How To Drive Sales With AI, Tiktok Lives, And UGC — Ian Sells | What Drives Engagement, How AI Finds Winners And Hooks, Why Most Brands Fail With Creators, Why Authentic Content Beats AI, How An All-In-One UGC Creator Marketplace Works (#428)

In this episode, we explore how brands can win with user-generated content, AI tools, and TikTok Live to cut costs and boost sales. 

Ian Sells, founder of Join Brands, shares why most creators don’t drive results, how AI helps pick the right ones, and what makes content engaging. 

He also explains how brands can launch UGC campaigns fast, protect against fake influencers, and scale with authentic creator content.

Topics discussed in this episode:  

• Why most brands struggle with creators and why only 10% drive 90% of sales.
• How AI helps brands pick the right creators and generate viral hooks.
• What makes a strong hook and why engagement beats scripted videos.
• Why TikTok Live is becoming a must-have sales channel for brands.
• How to match the right creators to the right platform for real results.
• What the Join Brands process looks like for launching UGC campaigns fast.
• Why UGC is powerful for Amazon sellers and how to repurpose it across channels.
• How creator vetting and certification protect brands from fake influencers.
• What kind of ROI brands can expect — including 700 videos driving 20M impressions.
• Why authentic creator content builds trust and outperforms AI-generated videos.
  
  

Links & Resources 

Website: https://joinbrands.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iansells/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@joinbrands
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joinbrandsnow/

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
https://tinyurl.com/ytkyt5jk

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00.078)
Nearly 90 % of the sales are generated by 10 % of the creators that post for our brand. AI has become a great tool for most of us marketers, right? Here's my website, here's my Amazon listing, here's my Shopify store. Analyze my store, give me 10 hooks that would draw users' attention. And TikTok Live is a super important part of building your brand on TikTok because it gives you free reach and it gives you continuous reach. We actually vet every creator that goes through the process.

and every creator has to get certified. We deliver about 700 videos in about 7 to 10 days, generate well over 20 million impressions.

Speaker 2 (00:36.226)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the E-Commerce Coffee Break Podcast. Ad costs are climbing, attention spend are shrinking, standing out online is tougher than ever, but tools like AI, user-generated content and TikTok Live are giving smart brands a new edge, helping them cut costs, trust and drive sales. Today's guest knows how to put those tools to work. Ian Sells is the founder of Join Brands, a fast-growing UGC platform that helps brands lower ad spend, boost traffic and scale with creator content.

He's also the founder of Million Dollar Sellers, one of the top communities for high level Amazon sellers. And with TikTok live sales hitting 17 billion, his latest launch comes just at the perfect time. So let's welcome Ian to the show. Hey, how are you today?

I'm doing very good. Thanks so much for having me here.

Let's dive right into it. First question. What's the biggest challenge brands face with content creation right now?

they've, well, they're faced to two main challenges. is, well, what should I do? Right. cause you know, there's unlimited options and there's so many people to follow and copy. And then how do I execute that? Do I use AI? Do I use real influencers? Do I go DM creators and find all those people? So it is kind of like, where, where do you start? And, you know, we can go down that road for sure. and talk about how to break it down the way I see it and, get rid of that analysis paralysis.

Speaker 2 (01:56.846)
Yeah, let's go step by step. Start with creators. Creators are all over the place. Some brands see good results, some brands, and I spoke to a brand earlier today, are struggling with them. What we get people wrong with working together with creators? I think there's plenty of points that can completely go wrong.

Yeah, well, I mean, for one, it's very difficult to work with, you know, these outside creators that you don't have a real relationship with and they don't have a brand affinity for your brand. So, you know, they may not take what you're looking for seriously. A lot of times creators, you know, overbook or over promise and under delivered, you know, lot of brands also on the flip side think that they're going to hire a creator and they're going to go viral. And that's just not the case. Right. So, you know, when it comes like to talk, it takes a lot of content to actually make the system work.

And if you look at the data, nearly 90 % of the sales are generated by 10 % of the creators that post for a brand. So, you know, most of the creators don't generate revenue. What does that mean? They need to take a hundred shots and only 10 of those will even significantly do anything potentially and far less will actually drive meaningful revenue and go viral. So there's just a lot of issues when it comes to working with creators. If you're going to go direct route and reach out to them, right. And try to find the right people on Instagram.

or on TikTok and DM them and say, Hey, we'd love to work with you. And then you got to negotiate, you know, a rate, right. And then you got to sign a contract for contract rights. And then you got to figure out how to get the product to them and then have them create the video along with the script that you want them to do as well as, know, verify that, get it posted, then pay them and track it that they don't take it down. So think there's a lot of, there's a lot of struggle in just getting the content. That's kind of where Joy Brands was kind of formulated was to solve some of those problems and make it a little bit more efficient.

I think a lot of brands have been there struggling their way through working with creators and then they have a handful and then are wondering there is no results coming out of it. And as you said, it's a volume game. Now AI obviously helps with that. It's getting easier to do the outreach. Tell me about how your system helps with having a really good base for greater content.

Speaker 1 (04:07.758)
Yeah. So with us, like we, we integrated some AI into our tool. One is to verify and ideally pick the creators that we think are right for you based on their past content history. So if you put up a campaign about a beauty product, we're going to like identify and highlight creators who are AI matching that have talked about beauty products in the past have promoted them. You are, are they, you know, mentioned that they're a competition, whatever. Right. So

We have those types of creators matching with our AI. then also, since you're going to enter your camp in your campaign, you're to enter your product information, we're to be able to say and suggest like a script for that particular type of content, whether it be TikTok, TikTok shop, Instagram, you know, what's working based on our AI. we'll kind of give you some suggestions somewhere to start, right? Cause that's a lot of times people's, you know, issue is where do I start? So to back it up, you know, AI has been common, great tool for most of us marketers, right?

to go and say, here's my website. Here's my Amazon listing. Here's my Shopify store. Analyze my store. Give me 10 hooks that would have drawn users attention and act like a senior level ad designer. Right. And it will give you a pretty nice output and then you can modify it from there. So you're utilizing AI has really helped people move from that writer's block. Like, do I say? What, do I present this? What are the features and benefits? What type of use case should I give to the AI? All that stuff. It's a little

bit easier now to kind of break from that initial script writing phase.

I want to dive a little bit deeper into the script writing phase. think it's important. Tell me, providing a full script to a creator a good idea or would you just give them carte blanche and they can do whatever they want? Or how does it work?

Speaker 1 (05:49.696)
generally I would suggest that you keep it a little bit more open, you know, give them some talking points to hit. And also the context of the video. A lot of times it's really better to research the hooks that are working today. Cause the hooks that came out, you know, and people are using months ago or not long are working today. So hooks are really important because like for instance, tick tock and Instagram, they're all tracking how many views and how long people are staying on that video. And the longer they stay on the video, the more likely it's going to get exposed to more people because they set you at levels of how the.

you actually algorithm expose your video teller people. you know, getting someone to watch for two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, that's the name of the game. And that's where a good hook comes in. It's not revealing, you know, everything right up front. Hey, save, save, you know, five dollars on this product. It's really like, tell me why you shouldn't not have this product and why you're dumb for not thinking and listening to this video. And let me explain to you the benefits of it. And then let me tell you, you know, the payoff of how you get this for less money. So you really have to help them move that

through that pathway, that funnel. it's all about the name of the game is all about engagement. So knowing the right hooks is good. And that's where some research comes in, seeing what's working in the market today or what's working in your niche. And then you giving those hooks to the players. They don't have to kind of guess on like what's trending right now. What hook type is working well. That's a good start, but definitely not giving them a full script because then they'll end up reading that on screen and it'll look scripted. And that's not what you want you to see it look like.

Well, then the UGC character completely is gone. You have like a state video there. Let's talk about the different platforms. I'm very well versed when it comes to YouTube shorts, Instagram, but I have no clue about TikTok live sales. What's the approach there? TikTok live sales is really doing very, very well. What kind of content works there?

Well, it's really about being live and being live, repetitively. So was like, can't just go live once and be like, okay, I it. Didn't work right. Same thing with the content. You're building your audience. You're building your, your circle, your sphere of influence. A lot of brands are using live to actually interact with their followers, interact with their, you know, people who are like, Hey, I'm interested in this product. and the more people that interact, then the algorithm brings in more people to kind of interact. So they really encourage you to do that type of thing. But just like content, does take.

Speaker 1 (08:09.742)
time to build up that audience to train the algorithm. Cause every time you post a video, you're training the algorithm on what is actually the content that you want to engage with your audience and how do you want them to engage with you? And so by getting more of those types of people that watch the video all the way through the algorithm goes, Hey, let's show them more people who are like these people that just watched all the way through. So you got to get that flywheel going and, um, tick tock. worked really closely with tick tock at joint brands, actually integrating a lot of APIs with them and data points. Um,

They are suggesting that TikTok Live is a super important part of building your brand on TikTok because it gives you free reach and it gives you continuous reach. So as you're staying live and going live more often, the algorithm is saying, okay, I know what type of people like this brand, like this content. you're going live from you, you can go live from your own brand page, you can go live from a side page or your own personal page. It just really depends.

I think there's a lot of movement specifically now with this TikTok, what's happening there. Tell me about the discussion I had earlier today. People were not sure about which platform works best for their brand. How do you choose or how do you make sure that you find the right creator for the right platform and that platform actually works for the brand?

Great, great question. when you're working with creators, it's, you know, you definitely are finding creators within a certain platform. So if you're, you you want to promote on Instagram, you definitely need a creator that's well experienced on there and has an audience. And so, you know, there's two types of creators, right? There's one is just creating content for you as a brand, you're going to post to your brand page. And then there's a creator that also has their own audience, a micro influencer, nano influencer, a mega influencer that you're trying to tap into their audience. And when you're trying to tap into their audience, you definitely want to make sure that maybe they have a audience that likes workout.

equipment or likes this beauty product because you can't just have a guy promoting, you know, a hair curler because his audience won't really, you know, engage with that type of content or maybe they will. I've told this to other brands, like sometimes they're like, Hey, I need a 60 year old man to promote my product. I'm like, maybe you have it wrong. Maybe you need a girl or a daughter who's bought something for her dad and she can promote it to her friends because everybody wants to help, you know, or their boyfriend or husband. So

Speaker 1 (10:20.814)
You know, can look at it from different approaches. You don't just need a specific creator that you you think is your target audience. It can be done in a different way, but definitely helps when that the creator that affiliate or influencer understands your niche has an audience of that niche and they can really talk to that and they know the pain points are. So I think it's super important to, know, and that's why we have the AI crater matching is to really speed up that process because I'm joining brands. have 350,000 plus creators that have, you know, have profiles on our platform and

You know, when somebody creates a campaign on our platform, you go a thousand applications. It's really hard to sort through a thousand different creators. It's like speed. So it's like speeding. So our AI will, you know, highlight the top 25, 50 of them, whatever that we think, you know, have the best match for your campaign type and your product type. And that's really, you know, something that we've kind of revolutionized and used to help speed up the process and suggest the other right creator, because it is important.

Talk me through the process. I'm a brand. I want to work with joint brands. How does it work? What's step by step? How looks my day to day business basically being on the platform?

Yeah. So join brands, you know, think of it like Uber for content or Upwork for content creators or affiliates. What it is, is a site, a platform where we have brands posting campaigns for creators to see in a marketplace to actually apply to. And as brands, you can also search our marketplace and find people that might fit your, you know, your needs or wheelhouses, not just ones that like discover your, your brand and apply to it. So it's really a, a, a matching algorithm that we have and,

It's really efficient because creators are always trying to like apply for new jobs and they want to make money doing this and they want to show off their content. They build their portfolios on our platform. So it's very simple. Joining joining on to join brands. It's free to sign up. We don't charge any platform fees or sorry. It's free to sign up on joining brands, but we don't have any subscription fees. You can sign up for a subscription course to lower your actual cost per campaign or to have additional features and functions.

Speaker 1 (12:24.238)
But just to sign up and check it out, create your first campaign and see what kind of creators are there for you to work with totally free, which is pretty cool. So most platforms charge a pretty big upfront fee and we don't have that. So, um, the way it works is you create a campaign. Let's say you want to work with 10 creators and you want, you know, six UGC videos. It's going to run you about $600. It's about $60 a video for just playing UGC, not influencer campaign. That's where the content will be delivered to you.

You can go on and create that and get 10 videos or you can get, you know, five images and three videos, whatever you want to do, create the campaign. And then you start selecting creators that you want to work with. And if those creators accept the job and that price, then you're on your way and they'll start making that content. And what makes us unique is that creators are kind of held to a timeline to get the job done. They can go purchase the product on your website. So that way you don't have to do any shipping. So once you've chosen a creator, they can be on their way and do it themselves.

Because the creators trust that we're going to make sure that the job is complete and they get the money because we charge brands once you've chosen a creator. So you're only paying for those creators that you've chosen. And we kind of end up like acting like an escrow company at that point in time. So it's super easy. It takes about five minutes to launch your first campaign. See all the creators that you can work with. And then from that point, you get to choose them and then you can communicate on the platform through a chat. You give them instructions, give them a campaign brief, which we can help you do with AI. And then, you know, all the different reference videos and things that you want to share with us.

Okay, that's very straightforward. What kind of industries works this best with? Are there industries where it doesn't work at all?

well, we've done campaigns for hotels, for Airbnb's, your restaurants. So, you know, on, on the platform, and of course apps and software companies as well. So we're not just free commerce. We're kind of like, you know, basically a gateway to accessing it. Even local creators in your own city. Let's say you want them to come to your restaurant or your, your store, your local store, do a video at that store. can do that through our platform. so the main, the main niche is obviously e-commerce and DTC companies.

Speaker 1 (14:26.746)
Amazon sellers that would choose an e-commerce campaign, but we have software and app campaigns. We have local campaigns for driving to local stores or buy a zip code. And then we have custom campaigns that you can pretty much do for any business that you think you need. Either UGC or you need influencers or you need affiliates to promote your software.

I want to touch a little bit on Amazon. You're in Amazon deeply in there. Amazon seller community is massive. It's around for a long time. Very well known. How does UGC content work the best if you're an Amazon seller? Where's the connection there?

Yes, great question. Well, that's kind of our roots. So, you know, if your name is on seller, one of the best things to do is to just start with like getting some images of people holding your product, right? Some real images. You can do this with AI, but it's actually quite better to use just real people. It's faster. And so people will hire like, let's say 10 creators to do a selfie image where they're holding a product, right? And saying, you know, basically smiling at the camera and just holding a product. And then you can take those images and put them into your listings and use them on your, you know, EBC.

and your Amazon post and then you can put them on your website because with Joy Brands you get unlimited content rights to use the images and videos however you want without having to negotiate that. So that's a good place to start. It's super cost effective. It's about $15 per image. So, you you could buy one, you could buy 10 or 100, it doesn't matter. But that's one way that Amazon sellers get started. Then I always suggest the Amazon seller grab about three to four videos from the creators and then they can take those videos, use them as is, use them in their ads.

It can also what I suggest is creating a montage like customer testimonial video where they take those videos and spice it together into one nice video, you know, flipping through the different creators. So it's really nice. So you can get a lot of bang for your buck and then you can take those videos and post them on your brand social media pages. So, you know, for $60 per video, you're going to get a lot of value out of that. Super easy. And then you kind of move on to the next step, which is the influencer side of things. So you can hire creators that are already approved on Amazon Associates.

Speaker 1 (16:32.014)
They can post videos to their Amazon accounts and promote your products. They're Amazon, you know, customers and their audience on Amazon, but they also tag your product. So that will actually link that video onto your listing into like this, you know, related videos category. It's sometimes even in the main image area stack. be a video that shows up from these. So there's a lot of great use cases just for Amazon sellers. And the most amazing thing is that, you know, once you get one video, you shouldn't just do one thing with it. You should do like

12 things with it. And that's kind of what we promote is like how to get the maximize, how to maximize your ROI from every piece of content that you get.

I want to touch on, we spoke about AI earlier. I want to touch about on the bad side of AI, user generated content. And you just mentioned it earlier that's created by AI. So fake influences. How do you make sure that the most real content comes over through the channel, wherever you're on and people do not think it's AI created. What's your best take on that? know it's a moving topic.

For one, we're a platform of all real people. actually met every creator that goes through the process and every creator has to get certified for every job type. So whether it's a selfie image or a product demonstration video or unboxing video, they actually have to be certified by sending us a video of them doing that with some product in their house. So we kind of vet them. We also verify that they look like the pictures in their profile on their social media page because they have to connect Facebook account, their TikTok account, their Amazon account.

all to our cloud from so that we know that they are, you know, in fact, the creator or a TikTok creator or a TikTok shop creator. We have to verify those things. So we do a lot of betting on that. You know, there's always some times where something might slip by, but you can reject the content of the, if the creator is trying to, you know, scan the system, essentially we blackmail them and not blackmail. We blacklist them and remove them from the campaign and we don't pay them out because they did dilated our terms of service. So, you we do protect against that. I would say, you know, AI,

Speaker 1 (18:29.282)
You know, UGC is a competitor of ours, essentially, because we are the real people. We are the real people with the audiences, which is great. That's one of the main reasons I think you should also use, you know, UGC creators is that they have an audience, whether they're small or not doesn't really matter because imagine if your wife posts something, her friends are going to see it that's really authentic, right? Even if it's only a hundred people that know her, they all now saw that she likes this particular cream for getting rid of, you know, whatever it is that she has.

so we, don't discriminate, we don't discriminate against anybody's following or whatever like that. There's always a potential for them to grow. so with AI UGC, I think the future of that is, the platforms are starting to basically say, and put tags on every video that is AI. So they're going to basically indicate this looks to be AI, this is AI, or on some platforms, they make you self-select was this created using AI or what percentage of this video is AI? Cause

If you look at YouTube, they were having all these channels created with all this fake content to earn it to monetize it. they weren't in basically YouTube has basically said no, no more of that fake content because it devalues the platform because people really end up wanting to watch real content by real people. And they don't want to incentivize, you know, just a billion bots making a billion pieces of content out of, you know, some random shop in another country.

your approach that you have this approval process and even check on their social channels if they are real people. Because that's obviously the first step to make sure that there is no bot pretending to be an influencer. Can you give me an example of a brand and you don't need to name the brand on what kind of results they saw when they started working with your platform?

Yeah, I mean, we've just we work with brands of all sizes, but we've worked with some of bigger brands. You can see on our website, like Mary with organics and costs, you know, physicians choice and things of those nature. We can do large scale campaigns where we drive about, you know, 100 to 500 or 1000 creators to create content within a matter of weeks for those brands, you know, all the way down to people who just want one piece of content or one image. So recently we did a Prime Day campaign for one of our large brands, about a hundred thousand dollar campaign.

Speaker 1 (20:38.082)
We delivered about 700 videos in about seven to 10 days just before prime day, all talking about that all by different people. So that was also 700 creators. I got exposed to that brand and also exposed to their audiences. And overall that that campaign generated well over 20 million impressions. And they said they had, you know, best prime day ever as well as saw the halo effect on TikTok shop and their on their social media engagement and also on their own store pages. So

Overall, like that tragedy is going to continue on. They're going to continue to do business with us because we can deliver that kind of scale and speed without much interaction by the actual brand owners. As I mentioned, we have a platform. So if somebody has a question about the campaign, they could just message you in their platform. It's not like you're getting email or a text message or WhatsApp or discord or Slack. So, you know, it gets a little bit complicated when you have so many things going on and we kind of centralized all that and we handle all the payments to creators. We handle all the, you know,

rejections, have all of the terms of service, know, transfers content, right? So we make it super easy for these brands. And, you know, whether you're small or big, it doesn't really matter to us, but we are here to help everybody scale because we have so many creators at our disposal. They're all looking for work because the end of day, they want to make money and brands want to pay them to promote their products.

So it's definitely a win-win situation. And I was on your website earlier and even have a library for different industries showing examples on how videos can look like. So I think that's quite helpful for someone who has no idea where they want to go for.

That's a way to get inspiration on what works, what isn't working. know, it's kind of just an example of what kind of content you can create with joint brands.

Speaker 2 (22:17.035)
Perfect. Even before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet?

just would love to invite all your listeners and followers to come check us out on joining brands, tell other people about it. we worked with over 20,000 different brand owners. We've got over 350,000 creators, influencers and affiliates. we work with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. and we're happy to support any of you guys with like, consultation strategy calls. We don't really have a sales team cause there is no fee to sign up. So we invite you to sign up, check it out if you need help.

In your team, it's free. We'll jump on a call with you or a team. I'll walk you through the entire platform, train your team how to use it. You know, whether it's one video or thousands of videos, we would love to support, you know, your community as well.

I will put the link to your website in the show notes and you just want to click away. I hope a lot of people will reach out to you because it's a no-brainer. It's risk-free. Try it out. I'm sure it will work for you and you can scale as you go, which I think is a huge benefit there. Thanks so much for your time today. I think a lot of people will reach out to you. I it's a great platform and I really believe that user-generated content, specifically if it's filtered, it's short, that there are real people. This is going forward one of the best marketing channels. Thanks so much for your time today.

Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much for having me. And of course, if anybody wants to follow me, check me out on LinkedIn. Probably the best way to kind of follow my content, the story that I'm putting out and all the case studies that we share. just Ian sells on LinkedIn.

Speaker 2 (23:45.208)
Cool, thanks so much. Thank you.