If you’re a DTC (direct-to-customer) brand and struggling with producing content, UGC might be your way out. What’s the fuss about UGC? User-generated content is any textual or visual content, produced by people using your brand’s product or services, i.e. users. While high-end branding photos and videos will give you a premium touch, raw, and unedited UGC will give you genuine credibility. People trust people easier than they trust ads - simple as that.
Acquiring UGC might be a hard nut to crack from the start and it might take more time and effort to build a solid base of it. Start with encouraging existing customers to leave a review on your website or Facebook page. From our perspective, there are 3 solutions to fix the content creation problem with cost and quantity:
If you’re at your raw beginning, you might want to postpone trying out the first option due to lack of budget and longer delivery times. If you have the knowledge, the resources, and the place to set up your studio, give option 2 a go. Keep in mind that aside from those things, you also need an experienced team to back you up. A strong plus to this option is having complete control over the execution, production, and delivery of the content. Let’s focus on the last option - creating your own UGC creative engine.
But why even choose UGC? For starters, it’s cost-efficient without any massive prior investment. A lot of people are willing to share their experience with your brand in the form of photos, video testimonials, or reviews in exchange for your products.
Briefing, briefing, and more briefing - content creators and influencers cannot deliver on-point content if even you yourself aren’t sure what your objectives are. If you’re aiming at gaining more brand awareness and recognition, do mass outreach to a lot of nano and micro-influencers. What might come in handy here is engaging with your actual clients and nurturing your user-brand relationship. When you feel you have the experience and the budget, contact macro influencers and your local celebrities.
If your goal is getting more conversions, search for more medium-sized profiles rather than placing all your eggs in one mega influencer basket. A small investment or giving away a collection of your products might start a great partnership with your chosen influencer and if your product is at the right place at the right time, it will result in conversions.
2. Don’t go balls to the wall, take it easy.
Define the scale of the influencer profile you’re looking for - nano, micro, macro. If you’re on a tight budget, start with nano influencers. While it may be time-consuming in the long run, this is a fast way to get a lot of raw and unedited content from genuine people. Profiles with a smaller following might not have the desired reach, but they often have a more loyal audience. They are more likely to collaborate in exchange for fair compensation and free product.
Be open to people that reach out to your brand with their proposal - you probably already won them over and caught their attention, so they are ready to take it up a notch and become your brand’s ambassador. If they reach out to you and their profile has a decent engagement-to-following ratio, propose a fair deal for both sides.
“Okay, where and how do I start?”
There are 2 ways of creating your very own UGC engine. Either start reaching out and acquiring content on your own or find an existing influencer marketing and on-demand content creation tool. If you want to avoid third-party commissions, start sending emails to chosen profiles or message them on their profiles.
A simple summary of the said options is:
For on-demand content creation campaigns, stick to existing tools. There are tons of up-to-date software and tools that let you open your first content creation campaign and there’s tons of material on how to do it. Our personal favourite is Influee, mostly because it offers everything we need to create a killer campaign brief and negotiations: Campaign guidelines, mood board, clear overview of applicants, deliverables, and delivered content.
For collaborations with macro and mega influencers, go with cold pitching and personalised email outreach. The primary goal of said collaborations is incorporating your product into the influencer’s lifestyle and appearing on their profiles to reach their audience. While these collaborations are often a lot more pricey, you can ask them to deliver the content they posted and use it as social proof on your website or ads.
Let’s focus on the first and more time-consuming option - Reaching out.
3. Create an unique pitch. Make sure to introduce yourself so the addressee knows who’s reaching out and which brand you’re representing. State the obvious facts why you think your products will fit their lifestyle and how you differ from other brands. What always did wonders for us is highlight a few things about their presence that caught our attention. For example, a certain influencer is Youtube-native and you’re enjoying their vlogs on Youtube. Tell this person which episode was your favourite and what part of it stuck with you.
4. Send follow-ups. Always log negotiations and deals you made with each person, even if you only reached out and did not get an answer yet. Try again. And then again in 2 weeks. They might be preoccupied with other projects at the moment and missed your email or they weren’t sure if they had the time capacity to start a new collaboration just yet.
5. Always negotiate the price and deliverables. The most common mistake is closing a deal without a brief description of what your expectations are about the content. Propose the deliverables first, then negotiate a price. If you’re planning to use their content on your profiles and advertising campaigns, make sure to mention it forward and ask for content rights.
6. Set the date of content delivery. If the content will be posted to the creator’s profile as well - ask about the expected date of posting. If you're working with macro-influencers with over 10K followers, generate a UTM link that they can include in their stories and bio. It costs you nothing to generate a UTM, but it gives you an insight into the traffic they drove to your site and how profitable this posting was for you. If you're aiming for more conversions, agree on a discount code for bigger profiles and track profitability by monitoring promo codes as well.
Option 2: Using on-demand content creation software
The assets needed to start this campaign are as follows:
After you have checked the two above, move on to opening your very first campaign and talking with content creators. Check their previous work and decide if their content style fits the vibe of your brand. Keep in mind that most content creators have a distinguished style that differentiates them from others. While they probably will be willing to follow your brand guidelines, it is still better to leave them with at least some creative freedom.
3. Having an Instagrammable product and paying loads to a mega influencer does not guarantee any conversions
Enter the user-generated content campaign journey with a simple mindset - it will not give you a direct or measurable ROI, at least not to all extents.
RELEVANCE x REACH x RELATIONSHIP
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: There are no secret formulas to creating a million-dollar campaign and there are no shortcuts to discovering your winning collaboration. The sooner you start reaching out and closing deals, the sooner you can test different formats and pieces of user-generated content.
Do your homework and explore the most influential people in your niche. For starters, aim for medium-sized profiles and find the profiles that fit your target persona best. When reaching out, be friendly and speak their language, while maintaining a professional approach at the same time. Don’t try to sell them your products at all costs and use cringe-worthy email templates. It will backfire and you will be filed directly under the “Do not answer” category.
4. The best for the last - double down on successful collaborations and try dark posting
Scale the organic content that reached the KPIs and put it on steroids. If you can allocate more budget to the influencer marketing and UGC, work on your ambassador program. There is no formula to say how long your trial ambassador contract should last, but for starters, we recommend 3 months. In 3 months, you should receive a decent batch of content, decide if their following fits your target audience (or if they helped to reach a brand new audience group), and form a mutually satisfactory partnership.
If you feel confident that this person should be the face of your brand, try dark posting from their profile. Influencer dark posts are ad-only purpose posts from the influencer's profile that cannot be seen on their feed. The brand does not gain control over their social media profiles, only the permission to advertise from them. Dark posting renders the conventional direct-response ads less effective. Dark posts appear more user-friendly and trustworthy and as we said at the beginning: people trust people more than they trust ads.
Additional resources:
UGC: One of the biggest secrets of 7- and 8-figure brand: https://wescale.agency/knowledge/ugc-one-of-the-biggest-secrets-of-seven-and-eight-figure-brands/
All journeys start with the first step on the long road towards the goal, full of challenges, opportunities, and adjustments. With this article, I would like to guide you through the beginning of our agency WeScale.
In August 2019, I had just finished working as a CMO in one of the fastest growing eCommerce companies in the region. In four years, we got from 0 to 50 MM € revenue by bringing together the best of Facebook, Instagram, Influencers, Content creation, localization, and direct response tactics to build up a strong beast in the industry.
Selling in 13 different markets, being strongly connected with other prominent players in the market, leading a 30+ people marketing team, and being part of a C-level management, gained us a lot of knowledge in the eCommerce area.
Some of the main areas were: how to grow, fast-paced a/b testing, implementing different growth hacks, opening new markets, introducing new products, dealing with challenges, creating original video & photo content, integrating Influencer marketing in eCommerce, and much much more.
Back to the drawing board: How to scale these results and help more companies?
At 27 years old, after being in the industry for more than five years, I was at the stage where I had to start from 0 again.
To tell you the truth, this was one of the most exciting things in my life.
Being at home, sitting at my table in the bedroom with my laptop and just thinking about what to do next; Like the first time, when I was starting with my own company.
I wanted to do something different, something that will help our partners grow and inspire others in the industry to go out there and do incredible things on their own.
So the first step was the decision on what I wanted to do. It went somehow like this.
I started thinking...
Since I started my journey, I have always loved the performance side of marketing, looking at the numbers, coming up with ideas with a team, and running thousands of tests to find the winning ads for scaling.
So the first part is clear; it will definitely be a performance-oriented company.
The next question for me was: Whom I want to serve?
The answer was easy → eCommerce businesses that sell products that improve people's lives, meaning that I wanted to work with companies that bring smiles and joy to the customers.
I was thinking deeper...
I compared my years in the agency that I owned to the year I worked in-house for an eCommerce company.
They both had pluses and minuses, and after hours of brainstorming with my sister Maja, who is an excellent coach; 100 podcasts that I listened to on my phone while hiking and tons of Zoom calls with my new network of people in the eCommerce area; I thought of ways of combining all of my years of experience.
That's when the ideas of Boutique eCommerce Growth Agency came to life.
Boutique eCommerce Growth Agency as a business model
Sounds interesting, right?
"But what does it mean?" I asked myself, because I wanted a clear picture of what I wanted to do for many years to come.
So the idea was to build a company of ecommerce professionals who love eCommerce and want to create inspiring stories together by learning new things and executing strategies that would help turn branded life-improving products into brands.
By serving a limited number of clients (quality > quantity), we would be able to go deep into each product and create an excellent environment for personal and business growth for our team members and our clients.
That was it!
After going through the plan, I had an idea of what kind of company I want to start building for the next 10+ years. I got super excited about it, knowing this plan will get me out of bed in the morning for many years to come. On the journey, we will be able to work with many amazing people - people we would never meet, if we weren't on this journey and knowledge we otherwise would not have the chance to gain.
All I could say at the end of that day was: Let's go! ?
Building a 12-member team in a year with zero employee churn
Super excited with a pretty clear idea, it was time to start.
How did it start?
I started working as a freelancer with three clients that I found within my Facebook and LinkedIn contacts. I got on with testing if I can implement some of my ideas and if they would result in sales growth.
This was in late September and October 2019, only one month after leaving the company. Those who had known me for a long time know that I am awful at taking breaks.
I rented a table in the coworking space near my home and started doing the work.
So the first three projects were all at their beginning, generating 5-15 K €/month and selling in a single country. The fastest way was to start in my own country, because I had some strong contacts here, and speed is always essential for marketing and eCommerce.
I didn't wait to find the perfect name for a one-person agency :); I believed that it would come naturally down the road. I started executing and getting feedback on the market.
For the first couple of weeks, I didn't have much execution to do, since the projects had just begun, so the budgets were small and stock limited, but I decided to go all-in and there were no excuses for me.
I started learning 3-4 hours a day about different growth hacking approaches on digital channels, studying the digital-first eCommerce brands and founders, doing the courses, making notes, and creating a plan at which stage to implement tests.
One precious thing was (and still is) the direct communication with clients; I can clearly remember how many hours we invested in our conversation via Slack, Zoom, or just sitting at the coffee shop.
I still believe that this is one of the best ways to shape your business and relationship because you understand the needs, vision, and business.
The first responses within November & December 2019 were incredible; partners loved the strategy we were discussing. We opened the first new countries together, worked with other freelancers to create content, and scaled the sales results.
That was a massive win for me.
Not only did I get the social proof confirming this is something valuable to work on, but at that moment, the name of our agency was born: WeScale.
From one man band to three musketeers
In December 2019, I decided to transform "me" into "we" and start a WeScale agency to help eCommerce businesses grow.
In order to do that, I needed a team, and I went back to my connections on LinkedIn and Facebook to find the people I wanted to work with.
So my first two hires were directly picked and reached out from my contact lists.
They are Jure & Nika, who I both already knew and always wanted to work with, because I always believed we shared the same mindset.
Jure was first, and Nika joined the company a few weeks later. We met in the cafe, and I explained my vision for the company, what I believe they could bring to the team and what I think we can do together.
I'm super grateful that they believed in me and the idea, so they both said yes, and on January 15th, 2020, WeScale officially became more than a one-man band. We started operating as a team and building infrastructure and systems to empower eCommerce growth in Europe.
With that, the exciting story of WeScale had begun. In less than a year and a half, we have worked with 10 hand-picked clients, built a team of 18 KPI-driven individuals and broke dozens of records. On behalf of the whole team, I would like to thank you for your support; our community, family, friends, partners, mentors, and all the others that helped us start and chase our vision. Thank you!
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