What If Your Customers Were Your Best Marketers? Grow Your Brand Faster with UGC
The strongest marketing doesn't always come directly from the brand. Reviews, customer photos, product videos, testimonials, social posts, and other content created by customers can become valuable marketing assets in their own right.
That's the idea behind user-generated content, or UGC. For businesses, UGC can provide prospective customers with something polished brand content cannot always offer: examples of how real people are using and experiencing a product or service. Research on reviews gives some evidence.
Northwestern University's Spiegel Research Center analyzed data from three online retailers and found that a product with five reviews was 270% more likely to be purchased than one with none, with larger effects for higher-priced products and rapidly diminishing returns after the first five reviews, as described in its report How Online Reviews Influence Sales.
That evidence concerns reviews on product pages, which are one form of UGC, so results for other formats such as video or social posts can differ.
Rather than treating UGC as a replacement for professional brand content, businesses increasingly use the two together across social media, product pages, advertising, email, and other parts of the customer journey.
This guide explains what UGC is, why businesses use it, how to encourage customers to participate, and what to consider before using customer-created content in marketing.
Understanding User-Generated Content: What It Really Is
User-generated content is any content created by real customers — not the brand — and shared publicly on digital platforms.
That includes product reviews and star ratings, customer photos and videos on Instagram and TikTok, unboxing clips, "day in the life" content featuring a product, testimonials, case studies, and social posts using branded hashtags.
What ties these formats together is that real customers created them, which many shoppers find useful because it shows how a product works in everyday use, in addition to how the brand presents it.
UGC is not automatically trustworthy, though. It can be staged, rewarded or fake, which is why disclosure and review rules matter, as covered later in this guide.
Also Read: The Marketing Strategy for Global Organic Traffic Dominance
Why User-Generated Content Can Be Valuable
One of the main strengths of UGC is social proof. When potential customers are unfamiliar with a product, seeing reviews, photos, videos, or experiences from other customers can provide additional information beyond what the brand says about itself.
A professional product image shows how the company wants to present the product. A customer photo or video can show how that product looks or performs in a real-world setting. Both types of content can be useful, but they serve different purposes.
UGC can also expand the amount and variety of creative material available to a marketing team. With appropriate permission, businesses may be able to feature customer-created content across product pages, social media, email campaigns, and advertising.
Reviews can also add useful information to product and service pages by answering questions, describing experiences, and providing perspectives that may not appear in the original marketing copy.
The impact varies considerably by brand, audience, product, content quality, placement, and marketing channel, so businesses should measure UGC performance rather than assuming it will automatically outperform professionally produced content.
Also Read: Social Media Growth: Building a Brand on Instagram and TikTok
How to Encourage Customers to Create Content
Businesses that want more UGC can make participation easier by giving customers a clear reason and simple way to share their experiences.
A post-purchase email might invite customers to share a photo, packaging can include a branded hashtag, or a product community can encourage users to demonstrate how they use what they purchased.
Contests and giveaways can provide another incentive for participation. For example, a business might invite customers to submit a photo or video for a chance to receive a prize, discount, or feature on the brand's social channels.
Whatever approach you use, keep participation straightforward. Customers should understand what you're asking them to create, how to submit it, whether there is an incentive, and how their content may be used.
Recognition can also be valuable. Featuring customer stories or acknowledging contributors can help make UGC feel like participation in a community rather than simply a request for free marketing material.
How to Activate UGC across your Marketing Channels
Collecting UGC is only half the work. The other half is placing it where it can help. On your website, customer photos, reviews and video testimonials on product pages can answer questions shoppers have about fit, size or quality.
Reviews and star ratings on landing pages and near checkout can reassure people at the point of decision. The evidence is strongest for reviews, as the Spiegel research above shows, and results for other formats vary.
In paid advertising, customer-created videos and photos are widely used on platforms such as Meta and TikTok because they look native to the feed.
Whether they outperform studio-produced ads depends on your product, audience and creative, so test them against your existing ads. If you use a customer's content in a paid campaign, get explicit permission for that use first.
Email is another place for UGC. Customer photos, testimonials and review quotes in post-purchase and re-engagement emails can add credibility. A periodic customer-spotlight email is easy to test, and your own open, click and conversion data will show whether it works for your audience.
Also Read: Email Marketing Software That Turns Subscribers Into Customers
Brands that built Empires on UGC - Real examples
GoPro
GoPro essentially built its entire brand identity on customer-generated adventure footage.
Rather than producing expensive commercials, they encouraged users to share their most extreme moments and featured the best content across every channel.
The result was millions of pieces of authentic marketing content that no budget could have replicated — and a brand synonymous with adventure that customers created themselves.
Airbnb
Airbnb depends on guest reviews to build trust between strangers, and reviews remain a core part of how listings are judged. It does not rely on guest content alone for its listings.
It launched a free professional photography program for hosts in 2011, as The Next Web reported, and it still offers professional photography, saying that high-quality images are one of the biggest factors for guests choosing a listing.
Starbucks
Starbucks has run seasonal campaigns that invite customers to decorate and share photos of their holiday cups, such as its 2014 Red Cup Contest.
Campaigns like this give customers a simple, fun reason to post, and they work because the product is already something people photograph.
Glossier
Glossier scaled from a beauty blog to a major brand almost entirely on community-driven content.
By consistently reposting customer selfies and making their customers feel like collaborators in the brand rather than just buyers, they built a loyal community that marketed the brand to itself.
Their aesthetic — real skin, minimal editing, diverse faces — was defined by their customers as much as their creative team.
The Legal and Ethical side you cannot skip
Customer-created content doesn't automatically become a brand's property simply because the customer mentions, tags, or posts about the business.
Before republishing UGC, particularly in advertising or other commercial marketing, businesses should make sure they have the appropriate rights or permission for the intended use. Requirements can vary depending on the content, platform, agreement, jurisdiction, and how the material will be used.
Keep clear records of any permissions or licenses you obtain, and credit creators where appropriate. Businesses should also avoid editing customer content in ways that materially misrepresent the person's original experience or endorsement.
For campaigns involving significant commercial use of customer-created content, appropriate terms, permissions, disclosures, and other legal requirements should be reviewed carefully rather than assuming a social-media tag alone provides sufficient rights.
Reviews and rewards also fall under US consumer-protection rules. The FTC's consumer-review rule, in force since October 2024, prohibits fake or misleading reviews and testimonials, and the FTC's influencer guidance, Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers, says that when you reward people for posting, the connection should be disclosed clearly.
Contests and giveaways can be regulated, and platforms set their own promotion rules, so check the rules where you run them.
Also Read: Full Funnel Digital Marketing: Turning Visitors into Loyal Customers
Conclusion
UGC works best when it is genuine, easy for customers to create and used with permission. Make participation simple, recognize the people who contribute, place the content where shoppers make decisions, and measure the results against your professional content instead of assuming it will win.
Be transparent about incentives and about how you use customer material. Trust is the reason UGC works, and undisclosed rewards or edited content can undo it.
