Latest statistics show that websites with UGC and UGC campaigns have 29% more web conversions than those without. In fact, UGC-based ads get 4x higher CTRs than average. These results made marketers realize they need to hire UGC creators for their campaigns in 2024.
But, hiring UGC creators requires a strategy and it can be challenging if you’re new to this. Luckily you came to the right place.
We connect UGC creators with brands and conduct the entire UGC campaign for our clients as a fully managed UGC agency. Until now we’ve connected brands with 2000+ UGC creators, and the content they produced has reached 75M+ total reach.
So, keep reading to find out:
- 5 most effective ways to find UGC creators for your brand
- 4 crucial factors to consider when hiring UGC creators
- 5 expert tips to keep in mind when hiring UGC creators
Let’s get started!
What’s a UGC creator?
UGC creators are content creators who produce content where they demonstrate a brand’s product or service. Although seems similar to influencers, UGC and influencer content are different in terms of the content creation and the purpose of the content.
For example, UGC videos are not scripted or staged to look aesthetic, but they are more raw as if going live on social media to share opinions. This makes the videos relatable to the customer audience and increases the engagement rates. Influencer posts, on the other hand, are more edited in terms of visuals to raise the appeal of the audience instead of relating to the videos.
Also, UGC creators do not necessarily have to post their videos on their social media as part of a collaboration with a brand. The copyrights of UGC usually belong to the brand and brands can use and repurpose the content as agreed in the UGC contract between the both sides.
Why Hire UGC Creators?
There are many benefits of implementing UGC in your campaigns, some of the biggest are:
- Boost brand authenticity and trust: About 70% of buyers consider real user testimonials and reviews before purchasing a product or service. Over 40% of the users read 4-5 UGC reviews or tutorials before buying a product. Based on this, by implementing UGC testimonials or reviews you come closer to your audience and build trust with them.
- Increase engagement and reach: UGC videos are excellent conversation starters with your audience. Sharing real reviews of a product calls the followers to comment on their personal experience with the product, like, or save the post. This is an excellent way to engage with your customers.
- Cost-effective marketing strategy: You can repurpose a single UGC on multiple marketing channels and reach a wider audience. Some of the channels you can repurpose UGC are social media, newsletter, website, etc.
- Access to customer data: Based on the comments, likes, shares, and saves of a UGC, you can learn a lot from your customers such as their preferences, interests, and much more.
How to Find UGC Creators
There are several ways to find UGC creators depending on the purpose and the number of creators you want to hire. Here’s how you can do it:
Hire a UGC agency
UGC agencies take responsibility for the entire campaign from finding and reaching out to UGC creators to delivering UGC posts for your brand. This helps brands skip many steps and reach the negotiation stage quickly.
Most UGC agencies use advanced searching tools and platforms to find matching creators, and AI tools to pitch the targeted creators which results in an 11% average open reply rate.
But, after sending over 800K emails in a month with a 36% reply rate, we realized what’s the secret to getting the best UGC creators to accept a collaboration with a brand.
We have a large database of 80M+ creators, with 40+ data points for each creator so we can do in-depth analysis and find the ideal UGC creators for every brand.
What we do differently than other UGC agencies:
Instead of using AI tools to approach influencers, we have an in-house team of 50+ creator outreach experts who handle the entire process on behalf of our clients. From reaching out to sending follow-ups, handling replies, and giving feedback during the content creation process to get high-quality UGC posts only.
Additionally, we can scale the outreach campaigns and reach out to 5M creators per month, with a 49% open rate.
Use creator marketing platforms
You can find UGC creators in any niche, location and platform using creator marketing platforms.
Using influencers.club creator discovery platform you can search through 80M+ creators. There are 40+ filters you can use to narrow down your ideal UGC creators quickly and easily.
All you have to do is select the preferred social media you want to search and type down the keywords you want to search as in the picture below:
Once done, click on Show Results and you will have a tailored list of UGC creators that are a perfect match for your brand.
Connect on social media
You can search by hashtag on social media to find UGC creators. Open any platform and add a hashtag in the search bar. Then, type your niche and add a UGC and you will find a community with tons of creators using that hashtag. For example, if you need a UGC creator for a beauty product, you can type #beautyugc and find a suitable one.
Then, open the account of the UGC creator and explore their feed to learn more about their performance, engagement, and other KPIs to see if they are a fit for your campaign. If they satisfy your criteria, make sure to connect with them, so you can start a collaboration.
The only downfall of this search is that all data is filtered manually and it may take more time to find suitable creators for collaboration.
Bonus tip: Nikola Sokolov, CEO of influencers.club, says that businesses should search beyond the primary keywords when looking for the ideal UGC creators for their brand. For example, if you are a fitness trainer trying to sell a program about postpartum program, “ugc female trainer” is a highly targeted keyword. Instead, you should search “ugc mom”, or other keywords related to the postpartum program because they will bring you closer to the target audience – new moms looking to get back in shape.
You can try this on our dashboard. Search by keywords, hashtags, or else on Instagram and add more as in the picture below.
Find creators from your customer base
Another way to find creators that align with your brand values is to look among your followers. There’s a high chance that you have UGC creators among your followers which will make it easier to partner with them.
You can do this manually by scrolling through your followers and see if you recognize creators in the list.
Or, you can use our enrichment service to filter your followers and find the matching creators.
All you have to do is upload your followers list. Then, you will get the final list of creators with valid email addresses, past collaborations, and other relevant data for your collaboration.
Bonus tip: Check the accounts that are tagging you. You may find potential creators hiding in your tagged list.
How to Hire UGC Creators
There are several crucial points to cover when hiring UGC creators for your brand. We discuss each in detail below.
Review and evaluate creator portfolios
All creators you find must go over the necessary screening process once you get the list. Carefully review their portfolios to see their skills and expertise in promoting other brands. Additionally, they must align with your brand values and aesthetics.
Reach out and make an offer
Reaching out to creators is super challenging. The chances of getting a response to a cold email are 1%-5%. But, after sending millions of cold emails, we noticed a pattern. There is a way to attract creators to open and reply to your email. The following tips can help you with it:
- Catchy subject lines: To increase the CTA and overall chances of getting a response, you need to write a catchy subject line. However, it must be within 30-50 characters or 4-7 words.
- Personalization is key: Emails that lack a personal touch look more generic and low-effort that do not help in establishing a connection with the creator. Make sure to always refer to the creator by first name, and research a few posts before you contact them. Make sure to mention what caught your attention to collaborate with them. This makes your email truthful.
- Add CTA: To increase the chances of getting a reply, you must add a good CTA. They don’t have to be pushy to increase the chances of getting a reply, but they should be suggestive or lead the creator to the next step.
Bonus tip: When in doubt whether your subject line is good or not, ask yourself whether you will open an email with that subject line or not. Edit until you come up with something you would open. .
Check the picture below to see a good and bad email example.
Bonus: Use some of our best-performing email templates.
Negotiate compensation and sign a contracts
Compesation with UGC creators varies from creator to creator. However, brands pay UGC creators around $100 to $250 for a 60-second-long video including the copyrights to repurpose the video elsewhere.
Next, all UGC collaboration require a legal contract. The UGC contract must be detailed to ensure all aspects are covered. Here’s what it must contain:
- Term of service: Duration of the collaboration
- Ownership rights: It must be clearly and appropriately explained who owns the content after production and since when.
- Launch date: The date when the content will be uploaded publicly
- Use Rights: Clarification on the content use rights for different purposes. You may want to use it as an ad, for your email marketing, or landing pages. Make sure you add all the details to the contract.
- Optional Posting Provisions: This refers to the terms on whether the creator can post the video on their social channels and how.
- Compensation: You should detail how and when you agreed to compensate for the collaboration.
- Additional elements: The duration of the content, number of reels, videos or pictures, and additional deadlines.
Free UGC contract template
Create clear briefs and guidelines
Sending a clear brief and straightforward guidelines are essential parts of UGC collaborations. Here are some crucial points your brief must cover:
- Purpose and scope of the project: This must be readable and easy to understand for the creator. Make sure you communicate it simply.
- Specify the type of content: Different content types meet different marketing goals. For example, to increase sales, you may need to produce more tutorials and reviews instead of other content.
- Format: Videos, pictures, or reels cost differently as they require different skills and effort.
- Platform: Creators must know the right platform to create a post accordingly.
- Brand messaging: Familiarize the creator with your way of communicating about your brand. It must be consistent to foster trustworthiness and credibility, so it’s best to share some of your past campaigns as references until they catch your brand’s voice.
- Tone: Specify the target audience. If you have an expert audience, then the tone should be more professional instead of informal. It would be even beneficial if you mentioned the intent for using your service or product. Does it solve their problems, simplify their work, etc?
These are the basic guidelines that allow the creator to start planning their content creation. If you need extra help with your campaign, let’s talk.
Let us handle the entire process of delivering UGC content for your brand
Tips to hire UGC creators effectively
Lastly, these are our best tips that helped us hire 2K+ UGC creators for our clients in just a few months:
Be clear about your expectations
When partnering with UGC creators you need to set clear expectations for the content creation and delivery with given deadlines. Make sure that the creator is open for post-edits in case you want some changes.
On the other hand, you should be transparent about your budget so that you can arrange the payment methods with the creator. Finally, you need to go over the legal requirements for content to secure successful collaboration.
Maintain regular communication
When the creator sends you their content plan, carefully go over the details and provide constructive feedback to improve the quality of UGC, and avoid laborious post-edits. This will encourage the collaboration between you and the creator.
Measure the performance of UGC posts
Define the KPIs for the UGC campaigns and evaluate the performance of the content by each UGC creator. Use various analytic tools to measure the impact of UGC on brand reach and engagement and provide feedback to creators to meet the KPIs. This will boost the productivity of the collaboration, and keep the creator on the right track.
Nurture long-term relationships
Respect the creator and their input in meeting your marketing goals. This allows you to establish a professional relationship with the creator based on trust and respect that can later advance to ambassador collaboration.
Conclusion
According to Statista, reviews stood out as a predominant form of UGC content that influences customers in their purchasing decisions. About 20% of the customers admitted they were influenced to buy a product because of the UGC review. So, as user generated content campaigns are a must in 2024, use the strategies mentioned above to hire UGC creators for your brand.
Lastly, we can fully manage your UGC campaigns so you can have the time to do what you’re best at – running your business.
