Many fast food businesses invest in UGC. It’s more affordable than influencer content, allows you to produce more videos with the same budget, and enables you to test different approaches. While it sounds very appealing, not all UGC investments deliver successful results.
In this article, we provide the key insights you need to create effective UGC and identify the right partners to achieve a good ROI.
Key 1: Remembering what UGC is
UGC (User Generated Content) refers to content naturally created by a brand’s users. This typically includes photos and videos, although it’s almost always video.
To help you understand, imagine spending £200 on a tasting menu, loving the experience, and wanting to recommend the restaurant to your social media followers when you get home.
You edit some footage you recorded at the restaurant, add a voiceover describing the experience, and upload the final video to TikTok or Instagram.
Your hypothetical video would look something like this.
That video is User Generated Content (UGC). Someone recommends a business to others in their network, but instead of using traditional word-of-mouth, they leverage digital channels.
The challenge for brands like yours is that people rarely create videos like this on their own. We all, as consumers, only recommend products and services when we really love them or find them genuinely surprising. In other words, UGC is incredibly powerful but also very difficult to achieve authentically without paying for it.
👉 What happens when brands pay for UGC? When done right and disguised as genuine, unpaid user-created content, its performance metrics surpass any other type of content.
Let’s take a look at how to do this for a fast food restaurant.
Key 2: Align Your Business Goals with Your Digital Strategy
This step can vary greatly depending on the size of your business. You might have a single restaurant, a few locations, or even oversee an entire franchise.
What’s the ultimate goal? It’s always to bring people to your restaurants, of course, but the commercial approaches differ:
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- Single restaurant: You’ll aim to attract more customers at specific times through promotions or simply by showcasing your menu. Typically, your budget won’t allow you to promote content year-round.
- Multiple restaurants: With a larger budget, you could afford 1–2 UGC campaigns per month with minimal paid investment. This would provide visibility throughout the year, though your strategy would need to be refined based on the population size of the city or cities you target. Repeatedly reaching the same audience might not be beneficial.
- Fast food franchise: As your business grows, so does the need for branding. Now, there’s a dual objective: keeping your restaurants busy year-round and increasing brand recognition. Remember, branding has long-term effects on sales and can also attract more potential franchisees.
- Takeaway restaurants: here the UGC can highlight some key aspects of your customer service, such as the speed and quality of delivery, the ease of use of your application or some of the advantages of home delivery (exclusive discounts, VIP club, etc.).
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Key 3: What UGC Should Look Like
So, we now understand that there are two potential objectives: attracting people to the restaurant and, ideally, starting to build branding. Before moving forward, let’s show you an example of UGC for each objective.
Objective: Attract People to the Restaurant
@tacobell_uk cravings fulfilled for only £3.99 - we’re obsessed 🤑 T&Cs apply. ©️2024 Taco Bell Corp. #tacobell ♬ i want it i got it - Official Sound Studio
You have something to communicate (in this example, an offer), a delicious dish to showcase, and all you need is the link between your target audience and your restaurant. That link is UGC—the person who visits your location and records the video.
It’s essential that the protagonist resembles the type of audience you want to attract to your restaurant. This is why scouting creators is such a crucial part of a UGC strategy—and often the most overlooked.
UGC isn’t always video. Sometimes it’s a carousel of photos, sometimes the person appears speaking to the camera, and other times a voiceover or on-screen text is enough. UGC is a versatile content format that allows for plenty of experimentation. In fact, many businesses request text-based UGC for reviews on their restaurant’s website or Google Business profile.
Objective: Branding
@subwayukireland Replying to @Brieeeee Now this is TLC done right 🧖♂️🥖 where else should we go? #subsinweirdplaces #subway #weird ♬ Funny video "Carmen Prelude" Arranging weakness(836530) - yo suzuki(akisai)
As you can see, there’s no commercial objective being communicated here. The goal of the video is brand awareness, achieved through humour and the relatability that UGC provides. At no point does Subway explicitly tell you to visit one of their restaurants—they simply entertain and amuse you, reminding you of their presence.
This type of brand awareness doesn’t have an immediately measurable impact on sales, but it does influence the medium and long term. Could you achieve the same effect without a content creator, using stock videos and photos along with a team of graphic designers? Absolutely not.
Key 4: Mistakes to Avoid When Creating Content
As you’ve seen in the previous two steps, UGC involves more strategy than it might initially seem. It’s not just about investing a few hundred pounds and hoping for results.
There are three fundamental mistakes you need to avoid if you want your UGC to succeed. Unfortunately, we see these quite often. In fact, some of the brands that make the following mistakes come to Alteraction to fix them:
Mistake 1: Hiring UGC from Freelancers
This is the quickest and cheapest option. It’s also the one that can lead to problems such as:
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- Neither your business nor the freelancer is legally protected without a solid contract that safeguards both parties’ interests. If you run a franchise, this issue multiplies tenfold.
- Negotiating with various creators and managing briefs and feedback can become a logistical nightmare— even if you have a marketing team.
- Without a specific digital UGC strategy, you’re unlikely to achieve the results you expect. You might not even know where to start with UGC.
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Mistake 2: Hiring UGC from UGC Platforms
These platforms are like marketplaces for UGC creators. They don’t filter your briefs or care about your strategy, nor do they study your target audience or how to connect with lookalikes through UGC. They simply connect you with creators, and you’re left to handle everything.
Some platforms offer apps to streamline operational tasks. But even if the logistics are simplified, without genuine care behind the content and a strategy optimised for UGC, the results won’t follow.
Mistake 3: Confusing Influencers with UGC
When you collaborate with an influencer, your goal is to tap into their community. With UGC, the focus is on the quality of the content and the investment in promoting it.
Here’s an article where we delve deeper into this topic. The key takeaway is that the two are not mutually exclusive, and your strategy can include both local influencer collaborations and UGC creator campaigns.
Key 5: Hire Quality UGC with Alteraction
If you’re looking to create UGC for your fast food business but don’t know where to start, we can have a chat about your goals. Already got a digital strategy in place? No problem – we’ll seamlessly integrate UGC into your existing plan.
UGC works brilliantly for businesses like yours. We’re talking about food experiences people genuinely enjoy – the kind that naturally fits with leisure time and that constant search for something new. Let’s face it, we all love trying new restaurants, don’t we?
What’s more, fast food now enjoys much better social perception than it did back in the 2000s – so the timing couldn’t be better.
👉 Fancy a quick meeting? Just pop your details below.
Here you can see we already work with some pretty well-known brands.
What clients value most about Alteraction is the care we take in selecting content creators, how painless we make the revision process and our ability to handle paid campaigns directly through Alteraction
We look forward to hearing from you.