To get your community to participate in UGC campaigns and contests, you need to make it worth their time and effort by offering prizes and benefits. By providing an incentive, you can get your community excited to participate in the activity. This could be intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. Whatever incentive or reward you choose, make sure it is enticing enough to drive participation. You know your audience best – find something that resonates with them.
There are two ways to incentivize your community to participate in UGC campaign
Intrinsic motivation
Intrinsic motivation refers to behavior that is driven by internal rewards. It’s defined as the doing of an activity for its inherent satisfaction rather than for some separable consequence. This is usually the activity itself or the sense of satisfaction in engaging in the activity. The motivators could be because it’s fun, they take it up as a challenge or simply to appease their curiosity.
Encourage your audience to get creative and use personalization to get them to share their ideas or story. Build your campaign around your customers, not just your product. Think of something that could truly engage and motivate your customers and help you build a relationship so they feel they belong to a community.
If it’s a fun challenge you’re offering your customers, give them a task and get them to share videos of how they tackle the challenge. Post entries as and when they are sent in to encourage others to participate.
You could also try creating a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) amongst your audience to get more people in on the action. Post regular updates and reminders about the deadline. Creating a sense of urgency with a deadline will help in getting in the submission faster.
Extrinsic motivation
Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is driven by external rewards like prizes or social benefits. While a prize could be a cash reward or points, social benefits are benefits that come out of winning such as an invitation to a networking event or the recognition that comes with being a winner or contributor. Ensure that you mention the prizes or spots are limited to increase competition and get higher quality contributions and create a sense of urgency.
If you choose to offer a prize as a reward for participating and winning your UGC campaign, there are multiple options to consider.
1. Prize
- Financial reward
A financial reward is a cash prize or gift card or coupon.
- Free trip to a holiday destination
You could offer a free trip to a holiday destination or a money-can’t-buy experience for the contributor and their loved one.
- Goodie bag of products of your brand
It will be your brand advocates who genuinely love your brand who create and submit contributions. They will love a goodie back of products from their favorite brand.
- Points
You could integrate a point system where customers who contribute UGC content can earn points with which they can avail discounts while purchasing your products or service.
2. Social benefits Recognition & networking
Social recognition and validation are also important motivators. Recognition or networking opportunities can be offered to encourage your community to take part in a UGC campaign.
- Recognition
So if you feel like your audience could be motivated with social benefits, feature their content on your channels and give them a shout-out. This might get other customers interested and they may send in their own entries in the hope of getting featured. If you see your audience being active and responding to the contest, engage with them. Like their posts and comment on it.
- Network
In addition to recognition, they also get access to a wider community of fellow customers and brand advocates. You may also give them opportunities to meet and interact with industry experts.
TIP: Once your contest ends, you’ll need to announce the winner publicly, through your social media or website. Request the winner to directly message you with their address, if you need to send them their reward. To personalize their gift, include a handwritten message with appreciation and encourage them to share a photo of themselves with their prize and tag you.
Conclusion:
Think about your audience. What would encourage or help give people a reason to submit videos. Free products, prizes, complimentary services, gift certificates, vouchers, financial incentives…. you name it! Incentives are the easiest way to encourage your contributors to record and upload a video for you.
When you start a project in Vloggi and write your project brief, you can add an incentive in the prize field. You can specify the incentive or prize for sending in contributions there to get your customers excited to participate.
With incentives, you can easily increase your engagement rates in your UGC Contest or collect Video Messages more effectively.
