User generated content campaign: the mechanic, the rights, the timeline and the numbers

A user generated content campaign is a time boxed invitation for customers to make something and share it, built around one mechanic, one hashtag or upload route, and one clear reason to take part. The campaigns that work have five parts settled before launch: the business objective, the creative mechanic, the incentive, the rights and consent wording, and the plan for where the content goes afterwards. The ones that fail almost always fail on the last two, because a campaign that collects a thousand photographs you have no permission to use and no place to put has cost money and produced nothing.

This page is about designing and running the campaign itself: the mechanics, the brief, the timeline, the legal checks and the measurement. For the always on side of this work, collecting customer content continuously and knowing what you may reuse, see how to collect customer content and what you may reuse.

Start with the objective, because it picks the mechanic

Objective	Mechanic that fits	What success looks like
Build a library of product photography	Photo submission with a clear brief and a usage incentive	Volume of usable, rights cleared assets per category
Raise consideration in a new audience	Challenge or template that is fun to copy	Participants from outside your existing customer base
Add reviews and proof to product pages	Post purchase prompt with photo or video upload	Share of products with at least three customer images
Launch a product	Early access in exchange for a first impressions post	Coverage at launch, and content ready for paid use
Strengthen a community	Recurring feature, such as a monthly spotlight	Repeat contributors and submissions without prompting
Collect ideas or votes	Submission plus a public shortlist and vote	Quality of entries, and the decision it informs

Pick one objective. A campaign asked to do three things produces a brief nobody can follow.

The creative mechanic: what makes people take part

• Make the ask small and specific. "Show us your morning setup" gets entries. "Share your story" does not, because the person has to invent the format as well as the content.
• Give them a template. A pose, a prompt, a caption structure, a frame, an audio track. The easier it is to copy, the further it travels.
• Make the entry useful to the entrant. People post things that make them look good, so design the mechanic to produce content they wanted on their own feed anyway.
• Use one entry route. A single hashtag, a single upload page or a single mention. Two routes halve your collection rate and double your moderation work.
• Seed it on day one with ten strong entries from staff, partners or paid creators, then feature real entries within hours. Fast reposting is the strongest incentive in this list and it costs nothing.

Incentives, ranked by what they actually produce

• Recognition. Being featured on the brand's channel, website or packaging. Cheapest, and it reliably produces the most engaged contributors.
• Access. Early product, a private community, a session with your team. Strong with existing customers.
• Product or credit. Simple, and it keeps the audience to people who want what you sell.
• A prize draw. Maximises entry volume, lowers average quality, and brings the most legal requirements with it.
• Payment. Paying per asset means you are commissioning creators, which is a different and perfectly good programme, run with contracts rather than terms and conditions.

Rights and consent, settled before launch

This is the section that decides whether the campaign produces usable assets. Get these written, published and linked from every piece of campaign creative:

• What you may do with an entry. Name the channels: your social accounts, your website, product pages, email, print, paid advertising. Paid use in particular has to be stated, because it is the use people object to most when it was not mentioned.
• How long. A stated term is easier to agree to than a perpetual licence, and it is usually enough.
• Territory and credit. Where the content may be used, how you will attribute the creator, and that you may edit or crop.
• How people confirm it. Entry by hashtag is weaker evidence of consent than an upload form with a tick box, so for anything you intend to use in paid media, get the form. The usual pattern is to collect broadly by hashtag, then ask the creators of the assets you want for explicit written permission.
• Other people, music and third party material. Require entrants to confirm they have permission from anybody identifiable in their content, be strict about content featuring children, and remember that platform licensed audio does not travel to your website or your advertising.

Where there is a prize, a draw or a vote, the campaign becomes a promotion with its own rules: full terms, eligibility, opening and closing dates, how winners are selected and notified, and the platform's own promotion policies. Advertising codes also require any brand relationship and any incentive to be disclosed clearly in the entrant's post, so build the disclosure wording into the brief rather than hoping entrants add it.

The timeline that works

1. Four weeks out. Objective, mechanic, incentive and terms agreed. Legal sign off on the terms and the disclosure wording.
2. Three weeks out. Upload route built and tested. Hashtag checked for existing use and for anything you would not want to be associated with. Moderation rules written, with a named moderator and an escalation route.
3. Two weeks out. Seed content produced. Creative for your own channels made. Email, pack insert, in store or on site prompts prepared.
4. One week out. Brief your team and any partner creators. Dry run the upload and the permission request flow end to end.
5. Launch week. Publish seed content, prompt your own audience daily, feature entries within hours, and request written permission for the strongest entries as they arrive.
6. Weeks two to four. Keep featuring, keep requesting rights, and watch for the entry format that is working so you can push it.
7. After close. Announce results, thank everybody, deliver the incentive promptly, and move the cleared assets into your content library tagged by product and by permission scope.

Moderation, planned not improvised

• Write the rejection criteria in advance: off brief, unsafe, offensive, uses other brands' material, features identifiable people without permission, breaches platform rules.
• Decide who reviews, how fast, and what happens out of hours. A campaign running over a weekend needs weekend cover.
• Keep a log of what was rejected and why. It protects you and it improves the next brief.

Measuring it

• Usable assets collected, meaning on brief and rights cleared. This is the number that matters, not total entries.
• Cost per usable asset. Compare it with what the same content would cost from a studio or a paid creator. This is the figure that gets the next campaign approved.
• Participation from outside your existing audience, if reach was the objective.
• Effect on the pages where the content lands. Conversion rate on product pages with customer images against those without.
• Performance in paid media. Customer made assets against studio assets, measured on the same placement.
• Repeat contributors, the clearest sign you have built something worth running again.

Questions marketers ask

How long should a UGC campaign run?

Three to four weeks suits a one off campaign: long enough for word to spread, short enough to create urgency. Always on collection is a programme rather than a campaign, and it works best once you have run one campaign and learned what people actually submit.

Do we need a prize?

Recognition and featuring get you the most committed contributors, and they avoid the legal overhead entirely. Add a prize when the objective is entry volume, and budget the extra time for terms, eligibility and winner selection.

Can we use entries in paid advertising?

Yes, with explicit written permission from the creator that names paid use, plus confirmation about anybody identifiable in the content and cleared audio. The reliable route is a permission request message to the creators of the assets you want, with the terms restated and their reply kept on file.

What if we get very few entries?

Nearly always the ask was too broad or the route had friction. Narrow the brief to one specific thing, show five examples, reduce the entry to a single action, and prompt the people most likely to say yes first: your repeat customers, your community members and your staff.

Should we use a platform to run it?

A collection and rights management platform earns its fee once volume makes manual permission requests and asset tagging slow. For a first campaign, a form, a spreadsheet and a disciplined moderator are enough. Our guide to the two kinds of UGC platform covers what each category does.

Your customers' words, summarised for someone else

The campaign gathers photos, quotes and videos you may reuse. A second reader appears after launch: an assistant that reads them as part of answering a buyer's question and paraphrases them in a sentence. Whether it does depends on where the content sits and whether the text can be read.

Four weeks after launch, ask the buyer question the campaign was built for in three assistants. AI Knows Us can run it on a schedule for you, so the campaign has an outcome measured beyond clicks and entries.