Luna Rocha: Leveraging UGC in Paid Social

Transcript: Leveraging UGC in Paid Social

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Whether it's corn boy or Trisha Paytas's baby, keeping up with social media trends can be a full time job in itself. Luckily for you, you don't have to because you can always hire an influencer. So that's why today I'll be talking about leveraging UGC for paid social. I think as advertisers, we tend to stick to our tried and true methods for generating leads and conversions, and we can be hesitant to incorporate new platform.

Especially social media, since it's a constantly evolving landscape with a steep learning curve. So hopefully today I'll cure some of these pain points and give you a practical guide for getting started with UGC. So, first of all, what is UGC? UGC stands for user generated content. This is a term used across a variety of industries, but for marketing, I like to think of it as a partnership between a brand and a creator, and it falls under the umbrella of influencer marketing.

here are a few screenshots of what user generated content tends to look like. As you can see, it kind of mirrors the native organic content on the platforms where they appear. And if you browse social media at all, you've probably seen these. I like to run UGC for D two C and eCommerce clients alongside traditional video and display creative.

Why use UGC? What makes this content more enticing than content produced by brands? Well, according to a business wire report, consumers are 2.4 times more likely to view UGC as authentic when compared to content created by brands. So, the appeal is that it mirrors the look and feel of organic. I'm a social media user myself.

When I'm scrolling the feed, I tend to scroll right past something that looks clearly like an ad, but sometimes I tend to linger more on UGC.  and according to hoot suite, this is pretty common because UGC ads are considered more memorable by the target audience. Another benefit of UGC is that the creator tends to know the ins and outs of the platform so they can leverage trending topics and, uh, trending hashtags on social media.

This may come as no surprise, but according to, uh, the stats TikTok and Instagram users tend to skew younger. So it's also a chance to reach a younger. You can consider UGC as social proof that your product or service is valuable to others. So what platforms do you normally run UGC on: Instagram and TikTok?

Instagram CEO. Adam Ze has been announcing platform changes to Instagram that will more closely mirror Tik Toks algorithm. So instead of seeing people that you follow. You're going to see increasingly viral content from influencers. And this creates additional opportunities for marketers looking to get in front of the new audience.

So how do these ads appear? Well, usually UGC shows up as stories, which you can see on the left or in feed ads, which I've included a screenshot on the right. And they usually come in a cost per click cost per impression, or cost per view model, which means a view of over 6 seconds. So similarly, tip TikTok also has in feed ads.

They also have spark ads, which you can think of as basically, uh, they're equivalent of a Facebook boost, because it's a way to create an ad out of your preexisting content that has maybe some viral potential. They also have top few ads, which is the first thing that populates when a user opens. And these also run on a cost per click cost per impression for cost view model.

And that's something you can set up when you're setting up the ads. So which industries benefit from UGC I've personally used UGC for direct to consumer brands, including subscription based services, retail and restaurants, where we partnered with local influencers. Although I think that there are additional use cases, including brand awareness for B2B.

So I think that advertisers would generally benefit from implementing UGC across a variety of industries. One particularly successful use case we saw was with a mobile app here towards state home moms. After implementing UGC, we saw a 23% lift in app installs and our influencer made sure to use hashtag mom life hashtag stay at home mom, and these were kind of the icing on the cake.

And I think that really contributed to the, uh, 23%.  so I attribute a large part of the success on these campaigns to finding the right influencer. How do you find the right influencer? Well, a cost effective way is to identify your engaged customers. Most likely you've been posting as your brand on social media for a while, and you probably have a user base that considers themselves a fan of your product or service reaching out directly to these people on your comment feed or DMing, them can be a great way to find people who are genuine fans of your product. 

Another thing you're gonna want to, um, think about is avoiding red flags. So you're gonna want to do your due diligence and look through the person's social media feed to make sure that there is no blatant red flags like drug use or political rants that could possibly alienate your audience or misrepresent your brand.

Lastly, consider diversity. Most likely your, the people who use your app or product come from a variety of walks of life. So think about this when you are choosing a brand ambassador.

Once you find the right ambassador, the next step would be creating a creative brief. So this is going to outline your goals and KPIs for the. Timelines deliverables such as how many posts, how many stories, brand and product details, CTA, and most importantly, the ownership. So once the content is live, who owns it, and whether you can repurpose UGC, I recommend repurposing for both organic and paid.

When you set up your campaign, I recommend using 20% of your total paid social budget for UGC. When it comes to creative, best practices, less is more, and you're gonna wanna really lean on your influencer cuz they know what's best on the platform. So you can consider them a subject matter expert. So it's a little bit more hands off than when you're creating most, uh, display or video ads.

Another thing I get asked about a lot is attribution. So what we usually do is create a referral code for each influencer, which then comes in as a promo code during the checkout process. So you can find the ROI from each influencer when it comes to your creator platforms. There's two main categories, product sampling programs, and influencer search engines, product sampling programs allow you to send out samples of your product.

And then the third party product sampling program, then distributes them to the influencers in their database. So it kind of is a hands off approach. You don't actually have to find the influencer yourself, or you can use an influencer search engine, which allows you to filter by age number of followers, engagement rate, and other details relevant to your campaign.

Here are a couple of, um, product sampling programs and influencer search engines that I've used. So I'd like to thank continuity, Joe Martinez from paid media. And my fellow presenter, Amalia Fowler for helping me with the presentation. If you have many questions or like to connect with me, feel free to scan the QR code on the right.

Thank you for tuning in!