Using UGC to cut CAC 50%

It should be well-known that influencer UGC improves performance marketing efforts. Commonly-cited stats include:

• UGC reduces cost per click by 50% from agency-produced ads
• Landing pages featuring UGC perform 29% better than those without
• UGC ads drive 300% higher clickthrough than traditional ads

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But…how?

If UGC is the strategy, what are some tactics that can enable its success?

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Gifting works for the right products

A lot of talking heads claim gifting is dead…but we’ve seen otherwise. Gifting can work if the product you’re gifting is either high-value or hard to say no to.

• High value - Expensive, limited run, handmade, etc. Ideally, these products are priced (but don’t cost) in the ballpark of an influencer’s fee, or are items they’d like to have but would never purchase for themselves.
• Hard to say no to - Unique experiences, pampering and self-care, innovative technology…nobody says no to a free trip, fancy spa day, or the newest gadget.

Groupon’s team put these principles to use by working with Creator.co to gift hard-to-say-no-to experiences like spa days, horse rides, and hydrofacials to over 100 influencers in a month, getting 1.3M organic impressions while decreasing cost per click by 40% and generating valuable content for their owned assets.

They then integrated that UGC content into their product pages, increasing conversions to sales by a whopping 7%!

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Seasonal trends make great content

Seasonal trends are a hallmark of great brand social content - and that also applies to great influencer and UGC marketing. By incorporating seasonal trends, influencers can inspire consumers who are thinking through how to best experience their own holidays - from Valentine’s Day through Christmas.

Simply sending out briefs isn’t enough to enable your influencers to make great content, though; the best marketers make it easy by providing inspiration anchors. These could be:

• Creative - Custom graphics, jingles, artwork, and other assets that can anchor a piece of content to the brand
• Events - IRL activations that bring influencers together and provide opportunities for organic, inspired content creation
• Collabs - Put influencers together and ask them to make something great around the product - the whole will be greater than the sum as fans will love to see their favorites working together for your brand

In a great example, NEFT Vodka anchored their holiday campaign by sending influencers to local Ralphs groceries in Northern California, where the brand was running holiday in-store activations. They paid to whitelist the influencer’ videos and run them as geotargeted ads to spread awareness of the holiday activation in their target market; as a result they doubled clickthrough on their ad campaign and decreased CPC by 50%.

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Scale a working campaign with the right tools

Performance marketing works best when you have lots of ad creative to test. Not just 2-3, but 20-30 or even a few hundred. The goal is to test everything and double down on what performs best.

But you know that.

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It’s easy to hire an agency to produce this much content; as we know, though, agency content doesn’t perform as well as influencer UGC. After all, doing dozens or hundreds of influencer deals in a single month can feel impossible when a $100 deal can take as much effort as a $10,000 deal.

That’s where an influencer marketing platform like Creator.co can help. NEFT Vodka worked with 22 influencers on its holiday campaign, while Groupon scaled their campaign from 30 videos to over 100 per month - both with small, highly efficient teams using Creator.co’s influencer marketing platform and marketplace.

By scaling their content output - optimized through tactics like gifting and seasonality - they were able to test more great creative, and ultimately achieve industry-leading 40-50% reductions in CPC.

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Written By: Avi Gandhi (Guest Author)

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