The Challenge
Mercedes-AMG wanted to grow awareness across new segments of potential customers and build more emotional engagement with their highly passionate social media audience.
With restrictions on creating new branded assets due to the Covid-19 lockdown, Mercedes-AMG wanted to find a compliant way to tap into the huge volume of high-quality user-generated content being created around the brand every day. This would allow them to publish more content and also build engagement by using authentic and trusted crowdsourced stories created by customers and fans.
The Solution
Mercedes-AMG chose StoryStream’s Curate solution to source and acquire rights to customer UGC (user-generated content) in a scalable and compliant way.
By encouraging Mercedes-AMG owners to post images, videos and stories to @mercedesamg, #AMG and other campaign specific hashtags, StoryStream Curate is used to source and centralise all of this content into the StoryStream platform. Via a combination of AI powered content analysis and smart workflows the best quality UGC is automatically filtered out so the social media team can easily select the best items. Rights are managed using a custom outreach message automatically triggered and posted to the content creator allowing them to opt-in and give explicit rights for usage.
All of the rights approved UGC assets are then automatically made available to the social media team and agency partners for easy publishing to both social media channels and to pages on the Mercedes-AMG website.
Results
Using StoryStream Curate, Mercedes-AMG has been able to rapidly scale the use of UGC and are now using it as an always-on strategy across social channels. Key results include:
Scaling Content: Over 100 rights approved UGC assets have been collected in the first 2 months and more are being added every week.
Increasing Social Media Engagement: UGC posts are consistently outperforming traditional posts, seeing an 18% increase in post likes and 55% more comments per post.
Growing organic reach: By using UGC, Mercedes-AMG has been able to post more content more regularly helping to influence the positioning in the feed via social media algorithms.
“StoryStream has allowed us to further engage our existing passionate audiences while also reaching new segments using UGC. Being able to get explicit rights and also automatically find the best content has allowed us to scale the use of UGC and we plan to further integrate it into our communications in the future”- Mercedes-AMG GmbH.
