One of the most important assets a marketing department has, is photography. A ton of it. Make the effort to acquire a range of diverse, high-quality images that capture your brand’s identity in various ways, to various levels. You want to ensure you have plenty of different content, to keep your feed entertaining and interesting—not predictable.
Make efforts to capture your own photography, but also, ethically source content created by your consumer. There is immense value in both.
Brand Created Content
If you’re only going to pick one of these two photography styles, I’d say don’t.
But then I’d suggest this one. Capturing and editing your own photography can be a challenge, but it allows you to establish and modulate your unique style. You are able to concept, then create exactly what you want—when you want it.
This type of content is necessary to get your brand off the ground. High quality images on your website, social media, and other communication outlets signify that you’re a legitimate brand who cares about and invests in its quality.
Brand Curated Content
The first step to employing a curated content strategy is to ensure you act ethically. Request permission from the original poster, and provide credit when you wish to work with user-generated content.
The second step is to ensure that the content holds your brand in a positive, but genuine light. Make sure it’s not sarcastic, or a joke.
Do a little bit of digging into who created the content you want to share. Look at their publicly available account information; when you credit them, your consumers will be able to do this as well. You want to make sure their overall image is in line with your brand.
This kind of content is extremely effective as it allows potential consumers to see your actual consumers interacting with your brand. This heightens the ability of prospects to relate to, and connect with your brand in a natural way.
Employ a Mix
Diversifying your social streams, website content, and photography across the board gives you a greater opportunity to appeal to more and more audiences. Sharing user generated content entices other users to generate their own content (which is the new word-of-mouth marketing).
While possible to rely exclusively on brand created content, you’d be missing out on a world of opportunity by ignoring the content created by your consumers. It might not be as finely finished as the content you can create, but its impact can be much greater.
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What are some ways you employ user generated content strategy? Let’s keep talking about it in the comment section!
Ethan Olkovikas, Creative. 