Ep 35: UGC vs. CGC vs. EGC: When to Use What (Replay)

Today, I thought it was worth breaking down the different forms of creator content. I should have think of these as the big three, if you will. User-generated content, creator-generated content, and then finally, employee-generated content. It's really important to understand why these types of content are different so you understand when and where to use each one. User-generated content is really useful for brands at every stage of development. One of the true benefits of user-generated content specifically is that, to really nail creator-generated content, there are three sort of main pillars that you have to understand. The organic reach that you can get from employee-generated content is huge, it's insane. I love working with Pilot House because while we are a performance marketing agency, we really pride ourselves on caring so much about brand and creative. At Pilot House, we don't just make ads, we craft them. Every edit, every word, every scroll-stopping detail is built with purpose and care, and I truly believe that care drives creativity and creativity drives results. Our attention to both scale and brand allows us to craft strategies that deliver you short-term results while making you long-term successful, which is so important for any DTC brand. If you are curious about learning more about working with Pilot House, you can fill out a lead form at PilotHouse.co and let them know you want to go on a brand new ad venture. You don't actually have to say that, you don't have to make a pun. I'm not going to force you to make a pun. Just fill out the lead form. We'd love to chat with you. Hi, welcome back to Adventurous, the podcast produced by DTC and hosted by me, Aves. Today I wanted to get a little bit more tactical. We've been talking a lot about different ads, different sort of theories of marketing and communications, but there's something that's been coming up a lot when I've been talking to brands, sort of in all walks of my work. I did really want to sort of bring to the pod because I feel like it'll be really helpful, especially if you're sort of a brand founder or a sort of marketing director. This kind of info is really juicy and great and yeah, I feel like it's also a really good timing because since we've started this podcast, I've had to sort of create a lot more content than I ever have before. I have had to be in way more content than in previous iterations of my work, which has been really interesting. I feel like I've really dabbled in the content creation side when I'm working with brands directly that I'm like really excited about. Sometimes I'll have like a really specific idea for B-roll or an asset, so I'll just try to capture it myself because it's a little bit easier to do than sort of describing what I want to someone else. Like, in my opinion, truly one of the few real privileges of being a young woman in the DTC space is that you kind of also very easily can slip into that creator role. But I do find there's also something that like DIY mentality, I feel like when you actually do something and experience it like content creation, for example, it becomes a lot easier to also describe to someone what you want because you know what goes into actually making it. Yeah, I've created content and a whim in the past when sort of major artistic inspiration hits, but it's never been part of my weekly workflows like it has been since starting this podcast and it is really hard. It's so hard like my heart goes out to all those content creators because as a creative strategist, I've always thought that like content creation is so easy to get in front of a camera and be like, I love this product and this is great. I truly thought it was easy and I'm not saying it's like the hardest job in the world by no means is it, but it's definitely really awkward to just talk into a void. So mad respect to the content creators who make it look really easy, I guess. I think that creators themselves are technically sort of a new clog in the marketing machine, new being within the past like 10, 15 years. And I think that there are really bright, beautiful ways that we can all be sort of fine-tuning the way that we use creator content and our overall strategies. I sort of think of these as the big three, if you will. I think it'll be good to walk you guys through the different types of creator content before getting into sort of different strategies around how to deploy each one. Right now, in my opinion, the most important types of creator content to really understand if you want to scale your business are user-generated content. So commonly referred to as UGC, creator-generated content, CGC, a little bit spicy, very similar though. And then finally, employee-generated content, which I guess you could technical it EGC. I don't really think anyone does yet, but maybe in a few years we'll all be loosely using that new acronym. But yeah, I thought I'll go through all three, sort of talk to you guys about when I see them working the best and also the differences, because like I said, I think it's really important to understand why these types of content are different. So you understand when and where to use each one. I'll start us off by explaining user-generated content, UGC. This is kind of the classic, it's like old faithful, the name really speaks for itself. The key is the user part of user-generated content. So it should specifically come from actual customers, like real users of the product. UGC should be authentic, it should be messy, it should be far away from your brand in a way, like it should really feel like it's come from an actual user, in my opinion. User-generated content can be something that you get organically from someone who just sort of loves the product so much that they're posting about it online. I think that I quantify user-generated content as like the conception of it comes from someone who's using the product and just genuinely really loves it. So whether you are paying that person or not, which I do think if you're using it for ads, you really should be paying for it. It comes from the person, the user themselves, it comes from the customer. A lot of the times how you find the best user-generated content is just ripping through people's organic posts about your product when you are a big enough brand. I do think that UGC is a little bit trickier if we're a very small startup and we're just getting going. It can be kind of tough to get that really authentic sort of fan content from people before you built up a real community, but if you're in a position where people just love, love, love the product that you make, it's a really good idea to foster a community so that they are posting this type of content. Then you can kind of go in and see what content is getting engagement and engage yourself with that person and say, "Hey, well, you know, give you a cheeky discount code, we'll give you product, we'll give you griter fees," and have someone who's actually using the product, speaking for it, it goes such a long way, it is sort of my favorite form of content. So I do think it's a really good idea for brands who are a little bit bigger to really have that focus on customer experience. If you don't have someone sort of sitting in that role who is sort of part CX and also looking to interact with customers online who are posting about your product, I think it's a really important step to take at the correct time in your business, of course, but investing in that actual community builder is really super important. People come out of the woodwork I find when you do have a good product and make the funniest coolest content that you probably as a brand would never really think about. The sort of main route for reaching out to people who are posting about your product sort of organically, I have found is always reaching out with a compensation offer and just saying, "Hey, this is great, it's getting so much engagement. Do you mind if we use it for an ad and we can pay you?" I definitely understand and I back up this sort of sensitivity around brands just taking content from organic channels and running in his ads. I don't think that's ever okay. I also think you're often going to get quite a bit of push back if the person who made that content that you're now leveraging to make money sees that you're doing that. It's never going to be a super cute look, so just really making sure that you're caring for those people. Like I said, just fostering an actual community, it goes such a long way. I've seen it firsthand. It is such a tool for scale for any brand looking to actually grow a presence as a brand instead of just like drop shipping, which is fine, super respectable, but if you do want to create that actual community, making sure that you're engaging with creators who are posting things organically in a really sort of above board way that you feel good about, super important. In my opinion, user generated content is really useful for brands at sort of every stage of development. In the early days, it can be a little bit more difficult to get your hands on, like I mentioned, but it just wonders to build social proof if you can find some and then run it as actual paid content to show folks that you're an actual trustworthy brand. It's a great way to show people that you know, you actually do exist. I think sometimes when we're used to seeing maybe an e-con brand only on our feeds, only through ads, it feels a little bit sketchy. It feels a little bit team-oom adjacent, so seeing that someone, a real person, purchased this product and they liked it enough to make a video about it, it goes a really, really long way when you are just sort of starting out and trying to convince people that you are a real brand and that your product is worth spending their precious earned coins on. I do think that one of the like true benefits of user generated content specifically is that it has a unique ability to show you on the brand side what people actually care about and I just mentioned this, but it also sometimes fosters content that you never would have thought of as the brand and I think that that's a good thing and a bad thing obviously not all of it is super usable and you're not going to feel comfortable about everything that someone says organically about your product, but I do think it's really cool to be able to see how people are interpreting USPs and benefits in a really unique way to their lifestyle. I just think you just see as the best. I also, as someone who I guess just loves people that's such a weird way to put it, I love looking at UGC when it comes in. It's like one of the highlights of my job to be honest is working with brands. I really believe it. I really love in seeing people as genuine UGC, something that really gets me is like watching unboxing videos for the brands that I work with that are like really genuine gifting moments. Sometimes I cry. I'll admit that. If vulnerable in the pod, I will cry at a really good piece of UGC and I think that that speaks to the value of UGC because it's so human and it evokes so much emotion from us that it's obviously going to stop this growl. It's obviously going to have an emotional impact and that's sort of exactly the way that you want to lead as a brand. Obviously, I feel like it kind of goes without saying, but if you're sort of a drop shipping brand, pushing a buy it, forget about it, toss it type of product, you're probably not going to need to invest in a whole lot of authentic UGC. That's fine. I don't want to leave those sort of businesses out because if you're not looking to actually build a brand, that's okay. That is fine. UGC is just probably not going to be the best thing to chase down in that case. Again, totally fine, totally cool. I think strategically though, it just doesn't always make sense if you're not long term building a brand to start building a community and getting that UGC, it just doesn't really make any sense. We'll talk about you guys a little bit more with some of the other types of content. But if you are in it for the long haul, you're a real brand, truly innovative product, exciting founder story, you are going to want to build a community if you're smart about it and that community is going to be excited to interact with you. I also think it's worth mentioning with UGC. On top of being an art history nerd, I'm also just a regular history buff. One of my first professional mentors was a lawyer with APHD in history and you can tell from the way that I act, but I remember used to give me books about various like empires, revolutions, major bills that were passed through Congress, really fun stuff that felt very dry at the time and not applicable to me as a young person starting my career. But I remember really learning a lot from looking at history and this is relevant by the way to UGC because I think that at this specific point in history and culture, there is a ton of thought and movement going on with people around how they actually spend their money. I'm talking about, you know, no buy years or months as a trend. I'm talking about Amazon protests, sort of real Les Mizz vibes out there in certain circles right now. And so I think that that community piece is just going to continue to get more and more important over the next few years, especially for DTC brands. It has already been important in the past decade to have that strong founder story to foster that sense of returning customer loyalty, but I do think it's going to get more important. So again, if you're looking to kind of stick around for the long run as a brand, it's really important to start considering now not only just to foster a great relationship with your customers to get UGC, but also just to really understand what they sort of need and want from you as a brand right now. For the record, I'm not telling you to go out and virtue signal, I'm not telling you to posture for social change like you are a business, you are a brand, but I think sometimes this brand's building community is less about being on the front lines unless you're like Ben and Jerry's and it's more about understanding what your customers need at this moment from you as a business or brand. And sometimes that's just all about fostering really fun space for them to relax in and talk about things that they love and that's okay. So the main takeaway is for UGC is that it needs to be authentic, it needs to come from your actual customers and also that you can just let it be fun, let it be how it is. I think that pulling customers in in that way, compensating them for their work and allowing them to really show the benefits through their own eyes, there's really no value on that and the scale that I've seen from pieces of content like this has been astronomical in my work. So make sure that you're focusing on that actual customer experience, building that community and the UGC will flow for brands who are really looking to sort of stick around as an actual brand. The next form of content I want to talk about is creator generated content. Oftentimes this is a big piece of confusion. What is the difference between UGC and CGC? Very similar acronyms, yes, but completely different. In my books, the definition of creator generated content is that it's content made by someone explicitly being paid to do so, super simple. It's content that's really driven by marketing, whereas UGC content is usually just driven by joy and love for the product, but creator generated content should be driven by an actual marketing related goal. Creator generated content has also changed quite significantly in the past 10 years or so, and I think that's one of the big differentiators between what is UGC versus what is CGC. It's become a really necessary piece for brands where it used to be almost like optional, but this casual content that feels organic used to be a hack and I would say now is just sort of a standard for any brand. I have spent a lot of time over the past year or so really thinking about the validity of creator generated content in this new cultural landscape that we all find ourselves in because so many brands have sort of used and abused creator generated content that I do think there is a general untrust now. I don't think that creators necessarily garner the best PR. There's a lot of folks who feel like the work is really simple, they're very overpaid, and that they're just sort of lying to sell products that they don't care about. And I think because of that, we just have to work a little bit harder to make CGC actually work. In my experience, it just takes a little bit more time and energy and resourcing to get it right compared to when people first started making creator content, and it wasn't kind of widely, like I said, used and abused by some brands. So I think that to really nail creator generated content, there are three sort of main pillars that you have to understand. Number one is your ICP and what sort of creator they're looking for. Number two, as a concept, is just originality. And number three would be, what kind of ROI are we actually getting here? So the first pillar there is pretty simple. You just want to make sure that the creator makes sense in this setting that you're putting them in. And if you don't really know who you're targeting, it's going to be hard to form you that a creator strategy that's really solidly based around your ICP. I feel like a very hot tip for brands is that sometimes the creator who's going to make the biggest impact with your ICP might not necessarily look exactly like them. It's more about doing the groundwork to understand that ICP, to understand who your main personas are, and then you have to understand who is going to appeal to that demographic rather than just trying to clone them through content. I hate to use this example because I don't think the food is very good. But it's sort of like Carl's Jr. using beautiful models in their ads. When we know that those beautiful models are not the target demo of those ads, nor they're probably eating at Carl's Jr. because it is gross, I'm a Carl's Jr. Hater. But we can see that that type of creator or actress that they're employing for these ads, they are going to really appeal to dudes driving long haul truck shifts. So it's not necessarily, again, about exactly cloning who your ICP is and who you want that ad to land with. It's more about going a layer deeper and understanding who it is that's actually going to appeal to them. The second pillar, which is more conceptual and difficult to explain, is just to try to be original when you're reformulating creator content. Another content, like I said, it's really taken over, it's become a standard for brands and we all know the formula, usually the hook is something like stop scrolling. This product changed my life, blah, blah, blah, blah. And sometimes it does work really well and it's worth just pumping out a lot of it. But good creator content that's going to perform for a long time, it's just going to take a little bit more time and thought to develop these days. I do think a really helpful tip for a lot of brands is, this is directly from meta. If you want to create some creative diversity, which is also a really big sign of a healthy ad library, when you want to create that creative diversity and you're testing a lot of video content, just switching up the first three to five seconds has a very similar impact to switching up sort of the whole asset and it's really almost people watch anyway. So try different opening clips with the same voiceover, then try switching up the voiceover, try adding different text as the hook, just try to think of a really good piece of content with a lot of promise as a rubik's cube and kind of shift little pieces around one at a time. Like I said, that for three to five seconds is really the most important to support your ad account and that you're creating some creative diversity. But it also just allows you a little bit more knowledge to be a little bit more strategic the next time you are prompting a creator to meet content. I'm going to say just like once for episode, but I think the whole point of this pillar of originality in creator content is that you need to be making content worth watching in this day and age. It is so important. I personally find really good results when I give creators a lot of freedom. I think a lot of sort of creative strategists do. I think it's good to trust them. I think that I like to, a personal sort of workflow there is to provide guidelines because I do often know sort of the mainstay hits and USPs that are going to work. But I never really apply full scripts only in very specific situations will I? Because it just doesn't feel as natural, it doesn't turn out as well and it also doesn't give them any space to actually use the product and bring themselves into it. So the final pillar here is, what is your ROI when it comes to creator content? And I find this one really interesting to sort of talk about and percolate with brands as we're working on sort of strategies to help them grow. Sometimes I find that people want to be producing a ton of really long form creator content but it's pretty low confidence and creates a lot of volatility in the out account. You don't see a whole lot of out accounts that are healthy, that are constantly testing sort of net new creators and concepts. It's just not in my experience a landmark of a healthy out account. So basically if you're sort of testing piece after piece of creator content and it's just not sticking, it really might be time to readjust that strategy. Sometimes I do find in verticals where there's already a ton of really similar looking creator content, these verticals tend to be like fashion, CPG especially where it's just so oversaturated. I do find that really strategizing around the type of content that you're putting out makes a lot of sense. Because like I said, we all are really familiar now with that same old, same old creator-generated content script. So really breaking out of that mold and figuring out how can we maybe capture content that's not just talking head reviews that feel really authentic and how can we get people using the product in a way that's entertaining. Because the thing with CGC is that you want it to be visually exciting. You want it to be more exciting than someone's funny podcast clip. Hopefully it's mine if you're looking at funny podcast clips. But yeah, you want it to be more exciting than, yeah, funny podcast clips. Pictures of really cute cats, things like that is what you're up against. So continuing with those same scripts can sometimes be a little bit tricky. Just because, like I said, so many people are now deploying creator-generated content into their out-accounts. So you really have to figure out how you're going to actually get your return on investment and what the type of content that you should be sourcing is. All right. The last form of sort of creator-generated content, I am very excited, saved the best for last. So if you stuck around for the whole episode, you're getting the hottest tips I feel like. But the last type of content is employee-generated content. I do think employee-generated content is sort of the new kid on the block. And I think that it is really cool and really exciting to me. And I love thinking about it, talking about it, making it. It's, I think, like I said, kind of new kid on the block. It's very fresh compared to some of the CGC and UGC trends that we've seen over the past few years. Last summer, DTC, we had an in-person event that was really fun, really magical, great time. And I was prepping some speakers notes for that event. And I've been researching Coach at the time because I wanted to sort of talk about them. And I really noticed their employee-generated content strategy at that time. Coach had, in a lot of ways, in my opinion, really fallen off. It was like this weird, very accessible, sort of quote-unquote luxury brand. And while it had its moments in the past, it did feel like it was kind of in a flop free fall for a while. And in my opinion, what really sort of brought Coach back and put it on the map again was a mixture of product development. They launched Coach Topia, which was aimed at a slightly younger audience. But they also had an incredibly strong both creator-generated content strategy, as well as employee-generated content. And I do think the employee-generated content is what really moved the needle for them. Just from sort of an outside point of view, what I absorbed, that's where really a lot of the interaction was coming from, it's really interesting. So with Coach, there were a couple of sales associates who were making in-store content really consistently. And the really cool thing, again, I don't work with Coach, so I can't exactly say. But the really interesting thing to me is that there is a lot of creator-content pushing specific products, as well as specific benefits to that product. One of them was that Coach bags fit a lot. They're just a great, technically designed bag. And so what is a really incredible funnel to put someone in is seeing content like that from creators that are talking about, "I'm bringing this bag to the office. If it's all my stuff, it's amazing. I love it. It also looks cute." And then to see a actual coach employee talking you through the quality of the leather or just sort of exactly what fits in the bag, it really made an impact. It made an impact so much so that, as I was researching this, to sort of work it into what I was speaking about at the event, I ended up buying a coach bag, which I think is really funny. The strategy worked on me while I was researching their strategy. But from the outside, yeah, that investment in creator content and then the product seeding as well on top of the employee content, it created an actual sense of social swarming. And I felt like at least organically and also through sort of this research I was doing that Coach was just everywhere. It was really interesting and cool to see. And I think it's still sort of continued into this year as well. So yeah, employee content is really fun and it's really effective. Whether you're a really big brand, a big legacy brand like Coach or a small DTC startup, it allows potential customers to access who you really are as a brand. I think the really interesting thing with Coach is that these videos were informative. They brought me into their world. The USPs were made clear. The actual benefits of the purchase were really represented. The specs were explained to me really clearly. That was exactly what you would get if you were in person shopping at a brick and mortar store for a coach bag, which is really interesting to sort of dissect. With smaller DTC brands, it is a great way to generate that experience that otherwise wouldn't have existed. Ads are sort of the new salespeople, so why not put salespeople in the ads and be direct about it? You know what I mean? I think a lot of the recent success and viability of employee generated content has been caused by the slight falling off of pure creator generated content. I think, in my opinion at least, if they know that they're looking at an ad, I think that they would prefer that we're selling to them well instead of trying to hide the fact that we're selling to them. It's a really interesting sort of pendulum swing where now it's like, okay, I understand that there's going to be a ton of ads when I'm scrolling through my socials and just make them good and informative and it's working in a lot of places. I'd say that the most powerful form of employee generated content though, it doesn't necessarily flow through ad accounts. I think that the real juice is people actually posting this content to their own accounts or accounts that they create with their name and their face. It signals, I think, that your brand is exciting enough that your product is good enough that real people are willing to attach their name to it who aren't the founders of the company. I think that that is really engaging for people and it really makes the brand feel approachable and really real and yeah, it's just like the value of having people working within your brand who are willing to do that is so powerful and can be such a big hand both from an ad account side like on myself. It made some really funny sort of employee generated content ads that work for sales and stuff like that. I also think that in an organic presence, if we're just looking to lift the brand, this type of content is really incredible and you cannot underestimate it. I often joke with brands and it's like, if you have some girl in your 20s who just likes making content, give her a phone and let her cook. The possibilities are really endless and like I said, the organic reach that you can get from employee generated content is huge. It's insane. And yeah, like I said, I think there's just something to real people being willing to put their face and attach their name to a product like you meet founders who don't want to show their face online. So if your product is good enough that none founders are willing to have it on their personal pages, I think you're doing something right and I think that you should really engage with those employees, especially if you're a bigger brand listening to this, really engage with those people, find out a way to get more streams of that content and really support those ventures because the brands who are supporting that employee generated content push are definitely reaping their rewards. This episode was a little bit more technical and tactical than most, but I did really think this was worth covering because it comes up in a lot of my conversations with brands, whether that's through audits or just sort of touching base for creative strategy. Understanding the differences in these types of content is so key in understanding how each of them can be useful to your brand and your creative strategy and yeah, I just think there's still a ton of sort of almost confusion between differentiating between UGC and CGC and EGC, it all gets a little bit messy, so like I said, really understanding the differences so that you can deploy them properly is really, really important. If you don't really understand what type of content you should be creating or really what the difference is and why some of them work better with different size brands than others, reach out. I love talking about this kind of stuff, it's really exciting when I'm looking at a brand. I feel like I do a lot of this work where you're kind of observing, seeing what people are doing and then making a call and sometimes you just need a third party yapper like myself to look at your ad account, look at what you're doing and say actually probably the highest yield opportunity would be, like I said, giving that 20-something-year-old girl a phone and letting her rip content or sometimes the highest yield opportunity is going to be mass production of CGC content if you are one of those drop-shipper brands. There's so many different ways you can go about it and like I said, if you don't quite understand, reach out, drop a comment or reach out on LinkedIn, I love talking about this stuff, I love yapping and like I said, sometimes it just does take that third party person looking at your account and telling you what's up. Thank you so much for listening, it would be so amazing if you could pop the subscribe whether you listen on Spotify or Apple podcasts, we love to see it. Like I said, give us a comment if you're not sure, if you want to drop your brand or like I said, if you want to shoot us a DM on any of our socials, we can definitely kind of do it there. If you don't want to publicly comment on a podcast, that is so fair. But yeah, I will chat to you guys next week, I'm very excited for the episode, I'm going to be talking about superheroes and ICP and what makes something comfortable versus what makes something exciting, it's going to be a fun episode, I've never seen a single Superman movie, but I will be seeing the new one to prepare. So if you care about superheroes, definitely tune in and until then, thank you so much and have a great day. (gentle music)