Ever been scrolling on Instagram and seen a video where someone makes some big, bold claim right off the top of the Reel? 

“This is why I stopped drinking water….”

“Here’s the thing, oxygen is overrated…”

“What if I told you that I made a million dollars yesterday…” 

That’s UGC-style content, and those opening sentences, they’re hooks. Insane ones that we made up as a joke. But yeah, hooks nonetheless. 

UGC stands for User Generated Content, so UGC-style content technically is user-generate-content-style-content, which makes no sense really, but hey, we’re not the acronym police. We’re just an agency with two offices in two countries, pumping out some of the best UGC-style content on the internet (duh, where else would it go?).

So yeah, we believe in, dream about, and produce a ton of UGC-style content for our clients. You know that by now. But let’s talk about something you might not know. Let’s talk about why we do it. 

Namely, we want to answer the question in the title of this article: Why does UGC-style content work so well? Who does it work for? And what’s its ROI? 

Glad. You. Asked. Let’s dive in. 

Why Does UGC-Style Content Work So Damn Well?

Where do we begin?

User generated content marketing will significantly boost your brand’s engagement, reach online, and credibility. When done right, it increases sales for your service or product. I can hear you screaming through the screen: 

But, WHY?

Well, it’s actually pretty simple. Monkey-see, monkey-do. 

You can create a 15-minute YouTube video, shot with $50,000 worth of cameras that takes 500 hours to edit and tells your brand’s story from garage idea to world’s first carb-free cereal, or, you can shoot a video on an iPhone featuring someone eating the cereal and saying they like it. 

Trust us, we’ve made both kinds of videos for our clients. Nine out of ten times, the latter wins with today’s digital consumers. And the ROI is better 99 times out of 100. Which means that you can put more money into your ads, get more customers, and keep the cycle going.

That doesn’t mean that filming yourself eating cereal will make you a millionaire. It also doesn’t mean that large brand pieces don’t have value. It’s just the way things are going in today’s fast-paced, ever-changing digital landscape. 

Of course, you still need a great script with a great hook, great editing, great acting, and great distribution. But what we are trying to say is that at the core of our desires sits other people’s experiences. When we see someone enjoying something, we say to ourselves, “I might enjoy that, too.” Hopefully not out loud, but you get the picture. 

That’s the power of UGC.  

Who Does UGC-Style Content Work For? 

In our experience, UGC can work for anyone with a product or service, pretty much. That being said, it does help to have a reasonable marketing budget and existing sales to turn this strategy on. 

The brands we see having the most success typically fall into a few broad categories. They include: 

• E-commerce brands already spending ad dollars on Meta and TikTok. 
• Teams already running ads but burning through creatives who need support with scaling. 
• Brands that want scroll-stopping content to both grow an audience and convert customers. 

And when we say e-commerce brand, keep in mind these don’t have to be small ticket items, and they don’t have to be e-commerce only brands. We recently ran a UGC-Style campaign with King Carts, a golf cart dealership in Tampa that also sells online and ships nationwide. Here's what a few of those ads looked like.

Our UGC marketing campaign sold so many golf carts, finding inventory became an issue. That’s not a joke. 

Here’s another example of a client we’ve been working with for the past year, FIXD. 

FIXD is an e-commerce brand, selling an affordable diagnostic tool that syncs with your car and instantly tells you if anything’s wrong, a revolutionary product designed to take the guesswork out of car maintenance. 

When we started working with FIXD, they had a growing demand for content. Their team was already running ads on Meta and TikTok, with one main goal in mind: Sales. 

We collaborated on three initial scripts, and fine-tuned them to ensure a successful shoot. We then organized actors and locations and began filming. Within a few days, we produced 24 videos to be used in ongoing ad campaigns for the brand. 

What’s the Return-On-Investment (ROI) of UGC-Style Content? 

First, we’ll speak specifically to our client FIXD that we mentioned above, then we’ll talk more broadly. 

Since that first shoot with FIXD, our ads have been bringing in double the return on ad spend that the brand was seeing previously. The increased sales volume has allowed the brand to reinvest in more UGC-style content, allowing us to write more hooks, scripts, and schedule more shoots done and edited by our team here at Something Great. 

It’s a fairly hands-off growth model for FIXD. Since proving our UGC marketing can move the needle, we’ve been able to act as a marketing arm for the company that operates with a good deal of independence. We’ve loved helping them grow, and are thrilled to continue the journey together. See an example of one of our many UGC-style ads below.

In a more general sense, the return for brands investing in UGC-style content is twofold: brand visibility and sales growth. For some brands like FIXD, sales is the only metric that’s of serious concern. For others, like our friends at Imperial Motorcycles, a dual-pronged approach that lays the groundwork for both brand and sales is the chosen route. 

For Imperial, we took a slightly different approach, choosing to use the mechanics at their in-house mechanic shop as the stars of our video marketing campaigns. Half of our videos focus on brand growth, while the other half drive direct bookings and sales for the company. Brand growth videos feature Q&As with the Imperial team, answering questions about the industry and bikes in general. These aren’t given an ad budget, whereas the direct sales videos have real dollars behind the campaigns. 

If you’re wondering why that is, it’s because our brand growth content tends to have more organic reach opportunities, naturally. The very first video we created for Imperial’s brand growth campaign reached 50,000 views in one day on Instagram alone, racking up over 6,000 likes and hundreds of comments. That’s real growth from future customers, without the ad spend. 

At the same time, our sales campaigns run alongside our organic growth campaigns. These typically lead to a purchase form, with the return on investment ranging depending on the client. For Imperial, we established a sub-$10 cost per conversion, which individually are worth hundreds of dollars to the company. That’s real, sustainable sales growth that continues to grow every month. 

Working With Us

There are two things that make us a trusted partner for so many brands when it comes to creating UGC marketing campaigns. 

First, we’re results-driven. As we’ve highlighted in our examples above, our clients see the needle move in brand visibility and sales, depending on their goals. We take this seriously–we know that without results, our clients can’t grow, which means neither can we. So that’s one of our two main selling points. 

The second, which is also extremely attractive to our clients, is the way we scale your campaigns. We script, shoot, and edit all content in-house here at Something Great. Every single video we create is tailored to your audience and ad objectives, done for you and ready to be plugged into your advertising campaign (we can even help with the distribution and running ad campaign, if that’s something you need support with). 

You walk away with plug-and-play ad creatives. No time wasted, no influencer headaches, just high-performance videos that drive your company forward. 

Getting Started With UGC-Style Content

We’ve seen firsthand how the right hooks, scripts, and creative execution can turn scrollers into customers and drive sales to new heights. If you’re ready for content that looks native to your platforms, performs better than your competition's ad campaigns, and keeps your brand top of mind for future purchases, we can make it happen. In-house, right here in North America, from script to shoot to sales.