UGC Ad Goldmine: Setting Up Your Creator Funnel Like a Pro | #241 Bostjan Belingar

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Claus Lauter: Hello and welcome to another episode of the e commerce coffee break. 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 Hassler Marketing. Bostjan and his team at Hustler Marketing have helped hundreds of e comm stores optimize the email and marketing as a founder and CEO. He now spends most time managing the quickly growing agency and all of his departments. In 2022, Hustler Marketing has sent out close to a billion emails and generated over 83 million in retention revenue for their clients in a spare time. He does with a partner meditation, reads fantasy novels, travels to warm and sunny countries. So 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 class.

Claus Lauter: Well, 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. 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 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 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, but there's another thing, right? There's also more and more ads on all these platforms 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, produce ads and commercials that don't really look like ads. And then basically you're just scrolling your newsfeed. 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 they send you on a link, etc.

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 glasses 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 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, in terms of 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 1 of our clients who paid, I think, 20, 000 to get these super polished videos from like a film studios with actors and everything.

And then they run that on ads and nothing happened like 0, so they literally spend 20 K, you It feels nice, but 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 2 are both very important. So if we break this down, 1st, where you find the creators. Another important. Point here is we call them creators, not influencers, 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 just spend a lot of money and not get a lot of ROI. There are exceptions.

If you get started with this, you don't want influencer, you want creators. 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 people that like your products that could also something, 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, people have ratings, right? It's like looking for a restaurant on Google Maps, right? You see the creators, you see how other people who gave them work before rated them, etc. Plus you can see things about them, their portfolio, blah, blah, blah. And then essentially we'll 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 add it in the best way possible. So that's 1, but don't also want to rant. There's the step 2 and whatever. But, is this so far?

Claus Lauter: I think it's very interesting to see the aspect of using creators and the difference to influencers. I think that's what a lot of people do have on their list. They throw them in the same bucket. But there's a distinctive difference in there. Now, once you get this content, , how do you use it in the best possible way to feed the monster?

For instance, Facebook ads, Google 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. 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. Not all of them.

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, 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 these. 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, 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 TikTok, Facebook, et cetera is an art in and of itself, but it's also not rocket science. A few important things. Well, anyone who runs ads knows this, but 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 keep that attention, which is very fleeting these days. And another thing that we like to do is, the first three seconds are key. So we're trying to come up with some really weird and,

the scroll stoppers, as weird as possible, as controversial as possible. Somehow those first three seconds, they need to stop your attention and get you to watch the rest of the video. It's not rocket science. And if you do this, right.

Wow. the results can 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, like back in the day, people would say, Oh, tick tock is just for the kids, right? Not exactly. So, of course, tick tock 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, 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 when we work on creatives for ads for them. we would create different videos, different types of videos for different age groups.

For example, for, older age group, we actually used some, older women, maybe 50, 60, the archetype of a grandma. We put like a younger kid inside of that and, 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 do that with 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: When it comes to the selection to the creators, there's different platforms where you can search on or even go on Upwork or Fiverr. 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 your strategic process even before you set out to do that. Once you identify who your target customer is, of course, you should know that if your store has any success, then 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 a, 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 that's pH neutral, super amazing product with like nice taste and whatnot.

Now, when the founders started with these, they thought that women will be buying these the most, right? So. First, we would market just 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 also the LGBT community, right?

So we 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 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, you could try to make them the brand voice or whatever. But you should keep trying to bring new ones because, 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 for years and years. So what you need to have is have many different winning ads so that you can scale those, 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 user rights, for that content. How's that? Build 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, and I should honestly know more of them because there's a bunch of competitors, but I don't know the ins and outs because our team is running that. But let's say b roll. io for an example. 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 clear. If you choose to work through Upwork or Fiverr or something else, you should probably create a contract, prior where they would give you the rights , to those assets, et cetera, et cetera.

So yes, you should definitely think about that. If you use the most popular platforms, they take care of that for you.

Claus Lauter: Give me a bit of an idea of how Hasler Marketing and your team help with setting a campaign up and about the timeline and everything that is involved with that.

Bostjan Belingar: First we would talk to the client, we would present them with this, I believe the two biggest, USP unique selling points are the fact that we find the right creators and then manage them. There's a lot of work, Hey, did you send these? Did you get the product? So finding and managing the creators and the creative brief.

I think those 2 the most difficult ones we spend hours and hours on those creative briefs. So we 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, interest is for 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, 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. , 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. 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, they didn't risk too much.

Besides, a few thousand dollars for like 30, 40, 50 ads, etc. 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 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 becoming hard 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 ad fatigue is in the game. This is why you have to always be looking for that next thing. There's different trends in Tik TOK, like the robot voice, right? In many cases, an ad. Doesn't perform, but then we do Robo 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 a hundred K a month I would say at least 40 different ads a month, if they're doing more than that, then even more on ads. Also, when we say different ads, there's a few definitions that are important.

You could have what we say is. Concept versus variation, right? So you could have 50 ads, but it could be, 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 if those first three seconds, so we call that hook, 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 works, they will see the rest of the ad.

Okay, this is our winning variation for the specific concept. So this is how, scale and test this.

Claus Lauter: it 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 in house capacity to do then outsourcing is the best way to go there.

And specifically coming up with hooks. I think when it comes to the creative department, you need somebody who's really on the day to day business. Involved with that to come up with the right ideas. Now, 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 to 300, 000 a month is better, a million is even better. So we're kind of trying to get into this whole, next level.

but it's difficult, 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. It's really, the competition is so rough and the worst part is

you never know if it's going to work or not, but that's the gamble that you have to be prepared to take. So it's definitely not easy.

Claus Lauter: Things have become much, much harder. Six, seven years ago, Facebook was a free for all. It was very easy to become successful, but it has become not only harder, but it has also become more professional. That's on the good side had sorted out the market for all 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 hustlermarketing. 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 can 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 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.

to, To those founders that are product developers, go for it. People need great stuff in their lives. So yeah. Good luck. Much.

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 I would recommend everyone who wants to have content created professionally to reach out to you and take it from there. Thanks so much.