#5 Ways to Fuel Your Content Marketing with User-generated Content Content marketing, by its virtue of helping customers make informed decisions, offers handsome ROI in terms of sales and building a brand

I'm in serious love with content marketing, not because it builds brands and increases sales, but it provides businesses with long-term benefits. And it's not only me who is so much enchanted with content marketing. Today a large number of businesses are adopting content marketing because people have become marketing-averse and traditional ways of marketing are not yielding a good return on investment (ROI).

Content marketing, by its virtue of helping customers make informed decisions, offers handsome ROI in terms of sales and building a brand. However, it is not easy to execute content marketing strategies.

According to a Curata research, "Finding best sources to create amazing content and creating enough content on a regular basis are among the top challenges faced by content marketers."

If you also face the same, here are five proven ways to include user-generated content in your content marketing campaign:

1- Contests

Contests and sweepstakes have been around for many years. With the growth of the social web, they have transformed completely. Well-designed contests are a good way to get tons of user-generated content.

Following are a few tips on creating a successful UGC contest:

• Finalize the goals of your contest
• Create an outline for contest parameters
• Optimize content for search
• Promote your contest to boost reach
• Choose, notify, and promote the winner

Content-focused contests provide you with a scalable, fun way to encourage your fans to create content for your brand.

2- Surveys

Not only surveys will help you get UGC but also they can help you create effective content marketing. How?

Online surveys can enable you to understand demographics, roles, and preferences of your users. Also, they can help you dig into perceptions, expectations, and impressions of your audience. By knowing all this, you can create a result-oriented content marketing campaign.

You should stick to closed questions to get quantitative data as open-ended questions often end with vague data.

3- Customer Stories

Have you started to collect customer stories? If not, you should do it immediately. There is a big difference between promises and tangible results. Most businesses promise to solve problems. But do all of them really do? Your customers have many reasons not to buy from you. Customer stories remove skepticisms of your prospective buyers and persuade them to buy from you.

When you're going to include customer stories in your content marketing campaign, you should look out for which product your customers have been using, how long they have been using your products, and how the products are helping them.

4- Video Testimonials

90% customers say their buying decisions are influenced by reviews, meaning that video testimonials have a great potential to maximize the success of your content marketing campaign and bring in big dollars. As video testimonials instill trust in prospective buyers and help you connect with them emotionally, you should not ignore any opportunity to get video testimonials from your clients.

5- Create Discussion Groups

Discussion groups can help you get tons of user-generated content. And a good thing is you can easily create them. Either you can host a discussion group on your website or you can choose a social media platform to do so.

Here are three tips to run a successful discussion group:

• Pick a relevant topic that your audience cares about
• Ask questions that relate to pain-points of your buyers
• Be prompt to address audience concerns

Wrapping it up, user-generated content is gold in content marketing. Contests, surveys, customer stories, discussion groups, and video testimonials are a few good ways to encourage your fans to create useful content to fuel your content marketing campaigns. And the best part is you don't have to spend big money on it.

Have any tip on how to incorporate user-generated content into content marketing? Do share it in the comment section.