In a newly released report, US-based content generation and analytics platform, Cohley and media publication, Digiday explores the changing state of user-generated content (UGC). The sweeping changes driven by a global pandemic and the resultant quarantine have scattered creative marketing teams, but they have also opened brands’ and agencies’ eyes to the promise of UGC as an avenue for fresh takes on campaign content, context, and audience discovery.
User-generated content — in this case, content for advertising that has been created by people who are not on the teams of brands and agencies — is driving an entire mindset shift that marketers are bringing to advertising creative overall. The study surveyed 300 brands and agencies in the summer of 2020 and discovered the benefits of UGC and the obstacles marketers are currently grappling with when it comes to UGC. Communicate lists the key findings below-
On the trail of high-quality UGC, the categories below are particularly prized for their effectiveness in today’s digital campaigns.
- 68% confirmed that good content formed the core of their advertising.
- In a time of dramatic e-commerce expansion (the at-home consumer is mostly shopping online), brands and agencies need a lot of content.
- With marketers in a rat-race, 48% said they’re only sometimes pacing with the volume of material needed to create campaigns.
- When it comes to the kinds of content that marketers are deploying overall, product videos and lifestyle photography account for the majority of the assets — 55% and 54%, respectively.
- The data below also shows that marketers have identified the UGC that works best for them – i.e., effectiveness and what they use the most are closely aligned.
- 70% of respondents predict a moderate to a significant rise in their demand for user-generated campaign assets.
- At present, just over one-third — 34% — said they work with some UGC to augment their in-house creative.
Challenges
- 79% said they struggle to discover high-quality creators but only 27% said there isn’t enough of it out there.
- Therefore, the problem isn’t a scarcity of UGC content creators but discoverability.
Solution
- While 79% of respondents cited the difficulty in finding high-quality UGC partners, 40% also stated that workflows were a challenge. But what does that mean exactly?
- Kim Snell, President of KMS Media Solutions, a firm that helps brands discover high-quality UGC creatives for their marketing campaigns, stated in the report that workflows slow or interrupt a team’s path to adoption. “I think it comes down to knowing what you’re looking for and understanding that with all of these content creators, it’s not a product shoot. They have to have some sort of freedom to create content that is true to them. It’s getting them to understand that if we hold these creators inside a small box, we’re going to get lower-quality content,” said Snell.
- She’s discovered the disconnection as a two-pronged scenario.
- One scenario is inefficient planning. Teams aren’t taking three months to plot out a campaign; they’re often working on a just-in-time basis.
- The second prong is a recurring confidence gap around the very concept of including creators outside the in- house team.
- The solution for this, according to Snell, is to loosen the rails a bit.
UGC and data
- 91% of brands and agencies said data takes a central role in campaign strategies at least some of the time.
- One- third said data is always the essential factor in matching the right creative to the right audiences.
- When it comes to assessing outcomes — empowering data to drive the performance of successive campaigns — the respondents identified certain key metrics that matter to them.
- It’s safe to say from the data that performance is not confined to only revenue when it comes to UGC content.
- Marketers are measuring content performance by analyzing audience attention, reach, and overall engagement: Total impressions, engagement rates, and total reach all earned north of one-third, i.e., 45%, 39%, and 36% respectively.
Managing data in UGC
- The task of managing data volume is formidable according to the majority of respondents in the survey.
- 90% stated that they’re facing a moderate to a very high influx of data for driving campaign content into the right channels to reach the right audiences.
- While respondents said they’re keeping up with the volume most of the time — 75% are keeping pace or tracking ahead of content volume in their work.
- One-quarter of them (25%), are seeing their efforts sometimes or often fall behind the volume of data related to content that they ingest.
The bottom line is that while there are data-driven capabilities in the marketing world, that doesn’t always mean that every marketing team can handle content and data at a sufficient scale. Respondents stated in the report that the challenge is often related to the toolkits with which they’re working, and the gap between the in-house knowledge they need versus the skill sets they have. Technology and platforms can eliminate much of the manual labor needed to source content and allow for not only workflow organization by stage, but also mass messaging and distributing an all-encompassing creative brief immediately. This enables brands and agencies to scale, drastically cutting down on the time and overall headaches of negotiating with creators individually.
