As Notion scaled its creator marketing, managing 60+ newsletter partnerships became inefficient, with challenges in tracking, creator discovery, and financial approvals for each collaboration. They needed a centralized, scalable solution to expand their creator marketing.
Passionfroot streamlined Notion's creator marketing with a centralized platform for creator discovery, management, and payments, reducing approval times and enabling faster campaign launches, scaling efforts seamlessly.
The Partner: Notion
Notion is a powerful all-in-one workspace used by individuals and teams for note-taking, project management, and collaboration. Their core users range from startups and enterprises to students and creators looking for a flexible productivity tool.
As a company, Notion has experienced rapid growth, with millions of active users and a strong global presence. One of the key shifts in their marketing strategy was investing heavily in creator marketing to engage their ideal customers - founders, startups, creative teams, remote workers and product teams.
The Challenge
Notion initially relied on VC and startup ecosystem partnerships to reach their target audience. As they grew, they explored paid marketing channels. Alessandro Puppo, Startup Program Manager, drove this shift, suggesting newsletters as a marketing experiment. What began as a personal interest became highly successful, leading to expanded efforts in newsletters focused on founders and investors.
As they ramped up their creator marketing efforts, Notion faced several key challenges:
- Scaling Chaos – Managing over 60 newsletter partnerships quickly became unsustainable. Tracking conversations, contracts, approvals, and payments across so many partners was inefficient and cumbersome.
- Finding the Right Creators – Identifying newsletters and influencers that truly aligned with their ideal customer profile (ICP) (founders & startups) required extensive research and communication to gather audience data.
- Managing Relationships at Scale – The sheer volume of email exchanges, approvals, and creative asset management created bottlenecks. They needed a centralized way to track and streamline creator partnerships.
- Approval Bottlenecks – Each creator collaboration required individual approvals from finance, which led to delays of 3-4 weeks before campaigns could begin. As they allocated 70% of their marketing budget to creators, this inefficiency was a significant roadblock.
- Expanding Beyond Newsletters – After seeing success with newsletters, they wanted to expand into Instagram influencers but needed a scalable way to find and manage them without repeating past inefficiencies.
The Passionfroot Solution
Passionfroot provided a seamless solution that allowed them to scale their creator marketing program with efficiency and ease.
Key benefits included:
- Discovering the Right Creators – Passionfroot’s platform gave them instant access to creator data, eliminating the need for time-consuming back-and-forth emails.
- Centralized Creator Management – Having a single platform to manage all partnerships helped them keep track of collaborations, assets, and approvals effortlessly.
- Wallet Payment System – Instead of dealing with finance approvals for each creator partnership, they could load a budget into Passionfroot’s wallet and allocate funds to creators instantly. This reduced the time to launch a creator collaboration from ~3-4 weeks to just ~5 days.
- Publishing & Managing Campaigns – The ability to publish campaign opportunities and have creators apply streamlined the workflow, making it easier to select the best partners.
- Scalability & Speed – Passionfroot enabled them to quickly select, onboard, and launch campaigns with multiple creators in just days.
Favorite Features: The Wallet and Live Campaigns
Alessandro has two favorite features that greatly enhance workflow efficiency. The wallet application allows them to allocate the entire creator marketing budget with a single finance approval, cutting down on the need for multiple payment approvals and speeding up campaign deployment.
His other favorite feature is the live campaigns feature, which allows brands to launch campaigns that creators can apply to. As Alessandro puts it, "It’s like publishing a job offer on LinkedIn. You get the visibility for something that interests creators, and you attract the right candidates aligned with your targets."
The Results
The collaboration with Passionfroot has led to measurable success for Notion’s creator marketing efforts:
- Conversion rates: Exceptional, with some campaigns reaching 15-20%.
- Total signups: 300% increase since implementation of creator marketing.
- Targeted reach: Improved significantly through better creator discovery.
- Workflow efficiency: 60% reduction in administrative overhead.
They measured their success through CPT (cost per trial) for every new startup, ensuring their creator partnerships delivered meaningful impact.
By leveraging Passionfroot’s platform, Notion has dramatically improved the efficiency, scalability, and ROI of their creator marketing initiatives.
Before & After Passionfroot
Notion’s creator marketing workflows have seen a dramatic transformation:
- Previously, managing creator partnerships required dozens of emails per collaboration, finance approvals for each payment, and weeks of back-and-forths.
- Now, they can launch partnerships in days, with a centralized system handling creator selection, management, and payments seamlessly.
- The time saved? Many, many hours—what once took weeks now takes just days.
Advice for Other Marketers
Alessandro’s key advice: “Run many small experiments with different creators, then double down on what works best for you!” By testing various creators and refining their approach, Notion successfully scaled creator marketing into a high-performing growth channel, with Passionfroot’s support.
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