How to turn a small-budget contest into 130 pieces of UGC content with Benyamin Elias

Episode Summary

Marketing offers plenty of room for creativity and innovation. It’s a perfect opportunity to expand your brand’s visibility and develop customer loyalty. But if you want to make the most out of a marketing campaign, you need to keep the bigger picture in mind.

In this episode of the Content Logistics podcast, host Camille Trent welcomes Benyamin Elias, the Director of Growth Marketing at Podia. They talk about Podia’s latest creator fellowship campaign, the benefits of running such a buzz-worthy program, and how to generate original content from marketing campaigns.

Guest Profile

Key Insights

Marketing works best when all the pieces are pulling in the same direction. The best way to get the most out of your marketing campaigns is to encourage team collaboration. Benyamin explains, "When I made the jump over to Podia and the transition to growth marketing in general, it was to focus on how we can create things that are bigger than the sum of their parts. We can make search-optimized content in the corner over here or be a media company or some other form of content-first or content-specific marketing [company]. But how is that interacting with our paid [marketing]? How is that interacting with our life cycle, our affiliates, our partnerships, and everything else that's going on? Those teams where people or programs are running separately from each other — none of them is really going to be successful in the way that they could be or in a lot of businesses that you need them to be."
In marketing, the story never ends. An ongoing marketing campaign can be more effective than a typical short-term one. Benyamin shares an interesting example. "A point that he makes in this book is that the news never tells the end of a story. There is no end of a story in the news; there is only the middle of a story. They tell every development as it's happening, and that makes it much easier to get people to pay attention to it. Even when a story extensively ends, they talk about the implications of the end of it or what it means for the people. Time keeps going on. It's, 'The story never ends.' And we can take that same principle and apply it to our marketing. We have an ongoing campaign."
Keep the bigger picture in mind. Sometimes you should put things aside for the sake of the bigger picture. Benyamin explains, "What is really important with that is that the big thing is the thing. It's not, 'I'm doing all my other stuff, and this big thing is happening.' It's not, 'This big thing is happening, but I'm just going to do this other thing.' None of that. The big thing is the big thing. [...] If you find an opportunity that really works with your big thing, go for it, and for everything that's not the big thing, you say, 'Maybe later.' We're not doing that right now. We're focusing on making this major investment of time and usually money."

Episode Highlights

If You Want To Make a Good Program, Start by Making a Compelling Offer

“What makes a good program is always the offer. The offer is the number one thing. You can do all sorts of hype, but if the offer is not something that people want, it’s just not going to get there; they’re just not going to do what you need them to. And money is something that most people want, so that is a pretty easy one.”

Generating Original Content From a Marketing Campaign

“The fellowship required that you be a Podia customer and that you be a member of the community. The community’s free to join if you’re a customer; it’s super easy to join, but we wanted to give people that extra incentive to get in. And we picked up another 500 community members over the course of this campaign, so we’re at around 2,300. People, when they applied to the fellowship, submitted a 25-minute application. We had 945 people apply, and they answered questions — How many years of experience do I have as a creator? What’s my monthly revenue? How many products do I have? What are the products like? What kind of products are they?”

Focus on the Potential for Success

“What mistakes do people make when they’re setting it up? Some of it is getting intense about measurement in advance, but people will say, ‘We need to hit this target.’ Well, you have no idea what the possible performance of this is. And you have to have a sense of how big this could be because you need to know if it’s going to be valuable or not. I said that earlier — anything we do needs to have the potential to be a runaway success. Not all of them have to be runaway successes, but they all have to have that opportunity.”