User content campaigns must drive user action to be successful, because a branded feed for user-submitted selfies isn’t much without any selfies. But of course, driving user action is hindered by the massive amounts of information and calls-to-action present in the average internet session, all of which competes for the user’s limited attention and click-tap capacity.
Detailed below are the multiple significant factors at play when a user decides to participate in a brand’s user content campaign.
Prize Value
Prize value refers to the user’s perceived value of the prizes that can be won in exchange for participating, such as a monetary reward, product reward, being a featured fan on that brand’s social page, etc. This can be affected by the perceived value of the prize (e.g. the impressive million-dollar prize for the Doritos Crash The Super Bowl campaign’s user-submitted commercial contest).
Participation Enjoyment
Participation enjoyment refers to the user’s perceived enjoyment of participating in the creation process. This can be affected by the creation activity’s novelty (e.g. a joint campaign between Dunkin Donuts and SharkWeek, in which user’s submitted selfies in which they were taking vicious shark-like bites out of doughnuts) and also pre-existing user affinities for the activity (e.g. Iron Man uniting its trainees to submit their already-common post-workout selfies to #ironmantraining).
Participation Costs
Participation Costs refers to the user’s perceived costs of the creation and submission activities. This can be affected by the medium and amount of required information (e.g. polished 30-second video spots for the Doritos Crash The Superbowl vs. selfies for #ironmantraining) and also the complexity of the submission process (e.g. creating and submitting a video all within a single Instagram user session vs. creating a video, uploading it to YouTube, and then tweeting the video URL to a branded hashtag, as was the case for the Sprite #changethegame campaign).
In order to drive user action, the perceived value (i.e. participation enjoyment and prize value) of participating in a brand’s user content campaign must outweigh participation costs (i.e. creation and submission costs). Of course, smaller brands will always be limited in their ability to provide large impressive prizes, and so much rely on campaigns with creative and inspiring content challenges.
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