How User-Generated Content Provides a Competitive Edge
UGC, or user-generated (created) content, is any video, image, text, or audio that users post online or on social media platforms in relation to a brand, a brand’s products, and the user’s experience with them. These user-created content pieces can enhance a brand’s equity by strengthening and improving its online reputation. UGC, and specifically unsolicited UGC, acts as a testimonial to how well a brand is living up to its promises and to the expectations that customers have of the brand.UGC offers many benefits to a brand and should be seriously considered in any content strategy. UGC puts the customer experience front and center—promoting not just products, but the benefit of those products. This enhances the brand’s credibility and serves as excellent social proof. A study by Crowdriff.com found that 47% of millennials and 36% of baby boomers trust UGC, compared to only 25% of them trusting branded content messaging. It is no secret that UGC can stretch your content marketing budget, as visuals, audio, and text can be repurposed from the users’ posts. In short, UGC is capable of building a deeper and more authentic relationship with customers, helping your brand appear approachable and part of the conversation while delivering content that’s genuine and cuts through the clutter and noise of purely promotional content.
YouTube Comparison Between Audio Ads and Video Ads
YouTube announced the addition of audio ads to their platform in November of 2020. Audio streaming platforms like Spotify and Pandora have had audio ads for a while now, but how do audio ads compare to video ads on YouTube’s platform? That is where Creatopy comes in. They conducted an experiment to test audio placements against the video ad format on YouTube. They spent $6,797 on the experiment and kept as many of the variables fixed as possible—keeping messaging, budget, and audience targeting the same and only changing the format of the ads.
So how did they compare? Audio ads had 68% more impressions than video ads, likely as a result of their CPM being $4.40 compared to the $7.41 CPM of video ads. When comparing click performance, video ads were the clear winners with 778 clicks on the ads compared to 315 on audio ads, a 146% difference. Due to the low click volume on audio ads, their CTR was low, at 0.04%, compared to the 0.17% on video ads. This also translated to a CPC that was $6.42 higher than video.
From [B]RIGHT’s perspective, audio-only ads can be very powerful in the right media strategy, given the right objectives. Based on the results of this experiment, audio-only ads could be great for driving brand awareness in a multi-touchpoint strategy, where you may rely on a different format to drive the consideration and conversion stages of the sales funnel.
Thanks for reading this month's marketing and tech-related news. We found these articles insightful and helpful in navigating the changing marketing landscape and hope they are of value to you too.
Until next time.
Seth Slone | Digital PM