025: Tactic Tuesdays: Audiences & UGC

Unleash the secret sauce of branding as we serve up a sizzling conversation on how user-generated content (UGC) has transformed our barbecue accessories brand. From our early days of sparking an organic UGC campaign to watching it flame up into a wildfire of customer reviews and unboxing videos, this episode is a feast of insights. We'll share how real customer interactions became our brand's most flavorful endorsement, helping us increase our Amazon listing's sizzle and customer conversions without breaking the bank.

As co-founders, Mike and Matt carve out the meaty challenges of curating high-quality UGC and the strategies that have helped guide our customers to create content that perfectly pairs with our brand vision. Witness how we turned our customers into our most valuable chefs, cooking up creative content through contests and social media engagement that not only seasoned our marketing efforts but also strengthened our community. Plus, get a taste of how we leveraged social media groups and Amazon's evolving landscape for brand storytelling to optimize our brand's visibility and conversion rate.

For dessert, we invite you to indulge in a discussion of the transformative power of TikTok influencer marketing and the potency of micro-influencers through the Amazon influencer program. Learn how these partnerships cooked up engaging content that boosted product visibility, often more cost-effectively than traditional advertising methods. We'll reveal the secret ingredients to generating a steady stream of UGC, the art of incentivization, and why UGC is the cherry on top for distinguishing your brand in the fiercely competitive e-commerce barbecue. Join us for this mouthwatering episode that's sure to leave you hungry for success in the world of branding and marketing.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the brand Fortress HQ podcast. I'm your host, john Stogen, and today, for another Tactics Tuesday, I have our co-founder, mike Kaufman, and our other co-founder, matt Atkins, here, and today we're going to be talking about user generated content. So that's one of those buzzwords that we've been hearing a lot about, especially as we talk about how you build and fortify your brand. Having user generated content and how people are actually using your product in the real world is becoming more and more important, and there's a lot of different ways to get that content, and so today, we really want to drill down on how you can get user generated content. So first thing I'm going to do is, matt I'm actually going to hand it over to you to talk about, you know, some different ways that you've used in order to get user generated content for your brands and brands you've worked with.

Speaker 2: 0:45

Yeah. So when we launched our barbecue accessories brand, you know we had an audience that we leveraged. Mike's done the hard work of creating an audience. I was able to piggyback on with an existing audience and you know a lot of the same things that Mike talked about. You know we used our audience for product research, like what are we going to sell? First, and you know, different than Mike, our products in the barbecue space are, for the most part, me too. We do have a couple of innovative designs on some things that are a little bit higher. And then what's the? What the masses sell on Amazon, but for the most part, our top sellers are all me too products and there's 20 other sellers selling the exact same thing, and there's Chinese sellers selling the exact same thing for 10 bucks less than we're selling it for. So we one of the benefits we've talked about so many of the benefits of having an audience, and this one in relation to user generated content.

Speaker 2: 1:41

It really wasn't anything that we asked for or anything that I expected. You know, when we launched, we had a couple of hundred people that were ready to buy it at full price. We didn't have to give a discount. We didn't have to do any giveaways back when we launched this brand and there you know, giveaways were the primary way of ranking a product when you launched. We didn't have to do any of that. And you know we had a bunch of people lined up in the worst part of the year to launch a barbecue brand in January, right after Christmas and, you know, after the first review started rolling in, it was fascinating to me how many of our audience clearly they were in our audience because they mentioned our Facebook group and mentioned some of the things that happened in there. But they were leaving reviews with videos and reviews with pictures and then they would start to post in the group anytime any of them got the new box and they would do an unboxing video. And again, we didn't at the time, we weren't incentivizing that in any way, it just happened naturally and right off the bat.

Speaker 2: 2:43

I started using that in some of our creative and you know this is back before TikTok was even around UGC. I mean, the acronym probably existed, but it wasn't something that people were talking about really or using in your marketing. But we started to include it because you know we were actually at the time looking for some new images for our listing and, right out of the gate, they started converting better because, I mean, these are exactly our target audience, that we're taking pictures and it wasn't just a content creator Like. These were actual customers that we've launched this product for using our product in the exact way that we want to show other people in the marketing using it. So, yeah, we were getting user generated content without asking for it right out of the gate, and that has really become a big part of who we are as a brand how we portray our brand on Amazon.

Speaker 1: 3:37

Yeah, and I just so I want to double click on. You know something there which is when you say not getting that or you didn't have to ask for it. I think you know that's such an advantage, whether it's because you've built a big email list, like you have my, or you know, like what you did, matt, which is partnering with somebody who's built that audience that is, you know, really passionate about that particular category, that you know you don't have to beat the drum really hard in order to get really good content. You know people are happy to do it for free, just to kind of show off the cool product that you made. So you know having that right to begin with is such an advantage as you go on with the brands. Are there other? Are you still primarily just relying on essentially ad hoc or goodwill of people to get user-generated content? Or if you put any systems in place in order to get that user-generated content?

Speaker 2: 4:37

Because we realized how better it made our listing look and how better it converts than you know, like high production value type videos, we definitely started asking for it and we actually put it in an insert card. So right now, the insert card that we're split testing in most of our products in that brand are share a picture of yourself on social media and enter into a contest. So we certainly incentivize it. Now it's something that but again, people know like the more people that come into our community, whether it be from joining the Facebook group or they purchase our product Also that's another thing that we include in our listing is that there is a community.

Speaker 2: 5:18

We don't say Facebook I don't want Amazon to think that I'm driving traffic off of the platform but it's obvious that there's some sort of a community somewhere and that's actually where we want people sharing their stuff. Because what we noticed is, every time we did a promotion in the group where we would send people to the listing, those people came back and did like unboxing videos in the group, which then got more people to see the. You know they didn't always see the post that we made in the group about the contest, but those ones that people were posting about unboxing their new product. Those always tended to get a lot more engagement, so we have certainly incentivized it, but because we're at the forefront of the group, showing people that it gets other people to do the same thing anyways.

Speaker 3: 6:01

Well, and that's the interesting thing about social right Is like I think that's the thing that oftentimes is forgotten is that the whole point of social is interaction, like that's why people are there. Right, you know like they want to be noticed, they want to see other people, they want to interact, you know, like that's the whole purpose. So it's like, if you are so like, we have an email list, but we haven't until very recently really started putting much effort into building out a social presence and start building up a follower list on social, and so it's like, yes, we can request that sort of thing through email and we're actually running a campaign here shortly to do so, but we're waiting for the season to ramp up so people have their pools open. But the but the thing about that is that emails are very different. Animal, right, like we can contact them and we can ask, and I'm sure many will respond.

Speaker 3: 6:58

But in social it's just a more natural thing. Right, like me, if you want to be seen, then you have to do something for people to see, which means you got to take a picture, you got to take a video or something, and if you're in this community, that's all about that. That's what you're going to take pictures and video of. And the other thing is is that then it's snowballs, because when you see somebody else do it, you want to be a part of the group, so of course you want to do the same thing.

Speaker 3: 7:24

So it builds on itself in a way that email can't. So I think there's a there's a value to both sides of that. You definitely want to have an email list because it's the only one that you control, right? Like, if you got a Facebook group, facebook could shut you down anytime, right? So you definitely still want to have that email list. But I wouldn't say that building the email list is in and of itself sufficient. I think that having the combination of the email list and that social presence with those followers and group members and things like that is definitely the one two punch that really takes it, I think, to the next level.

Speaker 1: 7:58

So, matt, you talked about it a little bit, but I really want to maybe dig a little bit deeper on. You talked about okay, so we got this. You just generate content, at least in the beginning, you know, essentially because of how strong of groundwork you laid before really even launching the brand, and now you've got kind of a process. What are the different areas where you're, where you've used that user generated content and where you've seen it have an impact on Amazon?

Speaker 2: 8:30

So it's really all over our listing, like I said, I mean that really has become part of who our brand is. Our tagline at one point was barbecue, products created by barbecue or something like something along the lines of we create bar, we are barbecuers and we create products for barbecuers. So I mean every. It started out just in our listings, like at the secondary. And third, like all of the lifestyle images that we were originally using stock images for. Or you know, I was that kind of do it yourself or bootstrap brand builder in the beginning, but I mean so all over my images. Every lifestyle images in my the carousel were actual people using our product in the wild. That started to go kind of filter down into the A plus content. Now our A plus content is pretty much all of our lifestyle imagery on A plus content or images taken from our community, and that's really the biggest place where we kind of play up the community.

Speaker 2: 9:29

I mean our goal is to get people in the group because in the group we control what we can say and we can have promotions in there and it's already a big group anyway. So building that kind of community feel for our brand is something that happened naturally, with this user generated content, but also we created some videos. Like you know, the there were some videos that people would send. People would send them in like as a review. Obviously, you don't have that as asset to use.

Speaker 2: 9:58

We were trying to take some. What we found on Facebook is that it was really hard to download a video that someone posted in the group because it just wouldn't be very high res. So we're right now actually we're looking for ways to how can we provide a place where people can upload videos, as opposed to posting it on Facebook, so that we have that. But I mean the videos that we have in our ads, the video on the carousel, like those were all just chopped up images for the most part of some of this user generated content that we were getting from our consumers. So all the way from our image carousel to our sponsored brand video ads, everything has a picture of some sort of customer using our product.

Speaker 1: 10:38

Yeah, and I think that's, you know, one of the big. So I mean, obviously, from a branding perspective, as you know, brand becomes more important and that's a theme you're going to hear over and over and over from us, because we just think it's so true as Amazon and really just e-commerce in general matures. The other thing is that for people to take away all those different places where user generated content, whether that be in video form or picture form, can be used you know some of the obvious ones that you talked about are you know you're listing not only your images but also your listing videos, but as that, you know, amazon really opens up a lot more areas For branding. The other thing is, you know Amazon posts in another fantastic place where you can use that user generated content, and you know brand stories and you know Number of other places that Amazon is opening up in order to really tell that brand story. And if you have used your own content, it gives you a big advantage of showing your ideal customer actually using the product.

Speaker 3: 11:44

Well, the other advantage to realistically is, especially if you're a brand that maybe doesn't have a large marketing budget, right, like if you're, if your margins are a little thinner, you know, or you're running into some issues and you just don't have the marketing budget. Like if you think about it, the thing about UGC is, for the most part, you know it's free. You know maybe you might incentivize that to some degree, but there's, there's generally ways to incentivize that that don't really have much actual monetary expense to the brand and then that content can be used. Like you said, it can be used anywhere you know, like on your listing, in your ads, on your social like. You can repurpose it so many different ways. And so you know, oftentimes if you want to do a really nice, you know, production level video of your product, like a lifestyle kind of a thing that's pretty pricey, especially for certain products, like maybe, maybe it's easier for you know, say, an item that gets used in the kitchen or something right, but like we sell cool tools.

Speaker 3: 12:43

So the only way that we're going to create a production level video is we're renting a really nice house with a pool. We need at least, you know, one or two people who are going to be in the videos. Then we need the crew who's going to be taking the shots and doing it like the last. Our last video shoot was like 10 grand or more, you know. So it's. It's an expensive process to create a really good quality video and, realistically speaking, these days, unless you get it Absolutely right, it's probably not going to perform as well as UGC is, and that doesn't cost you hardly anything. So so the other thing I'm curious about, because I mean obviously the quality that you get from UGC Varies widely.

Speaker 1: 13:29

Is there certain kind of prompts or instructions that you provide, you know, either via email or your inserts or as customers go through that process, to help kind of nudge them in the right direction for the type of content that you know works well for your customers?

Speaker 2: 13:49

So there's been a couple of members in our group that have kind of risen to the top in terms of content creation for us. You know, there's we have a lot of like competition pit masters in our group that travel the country in these competitions and a lot of them, um, actually some of our products, the ones that I was talking about, where they're not necessarily me too Um, one of them was using a much different application than we use it for in the barbecue space. But, um, like those those guys, they're, first of all, they're easy to work with because they understand, like these guys are, like they eat, sleep and breathe barbecue, so they're very comfortable around a barbecue. Like they come with a lot of ideas themselves for content or ways that they can uh show the product in use. But so those ones, you know, the ones that kind of rose to the top in terms of they were creating a lot of content for us and they were creating a lot of really good content. Some of them have, you know, youtube channels and things like that, where they have like expensive camera equipment so it just looks better. Um, but yeah, so with those ones, I mean, for the most part, you know, even if it were, even if it's something that isn't doesn't show it in the way that we want to show it. There's always places and and there's always uh places that we can use those. But what we've gotten now is like now we're starting to use actual content creators that are on these uh places like Tik Tok.

Speaker 2: 15:11

And what I love about Tik Tok is, first of all, back. You know, three years ago, when we launched that brand influencer marketing, which is what it was called back then, it was a lot more cost prohibitive for smaller brands. Now there's a couple of things that have happened. First of all, tik Tok is here, and that's a lot different where I mean, someone that doesn't have a huge following can go viral on Tik Tok. But then also there's not um um I forgot where I was going with that Um, but yeah, so you don't you when it's creators like so Amazon PPC has become a lot more expensive now, so those types, other types of platforms to advertise on, are now a lot more cost effective than they were before.

Speaker 2: 15:51

So now we're looking at things like influencer marketing, but on Tik Tok and they're they're in that brief where you're looking for them you can actually lay out what it is that you want them to do with the product. So we're kind of playing around with that a little bit more now that we're engaging with influencers on those types of platforms. But with our audience, they pretty much know how we want to see it and there's not really a whole lot of prompting we have to give them in order to see it in the way that we would want to advertise it.

Speaker 3: 16:19

Well. I think it's it can use, like when you post something at Tik Tok or something like that, I mean you, you have the opportunity to use that as Split testing. Let's say right, like I mean what videos perform you know you can start to see those themes.

Speaker 3: 16:34

You know, as you're using these videos for this purpose, you get to see the things that actually do go viral and how they go viral, so that then you can post those videos to your social and say hey, you know, people are really digging this. You know, can you make some new? You know new variations of?

Speaker 3: 16:48

this type of the video, you'll likely get more views. You know, whatever, there's all sorts of ways that you can, you know, kind of promote that to your audience and point them in the right direction, let's say, a creating content that's going to perform well.

Speaker 3: 17:00

I was also going to mention one other thing, and that is when you're repurposing the content you know it's important to recognize that videos don't perform the same on one platform that they do on another one. Like you never can really judge what video is going to go viral on what platform and to what degree, you know a video that gets, you know, 50 views on one platform might get 30,000 views, you know, on a platform that's going to be on another platform, and so if you're not repurposing that content on multiple platforms, you're probably losing out, because even though it looks like a dud on another platform, it might actually go well.

Speaker 1: 17:37

So, yeah, well, and there's two things that come to my mind just that I want to double click on based on what you guys mentioned. I mean, the first one, mike, is just to kind of build on what you were saying there. You know, not only do they perform differently on different platforms, but that's not to say that you can't, you know, repost that video or rework it a little bit a month later, three months later, six months later, especially with how fast content is viewed on these platforms, right, nobody's going to probably notice. And especially if you, you know, kind of remix or repurpose some of that content, even on the same platform, you might have the first time where it only gets, you know, two impressions, and then the next time it gets 200,000, especially on TikTok, where the logarithm seems to be very, very random.

Speaker 1: 18:26

The other thing, matt, that I think that you brought up, that I think is important for people to take away, or at least I want to double click on, which is, you know, when you're finding those influencers, when you find somebody you know, you, I feel like you're in a really good situation where you've got those people that kind of know what they're doing essentially, and not every brand or every category is going to have, you know, that luxury. So the other thing is is, if you find once you find, a handful of influencers that do a good job, like you, can have them on a regular basis making content for you, because it does take quite a bit of work in order to go find, you know, an influencer whether it be on TikTok or Instagram or somewhere else that produces good videos, produces them on time, and it's going to have an impact for your brand.

Speaker 2: 19:16

Yeah, I think having a black book, so to speak, of influencers and, like I said, a lot of ours came and how we started that process of earmarking the ones that we knew were creating good content for us. Was it started because the ones that were in our group Like I said, some of the ones rose to the top right off the bat because we knew, like a couple of the guys had YouTube channels or they were featured on YouTube channel, so they already had the really, really good cameras that in a lot of cases it's not necessary, but like the ones that they were creating for us, the content that they were creating was like taking grill grates off with fire in the background and using some heat resistant gloves, like those were the types of videos we were able to use for them and we incentivize them Like those. You know, those guys got product. They got any time we had new merch we'd send it to them and we treated them as we would an influencer, but they were kind of naturally just part of our audience.

Speaker 1: 20:08

Yeah, and I think the other thing you know, because we've helped a few brands with this that I would say is that TikTok marketplace for influencers has been incredibly helpful, where they actually have a really good platform where you can post, you know, kind of, hey, here's what I'm looking for, here's what I'm willing to pay, and then you have influencers who actually apply for it.

Speaker 1: 20:33

So, you know, rather than the challenges at least we've had in the past with platforms like Instagram is that you know it's a lot of work to find an influencer that you think is going to be a good fit for you and then you reach out to them and you know the response rate, quite frankly, is, you know, pretty low, whereas with TikTok, especially with market, with their marketplace, you can set up what is essentially a brief and then influencers come to you and obviously you know how much you pay per post does have a big influence on what quality you're going to get, but that's a lot. We found that a lot more effective than you know, trying to use some tool and reach out to people on Instagram and, quite frankly, a lot of the influencers that we were able to find on TikTok also had Instagram accounts and Instagram following. So we kind of got a two for one in that process.

Speaker 3: 21:27

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 21:30

It only makes sense that they would right.

Speaker 3: 21:31

I mean going back to that whole thing about you know, repurposing content. Like you're already creating the content, doesn't take that much more to post that same content on other platforms and see what you can get out of it. So most of them that have any kind of a following on one platform probably have at least some following somewhere else too.

Speaker 2: 21:49

Yeah, there was also another place that we found.

Speaker 2: 21:51

You know, I actually clicked on an ad on Facebook and it was talking about that when Amazon influencer program first came out, and there were these groups that were teaching people how to be content creators and how to use that platform as a money making, as a way to generate revenue, and we actually landed on a couple of really cool influencers in that group that weren't necessarily they weren't a part of our Facebook group.

Speaker 2: 22:18

They were just wanting to learn how to create content and by being a part of that group, actually purchased like a $99 program or something like that. But it put me in this group of people that were brand new to the idea of creating content, but they were interested in it and man, I got, you know, I think, ended up getting 10 to 12 videos for free, just sending them free content. You know, one of the things that what we looked for on Instagram were for a long time, we got the best response rates from kind of that micro influencer like right around or just under 10,000 followers, where their response rate was a whole lot higher and in most cases they were happy just working for free product. And that's what we were finding in these, these Facebook groups of, of these programs teaching people how to be content creators on Amazon affiliate. So that was, that was a little bit of a goldmine of finding these content creators that that really fit our brand Well, you just you know, serves two purposes, right.

Speaker 3: 23:14

I mean one of those purposes for them to post it to their you know followers and whatnot that they're going to get engagement with. But the other part is that you want the content like then you can repurpose it other places. So when you work with those micro influencers who are willing to do it for just free product, you know you get a lot more bang for your buck, because number one, like you said a lot of times, they get better engagement. But also you still get the content.

Speaker 1: 23:38

Whereas if you work with a large influencer.

Speaker 3: 23:41

Yes, you have more eyeballs and yes, you know you might get decent engagement and you get the content right, but you pay a lot more for it. So, like that piece of it, the fact that you get the UGC to use up somewhere else doesn't cost you any more from a micro influencer than it does from you. Know somebody who's got three million followers.

Speaker 1: 24:00

Yeah Well, in our experience we kind of found a well a couple of things to share around that. So, in terms of pursuing this process, the Goldilocks place for us was offering not only a free product for, obviously, what we were looking for, like unboxing and reviews and that type of stuff, but also some sort of you know cash incentive to go with that. It didn't have to be huge, even if it was you know 50 bucks for a micro influencer. We saw a lot better, higher quality videos, better response and all that type of stuff than if we were just sending a product. So I wouldn't be afraid to put a little bit of cash behind it.

Speaker 1: 24:37

Like that said, you're 100% corrective. You know I wouldn't go after you know an influencer that's got you know 100,000 followers or a million followers, because yeah, that's a big number. But the likelihood that those followers are going to see your video and are your you know target market, they're going to be interested in your product and your brand, are fairly low and that's you know. I think that's pretty much the accepted best practice at this point.

Speaker 3: 25:06

You could probably also and maybe this is the way you ran it. I don't know, john, but you know you could. You could run that in kind of like a two step right. Like, hey, you get free product if you create some UGC, but if you take it to this next level, you know and we get, you know these certain shots, you know, or you do this with the product or you take it. You know this link to video, you know, or whatever. Like you create some criteria that if they meet those criteria, you know, then they get the you know, additional 50 bucks or whatever. I think it's going to be different in every market. You know just exactly how effective that is and what the strategy you're going to use. But you know, knowing that you can put a little bit of money behind it and maybe you can get better quality content and then just deciding whether you want to put that behind the wall or not. You know, like, okay, you need to meet these criteria to get that extra. You know, juicer or not?

Speaker 1: 25:54

Yeah, well, the other thing that I would say, especially for brands that are just like, okay, what's an effective but easy way to get started with this and we've actually tied this into our launch process for new products is actually using a service called Join Brands, and we've had really enjoyed the work that we've done with them, because one they have an option where you can actually choose hey, I want a video from someone who is an Amazon influencer, so you know that video. Obviously, they've got other social channels. That's how you get the Amazon influencer account. But the nice thing about that is is that that video gets posted, you know, to their Amazon influencer account, which means it shows up on your listing. In addition to that, they do a lot of the legwork for you know, basically they have a whole pool of influencers and you kind of invite them and that type of stuff. So it just makes that process a lot easier and you can provide direction and you get the videos at the end, like you said, in order to use pretty much anywhere you want.

Speaker 1: 27:00

So we've actually started incorporating that into our launch process, where we'll run, like you know, 10 of those in the first couple of weeks, and it's great because they're buying the product. So we get, you know, some sales from it. You know we obviously, because it's of Amazon's terms of service, we don't ask for a review, but there are, I would say, probably a third to a half of them that do end up leaving a review because they bought the product, which can be, you know, very beneficial as well. So, at least as far as kind of where to get started on this process, we've found joint brands being really helpful from that aspect.

Speaker 3: 27:43

Yeah, something I was thinking about too, is that I think we're entering into a space right now where AI is creating a lot of new opportunities in order to make use, let's say, of content that you already have. So, in other words, I think we're about to see a large increase in tools that will make it possible to take UGC videos and regenerate them with a new person or in a different environment or whatever, so that you would potentially have the opportunity to take one piece of UGC and not just repurpose the same piece of content, but to be able to repurpose variations of that content if you wanted to. I feel like we're getting really close to that stage now. There's also the potential that maybe we're getting close to the stage where you can start creating them out of thin air who knows? But at a minimum, I think we're certainly moving into the space where you can take actual content that you have and start repurposing and regenerating it in ways that allow you to use it in more places. There are just more instances of it.

Speaker 2: 29:00

Before we started using the user-generated content that we were getting from our audience. To be honest, and almost embarrassingly, I would go a lot longer than I should have between photo shoots to split test new images and new A-plus content and things like that. But now we've got a Google Drive folder filled with hundreds of these photos that we repurposed in lots of different ways. For me, it's made us a lot more agile in terms of stuff that we want to create. Honestly, if I want to do something Christmas-themed, I can use some of these AI tools that you're talking about right now and upload some of the UGC that we already have in a Google Drive folder and put a Santa costume on one of the guys standing in front of a grill.

Speaker 2: 29:48

For me, that has made me a lot more agile because before, like I said, I was piece-mealing things together. I had a photographer, I had a graphic designer. They never talked. I had to worry about getting the point across to both of them at the same time. But now I just take UGC content, throw it in the AI tool. I can put it in a different background, like you said, put a hat on them and that's a new image that I can upload in an hour as opposed to weeks.

Speaker 3: 30:15

Right. Well, and you're also getting to the point where you could do that on mass. You could put one image into an AI. I'm pretty sure you could probably do this with Mid Journey. I know that you can do Mid Journey. If you set the right prompt, you can make it do like it'll do, like 10 repeats, like in each time Mid Journey generates images.

Speaker 3: 30:36

It generates four images. You can have it, do it 10 times with the same prompt, with a certain modification, and get 40 images out of it. Well, you can feed an image into Mid Journey and say hey, modify this or whatever. So we're definitely getting to the point where you could do that on mass. You could do 40 regenerations of that image in a heartbeat. Maybe only 10 of them are good, but you instantly have 10 new images that you can use any way you want.

Speaker 1: 31:07

Yeah, I think the thing that surprises me most about this obviously UGC is becoming well is important in a sense of being able to build your brand and getting that content. Amazon has definitely tipped their hat to this with I think it's Amazon Connect that they now have for generating UGC right on the platform. Is that what it's called?

Speaker 3: 31:30

Creator Connect maybe.

Speaker 1: 31:31

Yeah, Creator Connect. That's what it is, Although I will say the couple of experiences I've had with that have definitely left a lot to be desired.

Speaker 3: 31:45

We've had one good experience with Creator Connect. We ended up with a good creator that we're working with right now and that's been useful. A large number of other connections that didn't go anywhere and didn't materialize into anything positive, let's say.

Speaker 1: 32:02

Well, that's what boggled my mind, I think, how the framework for it makes a lot of sense as far as providing more incentive for that creator while at the same time, a discount to customers, which makes a lot of sense. Then you get more sales out of it. The blocking and tackling makes sense, it's just, for whatever reason, when you start actually looking at the execution of it, a lot of the creators at least so far in my experience I think this will probably be another one of those things that gets better over time. The creator quality of people that raise their hand from that, even when the incentives are fairly good, has been incredibly low.

Speaker 3: 32:47

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe they just feel like they have better opportunities elsewhere. The lower hanging fruit in that category is some of the creators that aren't doing well other places. That's where they are, I don't know. I'm not sure I can explain it, but it definitely hasn't been as useful as other options have been.

Speaker 1: 33:07

Yeah, all right. Well, I think, as we wrap up this episode, matt, for folks that know that they need to get user-generated content, what advice would you give to them, or maybe one action step that you would give to them, as far as how to get that ball rolling?

Speaker 2: 33:32

I mean, first, we talk about it all the time how important an audience is. You don't have to build the audience. Our audience is one that we partnered with. To be honest, just being active in some of these Facebook groups could create that in and of itself. Like I said, it really started to take come a whole lot faster once we started incentivizing it.

Speaker 2: 33:53

We do a part of our giveaway. That we do is a gift card for people that tag us on Instagram and tag us and follow us. That's the insert card that we're currently running on our products and it works. I mean, you're asking them to do something that, if they're happy with the product which we always make good products anyways it's something that they're happy to do. It's content that we have so much content because we started offering it as something to do. Then, also, on the back end, now we have, when people tag us, we have an SOP to start getting their contact info the best that we can. So, yeah, nothing else If you don't have an audience, if you're working on building it, even just using an insert card to incentivize that, which then you can reverse engineer into a list, is something that you can do right off the bat.

Speaker 1: 34:44

Very nice. Yeah, I think that's a fantastic advice for everybody who's listening and a great place to wrap for today on user-generated content. I'm sure that this will be just one of many conversations on user-generated content, because it's a pretty important thing when we look at building our brand and it's only going to get more and more important as we look at how to stand out from all the other competition that there is on Amazon and beyond. To