How UGC Fits Into Your Brand’s 2022 Content Strategy

With Q4 in full swing, most organizations are no doubt already working through a plan of attack for tackling 2022 from all angles. Budgets, marketing strategies, quotas, and other organization puzzle pieces simply can not be discounted until the new year already begins. These things take (lots of) time, meticulous pre-planning, and most importantly, approval from an array of folks. But there’s one massive, often camouflaged puzzle piece that is sometimes left by the wayside until well into the new year: content strategies. 

Don’t be frightened. We’re not necessarily talking about agencies, lights, gut-punching costs, and fancy cameras previously needed to stay viable from a content perspective. We’re talking about user-generated content; a more affordable, nimble, and effective way to create content that supports your brand or organization in today’s video-dominated landscape. By nature, UGC  allows you to create content on the fly and with less pre-planning and more room for communal participation. But what a lot of brands find is that it allows them to supplement traditional content strategies (and the budgets required to execute them) that they may have already planned and accounted for. So before you lock in that 2022 spending plan, here are a few ways that UGC fits into your 2022 content strategy whether you’re new to the UGC revolution or looking to get your feet wet.

Event Coverage

News Flash (for most of us): Events are either back in full swing or swiftly returning. For organizations, this can include happenings like conferences, summits, internal celebrations, or even office potlucks. Rather than relying on professional film crews to document these events (which is seldom possible from a budget standpoint) or not creating content around an event at all, UGC allows attendees to become the camera crew, filming content on their phones and showcasing their unique perspectives to give the event the human touch and splash it deserves. Think about the last event your organization hosted and how many attendees were filming highlights for themselves or capturing selfies with their peers independently for their own memories. Capturing content is an organic part of an attendee’s event experience anyways and with the myriad of UGC platforms available to you, you can leverage footage that’s going to be captured anyways and use it to benefit not only content pertaining to a particular event, but your organizations content library as a whole. Here’s what a few of those strategies look like.

Internal Communications

Every organization has one or a handful of milestones/events that they routinely celebrate internally and every employee loves an organization that knows how to celebrate appropriately. Whether it’s the retirement of a tenured employee, a successful quarter, the successful launch of a new initiative, or a holiday, video is always a viable way to spread the word, connect employees, and virtually raise a glass.

Take mobile gaming giant Zynga Inc. for example. As a company that prides itself in celebrating the diversity of its employee base, Zynga’s internal comms department knew that Pride Month 2021 couldn’t be properly celebrated with cleverly worded emails and a potluck. Remember, we’re talking over 2,500 employees across 3 three continents. Instead, they used a UGC platform like Cinebody to loop in various LGBTQ+ employees from all over the world and allow them to authentically show how they celebrate Pride Month. After a matter of days, they could take that globally captured and automatically uploaded footage to create a killer celebration video that could be shared across the organization and with all of their fans on social media resulting in an unprecedented level of external engagement and far-reaching internal participation in the otherwise lesser-know Pride Month festivities. If that’s not a surefire way to gratify your employees, we’re not sure what is.  

Recruiting Initiatives

Let’s face it. When prospective hires are looking into an open position at a company that catches their eye, the ‘grain of salt’ mentality is unavoidable. Too often are job postings on recruitment platforms inadvertently misleading or subpar in truly representing the workplace experiencing. Why? Because you can only demonstrate so much with bullet points, paragraphs, and gate-kept information.

It does not have to be this way. In fact, letting your employees do the talking in the form of employee-generated video is already becoming a fail-proof way to separate yourself from the millions of active companies who promote job openings on recruitment platforms and to attract the right candidates from the get-go. 

Axon Industries is a point-in-case. The public safety tech giant was battling a stark surplus of job openings that they needed to fill ASAP in order to keep up with the demand for public safety innovations sparked by the widespread protests seen in 2020. But this wasn’t only about the volume of hires. It was also about quality in that not everyone with tech experience was suited for such a mission-oriented environment. To hit both targets in one swing, Axon turned to UGC to allow existing employees to fill prospect ones in. In just days, Axon was flooded with employee-generated clips discussing the essence, goals, mission, and perks of the company which they could use as bait to attract employees that were game for the undertaking. The result? Thousands of well-qualified hires who possessed the ambition that Axon needed to keep moving. What’s more, the surplus of footage they received allowed them to continue cranking out various employee vignettes for subsequent hiring initiatives.   

If your organization has not yet considered the value of UGC as a year-round content tool, 2022 might be the perfect time to give it a whirl and ease the pressure put on annual budgets by traditional content strategies.