- Duration: 41 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KESZNN8J3M967BAKNZPW7BNE (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01KESZNN8J3M967BAKNZPW7BNE)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: sitting on the floor and sleeping on an air mattress. [Jaclyn Yost]: We’re making progress over here. [Michael Houck]: It’s nice to have a bed. I can imagine. Where do you live? [Jaclyn Yost]: In Charleston. Where are you based? I am a digital nomad. Right now I’m in Tulum. [Jaclyn Yost]: like about a week, but I’ll be here for the next few weeks. [Michael Houck]: I love Tulum, I spent like two and a half months there a couple of years ago. [Jaclyn Yost]: Nice, yeah, it’s my first time, but it’s a good vibe and there’s a lot of other people working and whatnot around here, so seems like-minded. If you haven’t already, go check out the steak risotto at Rosa Negra. [Michael Houck]: Rosa Negra, okay, I will. [Jaclyn Yost]: I’ll let you know. How are you? I’m good. How are you doing? [Kelley Louise]: Doing well. [Michael Houck]: I was telling Jaclyn I finally have furniture in my new house, so I’m no longer sitting on the floor, which is nice. [Kelley Louise]: I built the house, not me personally, but I had it built. And there was a long period in which I actually took calls from my bathtub. I respect that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that sounds very familiar. I don’t have a bathtub, but I might have made use of it if I did. I was working off of my workout bench for a couple days, taking calls, sitting on there. That’s the only piece of furniture I had. [Kelley Louise]: I had literally nothing in here. And so it was like sit on a concrete floor or sit in the bathtub. So I chose the And you couldn’t tell, like, unless I, like, picked up my computer and, like, showed you, it just kind of looked like I was, like, sitting in a, like, large chair, but… [Michael Houck]: That’s commitment right there. Well, I’m glad we both have some furniture now. [Kelley Louise]: It’s up in the world. [Michael Houck]: Are we going to bring in Steve as well, or should we get started, or how do you want to do this? [Kelley Louise]: I just pinged him. [Kelley Louise]: He should be joining. Let me double check his calendar. [Kelley Louise]: Theoretically, he’s coming. [Michael Houck]: We can give him a minute here, then. [Michael Houck]: How was your New Year’s? It was nice. [Kelley Louise]: It was quiet. I’m upstate right now, and we just went to a house party. Which was good. It was like 20 or so 30 people, not like anything normal. I split my time between the city and upstate New York, but I wanted like a chiller holiday season. So what about you? That sounds really nice. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, same here, kind of I mean, not upstate, but Charleston is kind of a lower key city, so it was nice and and just spent it with some friends getting ready to move into this place. It was nice. It was a good time. [Kelley Louise]: I was in Charleston last year for a wedding. It’s a great city. Yeah, it’s good. [Michael Houck]: I came in April for a couple weeks to check it out because my buddy said it’s worth checking out. Then I came back in July for a couple months for a test and just So now I’m here. [Michael Houck]: Hey, y’all. [Steve Spurgat]: Sorry about that. What’s up, Steve? How you doing, man? [Michael Houck]: Pretty good. How you doing? [Steve Spurgat]: Good, good, good. [Michael Houck]: I’m ready to rock and roll for 2026 over here with my house, which is nice. [Michael Houck]: What’s that? You got a new house? [Michael Houck]: No furniture, but got a house. So we’re off and running. In LA? [Steve Spurgat]: No, Charleston. [Michael Houck]: No, Charleston. I think I knew that. Yes, I did know that. [Steve Spurgat]: Yes, cool. [Michael Houck]: That’s good talent. All right, well, let’s just jump in. So I think there were a couple threads going around. So let’s make sure we’re on the same page for this call. So the main priorities here are follow up on Path for Leads, LinkedIn specifically, and then Um, we can go over anything from the, uh, 2025 roundup slash 2026 goals that Ben shared, have a couple of things we can add on to that. Um, and then also at the end, if we have time, we can talk about blog stuff. Cause I think Andrew mentioned something to me. I know today we want to focus on their stuff, but I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page there. Uh, as well. What was your first thing about leads? [Steve Spurgat]: You mean like the Strategy around being lead focused? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, just like, making sure we have a plan to turn the content I’m putting out into a lead system for you guys. Obviously, that’s a priority. So we want to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to optimize for that, as well as just growth and impressions. [Kelley Louise]: I think just to jump in from my end, the biggest priority for me today, even if we spent the whole time on this, would be LinkedIn. That still feels very, very half-baked in its current form, and I just want to make sure that we have alignment and a game plan around that Strategy moving forward. The second thing in terms of priority would be just kind of more of like a touch base around Leeds generation. I know we made pivots to the Strategy with X kind of halfway through last year, and those are in motion. I’m concerned about LinkedIn. I’m less concerned about X, given the changes that we’ve made. So I prioritize them like that. And then from an editorial perspective, I’m not moving on that right now, just from client. I need to get a lot of stuff out of the backlog and published, because we have a lot of things drafted in its current form. So I’m not ready to add anything new to that just yet. I’ll be in a different place. Soon, but not today. OK, all that sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Let’s focus on LinkedIn and then we can touch on X and sort of how it relates to that as we go as we go forward. So, yeah, I guess I think I have some context, but if you want to share maybe full context and make sure Ben has everything to on our side, just tell me what you’re seeing. Tell me where the concerns are and we can make sure that either we are already addressing them and we can share that or we to make a plan to right now. [Kelley Louise]: So just to kind of tee everything up and to bring Jaclyn up to speed as well, because I know that you’re newer in this process. When we kicked off with Megaphone, it just naturally started as a bit more of an X first focus with LinkedIn supporting that. And I reacted to some of the content kind early on because while it was right and felt directionally approved for X, it felt a little bit off for LinkedIn. And we kind of tweaked that and scaled it so that it was like, we don’t need to put every X post up onto LinkedIn. Let’s make sure we’re just putting the most relevant ones. And as we kept going through it, it just felt like we really need two distinct strategies, one for X and one for LinkedIn. So X is what you kind of see like as up and running and then LinkedIn, the like Strategy so far in its current form is really more output. It’s like three to five posts per week that we’re kind of trying to hit. I don’t know that we’re successfully hitting, I think we’re hitting like one to two per week right now. So from like purely a output perspective and not a strategic perspective, I’d love to up that cadence a bit, but then from a strategic perspective, I had sent over a bunch of, like, case studies for inspiration and just other LinkedIn’s to look at. Michael’s taken a look at them. We jumped around in Slack a lot because it was, like, end of the year holiday chaos and then Michael was under the weather for a long time, so I know that you had to get back on your feet. Where we kind of landed with the LinkedIn, like, Strategy is having it be, like, predominantly focused on case studies. We also shifted it away like more like here’s case study content that we can pull from the website and repurpose it for LinkedIn, but let’s not drive to the case study page. Let’s drive direct to the contact us page and then making sure that the content from those case studies was very like image forward and very visually driven. And that, like, by the time you got to the CTA, it was more of just, like, here’s a natural way to reach out and touch base. There’s stuff that I think we need to do on our end, like the contact us form, like, header, basically. It’s ugly. Like, things like that should be fixed. So from, like, a design and dev standpoint, Michael and Ben, like, I’d love to hear from you all. I know, Michael, you had done a really great audit on the X account originally. So even just seeing like when we go to the contact us form page, like what’s missing from that, like that sort of intel would be great. So we can make sure that we’re not just like pouring marketing dollars top of funnel for what is perhaps a broken experience. And then thinking about the content itself, we’ve posted, I think Jaclyn, you can, keep me true to what I’m going to say now. I think it’s been like two posts this year for like case studies. One of them we did, just Michael and Ben for your radar, we did tweak the language after it went live because the call to action didn’t feel natural going into the contact us form page. So really just like making sure that we have this clear North star of like, not just here is how the post is formulated, but also here’s some guidelines and parameters that Andrew can follow to make sure that the CTA feels natural and like non-salesy and also relevant for the next step in the experience. That’s kind of like, again, that’s why I say it’s like half-baked. [Michael Houck]: There’s certain things that we have identified as areas to focus on, but I don’t think it’s been Tested widely yet, and I also don’t think that we fully operationalized what that workflow looks like So just just to summarize to make sure that I’m hearing everything So number one is let’s make sure the output is where we want it to be and I think Yeah, I mean Ben we can speak you can speak to a little bit more of this when we circle back around to it But just to summarize higher output make sure it’s where we want to be number two is maybe more in-depth conversation around Strategy beyond just saying we’re going to repurpose the case studies, right? I mean, we’ve had some slack combos and threads, but as you mentioned, it was sort of sporadic throughout the last month. So just making sure we’re on the same page about that, making sure we’re committing to the right images, the right visual content alongside these posts, and then kind of doing a little audit of the flow and the LinkedIn into the contact us page in general. I can do a loom of that tonight. That’s easy. I can send that over tonight. But also the making sure that the CTA text feels sort of more natural. Maybe on my side, giving Andrew some more guidance around how to make those feel organic rather than having them feel just like a little bit more salesy. Is that fair? [Kelley Louise]: I don’t think the first one was salesy. I think I just have a personal aversion to like constantly like sell, sell, sell. It should be more like, and Jaclyn, Can strategize with you on this as well. I think what What I like is when it feels like a natural flow where it’s kind of just like oh, of course That’s the natural next step. Of course, I would reach out. That’s what I’m looking for I think what happened the first time wasn’t that it was overly salesy It was that it felt disconnected I think the copy actually said like Read more about how research informs our work And then it went to the contact us form. [Michael Houck]: So it was a bad user experience Yeah, that’s that’s not great because that implies that the page they’re gonna click on is the case rather than yeah I would actually advocate for sort of what we are doing on the front end basically Which is let’s bring more that content from the case study Into social because if we don’t want people and we talked a little bit about this like a month or so ago We don’t want people to have to Read the post and maybe they’re already excited about you know Working with you guys are about what you could do for them. They’re they’re visualizing it in from seeing the case study post. We don’t want them to have to go to the blog and then Read the whole case study, right? And then decide again for a second. [Kelley Louise]: Removing that piece of friction. Yeah, exactly. And I think to that side as well, there’s a lot of great content on our website, but if there’s something where you’re like, these dimensions would be great to have, or like, this is a great case study, but can you make something like this? Like, that’s the sort of ideas that we can take make and pass to our design team and get those assets designed and make sure that we have like their really stellar buttoned up case study. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, Ben, as you’re as you’re going through this with Andrew, can you make sure that we fly things like this early so we’re not putting any like last minute asks on the on the design team? And if we see that a post is going to be about something, we don’t have a design asset that would maximize or also just would be formatted right for social. Let’s just adapt, let’s just ask the team to adapt what they have for that LinkedIn post, but just with the right dimensions and structures as ahead of that as we can get, rather than it being like a last minute thing. [Kelley Louise]: And on our side too, Jaclyn, like if you wanna let Megaphone know what’s coming on the pipeline for new content, then we can do that as well. I’ve shared some behind the scenes with Andrew as well where I’m like, here’s a Google doc, but it gives you like a general idea so you can start drafting it. But if we publish something and we can get it on LinkedIn or X same day, like even better. [Michael Houck]: And then as far as the output goes, I think Ben, you can speak to this a little bit, so I’ll tap you in here. But I think that we’re, I think that we’re moving a little bit faster now. To say or like, where are we at right now? [Kelley Louise]: Um, Jaclyn, you want or banner Jaclyn, I think Jaclyn from our side can speak to that. [Jaclyn Yost]: I just looked at the deck from last week. Or sorry, your content tracker, but we had three posts go out for LinkedIn so far this year. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so if we do three more this week, then we’ll be okay. Yeah, I mean, we should be doing three per week, I’d say. [Michael Houck]: Minimum, if we’re going to be pulling some from X but changing them, then we could have that be higher cadence. I also think that we just do need to be more consistent here to see the results that we want as well, right? So this is probably just on our side as well. We need to make sure that we are not just producing the content, but actually making sure that it gets approved and gets pushed out and things like that, because the account was dormant for a long time. Like you guys have a good follower base on LinkedIn. It’s just that it was dormant for so long. So we need to train the algorithm that it can trust that you guys are going to be putting out content regularly. You’re investing in the platform. And so therefore it’s going to show your posts to more people by default. Um, cause it’s not as sporadic. So the quicker we can get into that three plus per week cadence and have that be consistent. Um, I think we’ll, we’ll see that in like, you know, average impressions per post and things like that as well. You’re saying three plus. [Steve Spurgat]: Plus on LinkedIn, right? [Michael Houck]: Anything less than three. And you know, unless we have one go super viral or something, anything less than three, it’s gonna, um, it’s going to ding us a bit. What are we doing on Twitter? [Steve Spurgat]: I believe we’re doing five on Twitter. Five long, short form or long form or a combination of both long form. Mostly long form. [Michael Houck]: I would imagine that I know we want to treat LinkedIn differently. I would imagine there are some things from X that we can, you know, tweak the voice of, tweak the tone of maybe, but, but bring over to LinkedIn as well. Um, I wouldn’t want to do that for every post, but if we are, if we do just want to get velocity up, that could be a way to quickly bridge that gap since we do have a bit of a basic content to pull from, from Twitter. [Steve Spurgat]: Now we, um, are we, We’re not really showing in our stats what we’re getting from the creator network. [Michael Houck]: In terms of like additional boosted comments or things like that? [Steve Spurgat]: Yeah, like anything paid or boosted. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, Ben, maybe that’s something you can pull together for the team of just like aside from just the overall 2025 results, like, what did we do in the creator network? What did that yield? Who were the creators if we want to get that granular and like we can talk about alignment? Alignment, things like that. So maybe let’s put something supplemental together this week so that we can take a look at that. I’m just looking at the most recent weeks. [Steve Spurgat]: I mean, we’re just not doing anything in recent weeks? [Ben Ornstein]: As in posts being boosted on the network? [Ben Ornstein]: No, we have done that. [Ben Ornstein]: And so what I do, just for your knowledge, Dean, is on the social posts, I actually know which posts got boosted and my Was spent towards it. [Steve Spurgat]: I’m just looking at the on the social post tab. Where is that? [Ben Ornstein]: Within within the content performance tracker. Oh, there’s a performance report. [Steve Spurgat]: Okay Social posts got it. I was looking at the summary. [Michael Houck]: No, it’s a Met Megaphone boost column II great Yeah, so maybe Ben, let’s just put together a little summary and just drop it in Slack so everyone can, we can start a little comment thread on it and I’ll share some thoughts there. Yeah, absolutely. [Michael Houck]: I guess, Gaklin, as you’ve sort of gotten into this process and you’re working with Ben and Andrew on the operational side here, anything that we could be doing to make your life as easy as possible in terms of getting the content at the right times, getting it approved, anything like that? Like what can we be doing better there? [Jaclyn Yost]: I would say the only thing that comes to mind is getting through like the edits required column a little bit faster. There’s some posts that have been sitting there for a few weeks. And so I think like a lot of the LinkedIn posts or like that cadence has gone stalled because of that. So yeah, that’s really the only thing that comes to mind. But if anything else does, I can send you a message. Other than that, like knowing that the content’s coming on a Friday and that I’ll like have the time to review and then it can be scheduled out the next week. And just like understanding when I can review will be good. And yeah, I guess like this, the point of this conversation is kind of just coming more into alignment of like what type of content we want to be posting on LinkedIn and just being crystal clear across the board from both sides so that we can run it a little bit smoother. [Michael Houck]: I also saw a couple of those posts that have been lingering in there for a bit in the feedback column. So let’s push those through this week if we can, Ben, from our side. And then, yeah, I guess in terms of content formats for LinkedIn and topics, I mean, I think the case study is still strong. I think we’ll see results continue to increase there as we warm up the account more. But anything else, maybe Kelley, Jaclyn, or Steve, that’s on your guys’ mind that we want to emphasize LinkedIn specifically as well that we’re not right now? [Kelley Louise]: I think like 80% effort case studies. I recognize that those like we’re saying that we want them to be more visually forward. So there’s probably more coordination around those. And I also hear you on increasing the velocity. So LinkedIn just like recognizes us as an active account. There’s a couple of articles that are in the queue. I just flagged one to Jaclyn earlier that will be ready probably today that we could throw in. I’ll try to keep flagging those as we’re publishing them. And then I know we had talked about anything in real life. We don’t have a ton of that. Jaclyn, is there anything top of mind from - know you just overhauled the So we’re doing like more like director interviews and then transforming that into content. So I think one of those that she just worked on was five myths and realities, like what you think you know about marketing versus what the reality is. I could see stuff like that performing well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, stuff like that tends to perform well, especially I mean, there’s two ways to do it right. One way would be text based posts. Where we’re laying them all out, we have a strong hook at the top, and then we sort of have a CTA at the bottom, right? That’s like standard what you would expect. What we can also do, because you guys have such a strong design element to everything and strong brand identity, is we could decide, hey, let’s put the one-liner hook in text at the top, but then have the actual five takeaways be either in a single infographic or in a five-page carousel. And then maybe we have the CTA in the main post, maybe even in a comment. That we add on after the fact. Those are the things that can drive up view time and dwell time that can lead to some extra impressions getting on the post. So it’s more expert, but that can, sorry, go ahead, Steve. Did you say something? Oh, I heard a weird noise come through. I just make weird noises. What’s that? I just make weird noises. [Michael Houck]: Those can be the things, like maybe we experiment with some space and one or two that are more visual and just compare the results. I would imagine that the visual ones will do better, but the question is, do they do better enough to justify the extra effort that will be put into them on the design side? So that’d be my recommendation there is let’s try it out and see. [Kelley Louise]: With that specific one, we are working on it for Instagram. And so it’s easy for us to tweak the design to like a different If you want to let us know, Jaclyn, if you want to even take that, I know it’s a work in progress right now, but like take the concept and drop it in just so Michael can check it out. And we have not passed that to design yet, if I’m not mistaken. So Michael, if you want to just like, it’s like a Google doc with like myth reality, like list it out. If you want to look at it, if you want to look at it and let us know if anything comes to mind that you think would be a good fit for testing around it, we could do like Instagram and LinkedIn and everything in one post. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think the size, the image size will need to be a little different. I forget what the exact dimension difference is, but I can, we have that in our figma. So I’ll grab that and I’ll let you know. I’ll also take a look at the copy and see what I think for LinkedIn too. This is also an area where we can help contribute some of these types of like copy for these posts as well. So, I mean, Jaclyn, if you’re going to be using this on Instagram and on any other channels as well, like feel free to lean on Andrew, Blake, myself, in order to help ideate these types of things as well, because these have historically done very well on on X. And I think, you know, it’s not they’re new to other platforms, obviously, but I think on Instagram, particularly, I’ve seen a lot of a lot of folks start to do this stuff over the past year or so, whereas it’s sort of been like, de facto standard on Twitter for a long time. So we’re very well-versed in these types of things if that’s the direction we want to go. [Kelley Louise]: We’re playing around with it a lot. So I think, Jaclyn, if you even wanted to show the behind the scenes, even though it’s messy right now. And Michael, if you all have any ideas that come to mind, just feel free to chime in. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, happy to. That all sounds good. And then I’ll go through and I’ll do that loom video tonight. You guys will probably get that. Pretty late Eastern time tonight. So no no rush to take a look at it Maybe leave I’ll just record a little loom going through the funnel and going through it from LinkedIn and just Seeing if there’s any tweaks or recommendations I would make there because obviously at the end of the day we want this to generate impressions But more so we wanted to have people go through those CTAs and take calls with you guys and become clients So I want to make sure that that’s optimized to the highest degree that it can be one other idea that we had Ben and I were jamming a little bit before this call and We have, um, and Ben, I know you’ve been doing this a little bit already, both going through the accounts, followers and DMing people, um, and also DMing people who engage with our content and things like that. Um, which is good. We want to be doing that. We also have a friend of mine’s company, they’re called Cape. Um, and they help out with, uh, warm outreach for sales in particular. It works pretty well for like agencies and, um, and and those types of businesses, high ticket items, high ticket sales, basically where you need a warm intro. We use it, it’s worked for us multiple times, we got multiple clients from it. So we have started doing this with some of our other folks that we work with and setting it up for them and managing their inboxes for them. Basically the way it works is that if, let’s say we’re using my account, if I am connected to somebody is then connected to somebody who runs a business that I might want to work with, Kate integrates with LinkedIn in a very unique way, and can get that data, and then proactively send a fully drafted message to my mutual connection asking for an intro to that person. It’s very cool. It’s like network based sales, basically relationship based sales, but at scale. [Steve Spurgat]: Does it automate the send or to kind of draft and then you send. [Michael Houck]: You can say that either way, they can either draft and send for you or, or you can set an approval process. Personally, I do the approvals. But yeah, I would want to the same too, because you it doesn’t really know, like, sometimes you have like frenemies that you’re, you know, or like, there’s people who would be weird if you send them a LinkedIn message when you could just text them, you know, something like that. [Steve Spurgat]: Yeah, I can do this with the rust too. Because I keep talking Russell, I keep talking about how do we leverage his network better. And he’s like, yeah, this is I’ll look at that. What can you have a rough just like back of the envelope with a charge? [Michael Houck]: It’s a couple hundred a month. And then they do. They don’t know what the current pricing is. But it’s no more than a couple hundred a month. And they do, I think up to 10 per day, but you can add on like a base tier. And then you can do more than that if you if you want to. [Steve Spurgat]: And it’s not and Is there your friends? [Michael Houck]: So this is where it gets a little, uh, a little fun. They have a very unique integration. You could call it a hack with LinkedIn, uh, that they figured out it basically overrides the in-mail, uh, limit as well. So they can go cold if they want to, but it’s also warm. So you don’t hit that limit in most cases. [Steve Spurgat]: That’s already, there’s already, and Mel is only for non friends. So that’s the main hack that they introduce you maybe. I mean, we’re already doing, we’re starting an outbound now where, and I, we do this from, from somebody else’s account where it’ll find people, it’ll connect with them, put a potential leads, connect with them. And if they accept the connection, then we send them an automated message about working with them. Um, which also avoids end mill because they accept your connection. Um, so maybe this is what those people do too. [Michael Houck]: They’ve got a little, they’ve shown me some, some LinkedIn hacking stuff. They spent a lot of time on this. And it’s a pretty unique thing that they’ve got set up. But I’ll chat with them tonight as well, and then I’ll send over some. [Steve Spurgat]: Yeah, no, that’s great. I would totally play with that. It’s funny. I’ve thought about that, like, oh, I should just hang out and look at Friends of Friends. [Michael Houck]: Takes forever, right? So you might as well have a side. [Steve Spurgat]: These days with Clod and their Clod Chrome plug-in, you can probably just have Clod go through it. But this is better. A few hundred bucks a month, it’s worth it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s not some crazy story. It’s pretty affordable. They’re helping a lot of people do like fundraising right now too. That’s an interesting use case that they’ve- Oh, that’s fun. Okay, I’ll send that all over tonight. I’ll do the loom tonight. Anything that we have not covered, Kelley, Steve, Jaclyn, that we should before we hop off? [Steve Spurgat]: I don’t think so. Yes, thank you. Cool, thanks for the time, guys. We’ll get the- Oh, there’s one more thing. As we were talking, I did just happen to after you showed me the spreadsheet. Our boost budget you said was 500 to 700? [Steve Spurgat]: October it was 300. November it was 330. December it was 650. Six less than that, because I just added in. So yeah, if we could just use our total budget, that would be great. [Michael Houck]: If we’re light, we’ll make sure at you guys too, so. [Steve Spurgat]: Yeah, or just use it later. And yeah, you know, I don’t want to, I want to penny pinch. I just like, it’s one of the cooler features. So I want to make sure we’re using it. I think it’s one of the cooler features. I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Ben, can you, can you do a, um, a little audit there and just make sure that if, if we need to add more budget, um, onto the next, say like a couple of weeks worth of posts to catch up that we do that. Yeah, for sure. [Ben Ornstein]: For sure. [Michael Houck]: Thanks y’all. [Steve Spurgat]: Thanks guys. Talk to you soon.