Podcast: Influencer campaigns vs UGC campaigns

If you have a budget for digital marketing, sooner or later the question arises:

Should I invest in influencers or UGC campaigns?

At first glance, it seems like the same thing: people talking about your product, right? But strategically, they are designed to optimize very different things. The objective and final result are very different.

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Many brands say:

• “We want influencer marketing” when what they are looking for is sales
• “We’re going to try UGC” when what they want is mass awareness

And that’s where the problem begins. Although both generate visibility, they do not play the same game.

This is the first step: knowing how to distinguish between these two forms of UGC:

1. UGC: requests for videos from UGC creators, which creators record and deliver to brands for use in organic social media, paid media, websites, etc. The creator’s profile is normally not present. It is the brand’s content.
2. UGC campaigns: content is published on creators’ social media and is “similar” to influencer marketing. The creators are micro-creators who publish from their own social media accounts, while the brand amplifies and targets the video with paid media to reach exactly the ideal audience.

On the HICARI platform, you can create both UGC and UGC campaigns.

You may be interested: in this podcast, we discuss what UGC campaigns are.

Influencer campaigns work especially well when the objective is:

• Mass exposure
• Brand positioning
• Association with a specific image
• Generating conversation

A large influencer has something key: transferred authority. Their audience trusts them, and that enhances the perception of the brand. The problem is the dispersion (among their followers).

Even if they have many followers, not all of them:

• Are your ideal customers?
• Have a sociodemographic profile that interests you?
• Are at the point of purchase?

Typical result: lots of reach, lots of awareness… and lower efficiency in direct conversion.

UGC campaigns work according to a different logic.

They do not depend on a single voice, but on volume and testing:

• Several creators
• Multiple assets
• Different messages and angles
• Amplification with hyper-targeted paid media (UGC Ads)

Here, the brand does not depend solely on the creator’s audience. It can reach exactly the audience it wants.

This makes it possible to:

• Optimize CTR
• Reduce CPA
• Improve conversion rates
• Scale campaigns in a controlled way

The cost is usually lower than a campaign with a large influencer, but ROI (how to measure UGC ROI) in performance is usually higher, because you are not buying reach: you are buying conversion capacity.

• Influencer marketing: a large part of the budget is concentrated on one individual.
• UGC campaigns: the budget is distributed between content + amplification.

The right answer is not one or the other. It depends on the objective.

If you are looking for:

• Positioning
• Aspirational perception
• Brand building

→ Influencer marketing makes sense.

If you are looking for:

• Sales
• Leads
• Scaling campaigns
• Continuous social proof

→ UGC is usually more efficient.

Both generate visibility, but the nature of that visibility changes:

• UGC: visibility + performance
• Influencers: visibility + brand