Using UGC inside a company's marketing has become a very popular practice lately, and one that delivers real results.
On one side there is the lift in conversion rates, as this piece on ecommerce traffic and conversions shows. On the other, the benefit that matters just as much: gaining authority and standing in the eyes of potential customers.
We went into this in more depth in our article on how to use user generated content in paid campaigns, which is worth reading alongside this one.
On top of that, the engagement generated by UGC videos on social media and YouTube runs far higher than the self-referential content produced in a studio for traditional ad campaigns.
More and more companies are turning to professional creators, known as UGC creators — but that costs money, and the return is not always as predictable as it is with conventional advertising.
Fortunately it is also possible to get user generated content organically, without paying creators to produce it. If you are looking for ways to get UGC for free, the next few sections should give you plenty to work with.
Before you start generating UGC organically: three things to think about
We know you are keen to have content ready to publish on your company pages and start improving how your brand is perceived. Before you do, though, it is important to consider three things.
The first is planning how you will use it, because you owe the people who make it something back. This is easy to underestimate when you plan a campaign to collect UGC organically and then use it as company content.
The second is participatory culture. People have a strong appetite to appear, to be seen, to have a small stage of their own online — and that is the impulse you can work with when you ask for UGC, because in many cases your customers are glad to contribute something to a brand they like.
But when you ask someone to make content, you need to be clear about what happens next and how it will be used, so they can actually see the space and visibility you gave them in return for their effort.
Third, always ask for permission to use it on your company channels. That avoids bad feeling later, and it gives people specific information about what their content will be used for.
If the people you ask are genuinely happy with your brand — real fans, even — all three of these work in your favour and you will collect a great deal of content.
Working with your happy customers: the best ways to collect reviews
First of all, as we said, understand that the best free and organic UGC comes from customers who are delighted with what they bought.
The moment someone completes an order, whether for a product or a service, is by far the easiest moment to ask for a review.
Reviews are among the most common types of UGC, and they can be published on review platforms or directly on your own website.
You can ask for them in writing, whether that means aggregator sites such as Tripadvisor, Trustpilot or Google Business Profile, or simply comments under your posts on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube.
Reviews work even better as short videos — Reels and stories showing the product in use, or capturing the unboxing. Remember to get tagged, or set up a dedicated hashtag, so the content is always easy to find and reshare.
Once you have it, remember to say thank you, ask permission to use it, and say where it will be published.
Asking once is often not enough: people are busy and distracted, scrolling past. Plan the request through automations and follow-ups by email and WhatsApp in the days after purchase, so they are reminded to contribute.
Another very effective technique is polls. Strictly speaking a poll is not content made by one individual, but you can use the data you gather to publish statistics on customer satisfaction based on many people's votes. Social media is the usual place to run them.
Finally there are two practices that often get overlooked, and on which some companies have built their success. Want an example of UGC that works in ecommerce? Product reviews that customers can leave directly on the product page.
If you look at Amazon, product pages are populated with reviews and Q&As written by customers of their own accord, and they help new buyers enormously. All of that is possible with no ad spend, and it fills your product pages with content at the same time.
The other technique applies to physical businesses — restaurants, hairdressers, clothing shops and the like. Sending follow-ups is not always possible there, especially without a CRM behind the business.
In that case an excellent solution is a QR code that, scanned with a phone, takes the customer to a page where they can leave a review in seconds.
UGC from your customer community: using Facebook groups and Telegram channels
You may also be in the fortunate position of having worked well over time and built a genuine digital community.
If you have a Facebook group or a Telegram channel where your customers gather to talk about your products and their experience, you can use it to generate UGC free and fast.
How? Simply: write a post that invites spontaneous interaction — ask for an honest comment on one of your products, or for people to share an experience of using it, better still with a photo attached.
Your reach in that setting is wide, and one well-designed post will bring in a great deal of content you can use in campaigns.
Did you know your own staff are an excellent source of UGC?
They are — and you do not always have to focus on customers, particularly when you are recruiting. The labour market has become very competitive, and finding good people through free online listings is no longer as simple as it once was.
There are also plenty of businesses that pay badly, which is why candidates approach employer brands with so little trust.
Here your colleagues and employees are a valuable source of content that you can use to build trust with potential candidates.
There are several ways to do it: from video interviews where they talk about their experience, through to more spontaneous things like candid photos from the workplace with a hashtag and a mention of your company.
Used well, this content noticeably raises trust in your business — and it costs nothing.
Prize competitions: one of the big brands' favourite methods, and one you can use too
Some companies have become famous for prize competitions that generated thousands of pieces of UGC. One well-known example is the campaign run by Burger King, since echoed by others, which offered customers a reward in exchange for doing one thing.
Want to know what? Photographing themselves with a tattoo of the company logo — permanent, or temporary with a sticker or a video effect. Anyone who took a photo or filmed a short video with that tattoo received a coupon worth a few tens of euros to spend in store.
That way the company collected thousands of photos and videos it could use, with permission, on its own channels.
You can do the same, perhaps adding a small contest to reward the most original entries, which gives your customers an extra reason to take part.
Always remember to be very clear in your instructions. Give people examples of the kind of content they could make, so they have something to work from and don't stall for lack of ideas.
Be specific too about the tag, hashtag or mention to use, so that your team can actually track the content as it appears.
And don't forget to give precise instructions on how winners will be chosen. You can even increase reach by selecting winners based on the number of likes and comments on what they published. Do that and you are guaranteed strong organic reach with no ad spend and no professional creator fees.
Generating UGC organically at an event
To collect a large amount of UGC you can also use a company event — an annual gathering of your most loyal customers, say, or a training day if that fits your sector.
During the event the important thing is to create an atmosphere that makes people want to share photos, stories and video. They will be glad to post if you build some anticipation beforehand.
Here too you want a dedicated hashtag for the event, so you can collect and monitor what appears, along with tags and mentions.
Another very effective option is video testimonials: at a good event, where guests are enjoying what you have put on, very few people will refuse to record a short interview you can then use in your marketing.
If you go this route, prepare in advance with questions that lead the person to talk about what your company stands for and what your products actually do for them. Their personal experience and how they see you are the levers that make this content feel unique and genuine.
Build a stage for the people who want to be seen
It sounds obvious, but a campaign to collect UGC usually needs a dedicated digital space for people to appear in.
Consider the well-known Starbucks campaign that launched the customisable red cup. People could take the red takeaway cup, decorate it and photograph themselves with it on social media.
The company then asked permission to reshare that content, which lifted how customers saw the brand enormously.
Following that example, you can create a dedicated space on your social channels where you publish user generated content at regular intervals, presenting it in a coherent run through the feed or as a weekly slot.
Your most loyal customers will be glad to appear, which is exactly why they answer your follow-ups asking for this kind of content.
You can also take a leaf out of GoPro's book and build a dedicated space on your website to host user content. GoPro, the action camera maker, built an entire page on its own site for the videos its customers film during their adventures.
That gives your customers somewhere other than social media to share what they have done, and at the same time gives prospective buyers genuinely useful content about what you sell.
Incentives and gifts: still one of the best strategies for launching a new product
If you want to generate UGC but have no customers yet because your brand is new, or you are launching a new product, giving something away will help enormously.
Take computer hardware — graphics cards or processors — or phones and other devices. There are countless YouTube channels where people film video reviews of tech products, and you can ask for content about yours after sending it free for testing.
Doing it this way costs a fraction of paying a professional UGC creator, and it puts people to work straight away highlighting the benefits and features of a product you are launching.
Alternatively you can offer discounts as an incentive to increase the volume of content. Some ecommerce businesses do this very well.
The day before the parcel arrives, the customer receives an email with clear instructions on how to make the content — prompts, examples, suggestions of what to film, photo or video — and how to make sure the company sees it once published on Instagram or Facebook, with the right tag and hashtag.
The key part of the strategy: the email hints at a small gift the customer receives if they post.
Once they have, the team spots the content and gets in touch to thank them for it — through an automation, or by hand if your brand is smaller. As a thank you they send a discount code for a future order, which doubles if the customer agrees to let the company use the content on its own channels.
So you are certainly not short of strategies for getting UGC free and organically. Pick whichever sits closest to your business model and your situation right now, and in a short time you will have a body of content that improves your brand's authority, how customers see you and the conversion rate of your marketing, organic and paid alike.
