Filling The Gaps: How To Constantly Activate Your Loyal Followers with UGC Campaigns

When fans/customers join a loyalty program there are likely many ways for them to earn points to redeem for food, prizes, etc. The majority of these point challenges usually involve purchases that then convert to points that are banked for future use.

Let’s explore a non-purchase approach to activating your loyal customers. 

A non-purchase approach is important because depending on the type of company you have a customer may only engage once or twice a month. For example, how often do you eat pizza? Once a month? Two or three times to get more points, maybe? That leaves 25-plus days a month that you’re likely to not be eating but still loving your favorite pizza brand. 

Mortgages? How often do you remortgage? Yearly? Every 2-4 years? You can fill in your own scenario here but even the most active customers still have a lot of downtime from fully activating with your brand and during that time they are still loyal and susceptible to other brands poaching them. 

This is where UGC comes into play.

You may ask yourself, “Is UGC a fair exchange for points otherwise earned by the customer spending dollars?” Well, according to a study by TurnTo Networks, 90% of consumers say UGC holds more influence over their buying decisions than promo emails or search engine results. So there is definitely gold in them thar pixels.

There’s an interesting side effect to asking loyal fans to post on Instagram or tweet on your behalf, you can get insight not only into who is spending the most (via your loyalty system) but you can now add to your data set who has online influence, and to what degree, on the different platforms. 

For UGC to be effective you need to create a focus or challenge. Just asking for a generic Instagram post or tweet with your brand name is too vague and uninspiring and will offer little challenge to your fan base (or results). 

Here’s a quick plan outline:

First, create a focused challenge. I’m going to say off the bat not to focus it around your fan base using your product as that limits posting frequency to the times in a month that they would already be using it (or eating it) and we’re trying to fill in the gaps. However if it’s a UGC ask as a result of a purchase that would totally make sense. 

The Challenge

Let’s say the challenge is to write an app review and post it online with a hashtag and @ the brand. This will help drive reviews and also help encourage your fans to share their love of the app which in turn alerts their followers to your app in case they didn’t know they could use it to order, etc. or in the case of Lay’s they took the approach of asking for new flavor ideas. 

Regardless of your approach, if you can get your audience talking and thinking about you, you’re winning! Lay’s layered on a sweepstakes, but for this example rewarding with loyalty points will also do the trick.