User Generated Content Vs Brand Generated Content
As a marketer, you’re always looking for new ways to capture your audience’s attention. But with a plethora of options out there, how do you decide what kind of content to prioritize?
Two of the most popular types of content to include in your marketing strategy are user-generated content and brand-generated content. Both are crucial for driving brand awareness, but which should you prioritize? When setting up your marketing strategy, it's essential to understand the differences between user-generated and brand-generated content, along with the benefits and drawbacks of each, before finalizing your plan.
What is user-generated content?
User-generated content is content created about your brand by others, typically your customers, sharing their authentic experience with your brand. UGC can be images, videos, text reviews, and can vary in style and aesthetic.
Some UGC content examples you might come across:
Product Reviews: Reviews come straight from customers and are shared on social media or in review platforms. They describe their experience with the brand and often include what they liked or disliked about it.
Photos: Captured by users, these photos show your product in their everyday lives.
Videos: Created by customers, these videos can include more context and depth about their experience with your brand. They may feature voiceovers, interviews, direct- to- camera conversations, or music with text overlays.
Blogs: Longer-form content format that goes into detail about a brand. Blogs can also be integrated into other content pieces like newsletters or content round-ups.
Podcasts: Audio reviews (sometimes with video) that offer in-depth insights about a brand and a user’s experience.
Tutorials: How-to guides and instructional content that naturally incorporate a brand into a larger post, like a recipe for an Orange Creamsicle smoothie featuring your brand’s vanilla extract or a home project using a specific brand of paint.
High- quality UGC is created with intention and authenticity, focusing on experiences. Consumers prefer to see products or brands in action through "get ready with me" videos or grocery hauls, rather than perfectly curated shots. Good UGC features clean, clear imagery or video while maintaining the unique style of the creator, ensuring it feels authentic and not out of place.
Pros & cons of UGC
When weighing the use of user-generated content in your marketing strategy, it’s important to consider its benefits and limitations.
Pros:
Authenticity: Sharing your genuine experiences with a brand creates more authentic content than following a scripted message. Consumers recognize this authenticity.
True Influence: Brand affinity grows when consumers see your brand seamlessly integrated into the lives of friends or creators they trust.
Cost-Effective: Genuine UGC is free. It costs nothing as a brand for users to create content about you and it’s happening naturally all the time (have you checked your tagged section on Instagram lately?). Many brands also partner with UGC creators or engage in influencer marketing to produce content.
Audience Engagement: UGC allows your brand to be discovered by individuals who don't follow your account. It might appear in their TikTok feed or Instagram explore page, expanding your brand's reach beyond your own audience.
Cons:
Potential for Misrepresentation: When users create their own content about your brand, they might get key details wrong, misrepresent your brand, or even share something negative.
Content Monitoring: It's crucial to keep track of how your brand is being mentioned, whether positively or negatively. Content monitoring or social listening can be cumbersome, especially if you don’t have the time and employee bandwidth to keep up with content being shared.
Lack of Brand Control: If your brand adheres to strict aesthetic guidelines, UGC might not fit well with your content. While creativity should generally be celebrated, it can also mean that your brand is not always represented according to your guidelines.
3 Examples of compelling UGC campaigns
When you’re looking to incorporate UGC into your marketing strategy, it’s helpful to examine examples from others to find inspiration for your own brand.
MingsBings
MingsBings transforms classic comfort food with a delicious variety of flavors encased in a brown rice wrapper that's free from gluten, nuts, sesame, and shellfish. Chef Ming, celebrated for his dedication to quality, launched a plant-based line that blends traditional Chinese culinary heritage with contemporary dietary needs, ensuring no compromise on taste or health.
To attract new customers, MingsBings collaborated with influencers and content creators to generate genuine, authentic content that seamlessly integrates their product into everyday life. By engaging a diverse group of people, from parents to those with gluten-free diets, MingsBings effectively demonstrated how their product can cater to various lifestyles and preferences. Feedback such as “I love that these are gluten-free” and “Will have to try this one out,” clearly showed that the content not only increased brand awareness but also indicated buyer intent.
This highlights the power of user-generated content: the more diverse the scenarios and customer types showcased, the broader the potential customer base becomes.
Mix Creative Community
Mix Creative Community is a welcoming and collaborative environment where creatives, entrepreneurs, and makers can thrive outside of their typical home settings. They launched an engaging UGC campaign by inviting Hummingbirds to explore the space and share their experiences with their entire network.
Rather than offering a single perk, Mix provided creators with options: they could either visit the space at their convenience with a Day Pass or attend an event with vendors, games, treats, and more.
By giving a choice, Mix successfully appealed to a diverse group of people and demonstrated a wide range of use cases for their space. The more varied the scenarios you can present your brand in action, the easier it is for potential buyers to envision how it might fit into their own lives. This approach broadens your appeal and deepens the connection between your brand and its audience.
Ultimately, the goal is to create a rich amount of UGC that authentically represents the multifaceted nature of your brand, inviting new customers to see themselves as part of your community.
Thelma’s Treats
Thelma’s Treats is a national brand selling handmade ice cream sandwiches inspired by Grandma Thelma’s recipes. Originally founded in Des Moines, Iowa, Thelma’s was looking for a solution to build brand awareness in new areas of distribution where they didn’t have a physical presence.
Enter Hummingbirds, as Nola Morris, Chief Marketing Officer, mentioned on her Local Marketing School podcast episode.
Nola incorporated working with Hummingbirds to create UGC into her expansion strategy for each new retailer Thelma’s entered. Launching a surge of UGC in a new city allowed Thelma’s to rapidly saturate the market and build brand awareness, sustaining their spot on new shelves.
Another advantage of UGC, especially for CPG brands in grocery stores, is the ability for creators to show exactly where the product is located. When potential buyers see a Reel of their neighbor grabbing a Thelma’s ice cream sandwich from the freezer at the local Cub store, they are more likely to remember it the next time they grocery shop.
Through strategic UGC campaigns, Thelma’s Treats is successfully expanding its footprint and fostering a sense of community and connection with new customers.
What is brand generated content?
Brand-generated content is exactly what it sounds like. It’s content created directly by your brand and team. This content is intended to provide value to your audience, whether by sharing more about your offers or providing educational information that benefits the person scrolling by.
Examples of brand-generated content include:
Product content: Photos and videos that directly depict, explain, or showcase your product or service, highlighting its benefits or features.
Testimonials and reviews: Compiling use cases and success stories directly from customers to illustrate real-world applications of your product.
Educational pieces: Content that teaches your audience something, whether directly related to your product, the industry, or the category you operate within, providing valuable insights.
Entertainment: Photos, videos, and graphics that incorporate your brand into a larger cultural moment or trend, aiming to amuse or engage your audience.
Tutorials: Content that offers step-by-step guidance on how to use your product or service in various ways.
Branded content goes beyond selling your product. Anything your brand creates that entertains, informs, or educates your consumer is just as valuable, if not more so. According to a Nielsen report, 63% of consumers are somewhat, very, or completely likely to buy a product from brands that provide valuable content beyond selling, such as a spirits company offering seasonal cocktail recipes. By providing additional value around your product, you’re giving consumers more reasons to trust and ultimately purchase your offerings.
Pros & cons of branded content
Understanding the advantages and drawbacks of branded content can help you determine when to incorporate it into your marketing strategy.
Pros:
Retain Control: When you create your own content, you control the message and ensure it aligns with your target audience. You also decide the publishing schedule, unlike relying on a UGC creator’s timeline.
Strategic Alignment: You can ensure that your content matches your overall strategy and campaign goals. This allows you to tailor your messaging and calls to action (CTA) to align with your priorities.
Unlimited Content: The only limit is your team’s capacity and resources. You don’t need to negotiate influencer rates or hope for a certain number of posts. You can create as much content as your team can handle.
Cons:
Lack of Trust: Consumers tend to trust recommendations from people they personally know over a brand. According to the 2021 Trust in Advertising study, 88% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know.
Limited Reach: Branded content is restricted to your own audience and followers.
Costs: Producing branded content can be expensive as it requires your brand to have the necessary resources, tools, and team bandwidth to create impactful content.
Lower Engagement: “Thumb-stop” ratios articulate just how compelling your content was to those scrolling through. The longer someone views your content, the greater their likelihood of clicking. Branded content often has lower “thumb-stop” ratios indicating content was less engaging.
3 Examples of brands creating their own great content
Quality brand content rises above the noise and provides key value to its audience. Take a look at a few brands doing branded content right.
Duolingo
Duolingo is ubiquitous on social media for jumping on trends, prioritizing entertainment over pitches or product placements, incorporating their lovable mascot, Duo, whenever possible, and occasionally dipping a toe into “unhinged” commentary.
For example, the recent release of season three of the Hulu show "The Bear" gave Duolingo the chance to insert its brand into an already popular conversation. They recreated "The Bear’s" iconic kitchen with Chef Duo and two of the actual cast members, Matty Matheson and Ayo Edebiri, to help promote the season launch. Naturally, this collaboration also brought attention to Duolingo and no doubt resulted in increased brand awareness and likely downloads of their mobile app.
REd Bull
Red Bull is renowned among marketers for its holistic approach to brand building. Instead of merely promoting their energy drinks, they engage in sponsorships, events like their Soapbox races, collaborations, and conversations that promote an adventurous lifestyle where their product naturally fits in, rather than just selling drinks.
Red Bull excels at storytelling, investing considerable time and resources into creating compelling narratives through documentary-style videos, athlete profiles, and more.
One notable example is their separate Instagram account dedicated to cliff diving (@redbullcliffdiving), a world series created by Red Bull to celebrate divers' acrobatic feats. Instead of graphics depicting their energy drinks or carousels of flavors, you'll find bloopers from their latest YouTube videos and compilations of epic dives from the past year.
What makes Red Bull's content so compelling is its authenticity and immersive nature. By focusing on the experiences and stories of athletes and adventurers, Red Bull creates a strong emotional connection with its audience. This approach not only enhances brand loyalty but also positions Red Bull as a lifestyle brand, rather than just an energy drink company.
OLIPOP
OLIPOP is a healthier soda alternative on a meteoric rise, recently named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential Companies in 2024. Their content strategy isn’t one note. While UGC is a significant part of their marketing, their branded content is equally robust. They engage in innovative collaborations, capitalize on relevant trends, and create content that feels authentic, even if it is produced in-house.
For instance, OLIPOP leveraged National Ice Cream Soda Day to highlight their flavors creatively. They shared recipes for transforming their various flavors into ice cream sodas, inspiring consumers to reach for OLIPOP in new situations.
They are also adept at engaging with trends quickly as they arise, such as this quip about the recent Strawberry Moon.
The key difference that sets OLIPOP apart is their creativity and ability to insert their brand into unexpected yet relevant conversations while maintaining an approachable, yet playful brand voice.
User-Generated Vs. Brand Generated: When to use each content type
Now that you’ve explored the ins and outs of user-generated vs. brand-generated content, it’s time to consider when to utilize each one in your content marketing strategy to align with the goals and priorities you’ve set.
Incorporating UGC into your content strategy
Brands that benefit most from UGC are those with products or services that can be effectively showcased through photos or videos. If viewers can't see your brand in action, it becomes challenging for them to envision how it might fit into their lives. Attractions, local restaurants and retail shops, beauty services, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands are particularly well-suited for UGC content.
Incorporating UGC into your marketing strategy can be as simple as asking your current customers to create content about their experiences with your brand. Starting with your existing audience is the easiest approach, but you’ll soon need to expand your UGC efforts. This is where partnering with a platform like Hummingbirds can be beneficial, as it sources hyperlocal creators and influencers who are already interested in collaborating with you and allows you to put a campaign together to increase your brand’s reach and generate UGC.
Consider tailoring your UGC efforts to align with specific campaigns or goals. For instance, you could encourage your audience to post UGC under a branded hashtag to create a cohesive story and reach new people. Alternatively, you could run a giveaway, such as a spice brand asking customers to post a photo of their favorite recipe using one of their spices for a chance to win a prize package.
Creating your own branded content
It’s crucial to share your brand's story, vision, and products to help consumers get to know you better, especially since many of them research brands before making purchasing decisions.
Brands with a clear mission or value proposition that can be effectively communicated through content and storytelling are ideal for brand-generated content. This is especially true for service providers, nonprofit organizations, e-commerce businesses, and technology platforms that might not be as visually obvious.
Branded content campaigns are typically more structured than UGC and follow a repeatable pattern.
Many campaigns start with a GACC brief, outlining goals, audience, creative/unique take, and channels/distribution for the content.
Next, determine who will be responsible for each piece of content, from copywriting to graphics to video production, editing, project management, and any other roles necessary to bring the vision to life.
Creating the content often involves batching efforts to produce several pieces of usable photos, videos, or graphics.
Finally, distribute the content through channels most effective or relevant to your campaign goals, which might include social media, blogs, newsletters, podcasts, or print.
Branded content is typically an essential piece of the overall marketing efforts for brands, big or small.
Why the best content strategies use both types of content
The best chances of winning over your brand’s audience rely on using both brand-generated content and UGC because both are necessary for building brand trust and affinity. It's crucial to convey your brand's story in your own words and be seen as a trusted authority in your product category through brand-generated content. Equally important is ensuring that you’re not the only one touting your greatness. When real people and customers share their experiences with your brand, it leverages the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing to increase conversion rates and overall brand awareness.
Brands like Duolingo, Red Bull, and OLIPOP exemplify successful marketing strategies, not just because they do brand-generated content well but because they also have a strong UGC motion.
OLIPOP utilizes tools like Hummingbirds to power their UGC engine. They engaged local creators to produce image and video content for their newest flavor launch, Peaches and Cream. The result was hundreds of real people going into stores to buy the product and sharing with their friends exactly where to get it, all while creating content that was authentic to them. A cookie maker designed custom OLIPOP cookies for her post, while another creator got creative with her pour.
UGC is key to bringing in new audiences and building trust, while branded content ensures they stay and continue to move through the purchasing funnel. It’s a continuous loop that you want to keep feeding on both ends to maintain its momentum.
Find a partner that supports your content strategy
Managing all aspects of your marketing strategy can be time-consuming and exhausting. That's why it's essential to have reliable vendors and partners aligned with your goals to ensure every detail is handled with strategy and intention.
Hummingbirds is a platform with expertise in UGC. We’ve created thousands of pieces of content from real people for brands such as OLIPOP, Goodles, Vacation Inc., and Destination Madison. We’ve learned what works, what doesn’t, and how to craft campaigns that achieve your desired outcomes, whether it’s Reels showing exactly where your product is on a shelf or an Instagram Story walkthrough of a restaurant’s seasonal menu launch.
If you’re ready to explore offloading UGC to a trusted partner, book a call with us today.