How UGC can get your business back on track post-pandemic.

As the government begins to ease movement restrictions, you’ll agree with me that your business needs to start seeing reasonable numbers again.

But, before you jet off towards your business goals for the rest of the year, I’ll like to remind you that the pandemic brought a change to the way your audience lives, interact with one another, with brands and even their buying behaviour. This means their post-pandemic life will in no way look like their pre-COVID-19 life. 

This shift in market dynamics and change in user behaviour suggests the need to adjust your content playbook to suit the current wave. It's important you have an Agile content strategy that allows you to make tweaks and adjustments as changes occur in your audience’s behaviour.

You’re at that point where you need to adjust your content playbook, as proceeding with the same one you started the year with isn’t gonna cut it if you intend to make any progress for the remaining part of this year. 

Just consider this your chance to kick that rigid strategy out the door and embrace being human with your content to connect with your audience - so don’t blow it!

Now more than ever, customers crave human connection, as necessitated by having to appreciate little things of life like spending time with family, catching up with longtime friends and having business meetings in pyjamas with kids playing and making noise in the background.

The lockdown triggered an increased usage of social platforms by customers, mostly to interact with family and friends or colleagues and business partners. 47% of internet users around the world spent a long time using social media and half of these users (23%) said they’ve been spending significantly more time using social media than they did pre-pandemic.

This means your customers spent so much time on social media in the past few months interacting, connecting and sharing personal stories and experiences. These undiluted personal experience content they share is what you should see as User-Generated-Content (UGC).

If deployed in the right way and with your brand in mind, UGC can be a cost-effective and efficient source of content for your team post-pandemic, as you can adapt it to suit your social media posts, blog posts and email newsletters.

Let's look at 3 ways it can help get your business back on track.

It builds trust

Building relationships with customers will become increasingly difficult, as they are just recovering from having their lives almost upside down, battling with the fear of losing their jobs, among other things.

One of the ways to build trust with customers going forward is by sharing authentic experience from other customers. Customers trust what other customers say more than what the brand says. So show them images and videos of other happy customers.

UGC will not only reduce your audience suspicion meter but will also drive believability for other forms of product/service content they get from you. 92% of consumers trust earned media, like UGC, more than any other form of content - so I strongly suggest you consider adding it to your strategy.

Social Proof

As the world gets back to business as usual, UGC shows your customers that you are also back in business - not like you ever left though. 

Most customers want to be sure that your business is still active and one way to let them know is by showing the return of business activities especially from the perspective of other customers. 56% of customers say that they rely on reviews and recommendations of other customers to make informed purchasing decisions.

With the help of user-generated content, you can provide authentic information about your brand’s current operations which can boost credibility and help build confidence. I feel UGC serves as social proof that can nudge a reluctant customer to take a step towards buying in a time like this.

 Human Connection

The average person wants to feel a real human connection to a brand before buying from that brand. This provides your brand with the opportunity to showcase it’s human element more than ever via your content. 

Your customers are real people, living real lives, so loosen your grip on the “corporate” stereotype and embrace humanity and connect with your audience.

People now appreciate the little things of life more than ever, an opportunity you can maximize to solve the challenge of content creation if only you’ll take a look at the content created by your customers even if they are not as top-notch as the ones created in-house.

 It will not only reduce your content creation cost but will also help you connect humanly to your audience.

If you’ve got thoughts, questions or any feedback, please feel free to drop them in the comments section.

Cheers