How to Gain Buy-in from Prospects by Leveraging UGC in Instagram Stories

In nyu. So quick housekeeping here. If you post any pictures or videos on Instagram, I ask that you please do tag me because I love taking these as highlights, so please do so. And then beyond that, if you want a copy of this deck, as well as some other resources I'm going to talk about, just shoot me a dm. I'll send you back a bit ly and you can go ahead and get access to that. I'll make it this afternoon. But I really want you to walk away with here with some tactic level steps that you can use to improve how you're doing social media marketing.

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So yeah, just DM me, follow me, all that good stuff. So here's the situation. People know they're being advertised to, right? Before you can get away with it, you're going to say, oh, we're going to sneak this in. Some kind of content that's really a branded message in disguise. And you know, we're going to sneak this by. But people know they're being advertised to because of everything that happened with Cambridge Analytica and all these other scandals that happen. Right? It's on the front page. So they know that they're being advertised to. But then beyond that, there's a complication. They know we know they know. Right? And I'm sure you've seen this before when you'll see comments on your social media like, oh, looks like your Facebook pixel's working great. And I'm like, who told them about Facebook pixels? Like, how do they know these things? But the average consumer is so much more educated than they used to be in regards to how digital marketing functions and how they're being targeted. Right? So when they see content for your brand, they feel preyed upon as opposed to educated. All right, that's a big challenge. So the question is, well, great, well, how do I make a buck then? Like, why is this guy just coming from New York all the way just ran at my parade here? The way you do that is it's really important to going forward, make a more authentic connection with your audience. Noise from all these other brands just screaming, trying to be louder than the next one. And just like Times Square, there's also some shady stuff going on once in a while too, whether it's real or amplified.

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So what I want to do today is talk to all of you and explain how you can make this more authentic connection with your audience and rise above the noise without screaming by using this UGC in your stories. So a bit more background about myself. I'm A business consultant based in Brooklyn, fortunately not Times Square. And I've been doing that for about 10 or 12 years, both internally and externally. And then I'm also working at Entrepreneur magazine as a digital marketing expert in residence, which means I'm consulting both internally and externally on how to use various platforms. What else? Before that I actually worked at Facebook as a client solutions manager, working with brands like Bonobo, Sorby, Parker, Barkbox, helping them monetize both paid Facebook and paid Instagram. Before that I was working at Adobe as a search engine marketing consultant. Great company. But it was located in Times Square, which is why I'm so jaded against the place. So that's me, that's my background and I also mentor at techstars. And the way you answer that question is with content marketing. So content marketing is an extremely, extremely unselfish form of marketing because you're putting your audience first and saying, how can I give them some kind of value? It could be some news that's going to be relevant to them. Again, it could be some kind of tips. Anything that provides value to your audience, you start with that. Because you have to earn the right to interrupt someone's day, right? Just because you're targeting them doesn't mean you're allowed to do that. So first, why are you interrupting my day? The second part is why would I want this? That's your value prop. And here's a really good way, a really good framework for you all to iterate your value prop. You know how what we do is in fact it goes like this. You know how you're in this situation, what we do is assist you in one way or another. In fact, here's some proof to that. So you know how what we do in fact, three step process, right? That's how you get your value prop across. But you're still dealing with this jaded New Yorker. It's like, yeah, so what? Why should I trust you? That's when that UGC and that social proof come in handy, right? So you need someone else besides you vouching for you. And then lastly, why should I buy it from you? You need at least one unique differentiator between you and another choice. Maybe you're cheaper, maybe you're more sustainable, right? Maybe you ship faster, whatever it is. But you need one unique differentiator and it has to be real. It can't be like when Coke is like, oh, we're vegan, like okay, thanks, you know, that's just like a manufactured differentiator. So it has to Be real. And the reason why this is so important, because I don't think a lot of marketers realize the landscape has changed a lot from like traditional conversion phone that you might have seen before, right? People are more jaded, and we have to address that. Unfortunately, what I see happening is people are like, they're just trying over and over again to make this work, right? They're experimenting one ad versus another, so on and so forth, and they're just trying to get lucky. And once in a while you will, but it's exhausting and it's expensive. So I read this really great book called Competing Against Luck. It's by this guy, Clayton Christiansen, who's of hbr and he talks about jobs theory. Anybody heard of jobs theory before? The Jobs to be Done theory.

Cool.

You're in the right spot. So jobs theory says people hire a product, a service, or a solution to help them achieve progress towards a goal. And they're interviewing you the same way you would interview someone for a job at your company. But if you're interviewing someone at a job at your company and they know nothing about the company, they're like, just hire me. You wouldn't do that, Right? The same way a consumer wouldn't hire your product, service, or solution to solve their problems if you don't prove first that you understand what the problems are. So the jobs theory is basically saying we need to prove that we understand this journey that the user's trying to go on and in order to get hired. So realize that your audience is hiring you to help them make progress towards a goal. You're keeping that story front, and then you want to tell the story of that journey and how you provide value. So you're almost an afterthought. You're like, hey, we know you're doing this well in this situation, we'd love to help you out. And here's some proof, right? So your audience is hiring them to help you make. Is hiring you to help them make progress towards a goal. But you can't be the only one telling the story about how you assist them. And that's where that UGC comes in handy.

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Another shift we need to make. So besides just getting rid of the traditional conversion funnel is this. You no longer work in marketing, okay? Because that self perception can be powerfully limiting. If you say to yourself, I'm just a marketer, I'm a digital marketer, I'm a social media marketer, you're not looking left and right for other opportunities, right? So I'll Say that again. These self perceptions can be powerfully limiting because you're not looking for other opportunities to help grow your business. So the way you want to think about it is you're in business development with a focus in marketing.

Okay?

So a fundamental shift here. So to work in business development, you gotta understand two things. One is your audience, the other is your business. So I'm going to assume all of you understand your business very well. And even if you don't, I can't help you with that today. So my goal is to help you figure out how to better understand your audience. And I have another model coming at you for that one, Design thinking, which I'm sure a lot of you are aware of through product innovation and product development. But my goal is to encourage marketers to think about this as an approach for how they can communicate with their brands. And it starts off with empathizing, just understanding your audience, who they are, what challenge they have, what goes on in their day to day outside of what your product does for them.

Right.

Because we can't just have all this stuff in isolation and then from there defining these problems and saying, okay, here's what their issue is and I think here's how we can help solve that. So from there you're going to ideate. Okay, cool. So how can we present this through content, in this case on social media in a way that's going to resonate with their audience? Prototype it. So come up with some examples of that content. You don't want to wait for the perfect piece of content because that perfection could be done in your progress.

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Get something out there, test it, look at your KPIs and then from there say, okay, this is working, let's make some tweaks, so on and so forth. But it all starts with this empathy, which I know is a buzzword, but I need you to decouple the the buzzword with the actual application of it, which is doing a lot of research on your audience.

Okay?

So with that empathy, we can learn things like this. And this is truly breathtaking here. So good opportunity to take a picture. Consumers say that they feel that UGC is 2.4 times more effective or authentic than branded content. Marketers all of us were saying, no, you crazy, branded content is more authentic than ugc. Let's just keep on trying it and see what happens. That's literally what we're doing. And this is from Business Wire, right? So again, consumers are saying, no, we think UGC is more authentic. Brands are saying, you don't Know what you're talking about. Here's another $20,000 video. So realizing that we, we need to just look at the world the way it is, not the way we want to be or the way it's been before. Right, but that's the problem as marketers. We don't see the world without the shadow that we cast upon it. We're just looking through our own lens. So realizing that there's this brand that I work with, it's called Bear Power Foods, and they make a meal replacement shake. So lots of healthy fats, protein, great to grab and grow when you're on the way. Actually had one when I was hopping on the plane to come out here from New York and realizing how important this UGC was. That's something that we used to make an authentic connection with our audience through Instagram stories. So the first thing I want to bring up is this. Questions become content. The more questions you ask your audience, the better your content can be because you're speaking exactly to their needs, their desires, their wants. So questions become content and you want to take the time to do that so you can listen to your audience. So we actually did use the stickers, the stickers question on Instagram stories to just ask people, hey, you know, when you're looking for a meal replacement, you know, what are some things that you would be concerned about? What would make you want to buy it? What would make you want to pay twice as much for the current meal shake you're using than you are right now? That's always a good question to ask your audience. What could we do that would make you pay twice as much for this?

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Product innovation. And through this, we found that the average consumer, our target audience were men between 25 and 40. And more or less, they just wanted to gain muscle mass, sorry, lose weight while maintaining muscle mass. So some of them were doing like keto based diets. Some of them were also just using this as an after workout shake. But more or less that's the goal. And the outcome of asking all these questions is it's a very thorough understanding of what's going on inside the head of your audience. And you could actually visualize that through an empathy map. Has anybody seen one of these before or heard of that? An empathy map. Awesome. So empathy maps are very similar to Personas, except you're digging inside the head of your audience and saying, okay, what are they thinking? What are they seeing? What are they hearing? What are they doing? And by hearing, I don't just mean like auditory. What Are they hearing? I mean, who are their influencers, right? Who helps them make decisions on this? So again, this is very similar to a Persona, but the thing with the Persona is that those are normally shallow demographics, right? And a Persona can say like, here's who's doing these things, but you wouldn't understand why. And unfortunately, if you can't figure out why someone's doing something, such as making a purchase, you can't figure out how to encourage others to do the same. So that's the benefit of an empathy map. And I'll show you a very high level example of one that we came up with for Bear. So again, we have these sections. What are they thinking? What are they seeing? What are they hearing? What are they feeling? Under here it says they hear their friends recommending products. And this is very important because in the health and wellness sphere, there's so much noise coming at you, right? You just want to filter that you can trust who's telling you how to do these things or who's telling you what you should purchase. So your friends are really big. What's a pain? It really gets on their nerves when companies make claims with no proof behind it whatsoever, which I'm sure we can all relate to. So this is part of that empathy map. And again, if you want to get some more background on how to do this again, just shoot me a note. I have more information on how you can build one for your own company. But this is going to be super powerful and you understanding how to better just communicate with your audience by just taking the time to understand them first. So back to that Gotham model, right? And we're going to be on the stage where we're talking about the value prop. Why would I want this? And these testimonies in ugc, why should I trust you? So with the value prop, this part I think was awesome. The founder, the co founder of this company, Bayer, this guy, Max Bauman, actually primarily consumed Bayer for six weeks.

Okay?

So he replaced two meals with this meal shake that he's the founder of. And he measured his body fat before and after. During the six weeks, his body fat went from 10% to 6.4%. So pretty real. I mean, for me, I could be on it for six months and I still wouldn't get that low. But Max is in pretty good shape and he works out a lot. So this is actual proof.

Okay?

And then what he did is he shared that to an Instagram story, his own personal story. But here's the big, here's the most important Part his company, Bear then shared that to the branded account. So it looks like they're sharing this ugc even though it was Max.

Right?

And here's what that looked like. He's actually at the doctor's office in this video getting the results of his body fat six weeks after. So a real doctor, real doctor's office, real results. And they're saying, wow, this stuff really works. Another part, social proof. Why should I trust you? So what they did was they also just seeded the audience by giving out free packages of Bear to certain people that had a strong social media presence. Not like macro influencers, we're talking like sub 10,000 followers, but people that on a regular basis were talking about health and wellness. And then those people, once they got the product, they would repost that ugc. Sorry, they would repost their UGC as an Instagram story. So we were getting it, they're talking about it, and Bear would then repost that. Here's the most important part about this, though. They would use organic performance, meaning are people swiping through and still engaging with this content as a proxy for how well it will do as a paid ad. So you can put 10 pieces of UGC out there organically. You take the top two or three and say, okay, let's put some money behind that. Here's some examples. This first gentleman, he's saying, delightful. And this one's actually pretty cool to watch because he's saying, oh, this is delightful. He's like, what am I tasting? What is that, cinnamon or is it heaven? I can't decide. So, yeah, super genuine. And this other woman's giving it a thumbs up. But you just see the audience reaction, not just someone who's working for the company or being filmed and paid to do so. You see the actual audience reaction. But here's the bonus. When you start showing this kind of ugc, everyone wants to be a star. So then they start sharing too. They're like, oh, cool, how can I be on this thing?

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So all these other. I don't call them random people, but all these other people started posting their reaction shots and mentioning the brand as well. So there's this multiplier effect that goes on with that. But here's the results for retargeting ads. I want to be clear about this. This is retargeting ads. People that had initially been made aware of the brand but not converted because they're missing that trust. But here's the results for retargeting ads. I want to be clear about this. This is retargeting ads. People that had initially been made aware of the brand but not converted because they were missing that trust. The ROAS for UGC was 400% versus 200% for the branded content they produced. So twice as effective, right? The ROAS for UGC was 400% versus 200%. But here's another implication of this. If you think about it from an ROI perspective, return on investment, that UGC just blew it out the water because you didn't invest much in these UGC videos, whereas the branded content, you know, you're actually filming this professionally, getting edited, so on and so forth, spending tens of thousands of dollars. So it just blew it out the water. Rent for the branded content they produced. So twice as effective, right? In regards to roi. And here's the benefit, right, of doing this with ugc. It's cheaper, obviously, quicker production time. And if you're a smaller company, you need that, right? You got to be nimble, you got to react quickly, right? So you're not, you know, not paralyzed by this analysis. Oh, but here's another implication of this. If you think about it from an ROI perspective, return on investment, that UGC just blew it out the water because you didn't invest. It's perfect. So on and so forth. It's more authentic. We talked about that already, right? That's what our consumers want to see. And then people also share your shares, so you have this multiplier effect put on top of it. So how do you do this? See the audience, right? So if you are in a position to do so, just give out some kind of free samples to a targeted demo and gently encourage them to share once they get it. You can also monitor any kind of brand mentions. So as soon as someone mentions your brand, you take a look at that content and decide if it's worth sharing. You would obviously reach out to that person first to say, is this okay? Because the worst thing that can happen is you share someone's content and they didn't approve of that and then you have some kind of challenges around that. So do these brand mentions or just go old school. Just do it in person, right? It's almost like guerrilla marketing at this part, at this point. Before I go to the next slide, quick question. Raise your hand if you have ever heard of blue blockers. Oh, thanks. Otherwise, this is going to bomb. So back in 1993, there's a commercial for these sunglasses called blue Blockers. And there's this guy they met on some beach in Miami and he made up some rap about blue blockers. Like on the set, on the spot. I'm not gonna do the rap because I would mess it up and embarrass myself at the same time. But that became this UGC that went in the commercial for these blue blockers, which are only 20 bucks if you act now. But again, this isn't much in this UGC videos. Whereas a brand of content, you're actually filming this professionally, getting edited, so on and so forth, spending tens of thousands of dollars. So it just blew it off the water. It was UGC because it's still the audience doing it. That's what Max did.

Okay?

He just went out to the beach. I think this is Venice Beach. You probably all know better than I would, but he just went up to people saying, hey, do you want to try this shake? I have. So again, he's proactively getting this UGC from people in person. And this first woman said, it tastes like a milkshake. And the other guy said, oh, it's pretty smooth. So answering more critical questions about this meal shake, first of all, how does it taste and how's the texture? Because for all of you who have ever tried any kind of healthy supplement or these meal shakes, sometimes with regards to roi, and here's the benefit of doing this with a kind of hit or miss, you're like, well, I'm doing it for my body, not for the taste. But in this case, fortunately, he's having these real people just give their immediate reaction to it, and that's what he's getting from it. So this is him just walking around with his phone. There's no, like, production value to it whatsoever. But, wow, those insights and those testimonials are golden. So again, how do you monetize this? Well, first, what you're going to do is you're going to monitor your organic performance, like I said before, and then promote things that are working well. But test it out for both initial awareness and for conversion. Because sometimes they want to hear from someone else first before they even hear from a brand. You can reinforce it with your branded content, right? This is something you can all do. Ugc, it's cheaper, obviously, quicker production time. And if you're a smaller company, you need that, right? You gotta be nimble, you gotta react quickly, right? So you're not, you know, not paralyzed by this analysis. Oh, is this perfect. So on, so forth. It's more authentic. We talked about that already, right? That's why next week, right? This is not some, like, esoteric thing where it's like, oh, first you get your team together, then you do this. Like, you can all do this stuff. It's not super challenging whatsoever. And this is the way to do it. But beyond that, you know, you're learning a lot through the process too, because as marketers, you're at the forefront of your business and your audience. You're this, you're, you're, you're closest to it than anyone else in the business because what our consumers want to see, and then people also share your shares. So you have this multiple seeing the reactions, you're seeing the comments, so on, so forth. So you take all that information you share with the rest of your team. You're saying, like, here's what I'm hearing in the comments, here's the DMs I'm getting. How can we make a better product? How can we make a better solution that meets the needs that are being expressed by our audience? So you're in this very powerful position where you're doing all this audience research and audience discovery on a regular basis. So use fire effect, put on top of it. So how do you do this? See the audience, right? So if you are in a position to do so, just give out some kind of free samples to a targeted demo and gently encourage them to share once they get it, that, and share it with the rest of your team as well. So it's not a linear process, it's cyclical. And the last thing I'll leave you with is this. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

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Because I'm not going to trust you to solve my problem if you don't even prove that you care about me and even understand me. So it doesn't matter what channel you're on, but just keep that in mind. People don't care if you are the expert. Oh, we've been doing this for so long. We have this product, features, benefits. They're like, so what? First prove that you actually care about me and then we can get to that part. So thank you very much for your time. I'm going to open up to some questions, but if you want to reach out to me, you can email me or just reach out to me on Instagram as well. But thank you very much. You can also monitor any kind of brand mentions. So as soon as someone mentions your brand, you take a look at that content and decide if it's worth sharing. You would obviously reach out to that person first and say, is this okay? Hey. Because the worst thing that can happen is you share someone's content and they didn't approve of that, and then you have some kind of challenges around that. So do these brand mentions or just go old school. Just do it in person.

Right.

It's almost like guerrilla marketing at this part. At this point. Before I go to the next slide, quick question. Raise your hand if you have ever heard of blue Blockers. Oh, thanks. Otherwise, this is going to bomb. So back in 1993, there's a commercial for these sunglasses called Blue Blockers. And there's this guy they met on some beach in Miami, and he made up some rap about blue blockers. Like on the set, on the spot. I'm not going to do the rap because I would mess it up and embarrass myself with the set.