The Power of UGC (User-Generated Content) in Event Marketing
Target audiences already felt more seen and involved when digital marketing went from text-based pop-ups and blinking banner ads to videos and reels with people in them.
They became even more invested when event marketing became a thing, and watched as product testing community mixers, and product launch events were live-streamed, and fundraising galas thrown by brands were storied. It definitely felt more immersive and interactive.
But sometimes it felt like they were mostly influencers and marketing reps self-promoting while overhyping brands.
That's when user generated content in event marketing flexed its muscles, and built the lost trust right back up in our jaded authenticity-meters.
Introduction: The Rise of UGC in Event Marketing
As more and more ordinary people like you and me started to post themselves participating in these marketing events, it registered itself as the next hit marketing strategy as ‘user-generated content in event marketing’.
So that's how we transitioned smoothly from synthetic to authentic marketing when target audiences sitting behind the screens started to respond more to photos, videos, live streams and stories made by users of products and services.
They simply trusted their own peers' content more than that of content marketers hired for pay, they found it more believable and relatable.
So, they engaged: they clicked and scrolled, they commented and shared, they spread the UGC and became willing cogs in the marketing wheel, without charging the brand owners a dime. Isn't it just neat?
And it becomes even neater when we find out there are tech support softwares like Modern Events Calendar (MEC), a wordpress plugin to manage the UGC-generated engagement on our wordpress website.
It has user-friendly features to create buzz and publicity for the events, facilitate booking for the event, and customizable features to design presentations of the event.
Why UGC Matters for Events
UGC event marketing has been somewhat revolutionizing in terms of building brand credibility, driving organic engagement, and developing a community around the brand by having attendees turned promoters do the bulk of event content creation.
Engagement Maximizer: Boost your understanding of Proven Tips to Increase Event Attendance with Ease: Tips to Fill Your Seats to see how leveraging organic engagement can drive event success.
Here’s how:
Social Proof For Events
When customers interested in a brand’s products or services attend their event and post about their experiences, it counts as authentic product reviews, and when they share their perspective, it acts as genuine testimonials.
Actionable Insight: Learn how to use 5 Essential Tips for Creating the Best Post-Event Report to amplify the impact of attendee feedback.
So it is the ultimate social proof that the brand’s merchandise is all it claims to be, and that's a marketing job well done.
Organic Engagement That Improves Event ROI
Most of us are directly familiar with how hard brand owners try to get their target audience to engage with their marketing efforts.
They resort to a variety of both legitimate and illegitimate marketing techniques, white, black and grey, to drive traffic to their web or social media pages, and get the audience to engage, and ultimately buy and have others buy the merch.
So when authentic attendee reviews boost event engagement by inspiring users to WANT to engage organically, not only it saves the brand owner a huge chuck on his marketing budget, it’s a great return on the investment they made on throwing the event.
Cost-Saving Tip: Discover 10 Budget-Friendly Event Promotion Hacks (No Big Spending!) to explore cost-effective strategies to enhance event promotion.
Community Building Through UGC Share
There are two types of participation in events of any kind, especially event marketing, the direct physical type, and the vicarious type.
User generated content has that magical effect where it taps into that sense of vicarious participation.
And it works as one of the best event marketing strategies because of FOMO, fear of missing out, being wildly present in the newer generation, which happen to constitute a big bulk of the target audience.
They live for vicarious participation, and it gives them a deep sense of belonging, being included and in the loop, through sharing an experience, which builds just the right type of community around your brand.
Types of UGC in Event Marketing
There are 4 types of user-generated content that can be leveraged into exceedingly successful event marketing campaigns.
Attendee testimonials and reviews
Users create content elaborating on what they saw, experienced, and thought during and after attending a marketing event, happily providing the genuine testimonials and reviews that the brand owner relies on to get the lead to get that elusive lead conversion.
Social media posts
The core power of user-generated content in event marketing lies in photos, videos, stories, and live streams of the highlights of the marketing events, giving the event the exposure it was thrown for.
This has been proven to get one of the biggest event engagement rates.
User-Submitted Content On Event Websites
The brand owner throws the event, presents and publicizes it on their websites, using features of plugins like Modern Events Calendar (MEC), and have users attend and precipitate.
Excited and happy with their event content creation, they eagerly post on the blogs, forum parts, and put UGC content into great use.
UGC In Email Campaigns And Promotional Materials
Event marketing teams then make sure to take smart advantage of UGC by using it as promotional material for their other types of marketing like email marketing, influencer marketing and vital marketing.
Strategies to Encourage UGC at Events
There are a number of actionable tactics you can employ to boost UGC, and have it wield the most optimum results.
Here are a few of the key ones:
The More Interactive The Activities, The More The Event Engagement
If you can come up with activities that drive the most interaction, you’ve milked your UGC event marketing for its best potential.
Organize photo contests, and put on live polls about the events, you’ll get the attendees to produce the best UGC, and the audience to anticipate some fun interactions, and yield some top-notch event engagement, as a result.
Use Branded Hashtags And Social Media Challenges
Get your audience/ event attendees to use hashtags of the brand when posting and sharing their UGC, to boost participation and engagement by audieses.
Engagement Maximizer: Read about How to Plan a Hybrid Event: A Step-by-Step Guide for insights on integrating online and offline engagement strategies.
You can also plan social media challenges, which have proven pretty popular among the users, and will elicit some high quality UGC material.
Offer Incentives Like Giveaways Or Exclusive Content Access
What almost always works is offering shiny carrots. When arranging contests and challenges promise tempting giveaways, like tapping into the human race’s weakness for being part of the exclusive club by offering some sort of VIP pass to normally subscription based content.
Highlight Success Stories And User Experiences
Using both the post and highlight features on instagram, and MEC’s Social Auto Poster addon across platforms, you can win big by posting and sharing two types of ultra interesting UGC.
Integrating UGC with Your Event Website
Knowing how to showcase UGC on your website can go a long way in making or breaking your UGC event marketing.
Below is a list of what you can/should do plus the tech you can use to get it done, and get it done well.
Embed Social Media Feeds And Galleries
Giving your audience the option of having the best of two worlds always wins you smiles and long-remembered satisfaction.
So having your social media feeds displayed on your websites and creating galleries for photos and videos of the UGC using plugins like Smash Balloon will do you a lot of good.
SEO Power Tip: See how Boost Event Visibility with MEC's Top SEO Features can elevate your event marketing game.
Integrate UGC Into Event Pages
You can use Modern Events Calendar’s features like Front-end submission to integrate user generated content into your event pages.
Organizer’s Secret: Learn How to Create an Event Website with WordPress in 8 Easy Steps to effectively showcase user-generated content.
Create dedicated UGC sections
Audienceand leads respond really well to organization, and compartments.
Dedicate specific sections to each different UGC type, like photo galleries, testimonials, and live comments to give them a sense of options and being looped in through different channels.
This will boost your credibility, while lowering your bounce rate, by keeping them on the website for far longer.
Leveraging UGC for Post-Event Engagement
There are three portions to how well you can capitalize on UGC event marketing: pre-event, real-time event, and post event.
Presenting, and creating buzz around the event and all the many ways users can contribute and interact by their UGC before each event is a big marketing effort in and of itself.
Putting on live streams and stories during the event is a big appeal that gets great exposure and engagement.
But then you have the post-event engagement that can get a life of its own and extend the event lifecycle by far more. Here’s how:
Use UGC to create post-event recaps and highlight reels.
You’d assume people don't like recaps, but you’d be wildly wrong when it comes to UGC content of fun events.
Do a gazillion versions of post-event recaps using UGC, and people devour it and digest it by lavishing engagement enzymes on it.
And the highlight reels? They get so many visits far into the future after the event, they make you grateful the highlight feature is there every day.
Encourage Feedback And Reviews Through Post-Event Surveys.
The modern citizen is a lot more on the opinionated side, audiences like conversations, and discussions, especially because it gives them a voice and a chance at giving their opinions.
So you can get a lot of post-event engagement by asking for feed-back through surveys.
Maintain Engagement By Sharing UGC In Newsletters And Follow-Up Emails.
Some people have busier lives, and some have timing mis-alignment episodes, when it comes to keeping up with the goings on of the events on their favorite merch.
So newsletters and follow-up emails not only keep them in the loop, they do a great job at poking at users' love for recaps, and recycling content.
Measuring the Impact of UGC on Event Success
Tracking the effectiveness of UGC in event marketing is what all brand owners in the modern digital marketing world do not, and should lose sight of.
It consists of a couple of parts you need to remain mindful of, here’s the list:
Identify Key Metrics Of UGC Event Marketing Success
Metrics such as engagement rates, conversion rates, and social shares are key in measuring how successful teh UGC event marketing was.
Advanced Tip: Understand Event ROI: KPIs to Measure Your Event's Success to effectively track your UGC-driven event outcomes.
They can be used in strategy adjustment based on data, to have consistent improvement of event ROI.
Decide What Analytics Tools To Use
Google Analytics, and MEC’s reporting features are two of the best tools to measure performance of your user-generated content.
Best Practices and Common Pitfalls
As there is always a list of insider knacks to every industry, there are some dos and don'ts to be alert about in UGC event marketing as well. So here are some practical advice and cautionary tips.
Best Practices For Curating And Moderating UGC
How UGC gets produced and monitored is pretty key in successful UGC event marketing. So pay attention to the following:
Guidelines
First rule of thumb is always have a guideline in place to make sure the UGC you receive is appropriate, both according to general decency standards of your society and for your brand persona.
Also, guidelines must be stuck to consistently, so you won't have to struggle to enforce them with your users, it’ll save you a lot of drama down the line.
Allowing for diversity according to different cultural norms is also another helpful tip to hold onto, so being consistent should not mean you are rigid and intolerant.
Moderation Strategy
Adopting the right combo of manual and automated moderation makes sure your guideline is upheld.
Usually automated moderation is chosen if UGC volume is high, but for screening profanity not using automated moderation is simply not efficient.
Be Protective Of The Users’ Right To Privacy
A pitfall of using user-generated content is involuntarily doxxing the user when they want to stay behind the camera and anonymous.
So watch out for user’s privacy preferences.
Avoiding Common Mistakes Like Over-Reliance On Unvetted Content
Practicing moderation in using UGC in event marketing is the wise thing to do, as is not relying too much on user generated content that is unvetted.
Have a team for vetting content, and mix and match your UGC with brand produced content. This approach will ensure authenticity while maintaining brand standards.
Exclusive Insight: Learn from Global Challenges and Their Impact on the Events Industry to navigate potential pitfalls in event management.
Conclusion: Harnessing UGC to Elevate Your Event Marketing
Using user-generated content in event marketing is a great tool to create exposure, build trust through providing authentic social proof, driving organic engagement, and add the power of belonging to the brand community to encourage conversation.
Pro Tip: Learn about the Best Email Integrations for Modern Events Calendar to manage your event's UGC-based engagement seamlessly.
So when done with help from software tools like live streaming, highlights, and Modern Events Calendar’s robust features, such as social integrations plugin, the marketing event’s likelihood of success in lead conversion gets amplified.
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