UGC can be a great way to highlight what a brand means to its customers. According to the Bazaarvoice Shopper Experience Index, released earlier this year, there’s a 137% conversion lift when shoppers engage with user-generated content on a best-in-class site.

We’ve seen UGC used everywhere from ASOS, which asks customers to upload photos of themselves wearing its products to Instagram, adding a hashtag to be featured on the brand’s feed; to Crayola, which created an AR filter its website visitors could use to customise their Christmas greetings to friends.

Kooness, an online art marketplace, has boosted sales by using UGC to add provenance to the artworks listed on its site. The artists film themselves talking to their smartphones, to give customers insight into their work. Later in this article, we’ll explain how LAMA could help your business achieve something similar.

Why UGC is both a blessing and a curse for companies

Businesses use UGC to pursue all sorts of objectives, notably including viral social media marketing, brand positioning, and building customer trust.

Unfortunately, there are also challenges attached to UGC – particularly when it comes to gathering content from users, storing it in an orderly fashion, and deploying it efficiently in marketing campaigns.

Businesses that don’t have access to specialised UGC tools will often find themselves needing to create bespoke solutions for these processes. This can be a major disincentive from doing UGC campaigns, as the time and resources needed to invent ways of handling user-generated content may render the whole process unprofitable.

LAMA: an end-to-end solution for UGC campaigns

This is where we come in.

LAMA solves the challenges of user-generated content with an end-to-end UGC tool, built specifically to handle user-generated videos.

The tool is an all-in-one solution for:

• requesting UGC videos from customers/sources;
• managing UGC in a single, secure location; and
• deploying UGC to websites and/or social channels.

Here’s how it works:

Every UGC campaign will be defined by two key factors: the user-generated content itself, and the people who create it.

Here on the LAMA dashboard (above), we can see key metrics for both, including the number of users you have added to your contact lists, the number of UGC videos you have received, and the number of reminders about filming UGC you have sent to users.

All the people who take part in your UGC campaigns can be managed here, in the ‘Users’ section of the LAMA tool.

The process for adding users is simple:

1. Create a list that will contain the details of participants in a UGC campaign;
2. Upload participant details to the list, either by manually entering their details into a form (e.g. name, email), or in bulk via CSV upload.

LAMA clients often use dedicated lists to store details of different types of UGC campaign participant.

For example, you might have lists for customers who say they want to participate in UGC campaigns; for clients who have agreed to provide a testimonial; and for company employees who are going to provide insight on how the business works.

Wherever UGC can enhance a business, you should be looking to build your lists of campaign participants. Just be sure to give each list a descriptive title, as this will make it much easier to find lists to re-use in future campaigns.

Once you have uploaded some users to LAMA, you can start asking questions for them to answer via smartphone video. There are options to ask questions to specific users, to specific lists, or to all the users you have added to the tool.

To set a question, LAMA clients can either type a new question into a form, or select from stored questions that have been previously created by the user.

You can also type in recording instructions for each question, to help users produce appropriate content. For example, you might write “do this outdoors”, “do this while holding the product”, or “do this while standing in front of a big sign that reads: ‘LAMA makes UGC easy’”. You get the idea.

After you’ve hit ‘SEND’ on your questions, your specified users will receive an email with a QR code and link, enabling them to record their UGC response.

In the ‘Videos’ area of the LAMA tool, you will be able to perform lots of actions relating to the videos uploaded in response to your questions, including:

• Watch the videos back;
• Download them to your computer, to upload to your social media;
• Generate HTML code to embed the videos into a CMS, e.g. WordPress;
• Get automated transcriptions of the audio from videos.

The screenshot above shows the search function within the ‘Videos’ section of LAMA, which can help with finding certain videos using the name or email address of a participant.

Sometimes you’ll want to ask multiple questions to the same user, to create an interview or video series.

In this case, the ‘Interviews’ section of LAMA is here to help. This part of the tool groups all the responses from each user together, showing the user’s name, the questions you asked them and the video answers they gave.

Some LAMA clients need APIs to give to their developers, as shown above. This makes it possible to fetch users using a cURL.

We can help make your UGC campaigns quick, easy and fully optimised

Smartphones have made it possible for all sorts of people to create quality content, and this creates a vast opportunity for businesses to gather user-generated content and then deploy that content to achieve their marketing objectives.

LAMA For Companies exists to make it quick, easy to add value-adding UGC videos to your site and social media. To learn more about how we can help you get the most out of user-generated content, request a free demo. 

Main image © Camylla Battani on Unsplash.