UGC marketing is the single biggest opportunity in mobile apps right now.
We got 50 million views in our campaign's first month, 450k downloads so far and we scaled our app from $300k/year to $1.5M/year in only a couple of weeks (with disgustingly delicious margins).
Our total revenue growth (can you tell when we started doing UGC?)
We even picked up 2 Youtube play button's along the way.
A plaque from a stealth channel and another one from our main
There has literally never been a better time to build yourself an army and create generational levels of wealth in only a couple of months.
The beautiful thing is anybody can learn how to do it, up until only a few months ago our app relied solely on tiktok paid ads and we didn't have a clue about how to run UGC.
But it's true, building your first UGC team can feel like a daunting task:
- When should you begin?
- Do you find a format first or find it along the way?
- Where do you find creators?
- What should you be looking for in creators?
- How much do you pay them?
- How do you avoid vanity views?
- How do you track performance?
- How do you keep up with trends and avoid content fatigue?
In this article I'm going to try to answer all of this and more. I want this to be your ultimate guide to a UGC campaign, from founders that actually got it done at scale.
We've gotten 80M views only in the last couple of weeks
Huge shoutout to my cracked cofounder @ernestoSOFTWARE. He's the best operator I know and our program wouldn't be where it is without him.
Let's begin.
Step #1: Make an app worth buying
The perfect UGC campaign starts with the product, contrary to what a lot of people say, I believe distribution isn't everything (although it's incredibly important).
To truly maximize your campaign's potential you need a product optimized for virality and conversions, both things need to be true at the same time.
Optimizing for virality can take on different forms:
- Adding a screenshot worthy feature
- Having an attractive way to describe your product in one sentence
- Having a feature people share organically
In our case we have a very attractive way to describe our product to our users, "block your phone until you spend time with The Lord" and we pair that with a catchy screenshot of our mascot.
There are two ways you can find this feature, you either take inspiration from your competitor's content (note i said competitor's content, not app) or you find it on your own.
Something we actually started doing recently to help write our scripts and find new formats is use Lightreel (shoutout to@Jibran_05 for showing it to me).
One thing if you are using Lightreel though, is to give it CONTEXT about who you are. When we originally asked it for formats it was the same ones we saw all over X.
But when I started pushing it to only give content from the last few days, emphasizing breakout ratios, our specific niche and the formats we were looking for, it was able to give us useful videos we probably wouldn't have found otherwise.
Lightreel helped us find Scroll The Bible's latest hooks and videos (they are trending rn)
And btw stop avoiding copying what works from other people, doing this is actually wise product thinking, even the founder of Zynga @markpinc wrote a whole book about why building completely brand new things is usually the dumber bet (Life At The Speed Of Play).
If you decide to find it on your own then you need to be testing it with your own content and I would advise to go viral first with that feature before you invest in a UGC army.
The second fundamental piece of your app before building your team is optimizing for conversions.
This mainly means your onboarding and d3-d7 retention if you have a trial.
Try to aim for a download to paid conversion rate of at least 5%, although you can begin a campaign with as little as 3%.
You can honestly begin a UGC campaign with trash conversion rates and mid features but if you want to maximize your profits I would first nail these through my own content before investing a lot of money into a campaign.
Step #2: Hire your first creators
Once you have a decent app you should try to start your UGC campaign as soon as possible.
We lost a ton of money by not starting sooner, if it's your first time, it will never feel like the right time and it will be very uncomfortable but you need to make the jump.
UGC campaigns need a big investment, there's no way around this, you should have at least $15k in the bank to start.
The reason is because if you're starting from scratch, you won't know what content works, you won't know how long it will take you to get your first viral hit (that converts) and if and when you do go viral you are going to want to scale very fast.
There are two ways you can start your UGC program:
- Find a viral format by posting yourself then scale with UGC
- Hire 1-3 UGCs, find a viral format then scale with more creators
In our case we actually went with #2
To find your first creators you can use a UGC marketplace, you can find them organically through tiktok or instagram or use a tool like Lightreel which finds them for you.
Using a marketplace is fast but pricier so if you're just starting out and will hire less than 10 creators I would just reach out to them directly or use an automated tool to find them for me.
How to hire UGC creators the right way
You don't want to hire just anyone, these people in the end are paid actors and you need to make sure they'll do a good job for you.
Every person you end up reaching out to must have gone viral AT LEAST once (500k+ views). This is a non negotiable, other than that look for the following things:
- They worked with previous competitors in your niche.
- They worked with other cracked UGC programs before (I'm looking at you cheater buster).
- They have camera charisma: they talk confidently and directly to the camera, they have a good understanding of hook delivery, you believe that they actually used whatever they promoted in the past.
- They know how to edit properly: they cut dead space, they know how to position the captions and subtitles.
- They belong to your actual niche (in our case all creators need to be Christian).
- They know how to follow instructions and read off of scripts properly.
- They communicate quickly and clearly.
- They are good looking and aspirational for your niche.
Reach out to as many as you can (if you start a campaign in a marketplace you are guaranteed to get 300+ applicants) and be VERY selective of who you end up hiring, this part of the process is key, don't hire wrong.
There are many kinds of payment structures but the most common one I've seen and the one we use is base pay + bonuses: $500-$1000/month for 60 posts + $20-$100/100k views, with a cap usually at 1M views and a view window of 1 week.
Try to always negotiate the lowest price possible, but be careful not to underpay because while some creators might take your deal, they can actually be unmotivated to make great content for you.
Once you hire them they should be cross posting to tiktok, instagram and youtube shorts (potentially snapchat as well).
Tell them to create their account and to warm up each of them for 10-30 minutes in your niche for 1-3 days. Creators usually know exactly how to get this done.
Other than that keep in mind that SHADOW BANS ARE A MYTH. Sure 1/100 times you might actually get shadow banned (getting literally 0 views every time).
But getting 100-300 views is not a shadow ban, it's a content problem, we've seen our own accounts go from hundreds of views to hundreds of thousands of views just by switching the hook.
You are likely not shadow banned, your content just sucks
Step #3 Managing your army
After hiring, the single most important aspect of your campaign is how you decide to manage your UGC army.
After making your first few hires you need to get them started on some content, this can either be the content that worked for you organically, your competitor's content, or viral content in your niche with your app plugged in.
Don't reinvent the wheel here, just. copy. what. works.
There are 3 main aspects to UGC management:
- Tracking performance
- Finding a constant content edge
- Creator culture (highly underrated)
Tracking the performance of your creators:
You need to be constantly tracking the performance of your creators, we use our own internal tool Viewtrack to track all of our creator's views, along with engagement rates, comments and payouts.
See all of your UGC numbers clearly in our Viewtrack dashboard
All you need to do within our platform is paste in the profile links of your creators and your views will get tracked automatically.
Knowing when to fire or make changes truly depends on where you are at with your campaign:
- If your creators are good (they've gone viral before and have worked with cracked companies before) and they are getting less than 1k views, that's a hook problem, iterate on the hook like a maniac. If you are here then you are the problem not your creators (if you hired well)
- If you are getting 1k-10k views on average then you have a video retention problem, is your creator engaging enough to make people want to watch the rest of your video? Is your script optimized enough? Is any creator getting more views on average? or are they all stuck within this range?
- If you are getting more than 100k views regularly but no downloads then you have a video conversion problem. Are you plugging in your app strongly enough? Is your CTA early on in the video? How does the comment section look like? Are you comment farming? The whole format could be the problem.
The main take away you should have from campaign management is that you should know exactly how many views you're getting per day and you should know exactly which creator is performing best and why.
In doing so you'll realize why a certain video works, it could be the background, the creators clothes, the way they talk, the way they speak, all of these things you should keep in mind and take note of as soon as you see any spikes in views.
And then you should replicate that to the rest of your creators.
Finding a constant content edge:
Once you find a winning format that converts your one and only goal should be to scale those videos as fast and profitably as you can.
You don't have to go from 3 to 100 creators overnight, often times that will actually hurt you (we made this mistake) since usually the marginal return of your creators decrease as you scale your army.
We've found that a sweet spot is anywhere between 10-30 creators in most cases.
Unfortunately though as you scale your army and you start getting millions of views per day you will quickly (in a couple of months at least) find that your content stops converting as good.
This is because viewers get fatigued of seeing the same thing and the format stops being as effective as in the beginning of your campaign.
It is super important that you are constantly looking and testing new hooks, scripts and formats.
We actually created an alert with Lightreel to send us a text every time one of our competitors starts a new hook.
We usually find a useful hook every few days, which we then test ourselves for a few days, before scaling it up with our creators.
Even though Lightreel is pretty good, I still wouldn't 100% pass on everything it says to my creators just yet.
But these tools are certainly getting close to automating important chunks of the marketing process which lets you focus more of your time on what really matters.
Set up a hook alert with Lightreel directly to my phone
A good rule of thumb is doing 80% exploitation and 20% exploration with your creators.
An underrated way to find new content and angles is listening to your own creators, we've actually found multiple formats this way.
Tell your creators to send in formats as they scroll their account while their post is being uploaded. Or even better, have this happen automatically by creating a great UGC culture (more on this below).
Don't ever stop exploring new content when you've found a killer format, because believe me, your formats will run out of life sooner or later.
Creator culture:
One of the most underrated ways to have a killer UGC campaign is by having an amazing culture.
Getting this right starts by hiring the right people to begin with (one of the main reasons we only hire Christians for our app).
You need to have people actually interested in making content for your app, they should also be using your app daily if possible.
Other than this to create a great culture you should become the UGC glazing final boss.
Genuine glazing part 1
Genuine glazing part 2
Congratulate them on every single thing your creators do right, show them how their efforts directly impact the company (downloads, ratings, reviews, charting).
But also be very direct and quick to show that anything less than A+ players are completely unacceptable. When you fire someone tell everyone why that person was fired and what you expect from everyone else.
Show them that you do not tolerate slacking and be quick to reward wins with bonuses or public praise in the UGC group chat where all of your creators should be.
You have to realize most UGC programs only care about squeezing the maximum amount of juice out of their creators, making it a very transactional and disconnected environment for your creators.
One of our creators told us this
Quick note from the screenshot above: UGC is not a new thing anymore, creators are fully aware of the ecosystem. In a space where nobody cares for their creators, be the difference.
If you actually try to get this right you will stand out and your creators will thank you for it and will go out of their way to help you succeed.
Our creators have literally denied better deals with competitors and have gone out of their way to keep working with us because we take care of them and we MAKE SURE they enjoy working for us.
Avoid vanity views like the plague
Views by themselves mean absolutely nothing, your views should be directly tied to your downloads and conversions.
This is why tracking everything is essential, you'll quickly realize if you are only paying for vanity views by comparing your views chart to your downloads chart.
Here's a list of things a well converting format usually has:
- Your app CTA in the first 15 seconds of the video
- An app demo or screenshot inside of the video
- Comments spamming the classic "what's the app" question
- Multiple CTAs inside of your video
- Mentioning your app in the post caption
From what we've found the best converting formats in no particular order are:
- UGC reactions + demo
- Talking head videos
- Skits with app directly connected to it
An added benefit of optimizing for conversions is you'll probably end up paying lower bonuses too.
#4 Squeezing the juice out of your army
If you've found a viral, converting format and you scaled your army to 10-30 creators you will now find yourself creating thousands of videos a month.
Congratulations, you've successfully created a content machine, the closest thing to a money printer in real life.
To squeeze even more juice out of that printer you want to be pushing those same videos as paid ads.
We've found that tiktok is the best platform to reuse your same exact UGC content.
All you have to do is create a broad campaign targeted at the United States only and then add as many videos as you can from your creators.
The algorithm knows better than you, one of our best performing ads is actually a video that only got 300 views organically (today it has millions).
So don't just add your best performing videos, don't try to guess which ones will work the best, just add EVERYTHING.
But don't upload them from your brand account either, run them as Spark Ads instead.
Spark Ads let you run your creator's actual post as the ad, which means you keep the organic views, the comments and all the social proof instead of showing up as some random brand account nobody follows.
The only thing you need for this is an authorization code from each creator, or you can also use the new Tiktok One dashboard.
Make sure you get the paid ad permission agreed on from day one because some creators will charge you extra for it, and you really don't want to be negotiating that when you already have the campaign built and ready to go.
Now for the numbers.
Aim for a ROAS higher than 1.5x (assuming you have a hard paywall) and turn off the videos that get you anything lower than this.
Start with at least $100/day and slowly scale by 15%-20% every week if your 7 day average performance is good.
I know people using the native tiktok ads sdk but I highly recommend using an MMP to track attribution.
The most powerful way to scale an app profitably
Do you now see why UGC is all the rage right now? Why everyone and their mothers is trying to crack UGC?
Because once you do, you've essentially created a (somewhat) predictable and scalable system that feeds on itself.
On the one hand you are getting millions of organic views and thousands of downloads a day while giving your brand a lot of value.
And then on the other hand you have essentially infinite content to test as paid ads which only increases your revenue.
The number one thing that kills paid ads is creative fatigue. With UGC that problem gets a lot more manageable.
That loop is what took us from $300k/year to $1.5M/year (and we're only getting started)
And the crazy part is that none of this is complicated.
We found good creators, we told them exactly what to say, we tracked everything obsessively and we ran the winners as ads.
That's it.
The only reason more people aren't doing this is because it's uncomfortable and it costs money upfront.
You have to spend a bunch of money before you know if any of it works. You have to hire people and then fire some of them. You have to look at a week of 3k view videos and keep going anyway.
Most people will read this entire article, agree with all of it, and then go back to adding features for the fourth time this week because that feels productive.
And I get it, I was that person. We relied on tiktok ads alone for months and didn't touch UGC because it felt too foreign to us.
Our biggest mistake was not starting sooner.
Every month you wait is another month your competition has 15 people posting for them and you don't.
There has never been a better moment to get started.
Go build your army.
