How to Prove ROI on UGC: The Business Case for Video Is Already Proven

Hey. What's going on, folks? It's Daniel Litwin, voice of b two b. I've got some tips here for you today on how you can better prove ROI around user generated content. Sometimes this can be a bit nebulous, and I understand that, you know, metrics for success are very different across different companies. But as a marketer, there are the classics. Right? Clicks, views, shares, click through. Right? Some of that stuff still matters, of course, but some of that is a bit dated now too, and there are new metrics for success around how your video is performing. Before I get into my main advice here today, I wanna reemphasize that as you're launching user generated content, don't forget that one of the most important metrics for success is actually the change management of your team, your communities taking on content as a habit. That alone, right, being able to gauge new users in MarketScale Studio, their use in MarketScale Studio, how many teams across your company are creating content, not just one off content, but consistent lanes, series, you know, repeatable styles of content, these are true metrics for success. The real mission that we, you know, shoulder here at MarketScale and that we help y'all accomplish is the mission of truly decentralizing your content capture across your communities, right, and empowering those communities to be a key part of telling your brand's story, whether that's through thought leadership, testimonials, education, you name it. So never forget. If you're being asked, hey. What's the ROI on this? Right? Be measuring the human element of this too. How many people are owning UGC? How many new content champions do you have? How many users are in the platform? What kind of content are they creating? Which teams are championing content? All of this is a very powerful aspect of user generated content success, really just the people. Right? But beyond that, sometimes you wanna see some numbers, and sometimes you wanna see something a little bit more granular. So let's give that side of things too. Right? So here are some ways to prove ROI on user generated content. I'm gonna give you a couple stats that you can deploy from your back pocket. Okay? Based on a recent Wise Owl report, eighty nine percent of marketers report positive ROI from video. Right? So video is sort of the entry point for content success and engagement success. Video's always gonna perform better, or at least eighty nine percent of the time. Is gonna perform better than a static image or an infographic or just a text post. Right? Now a recent study from the Aberdeen Group here, a video and business benchmark report found that forty nine percent faster revenue growth occurs for companies using videos versus those that don't use videos. Right? So, again, companies that use video for their marketing, customer engagement, education, etcetera, they see forty nine percent faster revenue growth. That's significant. Right? That means video is not just useful. It's not just great curb appeal, but it's moving the needle on concrete business goals, especially around driving revenue. Another call to action here for getting your sales team involved in content. Right? If video drives revenue, well, who's at the revenue wheel? Right? It's the sales team. So here are some other ROI metrics that you can be, using to gauge how successful your UGC is. One of them is general brand visibility, and not the typical SEO method, but the GEO method, generative engine optimization. Right? AI, LLM visibility. How are you being seen, mentioned, cited by Chad GPT or by Claude or by Gemini? Right? This is the new meta for how people are searching content, how people are asking questions about, you know, maybe a new buyer, right, to tap into, a new partnership to launch into if they're looking to educate themselves on important trends going on. Right? They're asking Chad GPT rather than Googling. So you wanna make sure you're visible there, and I'm gonna show you a few tips on that front too. Brand visibility, very big. Content efficiency. This is another one. Right? In the past, you may have had to explain content spend, x spend for x number of deliverables. Well, now if you're really championing the human element, like I said earlier, right, of fully decentralizing content creation across your communities, then you should be seeing more content efficiency, where not only do you get, more bang for your buck in terms of just more deliverables, but the content you are capturing can now be scaled more efficiently leveraging MarketScale Studio. So you've got one video. Now it's deployed across five different formats. It's, you know, cut up as a whole podcast for Spotify. You've also got the ninety second promos for LinkedIn. You've got the sixty second juicy sound bites that are going on your blog page, right, as Evergreen Thought Leadership. One recording session now, and, you know, rather than a a multi thousand dollar recording, project that you launch with an on-site video team, you know, a lot of time, a lot of curation. Instead, one virtual recording session or an hour sit down can turn into content for a blog, for a useful customer engagement email, a LinkedIn post, you know, a useful sort of topic summary, a press release. So content efficiency, both more deliverables as well as making more out of the content you have available to you, right, because of the on demand editing you now have access to. Another really solid way to frame ROI. Then pipeline influence too. Right? If you kinda well, obviously, if you bring your sales team into the picture here, but then you start to better connect the dots between your content that you're capturing in Studio and your existing, you know, CRM tools, sales tools, revenue driving tools, you will be able to measure, for example, pipeline influence here. Right? Did this piece of content drive engagement? Right? Did this post get a comment that led me to a lead? Did this video included in a customer email help secure new business? These are things you can start to tangibly track, and you likely have the tools to already capture some of this data, right, as most b to b sales teams have pretty robust, CRM tools nowadays. Now I want to also draw attention to AI visibility. This is a tool in our platform and more generally just the importance of having your content seen on LLMs. Right? The new meta is not do I rank number one on Google? It's is my brand being mentioned by LLMs when someone is asking a relevant question about our industry or about our about our product or service. Right? And, also, is my brand being cited as the authority? So when someone has questions about, you know, let's say a larger topic that covers your industry, are your blog posts, are your thought leadership articles, are your videos coming up as citations of authority around that answer? Right? That's what AI visibility is all about. And you have a tool in MarketScale Studio to accomplish this, right, to not only gauge that kind of impact, but then also make actionable decisions around it. And that's huge for ROI around UGC. It's not just amorphous marketing content. It's tangible proof of whether we are being seen and cited by LLMs. So if you have the right subscription type with market scale, and if you don't see this tool here, get in touch with your UGC coach. You might want to bump up your subscription so you get access to this. But you'd be looking for AI visibility here on the dashboard. AI visibility is going to give you all this awesome stuff. Right? And really what this is, and let's let's full screen this, this is your hub for seeing brand mentions, share of voice, voice breakdowns, citations, etcetera for LLMs. Right? So all this information is telling you who are your competitors, what are the topics that you are wanting to see, you know, how you're being gauged on. Right? For us, it'd be b to b video marketing or, you know, building a repeatable system for weekly content output. Right? So those are the questions we wanna know if we show up on as market scale. Right? You build these out, and then you get to see how your content's being gauged, right, by LLMs. How well is our perception stacking up to competitors? How well is our trust metric being stacked up against competitors? And more critically, you've got these recommendations here too of specific content to actually execute on. This is content that is being pulled from your prompt success and your actual visibility across LLMs and letting you know you need to create this content to be better seen on those channels. So this is a huge ROI metric, that you can now start to deploy because when you're looking at your, overviews here, you are being told No. Is it is How well over time is my brand doing? Are we increasing in citations? Are we increasing in visibility? Are we increasing in share of voice? Are we increasing in mentions on LLMs? This is tangible proof that the content you're creating is driving more organic visibility for your brand on the channels that really matter. So there you go, folks. There's no one single number or one single metric to use for ROI. It really depends on your situation, your team, and what your business goals are around user generated content. Start there. Always remember, start with where your core business goals are with even deploying this. Your business goal may be we wanna improve retention at our company. So we're gonna launch content initiatives to engage and spotlight our employees, to train our employees, and improve retention. So your ROI metric is gonna be, is our retention improved? Right? That doesn't really have to do with clicks or click through or views or shares. Doesn't have to do with LLMs or revenue. So, again, start with analyzing your business goal, and then map out the real metrics that are going to determine if your goal was successful or not. Then start to measure those. But if you just need high level ROI to measure, these are some good examples. Right? AI visibility is a big one. You wanna make sure that you go from invisible to mentioned to cited, leveraging GEO, insight, and you wanna make sure that you, tap into the general trends of the market, communicate how well video is already driving success for other marketers, and be looking around some other metrics around that human element, the decentralization of content that in and of itself is a return on your investment. Alright, team. There you go. Those are some simple tips and tricks for how to prove ROI on UGC. Good luck out there, and I'm excited to see how you prove some value around UGC for your business goals.