Hi Benyamin, Mandi, and Len,

Or anyone else from the Podia team viewing this page! Thanks for checking out my application to the Senior Growth Marketer role.

Below you’ll find more in-depth answers to the application’s questions.

I’m currently at Meta, based out of Dublin, Ireland, but I’m searching for a new and more challenging growth opportunity in my marketing career. When I found this role at Podia, I immediately thought:

“Well this sounds exciting! It’s exactly what I’m looking for!”

Hence, the elaborate application.

I look forward to meeting you and the rest of the team so we can explore this opportunity further and share my ideas with you.

Please see my answers to the application questions below.

Thanks,
Omar Itani

Okay, now let's get into the good stuff: when you saw the job posting, what made you think “I’m the right person for this role?”

I’ll tell you, first, what I loved most while reading through the posting.

It was this line, “as a company, we value running towards the most important problems” followed by this: “If you’ve ever been frustrated by following the “playbook” or trying to hit …questionable… KPIs, you know how it feels to have your creativity limited.”

Before looking for a fit for the role, I find it’s absolutely essential that there’s a fit with the company culture and philosophy. I ask myself, ‘am I the right person to join this small and nimble team who’s working hard to build something big?’ Do we share the same values, ethics, and vision of what we’re trying to create.

And the answer, as perhaps I’ve hinted above, is yes—there is a fit. I also believe time is of essence, and the greater the problem we tackle, the greater the value we can create. Likewise, pushing the boundaries to solve such problems begins with first pushing the boundaries of our own creativity.

So in addition to that, why am I the right person for this role?

Three reasons:

  1. I too am a creator, so I empathise with the user. I understand the importance of building lean systems for business growth (email automation, content creation, SEO optimisation, landing page optimisation, free downloads to capture leads, copywriting, etc…) and the struggles it takes to assemble that system and maintain it. For two years, I published articles behind paywalls (Medium.com) after which I began to regularly publish essays on my own site. Since then, my SEO traffic has grown to over 30,000 users per month and 7,000+ subscribers to my newsletter. As I learn and practice the skill of writing, soon I will be teaching it with a course built specifically to address my audience’s needs.

  2. The “creator economy” is such an exciting space to be in and I believe in your vision. The creator economy boasts around 50 million creators, 90% of which are still amateurs and are only getting started on that journey. The trajectory, the challenges, but also the opportunity to create the best-in-class one-stop-shop within that space is what makes it all so exciting. You’re helping creative entrepreneurs make a living doing what they love. This is a mission I stand behind and fully support.

  3. I’m a general marketer and storyteller with a hybrid of professional and entrepreneurial experiences that have helped me hone a powerful skillset.

Here are some of the skills I can bring to this role:

  • Digital marketing and partner management. My experiences in digital marketing at both, Google and Meta, have allowed me to evolve and refine my skills in working through the customer journey to build and test A/B digital strategies that drive reach, awareness, and conversion. Along the way, I’ve partnered with a range of small start-ups, large e-commerce retailers, and Fortune 500 companies to build these strategies.

  • Copywriting and email marketing automation. I built my own direct-to-consumer lifestyle brand and managed the entire marketing mix. For two years, I wrote the copy on the entire site and built the necessary email automation sequences to drive cross-sells and upsells, increase retention (for dormant customers), and boost re-marketing (for customers who engaged but did not convert).

  • Content marketing and storytelling. I’ve written over 100 research-based articles on philosophy, psychology, and creative thinking. This has rewarded me with the craftsman’s mastery of seizing attention, and then slowly dispersing it. Within two years, my readership has organically grown to over 30,000 users who visit this blog every month and 7,000+ subscribers to my newsletter. 

  • Comfort and literacy with numbers. You need at least two data points to begin building an argument, and thus, a storyline. The way I see it? Data without a story is as fruitless as an ocean without water, but there would be no story to tell, or swim in, if it weren’t for the insights derived from data.

What I love most about your 4 marketing principles is this: “Get attention without fighting for attention.” This is the magic of storytelling, and at the core of marketing is this one principle: If you want to capture and convert attention, you must tell a compelling story.

You’re looking for a growth marketer who is curious to swim and dive deep into the channels to search for the hidden treasures—the opportunities that would help grow your business. What does that take? To borrow the words of Benyamin Elias: “It takes strong marketing knowledge, but also skills like copywriting, SEO, data analysis, marketing automation, A/B testing, psychology, customer research, and distribution.”

So here I am, a creative writer and an experienced marketer who’s passionate about helping you grow your business and become the best-in-class one-stop-shop for creative entrepreneurs. How? By clarifying your message to your audiences while crafting the right stories to deliver that message effectively.

What’s an example of a marketing campaign run by someone else (not you or your companies) that impressed you, and what was impressive about it?

Typeform.

They had a flagship, 6-second bumper ad that said something along these lines: “Boring surveys like this, get responses like that.” The ad showed your typical Google Survey or basic MailChimp form and as the narrator said “responses like that,” you saw gibberish being typed up: “jakbfisdgbsdlkgjsdlgbsdjgksbfjsng.”

Which was brilliant.

The campaign was engaging and memorable, it spoke straight to me (as a business owner), and their message was well-received:

You deserve better responses, our product will help you get them.

What was so impressive about it?

Typeform was able to turn something boring into something fun. In a few words, they showed us the transformation they create: Turning surveys into extensions of real, engaging human conversations.

Imagine you have a freemium business that gets 100,000 visitors, 10,000 free signups, and 100 paying customers a month. Which portion of the customer journey would you focus on first? (We know it depends; we’re curious how you approach this type of situation).

“Podia has been growing organically for the last six years, and in June 2022 switched from a free trial to a freemium business model,” so let’s approach this question from Podia’s perspective.

And let’s first do some simple math:

  • 100,000 visitors to 10,000 free signups = 10% conversion rate.

  • 10,000 free signups to 100 paying customers = 1% conversion rate.

A 10% conversion rate from site visitors to signups is an excellent number to work with, but the same cannot be said of the 1% conversion rate from free signups to paying customers. This number is too low (especially if this business is relying on subscriptions as their single source of revenue).

This signals that free users are finding little reason to upgrade, which can be due to various reasons:

  1. We might be offering too many valuable features for free, so users aren’t seeing the value in our premium features. Likewise, this might be a communication issue; users aren’t clearly grasping the benefits they would gain by upgrading. We aren’t demonstrating to them how an upgrade could solve their current roadblocks or further drive the growth of their business. In other words, we aren’t speaking of the transformation our premium features will help them create for their business.

  2. The price-point might be too high. In this case, we can further segment our offerings to add an extra package between the “free” service and the first paid option. This might incentivise more free users to become paid customers.

  3. It might be the case that we’re attracting the wrong users in the first place, users who might not be inclined to use more advanced features and thus pay for them. In this case, we need to review our acquisition strategy. Are we reaching the right target audience?

With such a low conversion rate, we’ll have to support a large user base with a little revenue—this is not sustainable. A freemium model only works when it’s met with a high volume of traffic and sign-up rate (which we have in this scenario) and a moderate “free-to-premium” conversion rate (which we don’t have in this scenario).

So, in this case, I would first focus on the bottom funnel of the customer journey: the path from free sign-ups to paying customers. And I would ask myself two questions:

  1. Why do we have such a low conversion rate? Is there any data we have that could tell us why?

  2. What would happen to our revenue if we increased this by 1% more, 2% more, or 3% more?

But for now, let’s work within the limitations of what we have.

Consider below the four scenarios and assume that we generate $30 per month for every paying customer.

Created by author.

  • Scenario 1: As is now, we’re making $3,000 monthly revenue.

  • Scenario 2: Increase traffic by 100% but maintain our current conversion rates across the funnel. We’d generate a total of $6,000 in monthly revenue and thus a 100% growth rate in revenue.

  • Scenario 3: Maintain our current traffic and sign-up conversion rate, but increase our customer conversion rate by 2% (moving it from 1% to 3%). We’d generate a total of $9,000 in monthly revenue and thus witness a 200% growth rate in revenue.

  • Scenario 4 is for illustration purposes only. It showcases the impact we can have if we double down across the funnel, driving more traffic while also increasing customer conversion rates.

From a revenue perspective (and excluding scenario 4), scenario 3 wins.

Consider as well the cost implications of doubling our monthly traffic (increasing digital advertising budget, increasing our cost per acquisition) and the idea of focusing on driving higher conversion rates for our customer acquisition becomes a more fruitful problem to tackle.

What’s a project or result that you achieved in a previous role that you’re particularly excited to share? Tell us the story.

Between my experiences at Google and Meta, I launched my own e-commerce brand and had to wear the many hats of a first-time entrepreneur: Founder, growth marketer, merchandiser, and most importantly, a student.

Lovers of The Sea was born as a bootstrapped business that sold everyday plastic-free products.

I developed the brand identity, wrote the copy, built the full marketing mix, created the email automation sequences along with the communication strategy of owned and paid media. I managed the digital ads and leveraged purchase analytics to find product combinations that sold well together.

Products were initially sold in the USA and Canada, but a few months after the launch, the data proved it was not profitable to sell to the US market and so I focused solely on the highest-order-volume cities in Canada.

While I made a series of mistakes and burned through cash, thanks to the key lessons below, I was able to scale the business to 400+ customers and $30,000+ in sales within one year.

The lessons:

  1. Having an audience before you launch a product can help you validate the demand for said product.

  2. Your single objective in the beginning should be to streamline your process, your packaging, and your marketing costs. Figure out who your audience is and where they are. It is these factors that will help you achieve scale.

  3. Increasing conversions is not the goal, that’s the outcome. The goal is three-fold. (1) Grow your mailing list to increase the rate of returning customers; I found that mailing lists offer the highest open and click-through rates—our open rates reached 23% with a CTR of 5–7%—and mailing lists also offer the highest conversion rates. (2) Increase your average order values; the best strategy I found was to offer pre-checkout product upsells and one-click post-purchase product upsells. (3) Drive organic traffic by getting featured in news outlets or media publications, working with influencers in your sector, and building a content strategy through an SEO-optimised blog (I didn’t work on this last piece).

While it was a humble business with an even more humbling learning experience, I’m very proud of this achievement. It stands as a testament to what I value most in my working life: Taking on projects that challenge you to keep learning and growing, by solving problems you hadn’t tried to solve before.

In January 2021, the project came to a close.

Other than AI, what do you feel is the most important real-world trend affecting software marketing right now?

Short-from video content, community, and personalisation (which is technically AI-powered).

People internalise the advice they receive from figures they admire and trust. People listen intently to the ones they look up to–those whose success they wish to emulate. And so now, for every possible distribution channel (podcast, newsletter, social, YouTube, etc.), there are well-established creators who have authority in that channel.

Creators have evolved into brands just as how businesses have been brands ever since their conception. And what do all these brands have in common?

They hold attention.

And how did they get that attention?

Through content and community.

There’s one questions that every brand (whether creator or business) must ask today: “How will we capture attention?” And the answer will need to encompass at least one of these three components: content, community, and personalisation.

Creating engaging and informative short-form video content, building an authentic and inspiring community, and driving personalisation to improve user experience (through AI tools) are the three trends that marketers can leverage to capture more attention for their products.

 
 

A Portfolio of My Best Work—Writing

Since 2020, I’ve been consistently publishing articles on this website and other online publications such as Medium, Thrive Global, and Thought Catalogue.

My readership has grown over the passage of time. Currently, over 30,000 users visit my site every month and 7,000+ readers are subscribed to The Optimist, my biweekly newsletter.

Pages that rank 1st 0r 2nd on Google Search:

Other pages that rank on Google’s 1st page for the following keywords:

  • “Life lessons”

  • “Stop overthinking”

  • “Life design”

  • “Amor Fati”

  • “Mindfulness and regret”

Here’s how my site’s organic Google Search traffic has grown over the last two years:

And on Medium, my work reaches about 55,000 people per month:

Reach broken down per article:

Looking for samples of my work?

Here are some of my top-performing articles per category.

Personal Growth:

Entrepreneurship:

Creative Thinking:

For more, please check out this page.

A Portfolio of My Best Work—Brand Building

Lovers of The Sea was a brand inspired by the sea and it was born out of my love for the sea. The journey began in April 2019 as a movement to curb plastic pollution and inspire sustainable living.

My message was simple: Reducing your plastic footprint implies riding yourself of needless plastic, needless waste, unhealthy habits and living a more conscious life–one as natural as the sea. 

I developed the brand identity, brand positioning, marketing mix, and the copy and communication strategy. After 18 months, I closed the project and decided to move into a different direction.