Here's your secret sauce for running a successful UGC campaign in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, we’re seeing more companies running User Generated Content (UGC) campaigns on social media.

So, what is UGC? It's content created by users that have the potential to create engagement or drive conversations.

At Catalyst, we often run UGC campaigns for our clients, and in the process, we’ve learned a thing or two we'd like to share.

Here are our top tips for running a successful UGC campaigns:

The campaign should have a hero campaign asset. This asset should be the one you use to promote the UGC contest. We recommend using a few different variations and seeing which one performs better. Don’t be afraid to add text to the image, or include emojis in the copy to grab the attention of readers. Keep the body copy of the post short, and make sure you state how to enter the UGC competition in clear, short steps. 

Have an incentive for people to take part. The biggest mistake is not to include an incentive, and believing that a campaign will “speak for itself”. This will not work, especially for the Hong Kong market. You need an incentive for the campaign to take off. 

Pick an appropriate incentive. Companies with a product to sell should give away a flagship product, or a product the brand is famous for. Your incentive will impact campaign results. In our Wanderlust campaign for ghd, we ran 4 phases of a UGC contest - 3 with hair stylers as incentives (what they’re famous for), and 1 with a hair dryer. UGC entries were noticeably higher when we used the most desirable product.

Run Facebook and Instagram ads. You will need to invest money into Facebook and Instagram ads in order for the campaign to take off. Organic posts don't cut it for these types of campaigns.

Do research on your audience, and test it. Run small tests with different audience types. Do it with different variations of copy and creative. Facebook's relevance score is a great indicator of how relevant the ad is to your audience. With ghd, we did tests between local Hong Kong media and Beauty Publishers. Based on that, we were able to optimise for the right audience to deliver optimal results.

Think about how you want to use the platforms. If you’re running a fill-in-the-blank contest, think about how you’re going to collect the responses easily. Typically, Facebook is easier for this. If you’re running a contest requiring images or videos, it’s much easier to collect entries from Instagram’s platform.

With these tips, you’ll be on your way to successful UGC contests in no time. 

Within a strict budget, Catalyst grew ghd’s social media channels by a combined 45%, and reached over 262,000 users. We drove over 620 UGC entries on Instagram, which accounted for 18.9% of global UGC entries. 

If you’re looking for help with your social media channels, get in touch today, and see how we can help you achieve results using social media.