Everyone is online and more people than ever are active users. As of January 2025, 79% of the UK population were active users of social media. That’s a whole lot of people engaging, commenting, liking, and sharing.
To improve your SEO and attract more customers, businesses must understand that their audience is no longer passive. It’s more important than ever to understand how to focus on your customers’ engagement to build trust and grow your business.
What Is User-Generated Content?
User-generated content is online content created by someone not in your company that endorses your products or brand. Now, when we think of content, we might think of influencer videos or something more professional. That isn’t the case, as UGC is an umbrella term for a wide array of content that customers create.
Examples of UGC include:
- Reviews
- Testimonials
- Unboxing videos
- Social media posts
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Photos
UGC can be organic, meaning it is created by real customers of their free will, or paid UGC, where a content creator is incentivised to make sponsored content. It’s similar to influencer marketing but is cheaper, appears to be more authentic, and creators deliver the content directly to the brand, rather than having the obligation to post on their own channel.
The cornerstone of UGC is authenticity. If potential customers believe what they are seeing is authentic, then they will trust it and this means they are more likely to engage with your business.
Why UGC Matters More Than Ever
In an age where companies are fighting to get people’s attention, where millions are spent to get ad spots during the Super Bowl and a Christmas advert by John Lewis is a big event, people are losing interest.
A survey from 2022 found that 84% of people trust a band more if they use UGC (user-generated content).
Being seen as authentic, rather than some faceless professional organisation, has become central to building brand trust. Having the trust of your customers is integral to succeeding, with 81% of consumers consider it a deciding factor in purchasing decisions.
What can help you build trust and brand authenticity is co-creation, a step beyond traditional marketing that can help you become more innovative and appealing to a wider audience.
The Benefits of UGC for Brand Trust and Engagement
There are many benefits of utilising UGC and why it has become a huge part of other companies’ marketing strategies. They include:
- Trust: Content generated by real people, real customers, allows your marketing to be more authentic than anything you alone create. The authenticity of people sharing positive experiences about your business will help build trust with potential customers. According to Nosto, the visual content that generates the most customer trust is images and videos from real customers.
- Engagement: Encouraging UGC is encouraging engagement. Marketing campaigns can live and die by engagement, and UGC helps customers become directly invested in your brand. The relationship between seller and buyer is more balanced, so customers feel more motivated to interact and are more likely to remain loyal to your brand.
- Conversions: UGC can not only help with lead generation but drive conversions too. Quality reviews and fan made content mean that people go to your site and spend longer on them, improving the chance of a sale.
What Is Co-Creation?
Whereas UGC can just mean reviews or people talking about your products online, co-creation is a more involved process. It is the intentional collaboration between the brand and its customers to generate new ideas for creating and improving products and/or services.
Many companies have dipped into this well, including IKEA, which launched Co-Create IKEA in 2018. This digital platform enabled customers to become more engaged with the brand. IKEA asked customers for product suggestions, ran boot camps with entrepreneurs, and collaborated with university students.
LEGO revolves around creation. Their Ideas website encourages Lego users to create, vote on and give feedback on. If an idea receives 10,000 votes, it is then reviewed by senior LEGO employees. If the idea is approved and becomes a product, that creator will receive 1% of the net sales.
Loyalty & Buy In
Co-creation creates a sense of ownership, emotional involvement and trust. They feel trusted by the brand and reciprocate that trust, building loyalty that is harder to break than it usually is.
Other people will see the relationship between the brand and the customer and be more likely to buy into the brand.
How to Encourage User-Generated Content
You don’t have to be a mega corporation and design some platform to harvest customer involvement.
UGC is a huge part of social media marketing. There are simple things you can do, using your current social media presence, to encourage content from users.
- Branded hashtags: Asking for photos and videos with a particular hashtag can make UGC easier to track.
- Contests: Offering a prize creates incentive for your customers and boosts engagement. Contests can be simple photo or caption competitions, or something more involved, like asking for videos.
- Social campaigns: Run whole social media campaigns around UGC. Create contests, brands and giveaways around themes such as the lead-up to Christmas or a new product to create excitement.
The most important thing about UGC is that it should be easy and fun. Making it simple means people can do it quickly. Demonstrate the sort of things you’re after and tell your audience how exactly to participate.
How to Integrate UGC Into Your Marketing
There are many ways you can integrate UGC into your current marketing efforts, across all platforms.
Website
Including user product reviews and testimonials on your website will make you seem more relatable and trustworthy. By displaying real-life reactions, you are showing that your services and products are used in the real world and have helpful, authentic feedback.
Social Media
Reposts of customers’ photos, videos, and opinions across social media show you are listening. It also makes you more open as a brand and reachable, encouraging more engagement from followers. You can drive engagement with social media campaigns, asking for posts with branded hashtags, running giveaways and competitions to create a more communal feel amongst your customers.
Paid Ads and Emails
Combine UGC with paid ads so the creativity of your customers gets put on display. You’ll get heightened visibility and further build brand credibility and authenticity from a wider audience.
You can also make use of email marketing, including customer reviews, photos and stories in regular email updates.
Tools & Platforms to Manage and Showcase UGC
There are platforms you can use to help you gather, manage and display UGC. They include:
- Yotpo – This platform can help you collect and use UGC. It has features such as product subscription management, email marketing and collection and integration of reviews.
- Sprout Social – A wide-ranging social media management tool with integration into all major social media platforms, and can help you manage reviews and track branded hashtags.
- Hootsuite – Hootsuite can help you publish and schedule social media posts, manage incoming brand mentions and monitor online conversations about your brand.
Displaying UGC at Scale
UGC is a great tool, but moderation is key. You need to ensure brand coherence across all platforms and that UGC you use is in line with your values and look, so as to not damage your reputation.
Best practices for displaying UGC at scale include:
- Ask for permission from users
- Create guidelines for users to follow
- Understand your brand identity
- Measure your results
Measuring Success: Engagement, Conversions & Community Growth
Determining how well UGC is working for you and whether the ROI (return on investment) was positive and resulted in good financial outcomes.
- Conversions
- Sales
- Click-through-rate
- Number of submissions
- Engagement rate
- Repeat visit rate
- Average order value
You can get a greater idea of the ROI by standardising how the metrics are measured across the platforms, so you get uniform measurements. This may allow for better analysis that provides more actionable insights.
UGC as a Long-term Brand Growth Strategy
UGC and co-creation are powerful marketing tools to implement. You can use the creativity and enthusiasm of your audience to create authentic content that helps build trust and loyalty.
Are you looking to make customer participation a key part of growing your business? Work with the team here at Maxweb to create a marketing strategy driven by UGC.
Posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2025 in Latest News.
