10 Tips for Creating UGC-Style Content

You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations on how nonprofit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their missions through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of Attend Media. Jenny, today’s topic, ten tips for creating UG Style Content. Jenny, what is UG Style Content? UGC stands for User Generated Content. I think the most important thing to think about that is it’s consumer-generated content. It’s not created by the brain. It’s created by someone else. At the end of the day, it’s really that POV style content and it’s more authentic and more genuine. I like this. We’re actually talking about creative. We always talk about where the billboard should go or how much dollars you should be spending on TV. But now we’re actually talking about the cool stuff, the pictures, the videos, that kind of stuff. We talk about the tick-tockification of ads lately. I think that’s where a lot of this spends from. We run a lot of UGC content in our paid ads for our clients. About half of our ads are built from the brand directly and then a lot of different styles. About half is actually from this UGC style content. This influencer produced content. We’re typically seeing that that is the type of content that outperforms the content from the brand. Not that the brand isn’t creating wonderful, great content. We want to mix up both things because you never know what’s going to work better. But overall, that influencer content, that UGC content, performs better really because it just doesn’t look like an ad. It stops the scroll. Excited to jump into these tips today. Just so I can get my head around this. UGC style content, there’s two ways to do it. I’m thinking one, in the way your most familiar with Jenny is hiring influencers to go out to the attraction, document their experience, make it, put some cool music about it and post on tick-tock. But then there’s also the second way. We’re actually the brands, like the marketing team within the zoo, or the garden, or the museum, or the aquarium, can also create some UGC content too. It doesn’t always have to happen from an influencer, is that correct? Yeah, so it’d be like, they’re still showing the experience the same way. Maybe an influencer would rock around and show it, they’re showing it as well. Maybe you’re kind of editing that to look a certain way. So yeah, you’re sort of mimicking what you’re seeing out there from other people and what they’re producing. Alright, cool. So yeah, we’re gonna bring in a guest, an expert to help us out with this. Once again, we’re kind of the media nerds, so I’m gonna reach out to some creative friends. Our guest today is David Leach. He is from FEC Launch. David, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you so much, Ryan and Jenny, for having me. I really appreciate it. Alright, David. So you have a really interesting background in production. Why don’t you share a brief kind of history of where you were and how you got into this more UGC style creation? Yeah, absolutely. So my story’s a little interesting. I started off in high-end film and TV production, including commercials in NYC, and quickly pivoted that into helping D to C brand scale profitably, mostly on Facebook and Instagram. So on Meta, we would go from zero to 30K a month in profitable ad spend, relatively short period of time. So within a month, we would go zero to 30K in revenue. And then after that, I was brought into Thrills Adventure Parks, where I worked there from 2018 to 2023. And during that time, I saw that UGC style content on TikTok actually got over 200 million organic views. And with that organic content, I was able to repurpose it and use it to launch a new park that they opened in a new brand new market with no brand awareness. And we scaled that to 1.2 million in revenue in the first three months. Awesome. All with other people’s pretty scondent. Yeah, without hiring a production team, without going to New York and sourcing producer, director, director, photography, all that stuff. So it was just people, little guest goers or guests of the park walking around with their iPhones, and that is what made this whole thing fly. This is cool. Okay, so we’ve got a guest with background in DTC and FEC, who’s going to be talking about UGC. I love it. This is perfect. Like how marketing is that? Okay, so DTC, e-commerce, director, consumer, right? And we got to think that industry is like so cutthroat with how they do their marketing. And 99% of that marketing is done online. Then he has experience with the family entertainment centers, FEC, right? Which, you know, in our world, zoos aquariums, they’re more mission-based, FEC is a little bit more like selling ticket-based. So I think this is going to be like helpful to get this outsider’s perspective. And then we’re, of course, just to round out all the acronyms we’re talking about, UGC user-generated content. Okay, just making sure everybody is on the same page. All right, Dave, you got 10 tips for us. You sent them to me in advance. I appreciate that. Tip number one, don’t make it look like an ad. Sure. So when you’re creating user-generated style content, you don’t want it to look like an ad that you would see on TV. Anything that you feel like, oh, this could be on the TV commercial, that immediately, wrong. You want it to feel like, oh, I heard a creator once described this really well. She had recently blown up on TikTok and she was like, I, the format that I found the best was just me sitting down like I’m on FaceTime with a friend. And I’m showing her something. That is like the framework that you want to be, nobody wants to be sold to, nobody wants to be marketed to on TikTok and Instagram. You’re killing time before, you know, your train comes, you’re just scrolling a little bit. You just want something interesting, something fun. So that’s what I mean when I say, don’t make it look like an ad when you’re creating user-generated style content. I love that. Yes, definitely seen that 15-second repurposed in social quite a bit. The print ads repurposed in social and you can’t stop the scroll with that, right? So that’s an awesome tip. And I think, yeah, the more you have other people talking about your brand, the less people are going to think they’re getting served in ad. Well, that’s absolutely perfect. So we had a tip number two, video ads convert better than static ads. Absolutely. I mean, we’re in such a video first platform. They say, you know, I forget the exact number, but thousands of hours of content are created like every minute and uploaded to YouTube. So it’s really, we live in this video-centric world, a video, if a photo is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million. So you need to be using videos to sell your brand, sell your products or service. Sorry, that’s my D to C brand going again, but selling your attraction to get somebody to want to come and visit. Yeah, I think everybody in our audience knows that. And you know, videos are going to sell better than just plain old static images, but I think what this episode is all about is giving our audience an idea and practical tips on how to go create more video without breaking the bank. Is that right? Yeah, that’s exactly it. So we’ll dive into that. I think in our next tip, but before that, I do just want to say that, you know, one last thing on creating static image ads is that a lot of people will have like graphic designers who will design these beautiful. Looking, you know, geometric shapes and nice big fonts and logos and that I found is so the audience on these social media platforms are so banner blind to that. I think about time if you see a billboard so many times, eventually you just don’t even see any more. You just block it right out of your eyesight. And so banner blindness is a real thing and I think that happens all across the board now with anything that looks like it’s a graphic. Alright, so number three, spend money on media and distribution and not production. Absolutely, let’s take a hypothetical. So let’s say I’m a cultural attraction and I have a $10,000 marketing budget for the month of March, which is what we’re in right now. I can either go and hire a production team to come through and use my $10,000 to hire that team, create a great polished ad and then I have zero budget left over for distribution. Nobody’s going to see that polished ad and what’s a better approach is maybe having a low fi content or low quality content that’s generated either from your park. You can go on search your socials, find other people’s content or have your team go out with an iPhone, film some content very cheaply. So let’s say you spend 500,000 bucks on that and then now you have $9,000 left over to boost that to audiences and then $9,000 that’ll actually get you hundreds of thousands if not millions of views. Whereas if you’d spend all that on a content production team, you wouldn’t have any of those views. Yeah, just think back to kind of like what we were saying before, right, don’t try to fit this other content into these social platforms. I think it’s hard for people at attraction sometimes to think like that content is going to work, that organic content, that lower quality content is going to work, but it goes back to how authentic and real it is and that’s what people are looking for on the platforms like you were saying earlier, David. So yeah, definitely see that when we’re running paid media all the time, it’s the stuff that you don’t think is going to work well is when it’s upselling all the tickets. Absolutely, story driven content is king right now viewer retention. I mean, Mr. Beast even talks about this like viewer retention is everything that’s all these platforms are looking for. So if you can compellingly tell a story for 30 seconds because let’s be honest holding somebody’s attention for 30 seconds is hard enough as it is with just like one or two tips. So you really have to hook them with a story and once you hit that 30 second average viewer retention mark your video is going to go viral. It will absolutely fly and that’s kind of the standard now that I think a lot of people don’t realize is like when I’m filming a video now or I’m editing a video. It’s all I’m thinking is like how can I keep the audience engaged with me until the 30 second mark at least. I’m thinking, you know, especially for our zoo audience like cool videos about cute penguins and baby tigers and things like that does do pretty well. It maybe you guys can talk to talk to this like in terms of like the blend between organic content that is just more mission based more about the attraction versus hey having the cool 25 year old girl walk around the knife. What is that like blend you’re not saying just do one or the other but how does that work together. Who wants to take that one? I can start I mean I think for that a lot of times you know you’d say put that more mission based the cute quality right like put all that in your organic that’s so important. To res maybe you’re taking more of a sales approach with the paid so you know yes the cute quality can definitely drive some ticket sales. But it’s going to be more the experience that you’re going to put in that paid ad to drive the ticket sale and then more of cute animals right the zoo keeper sharing like a lot of information about. You know the animals that that that’s going to be more supporting your mission and more what you’re putting in your organic channels and typically that’s what we see doesn’t mean that one can’t work in the other but I’d say that’s most standard. I love that Jenny what you just said about using organic to enhance your paid ad strategy so especially in the beginning if you’re just starting out or maybe you’re not getting many more views than like 500 couple thousand views on every single one you know like that’s not going to drive ticket sales. But what you are doing at that point is you are creating a library so that when you run a paid ad and you make an ask directly if somebody like hey where is you want to you check out buying this ticket click here when you’re asking for the click somebody will probably want to do research on you before going ahead and purchasing a ticket to spend their entire Saturday on. So what they’ll do is they’ll click over to your profile and then if they see a bunch of cute koalas and giraffes and bears and lions and tigers they are more likely to say oh wow all that’s here and they’re not going to get that from your you know your first ad they’re going to get it from going to organic page so think about your organic especially when you’re starting out in the early days and maybe you’re not hitting these big numbers it’s OK it’s lead nurture you’re nurturing your customer. I like that alright switching over a little bit more to some influencers who can you know these are the people out there who actually go create you see style content for us. A tip number four is smaller influencers over larger influencers David what are you trying to say there. So I remember when you first kind of like was becoming mainstream and it was all about your subscribers how many people are following you how many people are striving to and that actually had a really big impact on how many views you got like if you had a million subscribers like you would get hundreds of thousands of views on every single video whether it was a flop or not you could just post anything but now we’re seeing people with five subscribers getting five million views on take talk and Instagram so it’s not about. The how many followers you have anymore it’s all about the content so these smaller influencers like for example like there’s a lot of city specific creators who are like going around finding cool things to do in their city they are maybe not as big as somebody with like you know a national presence. But that person with a national presence might be 10 to 20 times the price of getting somebody with just a local small audience and if they make that content good enough it is relevant to that audience it can really spread to just pass their audience and go you know as wide as you want it to it can go. And then if it does go national and say it goes absolutely viral you can then take that video and then create a 30 mile radius around where your location is and run that as a paid ad because you know that it works. Yep I’ve seen this happen so many times I think just one of the recent campaigns we ran for a client the smallest influencer we had which was I think about eight that they just shy of 10,000 followers total had the most viral video she had ever seen. And then we had a viral video she had over 600,000 views and she had and she was the least expensive influencer you worked with her content was less polish but it was all she was a mom and so it was just all about like you know her family time at this particular cultural attraction and it was I was so shocked at how far that went in terms of total views and engagement as well too. But yeah you never know who it is that’s going to go viral and that’s what we always say like you can work with larger influencers but just be careful about how much we’re willing to pay those larger influencers because you don’t want to pull away from. Being able to work with multiple smaller influencers that might fit a lot of different audiences that you’re trying to reach. Absolutely it’s all about shots on goal. You know what I want to hear this tip smaller influencers over larger influencers I’m kind of thinking like from a creative content standpoint you know I’m thinking if you know I’m a botanical garden and I’m under indexing my visitation with the Hispanic community right. Maybe I’m in a population with a large amount of Spanish speakers I’m thinking taking this tip and say okay I don’t care if you’ve got a thousand followers or a hundred thousand followers I like your content influencer because it’s Spanish speaking you are aligned with the audience that I want to invite in so it’s almost like my priority in reaching out or working with an influencer is not just the not the follower size but just more once again that content alignment. Can we are we getting more usage out of that one tip. I think so when you talk about you know marketing to specific segments and even with the mom example and other moms you know I mean this is kind of like every TV commercial even knows this is something from the TV commercials that you can take an apply to UGC is that if you want a Hispanic community to participate in whatever it is that you’re promoting show the Hispanic community in your ads and they will respond to that. Show your avatar in the ad and I think that’s a great thing to do you can pick your your UGC your content creator just based on that. You’re listening to the marketing attractions podcast conversations on how nonprofit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their mission through marketing your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of attend media attend media is a media planning and buying agencies specializing in zoos aquariums gardens and museums for more information please visit attend.media now back to Ryan and Jenny. All right so we’ve got David leach from FEC launch with us and we’re giving ten tips on creating UGC style content and what’s going to David’s coming from the FEC that family entertainment center and background. This is really cool to have that outside opinion. All right David tip number five more video content is better. Absolutely more video content is better if you’ve posted anything before with high hopes you said oh my gosh this video is going to go absolutely viral it’s going to hit 10 million views easy in the first 24 hours you post it and that video gets 200 views I mean I think we’ve all been there it’s so crushing a shattering especially when you put a tremendous amount of time into it and so that’s the first lesson learned is that it’s better to create of many videos over the course of the month and spend it instead of spending your entire month creating one video so if you have let’s say a month of resources create 10 20 videos test out different hooks different frameworks instead of putting all your eggs in one basket and creating one video that is most likely going to flop because even with those 10 to 20 different videos maybe one of them will get say a couple hundred thousand views maybe it will resonate with a smaller portion and you can say you can study that video and say what worked about it and then literally next month try again make it 1% better and try again so don’t be afraid to keep reusing content not only from other creators but from yourself whatever works do it better. I think to when you’re thinking of the you know using influencers maybe for some of this u gc content as well from a cultural cultural attractions have a lot to say so we kind of touch on this a little bit but it’s a mission it’s an exhibit it’s up behind the scenes it’s a you know special event right so you know it’s each of these creators that you work with that are producing this content can kind of be seen as a little like many TV series almost that you’re really using to tackle promote the smaller initiatives that maybe you’re not putting like your huge TV spot behind you building one and spot on TV that’s going to run throughout the year but you’re using influencers this u gc content to support all of these other initiatives throughout the year so yeah if you’re just working with one video concept or you’re just working with one influencer you can’t cover all of that so yeah more is better internally and externally with u gc content. All right tip number six look at social platforms as search engines. This one I’m just going to rip right from Neil Patel who’s the SEO o g on the internet if you guys have been around remember blogs written blogs not vlogs video logs written blogs Neil Patel recently came out and said that it’s SEO is dead because it’s not search engine optimization it’s search everywhere optimization and that means not just on Google but on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok like more and more people are using these other platforms to find and do research so find products find experiences do research about their things they’re not just looking at Google anymore. What about so if I’m thinking through like okay if I’m doing SEO and Google there’s all kinds of like strategies that I’ve got to try to get my content to serve at the top are there any tips that you’ve got for maybe is you know whether it’s different ways of tagging your content or requesting you know influencers that you’re working with on types of tags like what what are you thinking of when you’re thinking of your like social search strategy to make sure your content is showing up. Absolutely I mean keywords keywords keywords the same rules apply if somebody’s looking up things to do San Diego you want to have your location actually I find is a huge huge part of that because somebody can then just click your location and look at all the videos that are tagged with your location so hashtags are great kind of for just search engines so computers but I find people are really looking at places instead of hashtags absolutely have your hashtags they can still work. People will still click them but if you’re tagged with a place that not only gives the algorithm ideas about you know what type of content that you’re putting out but where and you want that content to be super relevant to your local audience especially if you are location based entertainment like a cultural attraction or a zoo. Okay I’m a little confused here guys so where are people doing this search like I’m searching on tick-tock I’m searching on Instagram is that what you guys are talking about. Absolutely all the above so if you’re on Instagram there’s a way to tag locations and you can see once somebody clicks that location they’ll see all the posts that are tagged with that location including a map so I find that that’s huge people can see exactly where you are if they’re close to you or if they’re on the other side of the world. Yeah this makes sense I’m thinking okay we’re gonna be in Denver in a couple of weeks right so I’m gonna go to my social platform of choices reddit which I know is like super nerdy but things to do in Denver right I’m maybe not going to Google first for that just because I want that more inside or take that more I’ll think it kind of experience so. This tip here is like create video content create UGC content designed for that visitor who might be coming out of town or maybe even that visitor who’s in town like looking for something to cool cool to do this weekend right. Absolutely you don’t just need to be appearing on Google Maps you can be appearing on Instagram Maps tick-tock doesn’t have like quite a map feature I’m sure they will roll out something like that but they absolutely do have some sort of locations and if somebody looks up things to do in Denver it can even promote like the top things to do in Denver and you might rank in that a I generated summer. Very cool all right number 7 repurpose your video content and this is kind of what you do right David. Absolutely so what I will do a lot of the times is when I can’t go to a location myself I’ll either have one of the employees there or somebody you know or an influencer go in take a bunch of videos film you know different aspects of the park and I’m saying park because you know that’s where I’m from but different aspects of the location and then I’ll choose different hooks or different intros that will then frame the rest of the content so if I’m talking about you know the arc. You know the arcades like I’ll start off with like an arcade video but then say hey look we also have a bowling alleys or vice versa I might say hey look at these bowling alleys we also have our kids and those two videos like. In that example that’s just two clips but just even changing which one you start with makes it a new piece of content so don’t be afraid at all don’t think like oh I posted this video once everybody in my audience has seen every single clip of this video because the reality is your average watch times going to be seven. Seconds if you make a 30 second video you know 14 seconds of video that nobody has seen. Yeah I think I’m thinking through to like repurposing that UGC content as well like so let’s say you’ve got a bunch of influencers that have come out for an event and now it’s the next year and that events happening again rather than waiting until it opens and getting all brand new influencers coming out. And I can like editing some of that content you had before that’s still useful for you know your this year’s event is just such a great way to again repurpose it’s low cost you’re either asking that you know the the influencers themselves to repurpose that content or to your point David you know you’re hiring someone like you who’s going to go in and like read it all that to. Fresh enough the copy dates you know you can change voice over all that you still got great imagery to use and no one is going to remember that from last year so it’s a great way to utilize it. Absolutely I see that all the time. All right tip number eight create Instagram spots within your attraction I really like this tip. Sure so Instagram I’m using a little loosely here because that’s the original take a photo here app but Instagram take talk Facebook you want to create social media spots where somebody can say oh let me take a photo right here so whether that’s a background wall everybody seen those step in repeat walls I highly recommend getting one of those for your attraction it looks like somebody’s on the red carpet people always red carpet so put a little red carpet in front of your backdrop with your logo on it throw if you’re any kind of zoo or attraction maybe if you’re you know have some flowers that is relevant whatever is relevant to your venue design something there that’s a cool backdrop people love cool you know you can just design an area with better lighting and you put a sign up and says hey take your photo here this is a great photo op spot. I love that yeah our audience are like way into science their science for everything so this should be a pretty easy tip to execute Jenny what do you think about this one. I think so I think zoos and gardens have such great backdrops right so they’re probably thinking a lot of people might be like well I don’t need to do that I already have a great backdrop but I’m actually thinking of one client who did this with like an event that they had they had like a VIP entrance and then there was a special photo op with special light like holiday lights for that VIP entrance because everyone’s going to want to show that off right so you know that’s a little extra thing that they’re able to do and ups you know that might be the sole reason someone’s buying a ticket but it was just like something that makes everyone feel like extra special when they’re buying this you know. Higher price ticket and not everybody gets to do that so it makes it super custom super unique and just a interesting way to utilize that. Absolutely yeah one of the things that I’ve seen done before too in the for a trampoline park is they painted a Jaguar around their logo and every it’s a glow in the dark Jaguar and there’s photo like I designed some lighting around it so that way the Jaguar glows in the dark but there’s also still light on people’s faces so with some different kind of spotlights there and that I will see all the time scrolling through social media and I look up the attraction everybody’s posting it and I’m not by any stretch of the imagination saying that post is going to be the one. That’s the one that goes viral and reaches 10 million people but what it will do is it’s going to reach their so circle their own social network is going to see that and they’re going to know oh that’s that’s you know ABC attraction that’s that’s where they took that photo. Love it. All right tip number nine create content that’s native to the platform. Sure a lot of times I’ll see a lot of ads and even content on the platform that’s shot horizontally and just as black bars on the top and bottom posted as a real and a video on this vertical platform like tiktok or you know Instagram reels and it’s just not pleasing it just doesn’t work on that platform and if you posted this content you know but time and time again I still see it being posted maybe it’s even square best case scenario. Instagram you can get away with the four by five that’s a little tip that I recommend from my paid ads days as big as you can take up of the viewport so the device with height I should say the more real estate you’ll take up in your audience’s mind on their screen so take up real estate on their screen you take up real estate in their eyes on their mind. Like it and then number ten find frameworks that work with other creators are you talking about stealing. I mean the phrase is good artist borrow great artist steel and I think that’s a fantastic phrase when it comes to social media you doesn’t need to be within your industry either or niche. You can look at other niches and say oh this series actually worked really well on this person’s channel let me try a series on my channel and i’m generally just a huge fan of series in general i’ve seen you know once you have one post that does well make another post just riffing right off of that even use that post in your hook. In the intro because build off your momentum it’s it’s really just once you get a post that’s going viral is getting views you people are already checking out your profile so it’s like no don’t wait to post something great later on post something great right now right now even if it’s not as great but it’s it’s going to reach more people and I think you know the more people that know about your park the more people are going to come to your park. Yeah I think our space is pretty friendly like they you know zoos do a pretty good job of ripping off other zoos once they find something that works but maybe another way to look at that tip there it’s like okay hey if you’re a zoo go look at the botanical gardens are doing or if you’re a botanical garden go look with museums are doing or if you’re a museum go look with the trampoline park is doing. The point here is if you find something that that works copy it is that right. Absolutely just a simple example just to one just to kind of paint the picture a little bit is that everybody at any of these attractions they get it right there’s always somebody at the ticket counter giving them the ticket so I don’t know if you’ve seen that trend that’s like the meat the you to where a waiter comes over they give you the track and say oh you know enjoy your meal and then you say to the waiter you to and but the waiter is not having your meal is just like you know one of those faux pas that you slip up. So I saw that done really well at a park where the ticket guy gave somebody gave a woman a ticket and the woman said he said have a good time at the park and the women repeated back to him you to and then he’s like what and then the next frame they’re like running around throughout the park together so that’s just like a fun little trend that I saw work and that totally has nothing to do with any kind of location based attraction entertainment whatever it started off being like as a restaurant you know I’m just like a man. So that’s a restaurant you know so that format from that joke that you know from a totally different industry works for others too. I’m stealing that one thanks David. It’s great. All right David so how can people get in touch with you if they’re interested in your video editing services and what you can do for them. Sure so I’m FEC launch at dot com you can also reach out to me on LinkedIn David Leach it will say founder FEC launch Scott my photo of blue background very nice photo of me. So either of those if you want to personal reach out or just fill out a form and email me that’s great too. Awesome David thank you so much for your time. All right thank you Ryan thank you Jenny. Thank you for listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. If you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to be a guest on the show please visit our website at Marketing Attractions Podcast dot com. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]