The ONLY marketing tactic this $10B unicorn is using 👉

This 'UGC gallery' hack can help you build truly loyal communities

🧠 Midjourney’s brilliant move

Midjourney turned its users’ AI images into a huge win by… launching a magazine.

Yeah - a printed magazine! 🗞️ Every month, the algorithm picks the best 20,000 images voted by users, and then the team manually selects the best images (based on clarity, originality, and beauty) and prints them. The creators get credit and praise on paper – it’s that simple.

💡 The idea: Celebrate user genius with a magazine featuring your audience’s best work with your product.

This magazine is a ‘UGC Gallery’ (UGC = User Generated Content).

I love this marketing tactic: It's not overtly promotional, yet it keeps users engaged with Midjourney's product = more retention. There's a thrill in the chase – the hope of being featured drives more creation and more interaction. It's a self-sustaining cycle of user engagement and brand awareness. ♻️

Midjourney’s printed magazine

💥 Why does this strategy work?

• 🧩 Retention: People stick around, hoping to see their work featured. In addition, those who buy the magazine become even more engaged and attached to the brand. Retention is the #1 benefit of UGC Galleries.

• 🫡 Brand loyalty: Being featured feels like winning an Oscar in your user community. This immediately makes users more loyal in the long term.

• 💖 Community: Midjourney might semi-automate the selection, but why not go further? Set up public nominations and real community voting. Boost the sense of belonging.

No matter your product, you can create a UGC Gallery:

Zoom, for example, could highlight the most creative virtual backgrounds used in meetings; Shopify can showcase the best new shops of the last month for inspiration; and monday.com may print the most beautiful & innovative boards.

🔋 How to create UGC galleries of our own?

1. Collect: Gather user creations (automatically or manually). Don’t have UGC? Custom dashboards, themes, and configurations can all be counted as ‘user creations.’

2. Curate: Have a team select the best. Be transparent about your criteria.

3. Create: Develop a format for showcasing these selections. This could be a blog or a mini-website. Still, I highly recommend a printed format: For software companies, the unexpected factor of something physical with digital work can be a conversation starter and attention grabber.

4. Communicate: Set up a landing page for the UGC Gallery & spread the word on all major channels (website, social media, etc.)

Again, even if you don’t have UGC in your product, you can find a way to spotlight your customers' use. For B2B companies, this approach offers a win-win situation, as the featured customers gain a brand lift.

It might sound counterintuitive, but I genuinely think any tech company could find a way to use it. If you believe otherwise, hit me up in the comments, and I’ll try to help.

🔥 TL;DR action item:

Celebrate your users’ work through a spotlighting mechanism (a.k.a. ‘UGC Gallery’) like a printed magazine. It is a bulletproof way to boost retention and build a loyal community.

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P.S. Cool fact: Midjourney’s growth is 100% pure Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Word of Mouth (WOM). This magazine is the only marketing idea I could find that Midjourney applies. So cool.

P.P.S. Imagine GitHub publishing a printed book with the most popular code contributions of 2023. Code on paper? That’s useless. And funny.

P.P.P.S. There’s something nostalgic about printed magazines, making them even more appealing. I wrote about this marketing idea here.

P.P.P.P.S. Low-content books like these can also make for perfect swag items. I wrote about this marketing idea here.

See you next week! ✌️

Tom

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Thanks to my friend Aakash for the inspiration for this marketing idea ❤️