Claus Lauter: Welcome to the e commerce coffee break podcast. Today we revisit the episode with Bostjan Belingar, CEO of hustlermarketing.Com and discuss how to set up a creator funnel and produce insane amounts of user generated content ads for cheap. So let's dive right into it.
Voice Over: This is the e commerce coffee break. A top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to Shopify merchants. and business owners looking to grow their online stores. Learn how to survive in the fast changing e commerce world with your host Claus Lauter and get marketing advice you can't find on Google.
Welcome.
Claus Lauter: Today we want to talk about user generated content and what that has to do with ads. We want to find out how you can Set up a greater funnel and produce insane amounts of ads for cheap. With me on the show today, I have Bostjan Belingar. He's the CEO of Hustler Marketing. Bostjan and his team at Hustler Marketing have helped hundreds of e com stores optimize their email and SMS marketing.
As a founder and CEO, he now spends most time managing the quickly growing agency and all of his team. The partners in 2022 has the marketing has sent out close to a billion emails and generated over 83 million in retention revenue for their clients. In his spare time, he does with a partner meditation, reads fantasy novels, travels to warm and sunny, sunny countries.
I can relate to that one and occasionally goes to awesome techno parties. So let's welcome him to the show. Hi, how are you today?
Bostjan Belingar: I'm very good. Thank you for having Claus
Claus Lauter: Bostjan, you have done a ton of emails, a ton of SMS, a ton of outreach. And with that, obviously you have created a lot of user generated content coming back from there.
And that will lead us on how you can use that for ad creatives. Tell me a little bit more on how you got into this whole area.
Bostjan Belingar: Okay. So let's just clarify a few terms first, because I think it's important. So for example, what e commerce brands would do for, for email and SMS and whatnot is typically not user generated, right?
So we would take their brand assets and we would, you know, do fancy banners and whatnot, but there's a big trend recently in the ad buying world on Facebook and Google, TikTok, and other platforms. I'm sure all the listeners are aware of the privacy policies, iOS and whatnot. So essentially marketers have less and less data to utilize.
The other thing is algorithms are stronger and stronger and, and you know, smarter. So nowadays it's not as important when you're running ads to really do fancy targeting or set up really clever rules. It's more about having. A lot of really good content and then letting the algorithm do its trick, right?
So but there's another thing, right? There's also more and more ads on all these platforms and and consumers are kind of sick and tired of just being pitched by ads all the time So that's where ugc comes in right user generated the whole point of this is that you find people that You know, produce ads and commercials that don't really look like ads.
And then basically you're just scrolling your newsfeed. You know, you start looking at some guy or some woman that is talking about something. And then only 30 seconds in you realize they're actually talking about the product. And you know, they send you on a link, et cetera. So I think that's quite important to understand.
Claus Lauter: Yeah, I think that's a normal problem for a lot of marketeers. They have their marketing classes on and decorate, as I said, banners and use stock images and whatever they have. But seeing it from the view of a customer and what they think about your brand, about your products and your services is a completely different angle.
And that's where user generated content helps with. Now, how can you facilitate whatever comes back from your customers or how can you motivate maybe as a first step customers to generate content? For you,
Bostjan Belingar: for sure. Maybe another important distinction, um, in terms of, you know, content for products. The reason why well user generated content not only performs better, but it's also a lot cheaper and we'll talk about the process.
But we recently had a story with one of our clients who, who paid, I think, 20, 000 to get these super polished videos from like a film studios with actors and everything. Um, And then they run that on ads and nothing happened like zero, you know, so they literally spent 20k, you know, and it looks nice It feels nice, but it's like it's it's not what works, right?
So with user generated content, there's essentially Let's say two things one is where you find the creators and how much you pay them And the other is how do you create? The strategy and debriefs for them. These two are both very important. So if we break this down, um, first, where you find the creators, um, another important point here is we call them creators, not influencers, right?
The, the important thing to understand here is that influencers will charge you a lot to do any sort of videos or promotional content for you. They are not just selling the content. They're also selling the quote unquote reach, right? They have a big following. So you hope to get clicks from them. In most cases, the influencer stuff is not really working very well.
So, you know, you just spend a lot of money and not get a lot of ROI. There are exceptions. So we primarily do not want, you know, or you, if you Get started with this. You don't want influencer. You want creators Um how to find them there's a bunch of platforms b roll is one and there's like a bunch of others online You could also go into fiverr upwork and any sorts of things like that.
The goal is to not just find People that like your products, that could also be something, you know, you could email your list and find some customers who are really happy, but what we prefer to do is find creators who have actual experience, right? If you go on B roll there's people have ratings, right?
It's like looking for a restaurant on Google maps, right? You see the creators, you see how, you know, other people who gave them work before rated them, et cetera. Um, plus you can see things about them, their portfolio, blah, blah, blah. And then essentially we just negotiate the fee for them. This could be a few hundred dollars, it could be less, it could be more depending on what you need.
And you could get quite a lot of content from them. And then it's up to you to edit it in the best way possible. So that's one, but I don't also want to rant, you know, there's the step two and whatever, but, um, how is this so far, Claus? Are we talking about the right sort of things?
Claus Lauter: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Yeah. I think it's very interesting to, to see the, the aspect of using creators and the difference to influencers. I think that's what a lot of people do not have on their list. Um, I think they throw them in the same bucket, um, but there's a distinctive difference in there. Now, once you get this content, um, how do you use it in the best possible way to feed the monster?
For instance, Facebook ads, Google ads with new ads, with new ad content.
Bostjan Belingar: There's two parts to this. One is the editing itself, but even before the editing, there comes the creative brief. For these creators and that this is where I think a lot of brands get it wrong, or they get overwhelmed because it's actually really hard to work with creators.
Um, not all of them. Well, almost none of them are marketers, right? So they don't exactly know how to present things in the best way. What currently works in the market, which target words are the right for the, your demographic, et cetera. So The way we approach it is we create this very detailed briefs where we would explain to the creator pretty much step by step everything they need to do.
We would tell them say this, we would give them even a picture of how the scene should look like. The briefs are like 10 pages. It's pretty in depth, right? But we literally, you know, It's like, so like they really can't mess it up. We kind of outline everything step by step. We give them plenty of examples and exactly what we want them to do.
And then they send all that raw content to us. We ask them for a few images and whatnot, and then it comes to our team to edit that. Editing for, you know, TikTok, Facebook, etc. is kind of an art in and of itself, but it's also not rocket science. A few important things. Well, anyone who runs ads kind of knows this, but, um, you want short videos, 15 to 45 seconds.
Seconds, you want a lot of very fast cuts, the rule of thumb is every two, three seconds, there's a cut to kind of keep that attention, which is very fleeting these days. And another thing that we like to do is, um, the first three seconds are key. So we're trying to come up with some really weird and, um, you know, kind of like, The scroll stoppers, you know, like as, as weird as possible, as controversial as possible.
It has to somehow those first three seconds, they need to stop your attention and get you to watch the rest of the video. And, and in essence, this is it, you know, it's, it's not rocket science. And if you do this, right. Wow. I mean, the results can be really drastically different.
Claus Lauter: Coming to the style of the content that you create, I think you touched on that quite nicely.
There is for which kind of age group or audience does this kind of content work the best? What's your experience there?
Bostjan Belingar: Oh, all the age groups. That's the funny part. It's, you know, like back in the day, people would say, Oh, TikTok is just for the kids, right? Not exactly. So of course, you know, it's TikTok is not for exactly all the age groups in all the sort of different percentages.
The different people use different platforms. For example, on Facebook, we work with, you know, one of our brands is called Blendjet. They have this fantastic product. And what we see is that people of very different age groups buy the same product. So what we would do is we would, when we work on creatives for ads for them, we would, We would create different videos, different types of videos for different age groups.
For example, for older age group, we actually used, um, you know, some older women, maybe 50, 60, you know, sort of the archetype of a grandma. We put like a younger kid inside of that and, you know, kind of try to show that love and connection together with the product, et cetera. Whereas if we took like a younger demographic, let's say a 30 year old woman or a man who's trying to keep fit and healthy, we would kind of do that with, you know, more like the healthy lifestyle diet, et cetera.
So there's like different things you can do. Especially with bigger brands that do sell to different demographics. You can't market to everybody with the same thing.
Claus Lauter: Hey Claus here, just a quick one. If you like the content of this episode, subscribe to the weekly newsletter at newsletter.
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As I said, 100 percent free. Also, you will find the link in the show notes. And now back to the show. When it comes to the selection to the creators, there's different platforms where you can search on or even going on Upwork or Fiverr. What's the selection process there? How do you or the brand, your client have influence on picking the right person?
Bostjan Belingar: I think it comes down to, you know, your strategic process even before you set out to do that. So once you identify who your target customer is, of course, you should know that if, you know, if your store has any success, then you should know which, or you can try to brainstorm on which demographics they will most listen to.
I can give you an example of another client that's selling. It's a really cool product. Actually, it's called Sweetums Vibes. It's some intimate vibes before sex. So it's slightly controversial for some, but it's, it's this like tissue, right? That's pH neutral, a super amazing product with like nice taste and whatnot.
Now, when the founder started with this, they thought that women will be buying these the most, right? So. First, we would market just to women, et cetera. As it turns out with testing different creators and different customer avatars, we saw that actually a lot of guys are buying this. And then, um, really, really strong was also the LGBT community, right?
So we kind of discovered this completely different customer avatars that we didn't even know. So You know how to prepare for search of those creators like as as usual testing you would first Try to find creators you think will work the best, but you should keep testing You should keep bringing new and new creators And of course with the ones that it works keep them try to retain them You could try to make them the brand voice or whatever, but you should keep trying to bring new ones Because, um, let me just add these and then make a stop.
The biggest problem to scale with bigger brands is that they need a large amount of ads, right? One single ad cannot bring all the sales to the store and it can't run, you know, for years and years. So what you need to have is have many different winning ads so that you can scale those, you know, ad spend budgets.
So this is why you want to have many creators. And then do a lot of editing, mix and match, try three seconds of these three seconds of that. Basically, you try to come up with new stuff all the time.
Claus Lauter: I want to touch a bit on the legal or contractual side of working with creators. Obviously, you need to get the rights, the user rights for that content.
How's that built up. So how do you make sure that there will be no legal issues at some point?
Bostjan Belingar: So most of the platforms that we use, one of them being real B roll, um, and I should honestly know more of them because there's a bunch of competitors, but I don't know the ins and out because our team is running that.
But let's say B roll. io for an example. Um, they all kind of have that inside already. So when a creator joins their platform, they already agree to all those rights. So you're completely in the, in the clear. If you choose to work through Upwork or Fiverr or something else, you should probably create a contract, you know, prior where they would kind of give you the rights to, to, to those assets, et cetera, et cetera.
So yes, you should definitely think about that. If you use the most popular platforms, they kind of take care of that for you.
Claus Lauter: Give me a bit of an idea of how Hustler Marketing and your team help with setting a campaign up and about the timeline and everything that is involved with that.
Bostjan Belingar: So essentially, first we would talk to the client, we would present them with this.
I believe the two biggest USP unique selling points are, um, The fact that we find the right creators and then manage them. There's a lot of legwork. Hey, did you send these? Did you get the product? Blah, blah. So finding and managing the creators and the creative brief. I think those two are the most difficult ones.
We spend hours and hours on those creative briefs. So we kind of explain this to the clients. In many cases, they're very interested. Right now, we actually have a wait list. We can't even deliver all the projects that, you know, the interest is for. Um, and once you know the client kind of thing, okay, we want to try that Um, we basically get started we do a quick analysis of their brand We start the creative brainstorming process where the copywriter account manager and some others would meet and think about hey You know, this is the brand.
This is the product. What are two or three different customer avatars that we can cater to? Right. And we're like, Oh, okay. Maybe it's a younger woman. Maybe it's blah, blah, blah. And then after that, we would find those creators. We would ask the client if they like them. Um, we would send the briefs to the clients to approve if they like that.
Type of brief. And once the client says, okay, we basically send the products on the client's behalf to the creators, send them the briefs, get everything edited, and basically the client just gets the finished product. Um, so it's a pretty cool process and honestly, it's not so expensive and there is no commitment.
So they can just test it once. If they get a batch of ads that they like, that's great. And then if they don't like it, they can always stop, you know, they didn't risk too much. Sites, you know, a few thousand dollars for like 30, 40, 50 ads, et cetera. So it's pretty solid.
Claus Lauter: When it comes to implementation of the content for the ads, how often do you think they should replace the ads with new and fresh content?
Bostjan Belingar: As often as possible. We're talking about, depending on the size of the brand, but we can be talking about 100 different ads per month or more. It's, it's becoming hard, you know, like that's the thing back in the day. You could have like three new ads a month and then you could scale with that. But nowadays you can't, the competition is rough.
The, the ad fatigue is in the game. This is why you have to kind of always be looking for that next thing. Um, you know, there's different trends in Tik Tok, like the robot voice, right? In many cases, an ad. Doesn't perform, but then we do the Robo voice voiceover thing. And then all of a sudden the ad performs right.
But I would say, depending on the brand. If they're making say 100k a month, um, I would say at least 40 different ads a month. If they're doing more than that, then even more, um, ads. Also, when we say different ads, there's a few definitions that are important. You could have, we say, Concept versus, um, variation, right?
So you could have 50 ads, but it could be, you know, five ads with 10 variations each, right? So that's not the same. So what we try to do is to have each concept to have maybe four to five variations and the variations is usually just different first three seconds. That's the key part, right? Because, um, If those first three seconds, so we call that the hook, right?
If the hook is not successful, then they won't see the rest of the ad anyway. So what we try to do with a specific concept is we try to put different hooks in front and whichever of the hooks kind of works, they will see the rest of the ad. Okay. This is our winning variation for the specific concept. So this is kind of how, you know, like you scale and test this.
Claus Lauter: That shows specifically for smaller versions, how difficult it is to get a successful campaign up and running on Facebook nowadays or on other platforms, because you just need to create a ton of volume. And if you don't have the The in house capacity to do so, um, then outsourcing is the best way to go there.
And specifically coming up with hooks. I think when it comes to the creative department, um, you need somebody who's really on the day to day business involved with that to come up with the right ideas. Now, who's your perfect customer at Hustler Marketing?
Bostjan Belingar: We work with different brands, but I would say they should be making at least 50, 000 a month in terms of revenue.
That's like the lowest. But if we talk about ideal two, 300, 000 a month is better, you know, a million is even better. So we're kind of trying to get into this next level, but it's kind of difficult. You know, I understand that it's, it's harder for the smaller people too, but if you don't have the ad budget, if you don't have at least 10, 000 of ad budget, then It's going to be tricky, you know, it's really, the competition is so rough that, that you just, and the worst part is that you never know, right?
You never know if it's going to work or not, but that's, that's sort of the gamble that, that you have to be prepared to take. So it's definitely not easy.
Claus Lauter: No, it's not an easy game. Things have become much, much harder. Six, seven years ago, Facebook was a free for all. It was very easy to become successful.
Um, but it has become not only harder, but it has also become more professional. That's on the, on the good side, um, sort of had sorted out the market, um, for all the, the bad apples that were on the platform. Where can people find out more about you guys?
Bostjan Belingar: Well, our website would be a good start. So that's, um, hustler marketing.
com. Otherwise, we do a bunch of content on our blog. There's some social media and Instagram. So there's a lot of places where, you know, you can kind of get in touch or learn more about us.
Claus Lauter: Excellent. Okay. Before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there one final thoughts that you want to leave our listeners with?
Bostjan Belingar: I think strength of the product is still key. If you have something that's really amazing, you know, it's going to sell and you will not need to work so hard on your ads. Because the product is awesome. If you're getting results, if it's somewhat different than the competition, then you're going to be good.
So to, to those founders that are product developers, like go for it. You know, people need, people need great stuff in their life. So yeah, good luck.
Claus Lauter: Okay. That's very true words for the end of this episode today. Well, Sean, thanks so much for giving us an overview. And I would recommend everyone who wants to have content created professionally to reach out to you and take it from there.
Thanks so much. Hey, Claus here. Thanks for joining me on another episode of the eCommerce Coffee Break Podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will make it also easier for others to discover the podcast.
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