Three reasons you can’t afford to ignore Community Content

Photo by "My Life Through A Lens"

Unless you have been living under a rock this past couple of years, you will no doubt be aware of the buzz around Community Marketing (if you have been under a rock you can read about it in this Harvard Business Review article).  Content creators are often wary of community content (also known as UCG – user generated content), fearing its lack of production values and polish can devalue their brand (and their own beautiful work). 

It’s true that embracing Community Content can take a leap of faith, but for most brands the upsides outweigh the drawbacks ( though very high-end fashion brands whose USP is exclusivity, might want to sit this one out).  Let’s dig into the three reasons you should consider making Community a pillar of your content strategy…

1.     It can provide sense of connection influential Generation Z are looking for

To state the blindingly obvious, Generation Z (people born between 1995 and 2010) are the future.  Whether they are your target audience or not, they have a huge influence on societal and social media trends. History shows that youth-led trends often fast filter to become mainstream (a recent example is Tik Tok. Pre-pandemic, most people over the age of 25 were unlikely to have heard of it and certainly hadn’t used it. However, according to a report from Tik Tok on 2020 trends, over the past year they have seen 11billion views of content with the hashtag #family, and parent-friendly Homes & Garden and News & Events are among the categories seeing the biggest growth on the platform).

 So, now we have established that Gen Z are the savvy marketer’s equivalent of a crystal ball, let’s look at why community content is relevant.

 It all boils down to Gen Z’s attitude to consumption. In sharp contrast to Generation X and older Millennials who are major consumers, amassing ‘stuff’ to telegraph personal identity and status, Gen Zers, are markedly less motivated by acquiring possessions. Instead, they want the brands they buy from to provide value beyond products. In short, Gen Z consider consumption as access to an experience, conversation or community. Brands can tap into this by giving their customers the opportunity to share information about and love for the brand’s products or rally behind a campaign, topic or behaviour. 

2.     Reduced budgets plus the need for even more content require new approaches

It’s likely that, like many marketing teams in 2021, one of your biggest challenges is how to produce the volume of content your customers/audience/boss wants with a much-reduced budget and possibly a smaller team too. Smart content marketers will be looking at how they can build and leverage their brand’s community to create content for the brand’s channels. This could be as simple as using positive customer reviews for email content to creating Instagram stories around social posts where customers have tagged your brand. If you really want to pull out the stops you could establish an all singing, all dancing forum like Lego Ideas. Via the Ideas platform, over 1 million users share and vote for new Lego set concepts.  The most successful are put into production, with the Ideas community member responsible for the concept earning 1% of royalties.  Members can also share pictures of their creations and enter competitions and challenges set by Lego, providing community content, a means of connection for the Lego super fan community and a funnel for new products. The genius of Lego Ideas is that by doing away with the traditional ‘brand pushes products at consumers’ way of doing things and taking a truly customer-led approach, the relationship between the brand and customer feels organic, equal and authentic.  Which is a seamless segue into the third reason to consider community content…

3. Consumers don’t trust brands. But they do trust other consumers 

The importance brands being authentic is hardly news.  But authenticity is not just about going easy on the airbrushing to show models’ stretch marks and zits.  For authenticity to translate into trust and eventually sales, the source of the content is as important as the content itself. In a 2020 study conducted by Kantar Media, 93% of 7753 consumers asked said recommendations from friends and family were their most trusted source of information when considering a purchase. Not a massive surprise – word of mouth (WOM) has always been the most powerful form of marketing. 

 The problem for marketers of yore, was that it was almost impossible to measure the impact of WOM recommendations as they weren’t privy to the conversations where they were made. These days, while we still can’t earwig on private conversations between friends, the rise social media tagging and use of hashtags provide marketers with the means to track and measure reach and engagement of customer-created content (sales are still hard to measure outside of affiliate marketing but don’t let that put you off).

 Doubling down on micro influencer strategies and identifying brand super fans to work with on an ambassador basis is a smart and relatively cheap way to create content at scale, the best of which you can reuse on your brand’s own channels. Done well, this content will inspire others (potential new customers) to follow suit. But remember, authenticity is the name of the game here.  Consumers are savvy to influencers featuring brands in exchange for payment.  Choose your micro influencers carefully.  Ideally, they should have a natural affinity with your brands and actually use your products, or at least have a history of using similar brands/products so the content is believable.  Also, don’t be a control freak and give your micro influencers an open brief. The more the content they produce feels natural and organic, the more their followers will engage with it, and the more valuable it will be for your brand.

The first rule of content marketing is to create content your customer really wants and needs (not just bombarding them with sales messages). There is no better way to do this than providing your audience with an opportunity to take the lead and create the content themselves. And - if letting go of all your perfectly polished content is a step too far – building Community Content into your wider content strategy is a brilliant way to gather insights and inspiration straight from the customer, to inform your in-house produced work.