussion so you can elicit the correct responses.

The responses we’re typically looking for in advertisements are things that are results-focused. In other words, I achieved “X” by doing “Y”.

The best kind of interview that I’ve seen perform are those on a live call or Zoom meeting. These live meetings have the best conversation flow and typically have the best responses.

The UGC Consent Form

I am not an attorney, nor can I advise you on anything legal, period. However, a typical content release form can contain language like this:

I hereby grant permission to [YOUR COMPANY] to use my [CONTENT] in [COMPANY]’s marketing campaigns including, print, websites, paid advertising, or digital media purposes without further consideration, and I acknowledge [YOUR COMPANY]’s right to edit my [CONTENT] at its discretion and that [COMPANY] may use [CONTENT] now or at a later date anytime in the future at its own discretion. I hereby release all rights to my [CONTENT] in the context of [COMPANY]’s use. 

It’s important to have the customer’s release in writing either, physically or digitally, as there have been many cases where we’ve had to take content down per the customer’s request. Some customers don’t care, some do. Nonetheless, it’s important to establish your protections as a company prior to moving forward with acquiring any sort of UGC.

The Incentive Method

You can either offer an incentive or no incentive. If you’re offering an incentive, you typically need to let people know that the customer was incentivized to provide their opinion. Incentives can include

• A Coupon for a future order
• Free Product
• Gift Cards

Incentives are super useful as you can simply just send a quick email to customers who have purchased the product 30 days ago asking who would like to receive a FREE [Insert Incentive]. Those who are super excited to receive your incentive are typically going to have a great camera experience.

The Survey Method

To frame our survey, I like to use a software called Typeform. Towards the end of the survey, you can ask for a star rating from the customer. If the star rating is >4, send them to a review page to leave you a public review, or request a UGC process.

To acquire UGC, the flow can look something like this:

Keep in mind, integrating a service like Calendly towards the end of the flow creates a seamless experience coupled with reminders emails and SMS notifications if you choose. This is super easy to format and setup once you get it going. This email flow gets plugged into the backend after the customer purchases the product as part of your post-purchase email flow.

You only have to set this up one time and then you have this email flow operational on the backend on autopilot.

The Star Rating Question

This is a very important question to assess the customer prior to asking for an interview.

If the customer is super happy with the product or service, they will leave you an internal review first. Once you establish the internal review, you can request an external review or interview.

This internal star rating weeds out those who were moderately satisfied or unsatisfied with the product or service.

Those who are not satisfied at all, are not going to go on to the next step until you can bring their satisfaction score up first.

Think of the internal star rating as a pulse on your customer prior to asking for any external reviews. As opposed to saying something like if you’re satisfied, do xyz you’re asking how satisfied are you?

This way you can moderate and have a tighter control over the quality of the UGC content you acquire.

The Interview

Start with a brief warm up and get to know the customer before you actually hit the record button. This can give you a lot of great talking points and things you can pull out from the discussion during the call. A call should last anywhere from 30-45 minutes and should be energetic and exciting.

Make sure you get to the room before the customer so you can prepare your microphone and camera. During your UGC interview, make sure you smile.

There are some key elements to make sure your brief your customer on prior to the interview, however. Do not skip this as this is super important to let the customer know that you are going to do a virtual call with them and that you need to make sure that the are checking the boxes below.

• Neutral and non distracting background
• They are in a quiet environment
• Make sure the microphone and camera are decent quality. Avoid poorly lit and poor resolution devices like old web cams.
• Test audio and video prior to beginning the discussion.
• MAKE SURE you are on a gallery view so you can always see both parties at the same time.
  • This step is super useful for the creative development down the road. Some of the best creatives I’ve ran were a simple gallery view zoom call.

After reviewing dozens of interviews, I’ve created the UGC Interview Phases. These phases outline the typical conversation flow and contain the right questions to ask during the interview.

If you’re ever confused or lose track, you can always reference this interview phase document to help you get “unstuck”. The document can be found by clicking here.

What questions do you have about the UGC content interview request process?