- Duration: 23 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JTRTRPFWR5T3S272YJA8KCC8 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JTRTRPFWR5T3S272YJA8KCC8)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: you Ryan, how you doing, man? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good. [Ryan Carlin]: How are you? Good. [Ryan Carlin]: Good to meet. Yeah, likewise. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thanks for thanks for the time. [Ryan Carlin]: I appreciate it. No, of course. [Michael Houck]: Thanks for having some time. [Michael Houck]: So I took a look at Topanga. And obviously, first of all, I used to live right by Topanga. So it’s a yeah, I’m in LA too. [Ryan Carlin]: Are you you fled? You’re one of those that fled. [Michael Houck]: I’ve been gone. I got moved I moved up to San Francisco back, this is like 10 years ago, early Uber days as the business was growing. I moved up to SF, but in my heart, I still live in Santa Monica. [Ryan Carlin]: I’ve lived in Santa Monica for like five years. I have a condo there. It’s the best. It’s like, I mean, LA, I’m sure you’ve heard about it. It’s just turned into a bit of a shit show in the last couple of years, but it’s still good, I think. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, Santa Monica itself, I think, is kind of its own thing, which is nice. But yeah, a lot of my friends have also loved. But yeah, so love the name and love the mission, too. Super cool. Reusable packaging, obviously, is needed. And finding a way to bring it down and make it accessible and usable for folks, it’s important. So I love it. It’s great. [Ryan Carlin]: Yeah, thanks. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, I guess we’re about to learn more about sort of your goals around content specifically, and then I can share context and background sort of on what we do and our process and sort of how it would work. [Ryan Carlin]: Yeah, definitely. So I have been with Topanga a month and I’m more in like the fractional piece of it. So I’m coming in, so a little history on them. They’ve been around for three, four, five years, something like that. They had to pivot the product a couple of years ago and they moved in this reusable packaging Um, end of last year, they got their series a, and it was all through like outbound sales. It’s going to events, building lists. It’s, uh, you know, prospecting through outreach and LinkedIn touches and stuff like that through like a BD team into a sales team. Um, the founder, well, there’s three founders. The CEO is, has some experience in like, like top of funnel marketing, I guess. Like around brand awareness and stuff like that, brand marketing, but not, probably doesn’t have like the experience on demand gen. So I came in to fill that out. Really start to test out like, is demand gen something that like works for this? Like it’s almost a smaller group of people. Um, and so that’s, that’s kind of what I’m here. I’m like figuring out budget and figuring out, you know, where to like make bets and placements and stuff that. So we’re looking at like a decent budget, I would say. And then like, yeah, so like that, where the reason I reached out was because I followed you for a while newsletter and stuff like that. Thanks appreciate that. Which is awesome. I love it. And so we were in all like transparency we were and I’m coming in and there’s a bunch there’s just so much shit happening this company but I got into I got plugged into a meeting that they were taking with Vireo. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them. They’re an agency that does like social, kind of similar to what you do, but it’s more on like the video side and stuff like that. And I was looking at the price tag. I was like, this is for a company that like hasn’t tested this out really at all. It’s too expensive. And I think like Paige, the CEO and I are like, this is not what we’re looking to do right now. At least that’s my opinion. And so I was like, What is a better way to test this out? We understand LinkedIn video is really important, but is that the first way to see if this works? To really see if we can engage the right audience on LinkedIn? Does it have to be video? Because it’s such a big lift. And I said, I’ve followed Justin Welles for a long time, and I have his OS system, all that stuff. And I’m like, there’s definitely ways to do this that’s better. And so that’s what we’re exploring. Wearing right now. It’s like, how do we go out there and like create like some founder led, like marketing on specifically LinkedIn that like we believe in. And then along with that, there’s always like opportunities for like, you know, other things that come in, like, do we want to build our own newsletter and stuff like that? [Michael Houck]: You know, that’s cool. [Michael Houck]: So on LinkedIn, this would be for page specifically. [Ryan Carlin]: Um, and then I think we’ll test it out with her first, and then we’ll move to others if we need to, like Adam, her husband and co-founder. John does a lot of webinars and stuff too, so he’s probably more than happy to have this type of thing happen too, but it’s tested out probably one account at a time. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, makes sense. Okay, that sounds good. We work basically anywhere from seed series A It’s sort of our sweet spot for founders anyway. So it makes sense. Our process is pretty lightweight. We work with busy folks, and so we’re not trying to put a bunch of meetings on their calendar or anything like that. We can actually operate totally async if clients want us to. So most of them do because they’re super busy. So what we do is we’ll set up a Slack channel. We’ll do sort of one kickoff call at the beginning, which will be myself, the writer who’s going to be on the account, And then if you, obviously, I assume you would be on that call and then also page. And we would just go super deep on like, what is the voice? What is the sort of content pillars that we want to tackle? Who is this audience? What do they care about? How do we reach them? Where are they being reached today? Stuff like that. And we’ll build a sort of like internal content profile for the account. And then every week we’ll be sending ideas in like a shared Slack connect channel. And all we need in response to that is like, you know, anywhere from a three to five minute rambly voice note in Slack from page or from you, just sort of outlining the POV, the unique insights that we should incorporate into content about those topics. And if we get that, I say midweek, then there’ll be incorporated into the batch of content that we deliver on Friday. We’ll work to get a few weeks So we’re not scrambling from week to week or anything like that. And then everything can happen in the Slack channel unless otherwise preferred. So we’ll have a Notion hub set up where the content will live and you guys can review it. You can request edits and things like that. And I’d say there’s usually like a one-ish week ramp up time. We’re just doing research on the niche post kickoff call, but then it’s weekly from that point on. Cool. Yeah, it sounds good. [Ryan Carlin]: I actually told Jenny, who’s on our team, she’s a little bit more junior, to not join today. Or she was unavailable, I don’t remember. But I’d love to get, either way, I’d love to get her, I would love to get you in front of her as well, because she’s probably gonna be the one that, her and Kristen on the team are gonna be guiding. Some of this social stuff. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ryan Carlin]: And then page two at some point. Happy to either chat with them or just include them on the kickoff call. [Michael Houck]: And then just other context on our side. So our process internally, it’s myself and Blakey Mall, who sort of are like silent partner in the agency. He’s our editor in chief. No content that we send to you guys at the end of the week will be will not have gone through either him reviewing me reviewing it, or in many cases, both of us editing it. So that’s our internal process. And our writers are folks who, you know, it’s human written. We’re not using AI or anything like that. And these are folks who, between Blake and I, we’ve worked with for a long time. So they’re high quality folks. [Ryan Carlin]: Awesome. Do you guys have any case studies, examples that you can send over? [Michael Houck]: We try to keep everyone pretty anonymous, because nature goes I can send over some, like, general case studies without, like, people’s names attached, if that works? That’s fine. Okay, I’ll send something over, say, you know, before the weekend. Yeah, that’s perfect. Okay. And then, and you mentioned budget, and also, I just want to talk about video real quick. So, I would agree that we can probably test the audience and kind of probe and see what they’re responding to without needing to do video. That’d be more efficient. Or cost-effective that way. But when we do get to that point, we feel confident we understand how to talk to them on social and what attracts them. We can do video as well. We can wrap that up. We don’t post much about that, at least not so far. But we are doing it for some folks, and it’s going well. So we can keep you in the loop with how that goes, and we can do that when the time comes. And then pricing, yeah, I mean, it depends on the volume of posts that you will want. But we have options starting minimum 2k standard is 4k. It’ll range depending on what they what they want. Yeah, I think we’re looking. [Ryan Carlin]: It’s not as much budget. I don’t think it’s more of like, how long and how many posts I guess will it take to take us to prove it out? Yep. Yeah. That’s more, more what I’m looking for. [Michael Houck]: Okay. I mean, Maybe we start with a full account takeover where we go in, we optimize the profile, we would handle operations. So when people respond to our posts, we’ll have a guy logged into the account for our ops team who’s actually leaving replies, generating conversations in the comments, which tells the algorithm to push that post more, drives impressions. And they’ll also be doing proactive engagements. So we’ll identify a list of thought leaders in the niche who the audience that we want and they’ll be going in you know multiple times a week to leave comments on the viral posts from those people and then sort of getting free impressions on our profile on pages profile that way yeah and hopefully converting them to followers we also have the creator network through megaphone which you’ve probably seen if you’ve been reading the newsletter it’s you know we can share posts with creators who amplify it to their audiences and so some of that would be be included in that as well. [Ryan Carlin]: Okay, cool. Um, do you guys do like, dm dms also like more sales driven type stuff? We can do that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we have a couple of folks who are doing that for if we have like a specific goal in mind, and we work with you guys on sort of copy, we can we can take that on as well. [Ryan Carlin]: Yeah, I think like, definitely audience is important here. Of course, but I I think this place that Topanga is in right now, it’s very much like legion, but all the stuff like we are core, one of our core vertical is colleges and universities. And so all this stuff that’s going on with tariffs and this and all, you know, it’s affecting it. And so legion is important. And so if that can be like a part of it and whatever, and I’ll let, leave that up to you on like what you think is best, whether it’s like DME, like we have our sales team right now, like DMS, a lot of these people already. So there’s that like element of it, but I don’t know if there’s anything else that you suggest there. [Michael Houck]: We could, we could think about whether it makes sense for page to have sales navigator on her account and we do some things through that. But if we’re just also doing folks that she’s already connected to or who have public profiles, we’re happy to do DMS for them as well. And you know, we do this for, for my own account, we do this for other clients too. So we have some sort of like baseline sequences that we can run through, but it’s always better when we sort of get a little bit of input from you guys on what that should look like, [Ryan Carlin]: So we’d want to work together on that. [Ryan Carlin]: Yeah. Yeah. I think, um, yeah, the messaging will work through, um, I’m more thinking about like the strategy piece of it. Like, you know, um, are we putting out posts there that are specific, it’s like more value add type stuff where it’s like putting out this great stuff. Into the world or is it specifically Legion? And if it’s Legion, like there’s stuff that we can come up with. Like we’re putting out a white paper soon. We have like an ROI calculator. That’s like a really like interesting tool for this audience to use. Like, are those the types of things that we can use also? Yeah, those things are great. [Michael Houck]: Anything that we can sort of position as a lead magnet and use to collect emails, like, oh, you use the calculator use the ROI calculator for free, but then if you want your sort of like full report with all these different things that we’d be able to do, you have put in your email and you get that emailed to you or something like that. Like the more stuff we can do like that, just simple funnel design, the better, and we can advise on that for sure. Okay, cool. [Ryan Carlin]: That’d be great. Oh, cool. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so what I will do then as a next step, I’ll send over just sort of a summary of what we talked about as well as at least one, maybe a couple other little case studies that we have. And we can roll from there. And then I’ll send over options for sort of getting started. And you tell me which one you want to go with. And we’ll get that rolling ASAP. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Well, sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Cool. All right, man. Chat through now while we’re on the call? [Ryan Carlin]: No, I think my mind is always like pretty strategic, Jenny might have some questions that are more like tactical. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Cool, man. Great. Thank you. I appreciate it. Good to connect and we’ll chat more soon. Sounds good. Thanks. Bye.