What are the main differences between UGC and influencers?

This question leads brand and agency marketers to contact Alteraction.

For more than a decade, it’s been quite common to see part of brands’ marketing budgets allocated to influencer collaborations. After the rise of TikTok, and with the advent of Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts as competitors, UGC started to gain popularity.

Meaning of UGC

UGC stands for User Generated Content.

Any content created by a user on the internet that connects to a brand is UGC. Mainly, we are talking about photos and videos on social media and reviews on e-commerce sites.

On Alteraction’s Instagram profile, you can see many examples of UGC content for social media If you visit any product page on Amazon, you’ll see that reviews take up a significant portion of the product pages. Remember, this is also UGC.

Although it doesn’t always happen, brands usually pay for this type of content. If it’s camouflaged as genuine content created by the person in the video, UGC can work very well in both upper and lower funnel strategies.

Now that we’ve covered the basic concept of UGC, let’s compare it with influencer marketing.

UGC is not influencer marketing

Here are the 5 main differences between UGC creators and influencers:

#1 The number of followers doesn’t matter

With an influencer collaboration, you aim to reach the influencer’s audience. This only makes sense if your buyer persona is part of that audience and if you know the influencer has a certain level of engagement with their community.

👉 With UGC, the number of followers of the person creating the content doesn’t matter. Usually, you would post it on your profile or promote it as an ad from the creator’s profile, but ensuring the click leads directly to your website.

In summary, with UGC, only the quality of the content created matters. If the creator resembles your brand’s buyer persona, that’s great, but remember, their followers are irrelevant because we don’t want to reach their audience.

#2 The cost is related to content scalability

Collaborations with influencers are not exactly cheap. Professional UGC content (like the one we create at Alteraction) is more affordable and, as a result, it’s easier to scale your social media with it.

For example, an influencer with 300K followers might charge you €5,000 for 1 Instagram post and 1 story, allowing you to run paid ads for the month.

👉 What if we move the same budget to UGC? With €5,000, you can create 8 high-quality UGC videos with different creators, saving around €2,000 for various paid campaign scenarios.

As you can see, if your goal is to maximize your social media ROI, UGC is a better option than influencer content.

#3 You have more control over the content

Good luck if you want an influencer to meet all the requirements you’ve outlined in the brief.

In fact, one of the advantages of influencer marketing is leveraging each profile’s communication and persuasion skills with their audience. In other words, giving the influencer freedom to create and say what they want, within certain boundaries.

👉 If you’re looking for more control over the content because you don’t want to reach the influencer’s audience, switch to Alteraction’s UGC:

      • We send you a list of creator profiles for you to select the ones you like the most.
      • After our internal review of the created content, you provide feedback and we apply it.

As you can see, you can choose to have full control over the user-generated content creation, or let us handle it with minimal reviews from your team.

#4 Content longevity

Influencer collaborations tend to be one-off and you can’t reuse the content or repurpose it for paid campaigns.

For example, if you decide to push paid ads for influencer content and the metrics are doing well, you might want to continue the investment in the next month, right?

Well, you’d have to pay the influencer a new fee. And this renegotiation could make it no longer worth extending the paid campaign.

👉 With UGC, negotiations are much more flexible.

In the contract, we can negotiate the duration of content usage, whether for organic or paid campaigns. If you want to extend it, we can do so at very affordable costs.

In other words, UGC allows you to cut investment when the campaign’s performance starts declining, not when your budget dictates it because the influencer charges an unaffordable fee. For paid performance marketers, this is incredibly valuable.

#5 Variety of formats

Influencer marketing offers many possibilities at the budget level. That’s why terms like nano or micro-influencers have appeared.

However, it’s less capable of offering a variety of content formats. Some influencers specialize in photography, but unless your brand is heavily linked to static image formats, you’ll usually ask them for a video.

With UGC, formats are more varied.

  • In one collaboration, you can request a video as the main content and pay an extra fee if you want the creator to include some photos.
  • Within each format, we can request multiple variations to feed Meta or TikTok’s paid campaigns. With an influencer, you get one final video, and you can’t test anything.
  • A very popular format is the review, with or without product photos. Brands with e-commerce or Amazon presence use these to improve their conversion chances.

Now you know the main differences between influencers and UGC.

You understand what each type of collaboration can offer, and that Alteraction is a great option if you want to allocate part of your budget to UGC.

Remember that influencers and UGC creators can coexist in the same digital strategy. In fact, they can complement each other very well or target different points in the funnel.

Do you want to talk more about all of this?

Fill out the form at the end of this page 🚀