How CIPIO.ai Helps Scaling UGC and Community Influence Marketing: Q/A with Co-Founder Growson Edwards

Website Planet had the chance to sit down and chat with the President and Co-Founder of CIPIO.ai, Growson Edwards.

Cipio is a tool that combines the power of brand communities and generative AI to scale visual UGC (User Generated Content), increase the ROI of paid ADs campaigns and increase the engagement of social media content.

Thanks to this unique approach called community influencer marketing, they have been able to drive growth for brands like JBL, Orange Theory Fitness, and Botanic Choice.

This interview goes deep into the benefits of community influencer marketing, and how Cipio helps streamline the development of community influencer marketing campaigns by leveraging the power of generative AI, machine learning, and 140+ million social profiles and consumer data

Let’s introduce CIPIO.ai to our audience. What is it and how does it work?

CIPIO.ai is solving the content problems many e-commerce and retail brand managers have with their Meta and other social media campaigns. Branded content no longer performs as well as user-generated content, so scaling UGC makes more sense, and that’s where we come in.

User-generated content (UGC) always boosts the performance of all digital marketing channels:

• Quadruple your ad click-throughs
• Boost consumer trust by 79%
• Drive 7X more engagement on social media
• Improve website conversions by 29%
• Increase email click-thru rates by 73%

But acquiring UGC can be a time consuming and costly process. You spend hours finding creators, contacting them for use of their content, obtaining the files, securing permission to use it and so on. We help brands scale the acquisition of UGC to provide higher-performing ad creative for social campaigns. The software and our optional managed services team turns that problem into a scalable, turnkey solution.

How does your mission differ from the other companies in your niche?

CIPIO.ai has two core philosophies that make us very different from other UGC and even influencer marketing platforms.

1. We believe that the best content creators a brand can work with are those already within your brand community. So instead of looking first at social media creators, CIPIO.ai maps your customers, social media followers, competitor and affinity brand followers, those talking about you or your category online, and starts there. This means the content you get in return for your UGC campaigns come from more authentic creators for your brand.

2. When you’re searching for content, you should start with the content. Other platforms have you enter a keyword or a topic, then you see a list of creators who may have mentioned that keyword or topic. With the industry’s only image-to-image and video-to-video search and discovery feature, CIPIO.ai allows you to upload a video or image you like, then instantly see videos or images that look just like that. We allow you to easily identify the content creators, pull them into your outreach list and get to the right kind of content faster.

What is community influencer marketing, and how does it differ from traditional influencer marketing?

Community Influence Marketing is our way of explaining that philosophical approach to start by mapping your own community – the creators who already know your brand – as the first step in finding UGC and influential creators to partner with.

Ideally, your brand’s marketing content comes from authentic customers and users who collaborate with you to help share their passion for your brand. You don’t build that by starting with big shot Instagrammers who may or may not know you. You start with the customers who are already using your product and encourage them to create content around it.

What are the major steps to plan and execute an effective community marketing campaign, and how does CIPIO.ai help with each of them?

The steps to run a community marketing campaign are fairly straightforward:

1. Map your community
2. Analyze them for either influence or quality of content, or both
3. Identify and prioritize the creators you wish to work with
4. Engage them with offers and opportunities to collaborate
5. Negotiate an agreement to deliver value to and from them
6. Manage a content collaboration to produce the required outcome
7. Handle compensation (if needed) for said collaboration
8. Measure the effectiveness of the collaboration

CIPIO.ai’s SaaS platform is custom built to handle each of these steps in a seamless workflow that can be managed by an internal team within the brand, or certainly through our managed services team who can handle all the day-to-day campaign operations while you review creators and content for approvals.

All of the specific nuances of campaign management have been accounted for in our platform including templated agreements, e-sign functionality to speed up the negotiation process, in-platform content review and approval, and easy project management features which can be customized to each brand’s specific workflow steps.

Can you share one success story from your customers? What results did they achieve thanks to doing community influencer marketing with CIPIO.ai?

One of our favorite examples is FITNESS SF, a regional chain of fitness centers in the San Francisco Bay area. They wanted to engage their members to create authentic content about their experiences with the brand and share those on social media to increase awareness, engagement and drive new memberships. The content would then fill the coffers of the brand’s advertising and social media content, saving costs of creating original images and videos for campaigns.

Since launching its community influence and UGC efforts, FITNESS SF has inspired members to post inspirational and instructional workout content and Instagram and TikTok to the tune of 35 new pieces of content per month. And its members were inspired! Two videos eclipsed the 1 million view mark, “going viral” as part of the campaign.

CIPIO.ai’s UGC solution was so right for what the brand needed, its social media manager actually declared content to no longer be a problem for the company.

What do you see in the future of your community marketing, and how do you plan to cope?

The world of content marketing, which encompasses influencers, advertising creative, and beyond, is constantly changing. Brands are asking for less influencer content today and more user-generated content because it performs better in social ad campaigns. But there will always be a healthy mix of UGC, influencer and brand content at play.

Our future is focused on applying artificial intelligence solutions, particularly generative AI solutions, to help brands take one piece of content and repurpose it in hundreds of ways to further defeat the issue of not enough content, and not enough content that performs. We won’t divert our attention away from solving the community influence and UGC needs our clients have now, but we are busy anticipating the issues they’ll have in the future, too.