- Duration: 41 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JPQVXWX709S34M1AYEABA2MT (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JPQVXWX709S34M1AYEABA2MT)
Transcript
[Samantha Gamboa]: I’ll give everyone a couple of minutes to trickle in. Hi, Parker. Hi, Cass. Hi there. How’s it going? [Casimir Stone]: Doing well. How are you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Not bad. Not bad. [Samantha Gamboa]: Just struck it through the week. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes. [Samantha Gamboa]: Well, halfway right. Hi, Ty. I believe Ty is in transit today, so I think he’s more of a observer than participant. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All good. [Samantha Gamboa]: Hi, Anthony. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hello. [Samantha Gamboa]: Sorry about that. [Anthony Kelker]: I was on mute. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Everybody? How’s it going? Hello. [Samantha Gamboa]: Looks like we may be waiting for one more, for sure, maybe two more. [Samantha Gamboa]: Where’s everyone at today? James and I are in Austin. [Kali Mackay]: Home office right outside Philadelphia. Okay. [Parker Milner]: I’m in Washington, D.C. Very nice. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Near Shreveport, Louisiana. [Casimir Stone]: Kansas City. Kansas City. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Where’d you say, Michael? Nashville today. [Samantha Gamboa]: Nashville, okay. That’s way less exciting than last time when you were in Argentina. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ve been all over the place. I was in Dallas last week. [Samantha Gamboa]: Okay. All righty. Okay. Um, if Brooks hops on, we’ll get started. It doesn’t look like Daniel might be coming. Otherwise we think we’re good. [Ty Aravazhi]: Brooks actually had to bop out at the last minute, um, little emergency thing that came up. So it’ll, I think it’ll be cast myself. Parker, uh, yeah, three of us are here. Perfect. Alrighty. [Samantha Gamboa]: Well, let’s go ahead and jump in then. Um, I think I’ve met most of you, maybe Cass, we haven’t talked yet, but I’m Samantha. I’m with Sengfreud helping streamline all of the different marketing vendors for Augment. We’re in the same office. I’m always going to chat with Noel anyways. Um, I’ll toss to you Jameson. [Jameson Pitts]: We’ve been brought on to organize all of us, this team, together for Augment. I’m in this fractional role of head of marketing for Augment, supported by Sammy, and excited to get us all together and run this a little bit more like a traditional marketing team, get lots of little things off of Noel’s plate and charge at our big North Star goals. Good to meet you guys. [Samantha Gamboa]: And Kali, if you don’t mind going next. Absolutely not. [Kali Mackay]: So yeah, I’m Kali Mackay, and I’m the organic search account manager here on the PowerDigital side. And I’ve been working here for a little while now behind the scenes. And with me on my team is Anthony Kelker. And not here is Daniel Safuentes as well. He works a lot with me day to day, kind of boots on the ground, or our strategy. And I already mentioned I’m kind of on the East Coast here. So now I’ll let Popcorn over to Anthony and let him talk a little bit about himself. [Anthony Kelker]: Excuse me. Hey, everybody. I’m Account Director over here at Power Digital. So I’ve been with Power for about a year and a half, but I’ve been an SEO for probably 15 years. So just working with Kali and the team to ensure that our content strategy, our marketing strategy, everything’s on point and working toward the open performance goals. So nice to meet everybody and looking forward to working with you guys. [Samantha Gamboa]: If I can toss it to the Money Marketers team, whoever wants to start. [Casimir Stone]: Yeah, I’ll jump in. Kaz here, Casimir, the creative director over at Money Marketers. We’ve also got Ty, our account director, and Parker, one of our top writers editors, and we have a few other writers on the project as well. Yeah, we do kind of a lot of these blog newsletter content things for different financial groups. Augment’s been a great project so far. I’ve been handling blogs, LinkedIn posts, and yeah, very excited to get on the same page with all you all about it, so. [Samantha Gamboa]: Ty or Parker, anything to add? [Parker Milner]: No, that about sums it up. Yeah, I’m Parker. I do a number of different writing and editing roles, like Cass said, money marketers and have a journalism background. But I really enjoyed working on this project so far, like Kat said. [Samantha Gamboa]: Awesome. Thank you. And then that leaves us with Michael. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: What’s up, everyone? Michael Houck, founder of Megaphone, founder of a couple other companies as well. I’m a founder, I’m a creator, been building audiences for years at this point. We’re working on Knowles social media right now and looking to help out in way that we can across Augment’s assets. Thank you, I appreciate it. [Samantha Gamboa]: A couple of others that aren’t on this call, but you may see them floating around in the content channel, so I just wanted to run through them. David McCourney, he is our designer. He is kind of running things on the brand side for us, helping us put together the visual side of that. I think PDM probably has interacted with him already the most. He’s doing all of the implementation on the back end of the website. We have Adam He used to work at Augment, but has since taken another role, but he still does the newsletter for Augment, The Pulse. So you’ll hear us talking about getting things included in The Pulse that goes out every day on Thursdays. We have Sakura, who we partner with for the Power 20 research tools. We also partner with them on the live streams. So that is John, Eric, and Walter, and they are a research institution that helps us put out content as well. We have been putting ads out through them as well. And investing channels also platform even putting ads out. We have some contracts with them for several more pieces. So you might hear stuff regarding the rest of those people as well. So I wanted to go through that. Really the reason to have this call is we have a lot of different vendors and we’re all working in slightly different ways. And it’s been leading to just a lot of balls in the air. Knowles saying like, Oh, where’s this? About how are different things going on. We want to take as much stuff off of NOLS as possible. We want to streamline a process from writing content all the way to publication and really get a cohesive tone across the board and just streamline that whole process. Jameson, as the marketing director, met with NOLS and put together a marketing plan for the year of 2025 that I’ll go through and share with you guys. You should also have access to open the swelling your end. But I’ll go ahead and screen share. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Jameson? [Jameson Pitts]: I can screen share if you want, because I’m going to blow through it really fast. It might be easy if I do the slides instead of kick. Next slide, please. OK, so there’s nothing in here that’s a surprise. But I actually think the formality of this is valuable. This is the first time my role has existed in the organization. So bring a little rigor to it. I think the most important outcome of getting this working group together is moving from individual teams working on channels to turning one business strategy and business goals into one content strategy, which we then express across all of these channels that were able to influence. So I’ll just cover a couple of things in here. Some of it will be very obvious. In addition to that strategy planning cohesion opportunity, I also think a reality for Augment to hit its growth goals is we just have to do a whole lot more everywhere on every channel. And I’m working on that. I know that that would be like an exercise of budget and resources and that type of thing there. But I think that’s another part of it. Let’s see. So quick recap here. We just went through, but this is the way I see the marketing organization coming together. And we’re here to add a planning function at this level that we haven’t really had or has happened of a piecemeal in Slack. One thing I want to touch on here on the process, two things I want to touch on the process. One is more of an emphasis on every channel hitting its benchmarks in a way that ladders up into a logical North Star goal for the whole organization. And then breaking that down into monthly content plans, which we then coordinate on across this group here and hit week to week. And this is where we’ve sort of been living, I think. And so I just want to kind of lever us up to this, where we are, as an example, we’re choosing blog topics based on an SEO theory has a chance at driving us enough traffic and has a chance for enough investments for us to hit our revenue number at the end of the year, right? And then executing that concept and then reviewing those results and repeating from there. One other process note, I think this will be a review for most of us. This is the PowerDigital team is learning some of our compliance intricacies here, but I kind of want to standardize our compliance process so that it’s clear when a piece of content has marketing approval, which will, for the most part, be myself and will sometimes be Noel and Gino in specific cases. I think that’s running pretty well. But this is where we’ve kind of been tripped up to date then there has historically been a little bit of a cook’s in the kitchen problem, making sure we can just very quickly go from, let’s say, a keyword strategy into a topic, into writing the content, into getting the content approved by a subject expert at Augment, getting a compliance approved, and getting it posted on time. This is something that we need to be experts on. The competition is doing great. We just need to be able to do it at a good clip. So basic process will be planning the content in advance in one calendar, those topics being based on an overall strategy, that content getting marketing approved like it has been, the owner of that channel taking that through Hatreus and getting it compliance approved, and then the same owner of that channel, making sure that that content gets scheduled in whatever end platform it will be scheduled in. And that’ll be a mix of people, right? So if it’s like a media buy, that’s Sam, he’s doing the compliance approval and making sure that media gets placed. If it’s social, there’s already a rich process for tracking that and making sure that those, that is scheduled out on LinkedIn, whatever it is. The blog, I think is like an area where we can discuss, tighten this up and make sure we have a clean path from compliance approved And then who schedules it? Does David decide? We work that out and make sure that we have it going out at a cadence that makes sense. This stuff is all pretty obvious to you all. I just want to emphasize a focus on instrumentation and attribution, so historically, Augment has tracked user signups with a pretty basic referral code format. We have implemented segment and amplitude to lever this all the way up to just a classic first touch attribution system. So if we are generating new traffic, we will capture that anonymously. And then if we’re able to engage that person later, are deeper down the funnel and identify themselves, we can take that back to the original source of traffic. So this is stuff that we are talking about in these calls, reporting on each month as we try to drive more inbound signups. And the last thing I’m going to show here is this is my best current vision of the augment flywheel and how these pieces come together, kind of like a basic attention, storytelling, conversion model here. So I think historically, Augment has done a good job at leveraging all these channels. I think they have sometimes been guilty of being short-sighted about the effort and relationship relationship required to turn marketing content into users that convert and invest $10,000 to $100,000 into a private company, right? And so I just want to get us thinking with a flywheel mindset that we are going to capture people at this outside ring, and then continue to market to them, draw them in, market to our existing users or existing investors, people on the platform, everything like that, all the way in. And our core tools are these services that we’ve talked about today, right? So Michael with better content. There’s some new ideas in here, right? How we can bulk up memes, the social channels, media buys, some of these core services in the middle. So the manual, the new one, we’re very excited, right? We’re going to keep building that out. Blogs, live streams, events, and then pushing them all the way through. And then importantly, I want to make sure that we are leveraging these assets across channels. So a significant amount of effort goes into a live stream with Sakura. Sakura is a great research firm. We have this partnership with them to prepare this research for us, to host these events. And that is an example of something that if we are coordinating in a group like this, is easily fodder for all kinds of social content, a blog recap, any type of explainers, email content. So that’s one thing that we can leverage throughout the flywheel there. So let’s see. Anything else in here that I want to talk about? I think it’s useful if you guys see these numbers for a second. Second. I just want to give like an example of kind of the stakes and the urgency here. So a little thought experiment might be like, let’s say this team’s goal is a million dollars of revenue this year, right? We know that a retail investor’s annual revenue to is a couple grand, right? So that would mean we need 500 people to sign up and invest. That means we need 5,000 people to sign up since we have kind of free accounts that don’t convert, right? And then what percentage of people are gonna actually even make an Augment account? Maybe it’s only five, which means we need 100,000 people right at the outer ring of this five which is something like three times what we’re doing right now, right? So, and that’s just a million dollars of revenue, right? So, this is why we want to kind of get this rigor and cadence and everything flowing here so we can get these numbers. All right, Sammy, anything in here that you wanted me to cover that I didn’t cover in my lightning round marketing plan? [Samantha Gamboa]: If you might want to go back one slide, I think that’s beneficial. To the kind of rough goals. Yeah, the production benchmark. So I think we’re mostly hitting these. I think some of the SEOs where I really want to focus on today, just process wise, especially because we have both the manual and the blog. Obviously social, we’re only doing one channel right now. We’re already in talks with you about that, Michael. Media buys, we’re actually pretty ahead of where we’re supposed to be on the one to two per quarter. We have both PirateWires and investing channel right now. Email, we always kind of interact with Valenta separately, but this is really what we’re hoping to get to. No one has much greater goals than this, but you know, I want to set realistic goals in the beginning and make sure that we’re achieving those before we start just putting pedal to the metal. But does anyone have any questions about this? Does this feel realistic to everyone? Everyone kind of knows what bucket they’re in obviously, but does this feel good for a starting point? That was everything I’d add, Jameson. [Jameson Pitts]: No, yeah, it sounds good. I will release it to you. Great. Okay. I’m gonna hit some of the points later on my agenda. [Samantha Gamboa]: So I’m gonna jump around on here. Kali, I’m not going to do the entire thing. But I am going to just briefly share the deck that you put together and shared with us yesterday. This is most important for the SCA. Team. So just to kind of understand the fun line and Jameson’s already talked about it. Power Digital is coming in. They are not really generating any content for us. They have a strategy for SEO. They have done analysis of the website. We’re already implementing all of those with David McCorney and they have identified keyword opportunities and just organic search strategy across the board. So what we really want to see is looking at the striking distance keywords and all the opportunities that they’ve highlighted and they’re going to come up with with some topic suggestions for us. That doesn’t mean that we don’t want money marketers coming up with those. And we’re always going to have ones tossed at us from Noel, as he does in the channel, just throwing out topics as they come. However, we want to make sure we’re looking at this very strategically. So they’ve done competitor research for us. They’ve generated a bunch of different buckets of keywords. Not all of these are loved by compliance. We might need to strike this slide entirely, Kali. [Jameson Pitts]: Would you mind lingering on the like how to invest? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Jameson Pitts]: Yeah. Okay. Just like, as an example, this is like, obviously going to be an important keyword for augment to turn content into conversions. And we’re getting smashed, right? Competition. So, you know, this is like, for the first time, like to the money marketer seem like we can offer some rigor and parameters around the topics and the content that we want to focus on. Of course, we just put up like, like the manual content that has all this kind of educational stuff about secondary markets just went off. So you’re not going to feel any of that. I can’t see any of that. We have to win these, right? Like, there’s no other way that will be, you know, a billion dollar secondary marketplace without winning how to invest in the, you know, the most popular private company to trade right now. So just set the stakes for a bit. And, and with, and then I, and Kali, right, we’re at a later date, you’re going to kind of help us convert this into specific topics, right? Yeah, absolutely. [Kali Mackay]: This was a real high level, but super competitive kind of look and just giving some of the biggest opportunities we found right off the bat. But yeah, absolutely. It’s going to feed our future work. So Kali, let’s kind of talk the best way to do this. [Samantha Gamboa]: You’re going to give us topics and you’ll put them in the content channel so you can collaborate with money marketers. I believe Ty or Parker’s the writer. Sorry. Also hop in here and money marketers kind of let me know who should Kali They get those topics too. Ty. Ty, okay. And then Ty writes those, sends them back to Kali. She’s going to kind of look, review that, give it the A-okay. Ty sends it to Hadrius. Ty, you’re in Hadrius, right? Yep. Perfect. The last piece here is a piece that we are still working on. Sometimes they’ve been going to David Pokorny. Pokorny’s also in Prague, sometimes like other places. He’s a little harder to pin down, but we forgive him because he’s a very talented developer. Um, I would really like to see that we get you access to web flow tie and you’re able to publish those. Is that something you’re practiced in? [Ty Aravazhi]: Uh, not practicing, but definitely something that I can do. Yeah. Perfect. [Samantha Gamboa]: And I can definitely help with you and walk you through that process and I can get on a call and we can just do a little slack cuddle. But that’s something we would love to see the person who creates content go all the way from origination to publication. Um, currently we’re missing a little bit of that. And so that’s something that I want to slap everything that we have approved up, get it out, and then just start this fresh. Kali, do you have an estimated date for topics for the next batch? [Kali Mackay]: We try to aim to get our next month’s topics out on the first week of that month. Sounds like we want to be a little bit more forward looking. So I think what we can do is try to get the following month’s batch of topics out on the last month of the last of the previous month, if that works. So either the last week of the previous month or that first week of the month, we’ll share our topics with you, Ty. And this will be in the format of, we will have our kind of main theme, our target keywords that we’re looking to include, and then a little bit of a brief synopsis. We’ll break it out into the different headers and things like that that we suggest, always trying to keep the keywords in there. Definitely not keyword stuffing. We know that you are the expert here and we leave that kind of creative license to you so we’re not going to tell you exactly what to write but just kind of tell you the things and the themes that we see you that we’d like for you to hit on. We’ll also have you know maybe a couple internal linking recommendations or if there’s a good aspirational piece of content that kind of spurred the idea we’ll be sure to include all that as well. [Jameson Pitts]: That’d be hugely helpful thanks. Absolutely yeah no problem. Sammy can I just hammer an example home real quick on like so like that’s to just like invest in Anthropic. So by having this team together meeting regularly, we just did this event with Sakura, diving into the ups and downs of Anthropic versus their competitors, etc, etc. I think with enough coordination and forward looking, we can pull this thing off, which is like, we have a business goal, triple the traffic, right? We have a business goal, do a million dollars in revenue. A marketing goal, triple the traffic. We have competitive SEO insight, which is Fortune and everyone are winning how to invest keywords. We have a strong partnership with a research firm to do really super solid content, right? Post this live stream about Anthropic, and then we can leverage that into this rudimentary example. Number up, right? We can turn that probably to a blog content, comparing those AI companies. One of the articles could be how to invest in Anthropic, or it could be more advanced than that. Similarly, the social company, we can do like whatever that, you know, social content, we can do videos, or memes, or null content, or anything about what the heck cloud is doing, and the AI, and this and that, and right, so you can pull that one thing off across, and then review. I’m like, did we move that keyword? Did people click on that content? Did people come to the webinar? Did any of those people, and eventually, did any of those people invest? Like, is this flywheel turning fast enough for it to work? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So, there you go. [Samantha Gamboa]: Jameson, looking at the process here, Kali, topic’s a tie, tie right sends back to PDM for review. They approve or say, let’s get some more keywords in X, Y, Z place, and that takes a turn. Then you review before it goes to Hadris. And in this case, for the most part, we’re really going to avoid trying to ping Gino and Noel unless needed. Do you have anything to add on that turn there, Jameson, your review, and then it goes to Hadrius, then the publication? [Jameson Pitts]: Yeah. So I’ll work it out with Gino. Gino would be the right one to review capital market-specific content. I don’t think how to invest in Anthropic is worth Gino’s time, right? Ty, it sounded like from Ditra that you’ve got a real rhythm in Hadrius with the compliance team, you’ve got that down, that it’s rare that it would have to be like, your content’s getting blown up by compliance and we have to start over. So I think that that’s kind of like the right thing there. But if it’s like a piece of manual content that’s about some specific capital markets topic, then I would go to Geno for review and same process that you’ve been running, yeah. [Samantha Gamboa]: Awesome. Any questions on that flow? Does everyone feel good about that? Perfect. That brings me to, I’m going to jump around here. We’re going to go to voice and tone next. Currently, we have kind of a little bit of segmentation going on amongst the team. It feels a little bit disjointed. We’re also missing a couple of channels, primarily social. The channel we do have is Knowles, and that’s kind of like a, how would you describe it, Michael? I’d say it’s like a, less formal, innovative, disruptive. I know you put together a little bit of a description. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so I think for tone, you sort of nailed it. Noel’s voice is authoritative, but he also doesn’t shy away from being super direct and controversial as needed as well. We want it to be super authentic and personal. I’d say I’d probably stop short of being fully like anti-establishment, but definitely challenges the status quo um while still sort of being uh being witty uh as well so um you know formats we’ve tested out a few different formats for the account um we see a sort of short paragraphs uh doing well um uh you know no has sort of his own preferences around formatting that we use that as we think about expanding into the company accounts might [Samantha Gamboa]: be different uh slightly different voice for the company account but that’s that’s we see on his side um I did get some feedback from noel on the long form content for the manual and blog. Overall, our goal is to make a more cohesive voice. What we’ve been seeing has been really good. He does think it’s a little too buttoned up and formal. He wants it to be a little more casual, but still continue to have that very educational, dense with information. I don’t think we want to be too similar to Noel’s voice and the fact that it is almost anti-establishment. So definitely a little softer around the edges there than Noel is, but if you know Noel at all, that just how he is normally. And augment shouldn’t take that tone specifically. And I’m curious, Michael, since you’ve been writing for Noel, and you’re hopefully going to be doing the other channels for the company, if you have some suggestions on tone and ways to make that a little softer and more casual, but yeah, I mean, we can put something together and I can share it with the group in the channel. [Michael Houck]: If that’s helpful, because I don’t I know everyone’s, you know, we’re at time, I don’t want to keep everyone over. But we put some thoughts together and share as well. Perfect. [Samantha Gamboa]: The last thing, and we are at time, I just want to share that we are using this content calendar here and there’s tracking status. You’ll notice there’s your bucket category and the channel it’s going on. The one thing I want to highlight, which hasn’t been happening every time, is after something’s published, if you can link to the specific post and then just bring it down here to the completed section, just cut it, paste it down. You’ll notice there’s the status of approved and then drop it down to posted when it’s there or scheduled if it’s something you can schedule. And I’ll have this in the channel as well. Otherwise, the last thing I want to highlight is kind of meeting frequency. I want to do this at least bi-weekly until we get a good cadence down. Is this time good for most everyone? Cool. I’ll put this for two weeks from now and we can work from there and we can get in the channel and collaborate. So we’re minute over. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out via Slack and we’ll really tighten this up. [Ty Aravazhi]: Thanks guys. Good to meet everybody. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thank you.