UGC allows you to simultaneously build brand awareness, extend your brand reach, and encourage engagement, making it the Holy Grail for marketers.

Through your brand management platform, you should be able to motivate an army of people to extend the reach of your hard work.

Here are some valuable tips on how you can make the most of UGC.

Seamless social sharing

Your brand management platform should allow you to share created artwork or ready-to-use assets directly to your social networks.

This function allows users to kiss goodbye to awkwardly downloading files only to have to upload them again to their social networks. They can simply share their artwork and/or assets, in all their glory, at the click of a button!

At BrandStencil, the Alzheimer’s Society was the first to debut this feature to great effect for their campaign called ‘I’m a Dementia Friend’. The tool allowed them to award a digital badge to people who had participated in an online Dementia Friends course.

Participants had previously been given a physical badge, however, the Alzheimer’s Society quickly adapted to the modern approach and created a digital badge for Dementia Friends to share on social networks. And it proved to be a great success!

This inspired supporter engagement, helped others to sign up for the course, and promoted branded UGC.

You can read more about Alzheimer's Society's campaign success here.

Use BrandStencil to embed your templates and ready-to-use assets directly into your website

With BrandStencil you can embed your resources directly into your website to help you extend the reach of your campaigns.

Time to Talk Day has successfully used an embed for years. You can view an example of one here.

We feel that including customisable digital templates in your campaigns is one of the best ways to promote branded UGC. This allows members of your audience to express themselves in their chosen medium to get involved in your campaigns.

Read more about how Time to Change used this feature here.

Buzz hits the spot

What if you’re not at the stage where you need a brand management platform but you still want to engage your audience?

Buzz is a slimmed-down version of BrandStencil which can use on a per-campaign basis.

Buzz is a simple embed that can be used anywhere. You can slip it into a campaign landing page or a microsite. It offers an easy way for you to encourage people to engage with your brand, tell their own stories, and create and share your branded materials!

Chrons and Colitis UK have effectively used this tool in their ‘It Takes Guts’ campaign. It was part of a wider campaign to open up the conversation about inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

They used Buzz to give people living with IBD a voice encouraging them to speak out about their experiences. Their Buzz campaign, to date, has resulted in over 1,200 assets created and nearly 600 social shares. This increased audience engagement and branded content shared to thousands of individuals across their social networks.

The power of community

A good brand management platform can help you enhance community spirit for positive results without breaking a sweat or the bank! Studies show that 57% of consumers will stay loyal to a brand if they can sense a human-like connection.

That means you need to post things on social media that your audience will engage with. Focus on building a personality for your brand so it can come to life. Be generous and engage with your social media community by asking the audience questions and, importantly, listening to what they have to say.

Last year Healthwatch ran a campaign called ‘#BecauseWeAllCare’. Throughout this campaign they asked their supporters to share their experiences of the NHS. They used BrandStencil to provide supporters with social media tiles, encouraging the conversation with truly great results.

Why is this important?

Increasingly marketing comms are becoming digital-first. So it’s vital that you can reduce the barriers that stand between your teams making artwork and sharing them on social media. This is where a good brand management platform like BrandStencil will come in.

Not only will a platform like BrandStencil make it quick and easy for your team to create and share materials, it will also give you the chance to create public templates that your audience can use to create and share their own artwork featuring your brand!

We have several clients using BrandStencil in this manner. When it’s done right, it's a great way to keep budgets low, KPIs high, and hit a wider, engaged audience!