Today we’re going to be talking about the power of User Generated Content (UGC) for the Japanese Market. At JapanBuzz we love collaborating with influencers, generating engaging content and often dedicate a portion of an influencer campaign towards asking influencers to create posts geared towards organic UGC posts. The idea here is to get their followers to also create interesting UGC, creating a trend. UGC can be done on Instagram, blog posts, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc, but in this article we’ll focus on Instagram. Instagram is an excellent choice for influencer marketing, as it drives the highest engagement in Japan.
The audience often see UGC posts as more authentic than just brand created content. UGC posts also bring a far bigger impact on their purchase decisions. UGC posts are said to be more trusted than traditional advertising due to the “word of mouth” effect, not to mention the social proof factor. Added to this is that it’s more affordable than running ads, it’s easy to target a very specific crowd of people and drives organic engagement. As mentioned, influencers can drive a UGC trend and it’ll help any brand campaign become more recognised by the public. Below are four things to take into consideration when running UGC campaigns:
Make it meaningful, but also fun.
Make the UGC campaign content easy to do, but also meaningful and fun. Making meaningful content is a good way to increase the viral factor in Japan. Collaborating with influencers to power forward the UGC trend aimed at their followers is a must.
Authenticity is key
To get great engagement we need to do more than simply placing your product in an influencer’s feed. By getting influencers to create great UGC and making the post as personal as possible will appeal to their followers. Make sure the product & brand information are included, but why not try having the obvious product photo on the 2nd slide of a carousel post rather than the first. It’s great to do this in good volume rather than just a few posts as you’re trying to create a trend. Check out the photos below for example for Sofina White Professional, a beauty product. All their influencers are doing a C Zone pose, showing an area of the face that the brand thinks it most important for beauty.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bhu9JpnHiCZ/?tagged=%E3%82%BD%E3%83%95%E3%82%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%8A_pr
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bgi0H_Ul3l4/?tagged=%E3%82%BD%E3%83%95%E3%82%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%8A_pr
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bhq10KznOdu/?tagged=%E3%82%BD%E3%83%95%E3%82%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%8A_pr
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bhu94YRDFTK/?tagged=%E3%82%BD%E3%83%95%E3%82%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%8A_pr
https://www.instagram.com/p/BgdatHqFvvn/?tagged=%E3%82%BD%E3%83%95%E3%82%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%8A_pr
https://youtu.be/195FU2GMmG0
Create tension and talking points
The Japanese audience resonate with influencers discussing genuine concerns or something they never spoken about before. If you have a product that solves customers problem and pain, that’s great. If not it’s a good idea to create captions that will drive conversation.
Keep it fresh
It’s great to create different variations of a campaign so we don’t bore the audience and we make a big impact!
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We’re looking forward to helping you run and manage your influencer campaigns in Japan. For every campaign we create strategy to get the most engagement possible based on the uniqueness of the Japanese market.
