- September 29, 2016
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3 Reasons Why B2B Marketers Should Bear-Hug User Generated Content
Move over B2C integrated marketers. Your B2B counterparts are joining the User Generated Content (UGC) revolution.
User Generated Content is any content produced by your target audience and shared publicly online with the world–especially other potential users of your product or service.
Examples of UGC-sharing platforms include social media services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and others, as well as popular review sites and designated sections of your own company website. Forms of UGC familiar to both B2C and B2B practitioners include video, blogs, images and posts (of all flavors), and of course, case studies, testimonials and ratings/reviews.
Joining the Fun
B2C marketers have been riding the UGC wave for years, while B2B marketers have only recently begun to gain traction in harvesting and distributing user/customer content.
“For many B2B brands, their products and services don’t always have a physical presence that’s easily recognized,” writes Caitlin Burgess, Content Marketing Lead at TopRank Marketing.
Still, for B2B companies–even growing ones–the benefits and opportunities for emulating success in the B2C space abound–smaller budgets and marketing teams notwithstanding.
Why UGC Makes Sense for B2B
For marketers seeking to expand and leverage UGC, “It’s the versatility of user-generated content that really answers the need at B2B organizations [where] content requirements are so diverse…and budgets are so challenged,” writes Dan Kimball at MarketingProfs.com.
Kimball also cites other ways B2B companies can benefit from UGC:
Resource efficiency: B2C brands often boast bigger budgets and employ more staff than B2B companies. Inspiring and enabling customers to create and share their experiences reduces the content-creation workload, freeing up internal teams to tackle other marketing tasks.
Promotional diversity: Effective B2B marketers are skilled at identifying a strategically relevant goal (creating awareness, gathering qualified leads, generating brand preference), and repurposing and integrating UGC into marketing collateral, blog and social media posts, and website content. Having a curation strategy in place–how you categorize, store and ultimately distribute user-supplied material–offers a quick and easy way to strengthen and diversify your integrated-marketing toolbox.
Brand authenticity: Increasingly, both B2C and B2B audiences give more credence to the opinions of peers and likeminded-others than to slick ads and high-dollar promotions. Providing a channel through which customers are free to share their thoughts and experiences paints a truer, more authentic picture of your brand. What B2B company that puts customers first wouldn’t want that?
