UGC Ads: Performance Marketing's Secret Weapon

Lina Hagström
April 13, 2022

Influencer marketing on social media platforms like Facebook has been around for almost a decade. While this is an excellent way for new brands to find customers and drive awareness of their product or service, it's also critical for more well-established brands. When launched in paid campaigns, this content drives the highest engagement, performance, and retention for new customers.

The Marketing Team's Dilemma when it comes to Creative

What type of creative works best? It’s the never-ending question brands constantly ask. The dilemma represents two types of creatives on social platforms: Branding and Performance. Both creatives sit on opposite sides of the spectrum and achieve different results.

Branding assets are well-planned, well-thought-out creatives that elegantly paint your product or service according to brand guidelines. They drive affinity for your product over the long haul, but usually fall short of driving customers to immediate action.

On the other side of the spectrum are Performance or Creator ads. These are less polished, user-generated pieces of content that mimics the content audiences already consume on various social platforms. They tend to have have shorter production times and give the Creator more control over the content versus the brand.

Most marketers run into the issue of trying to achieve both performance and branding in the same ad. Realistically brands should think about their creative inventory as a mix: X% allocated to performance, Y% allocated for branding.

What are Creator ads and why do they work so well?

Creator ads are produced by creators specifically to feature your product or service and give potential customers an idea of what they can expect from your brand.

When speaking about this creative type with many customers, the number one reason they haven’t tested this type of ad is because it’s not on-brand. While we agree that having a cohesive and aligned message for your brand is essential, it’s also important to have some of your ads be on-platform.

What we mean is that when advertising on Tiktok, Meta, Pinterest, and Snapchat your ads should align and feel native to the ecosystem. If your ads appear overly polished or too well-produced, they will scream, “Skip me!”

What goes into a good Creator strategy?

There are many things to consider when thinking about your Creator strategy and how to reach your goals.

Creators

Selecting creators is the first step. Creators will be your brand's voice and ensuring they're capable of producing quality content is the most important aspect of this step.

We usually recommend going outside your standard demographics when you first start testing. If you typically target 18-35-year-olds, it's still good to experiment with a Creator from a more mature demographic.

Finally, brands often try to control the production of the content too much and end up killing its authenticity. Trusting in the Creators you chose is key. Allow them to show their true personalities.

Audio

Audio is a massive component of these assets, whether music or voice-overs from the Creator. Additionally, the audio should follow the platform's native best practices. For example, TikTok should be more music-centric, whereas Snap and Facebook should be geared towards talking.

Motion Design & End Card

Going back to the on-brand versus on-platform debate, motion design for these types of assets is the only area where you'll be able to capture your brand guidelines. The colors, fonts, and end cards should deliver your brand's image. We have seen that featuring a platform's trending fonts or colors is an effective way to drive results for some more experimental brands.

Volume of Creatives

Unlike polished, high-end brand assets, volume and variation significantly impact success. Once you have nailed down what works and what doesn't, you should start to scale your assets and work at dethroning your king of the hill creatives.

Our recommendation is not to repurpose existing Creator ads you have made in months past, but to produce net-new content with new Creators. This will ensure the platform's algorithm continues to test your assets in subsets of your core audience and find additional customers.

Unlock growth and drive authenticity with bespoke Creator content

Getting started with Creator Ads can seem like a daunting task:

  • Finding Creators
  • Setting up contracts
  • Negotiating fees
  • Filling out briefs
  • Asking for edits/reshoots for content and adding the right motion graphics

Introducing Creator Connect: scaled production of Creator-style assets built to drive performance and reach new audiences in an authentic way. Your Creator Connect team sources your perfect creator, manages the relationship (and tedious negotiations), and analyzes performance to optimize assets each month.

Creator Connect delivers 5-30 custom Creator assets directly to your team every month.

  • Fully managed service from start to finish. No need for tedious, manual sourcing and negotiations on the brand side
  • Experts in briefing Creators to ensure brands receive high-quality assets that are brand safe
  • Ongoing monitoring and optimization of assets each month to help drive performance

Using assets from Creator Connect, brands have seen 15X increase in spend and 64% decrease in CPI when compared to BAU creative.

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