How SMEs Can Operationalise UGC for Scalable Content Marketing

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: your customers trust each other more than they trust you.

Nielsen data indicates that around 92% of consumers are more likely to trust recommendations from real people over direct brand messaging. That’s even when the “real people” are complete strangers.

This is a big deal for Singaporean small and medium enterprises (SMEs) trying to cut through the noise. Luckily, there’s a pretty cost-effective and scalable solution sitting in your own customer base that can help you do that. 

It’s called user-generated content (UGC): content created by your consumers. 

When operationalised properly, UGC for SMEs can transform your visibility and even build you significant trust… and without burning your marketing budget.

Why a UGC Content Strategy Matters for SMEs

Most SMEs operate with lean teams and budgets. This worsens the pressure to produce high volumes of engaging content consistently.

User-generated content marketing is cheaper than a creative agency or multiple macro-influencers. Incorporating scalable user-generated content marketing into your strategy can also let you tap into more performant assets.

Brands adding UGC to marketing have seen 29% more web conversions, for example. Social media campaigns with it get 50% more engagement.

It essentially lets you maintain consistent and engaging content output without taking up resources to create everything from scratch. That’s because it’s powered partly by your audience.

Why UGC May Be More Important Than Polished Brand Content

One thing really pushing UGC to the forefront is that many platforms today reward authenticity. TikTok and IG Reels are less about the amount of time you spent producing a video than about how real users respond to it, for example.

UGC also reduces what marketers call “ad resistance”. This is the psychological tendency modern audiences have developed to mentally filter out anything that looks like a brand going after a sale.

This isn’t to say that you should abandon professional brand storytelling. Your official brand identity still matters for building long-term recognition.

The idea is to balance that with more human and relatable content formats. This recommends a blended content strategy instead of a full pivot to one over the other.

How to Get UGC Content without Relying on Big Influencers

1. Work with Your Customers and Nano Creators

The secret to how to get UGC content is to realise that you don’t need celebrities or mid-tier influencers. Quality UGC can come from nano influencers (people with 1,000 to 10,000 followers) or even people with no followers at all!

Look for people with highly engaged followings in your specific niche. Look at your own customers. Many are already posting about your products, and you just need a system to surface that content!

2. Incentivise Submissions

Not all of the people you contact will want to create content for free. This is when you can incentivise submissions, even if only through bartering. 

Product gifting or PR packages are a tried-and-tested approach. You send the product and the person shares the experience. This may be content showing them using the product, displaying before-and-after results, and so on.

The key thing to remember here is that UGC doesn’t just happen organically. You may have to build deliberate touchpoints for it. 

Try sending customers a follow-up WhatsApp message after purchase, for example, or launching an Instagram DM campaign inviting customers to share experiences for a prize.

3. Don’t Forget about BTS Staff Content

Your own team is an underused UGC source. Behind-the-scenes staff-generated content can humanise your brand in a way polished product photography can’t. 

This type of UGC is especially effective on TikTok and Instagram, by the way. On those platforms, audiences expect unfiltered everyday content. Your staff can easily provide that.

How Can SMEs Build a UGC Workflow That Scales?

A sustainable UGC content strategy needs the same infrastructure thinking as any business operation. How will you source, collect, store, and eventually deploy it?

Start from the beginning with something like a simple content bank or submission channel. Pick out the channels through which you’ll collect the UGC, then set up something like a shared Google Drive folder for approved UGC content.

Don’t forget to organise it too. Not all UGC serves the same function, so it should be categorised. Possible categories are product demos, testimonials, before-and-afters, etc.

Categorising these ahead of time will make it far easier for you to deploy the right content type across the right channel. Whether that’s organic posting or email marketing, for example, you can more easily draw the right UGC from your bank.

By building this as a system, you empower yourself to plan and deploy content faster and more effectively in the future. Definitely worth the small time investment!

Build Your Scalable UGC Marketing Today

The brands that will win at scalable content marketing don’t need to be the ones with the biggest budgets. They’ll be the ones who set up the best systems for authentic content creation, leveraging things like UGC assets.

UGC gives SMEs a great field-levelling opportunity. If you need help building a proper user-generated content marketing strategy for your business, reach out to us. 

We’ve worked with many Singapore SMEs to develop efficient and effective marketing campaigns. Contact us today for a no-obligation chat!