Consumer-Generated Marketing: Tools You Can Use to Grow Your Product
Uncover the tools available for effective consumer-generated marketing and learn how to utilize them in your own initiatives.
In today’s highly saturated marketing environment, exorbitant marketing costs and big budgets are often required for effective promotion. Businesses are faced with the challenge of reaching their target audiences in a cost-efficient and impactful way. In this context, the role of product managers becomes increasingly crucial.
Product managers have the unique opportunity to extend their software products, integrate with external tools, and organically grow the product’s audience. By actively supporting marketing efforts, product managers can unlock new avenues for growth and bring innovative ideas to the table.
This cross-departmental collaboration not only benefits the marketing team but also contributes to the overall success and recognition of the company. Without the product managers’ insight and support, marketing professionals may not even realize the full potential of what can be achieved.
In this article, we will:
- Explore the emerging trend of driving product growth through community activation and consumer-generated marketing.
- Delve into the concept of consumer-generated marketing, understanding its potential and its benefits.
- Through real-life examples, we will gain inspiration for our own use cases.
- Finally, we will examine today’s tools for consumer-generated marketing and explore how they can be effectively utilized in our initiatives.
What is consumer-generated marketing?
Consumer-generated marketing (CGM) is when companies prompt their customers to create content for their product brand. Often such content plays a central role in customer acquisition and growth marketing campaigns.
As a result, you can build a new community or activate an existing one around your product that enables referral and promotion organically without ad spend. This method is also more natural and reliable, offering more trust in comparison to classical advertisements that people got used to ignoring.
Is consumer-generated marketing the next growth channel?
According to Wordstream, the cost per lead (CPL) increased by an average of 19% in 2022, with further rises anticipated.
The market is saturated with similar products, making it difficult to stand out among the competitors.
The customer acquisition cost has increased by 60% in the period from 2013 to 2019 and appears to keep growing at the same rate since then.
Additionally, consumers tend to ignore ads and rely on recommendations instead.
For niche products, ads may not work as a growth channel as their target audience settings can be too limiting if a product tries to advertise to a relevant segment.
How can consumer-generated marketing be used instead of PPC to generate traffic and leads?
One of the solutions to the PPC problem can be consumer-generated marketing, but why can it be an effective growth channel?
By allowing your customers to create and share content for your product, you save time and money on content creation and promotion. Your customers will take the conversation to social media, where your product will get exposure through referrals and word-of-mouth.
As a result, you can expect a boost in traffic and higher interest in your product from existing and potential customers.
Consumer-generated marketing campaigns usually cost less than paid ads and can engage the community.
Let’s take a look at some real-world examples of CGM in action.
Real-world examples of consumer-generated marketing campaigns
We chose the Doritos campaign and Affiliate World Conference as examples because they demonstrate the incredible success that consumer-generated marketing can achieve. These two cases showcase the effectiveness of CGM in diverse contexts.
Doritos Legion of Creators
Doritos launched a website called Legion Of Creators to host multiple CGM campaigns.
Whenever a campaign is launched, Doritos fans can create branded content. Then Doritos shares it on its social media accounts. The purpose is to give customers a voice and to activate the brand’s community.
The content users made was hilarious and outrageous at times, but importantly it drew a lot of positive attention to the brand.
By providing an outlet for creative users, Doritos successfully engaged its fan community and promoted the brand simultaneously. We can see that image-generating software is probably used for Doritos’ customer-generated marketing.
Affiliate World Conferences
Interestingly, the Affiliate World Conference also probably uses image generation software to spread the word about the participants of their events.
For affiliate marketers and e-commerce entrepreneurs across the world, Affiliate World Conference is an important event to come together and network.
That said, the promotions and content surrounding Affiliate World Conferences have been orchestrated cleverly. Affiliate World has used image generation templates to help users create content. This customer-generated content is used promote its events. However, it’s not just the customers who have utilized generated content — its sponsors and speakers too.
Branded templates were used for:
- Speakers. Whenever speakers are announced, the host adds their mug shots to a preset of a banner. The preset includes a space for a quote, name, time, and date of the performance, which can be changed quickly. Both, the host and the speaker can share the banner on their social media for promotion as banners are catchy.
- Sponsors — Another set of image generation templates was provided for sponsors to edit and personalize to promote themselves.
- Participants — In the same way as sponsors and speakers, another set of templates was available for participants. Participants let their audience know that they have a booth at the exhibition, and will be up to one-on-one conversations.
As a result, Affiliate World promotes its events with these visuals and images organically to the audiences of the participating businesses.
Banners are also used as ad creatives.
These two examples highlight how image-generation software can catalyze the impact of consumer-generated marketing.
However, it doesn’t end there. Let’s take a look at other popular brands and their CGM campaigns.
Netflix — The Stranger Things 2
Netflix used CGM during the release of Stranger Things 2. With the hashtag #strangerthings2, many users began to document the ‘stranger things’ that were happening in their lives that day — usually, some funny events or other bizarre moments. Users shared these images on social media with the hashtag. This massively benefitted Netflix, as, during a 2-week period that the campaign was running, the Stranger Things audience increased by 1 million.
Airbnb and Regram
Airbnb took a smart approach to CGM by regramming user-generated content. Airbnb reshares the images made by their clients. Specifically, by the segment of their customers who host travelers. Not only did it boost their host’s traffic, but it reflects well on Airbnb and provides the company with plenty of high-quality content.
Lego and their Lego ideas
Back in 2015, Lego launched Lego Ideas.
Lego Ideas started as a competition where users designed a new Lego set, and tried to gain supporters for the idea. If creators gained at least 10,000 supporters, Lego would consider making the set an official product.
Here are a few recent entries
It was a genius move from Lego. They engaged with their community and drew positive attention to their brand and products. Well done Lego!
Tips on How to Get User-Generated Content
- Customer Feedback and Reviews — Anytime you buy a product or service, you’re likely to check the reviews and feedback. It is technically consumer-generated content — and it can make or break a business. Many reviewers like to leave photos and images of their products. By replying to reviews, and sharing positive feedback or photos on the product page, you are providing potential customers with proof that they could be happy customers.
- Making a Banner for a Discount — Many brands involve users in making branded banners for a discount. It urges users to get creative and generate content for the brand. Also, regular customers can apply for an affiliate discount to share with their friends. A unique code is generated for the customer and added to a banner that customers can share on social media. Supply customers with a link where they can choose among the branded templates to create the perfect banner.
- Contests — Contests are a simple yet effective way of engaging existing and potential customers. By offering a hashtag contest and asking for the best content, you can engage your community and increase awareness with potential customers.
5 popular growth-hacking tools for consumer-generated marketing
Now we’ve covered the basics of consumer-generated marketing, and how effective it can be (including real examples), let’s take a look at the 5 best growth hacking tools to help you with consumer-generated marketing.
DynaPictures — Dynamic Image and Video Generation
DynaPictures is an image generation platform offering an image generation widget that you can add to your website so users can easily start uploading their images and adding their texts via a form that is connected to a certain design template. On top of this, DynaPictures can produce images in bulk, saving you more time and money. There are several similar platforms, but DynaPictures is more cost-effective and generates images much faster than competitors (when we used it for our own campaigns).
If you want more control over the branded content that your users produce, make a few templates, before embedding an image generator toolkit. Your community will appreciate the fact that when you ask for user-generated content, you make it easier for them to create content for you.
WishPond — Hashtag Campaigns and Photo-Sharing Contests
Wishpond is a marketing automation platform that includes a variety of marketing tools. Out of these tools, hashtag campaigns and photo-sharing contests are two great ways to boost your CGM.
For hashtag campaigns launched using Wishpond, all entries are pulled from social media to your contest page automatically. With photo-sharing contests, you can easily allow users to submit photos, and participants — to vote on which ones they prefer. With Wishpond, this process is made simple and quick. There are several alternatives to Wishpond that can offer better pricing depending on the features needed.
Taggbox — Creating Shoppable UGC Galleries
With Taggbox, you can aggregate all user-generated content from multiple social media platforms. Use the generated content to promote your brand or products. Taggbox includes themes, customization tools, and filters.
For example, you can create shoppable galleries from user-generated content with Taggbox. You can accumulate and filter images and tag certain products. If there is an image of your customers wearing one of your products, you can take this image and tag the product.
Yotpo — Collect and Manage Customer Content
Similar to Taggbox, Yotpo aggregates and curates user-generated content for the brand. You can manage and respond to reviews or posts, and use them for promotional purposes.
Yotpo allows you to filter out reviews and posts. Users of Yotpo can combine reviews and content with customizable options to personalize them to your brand. There are multiple integration options available with Yotpo, including Shopify and Salesforce.
SocialNative — Insights into User-Generated Content
With SocialNative, you can connect your brand with creators to get user-generated content. SocialNative sources the content related to your brand with hashtags and mentions and collects it for you.
Thus, you can connect to influencers and social accounts that can boost your brand visibility. Share marketing campaign outlines with creators so their content aligns with your brand. Insights and analytics are also provided.
How to get started with consumer-generated marketing
There are two popular options for launching a consumer-generated marketing campaign.
Option 1 — Community Activation
Activating the community is one of the popular growth hacking techniques for growing the user base. The best approach is to design and run a campaign targeting existing customers using all your available channels.
Here’s how:
- Encourage clients to share their experiences using your product or service and join the community — use your social media and emails!
- Create a web page that contains:
— Motivation section — Give your users a reason to share their experiences (a personal discount that grows as they involve new users).
— Describe how your users can share their experiences — provide instructions to upload your photo here, then share a generated image with the hashtag #mycampaign.
— Embed an image generator widget onto your campaign page. Tools like DynaPictures can do this all for you.
— Include a social proof section with examples of images by others to inspire.
3. Design a banner or image template for your users and embed it on your page to allow users to generate images easily.
4. Monitor your campaign on social media and the web making improvements along the way. Use tools like Taggbox or Yotpo to automate this process.
Option 2 — Engage an Existing Segment of the Audience from Your Community
Analyze your audience to find a segment that’s more likely to engage with others. Then, you can begin your customer-specific campaign.
- Come up with a campaign topic that would be of interest to your segmented audience. It may be a specific product or service that your target group uses. Campaign themes should resonate with your existing customers so that they:
— Feel that they express support for the product or service they like.
— Feel that they can influence and bring value by spreading the word about the brand.
— Are motivated by the incentive that you offer in return for promotion. - Prepare a web page with the campaign description. Use promotional and engaging language to make it sound appealing. Include any contests or incentives.
- Create an image or banner template using an image generator platform and embed it as a widget on your campaign page — consider image generation tools.
- Monitor your campaign on social media and the website — making improvements along the way. Use tools like Taggbox or Yotpo to automate this process.
The five tools and guides we shared, such as image and video generation, help to simplify creating content for your customers. Remember to always give back to the community before asking anything of them.
We hope this will help you to launch a marketing campaign, or inspire a successful growth hacking campaign for your product.
