← Bald Ambition
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- [00:00]
A
Hello and welcome to the Bald Ambition Podcast. I'm your very bald host, Mookie Spitz, and the one with all the ambition today with us is Mr. Jason Fishman. He is CEO and founder of DNA, the digital niche agency. He's got his own podcast, test, optimize
- [00:23]
B
and scale.
- [00:24]
A
And scale what we're all playing for. The scientific method brought to life for his listeners and viewers. Welcome aboard, Jason. Thanks for joining us.
- [00:35]
B
Thanks, Mookie. Bold ambition. Love it. Perhaps I'm here today with the bearded ambition. We both have that ambition in common.
- [00:42]
A
Yes, I'm the one follically challenged. You're making me jelly as you speak. And I'm all ears. And our listeners are all ears and all eyes.
- [00:51]
B
Maybe I could throw a bold filter on of sorts. I'd be happy to do it.
- [00:55]
A
Tell us about the DNA that got you this nice bouffant of hair and at the same time, the DNA that is the DNA of how you reach investors in today's cray cray AI SEO, Geo. What the hell is going on next? Digital marketing.
- [01:18]
B
You got it. It's what we all want to talk about these days, right? I actually did one of our monthly webinars, our educational series on Geo yesterday. That's the lens we're consuming content, the Internet, the world with these days. I started my agency DNA as a growth marketing firm. DNA because what you can do with advertising, with targeting, can you reach someone by their genetic makeup? Somewhat close. And I found an application here towards investors. A niche, a demand though from our growth stage clients. They were always talking about their capital raises. I learned about vehicles exemptions, laws that allow for solicitations using digital marketing to investors. I've worked on over 500 capital raises at this point have produced collectively on those campaigns, hundreds of millions. And through advertising, through outreach, through content, can talk to you about the inner workings and the AI setups. And yeah, I like to showcase the results. Success leaves clues on my podcast test, optimize, scale. That is my approach towards growth.
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A
Do you sleep?
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B
I try.
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A
Coffee? Jason, do you lead a balanced life throughout all of this?
- [02:32]
B
I do, I do. Been doing this for a while. It's important so you avoid burnout and really come to each conversation fresh. So my espresso regimen throughout the day is strong. Have a 10 month old daughter, first time father, but have the sleep system balanced out and enough fun with the family on the weekends and kind of evenings, some evenings work and meetings. But I have a lot of fun. They say the most successful people you can't tell whether they're working or playing. I try to fit into that category myself.
- [03:03]
A
Yeah. If you love what you do, you never work another day in your life and it sounds like you're loving it. And you've got a nice work life balance which presumably is helped along by the technology that we're all plugging into Thousand percent. When you talk about investors, tell us a little bit more about your niche, what's unique about them? And right now, from my bald headed vantage point, investment is also kind of cray cray. You've got capex spending on a part of so many companies through the roof, mostly AI, got the data centers sprouting up, you've got this huge shift in the market back into tech. There's jitters, just like the jitters from the dot com bubble era, but there's a lot of optimism and there's a lot of opportunity and the chip sector in particular is going wild. The AI frontier companies aren't really turning a profit. Although Anthropic is a great example of almost getting there. It's exciting. There's, there's a lot going on now, Jason, more I think arguably than ever before. What's your point of view on this macro? And then what kind of advice and counsel and benefit are you giving people individually with what they're hoping to do with you?
- [04:30]
B
Sure, I work with a lot of entrepreneurs, also work with publicly traded companies on priced rounds using these investment vehicles. I define all them as growth stage companies, but in many cases on the smaller side, which to me was very fulfilling, very exciting because companies fail if they're under capitalized, straightforward, you know, you look at the stats of how many fail the first year, the first five years are not able to compete because they were not successful in their fundraising rounds. So when I found this lane for me to market and be of value towards their capital formation, the light bulb went off because so many are. Too many founders are limited by their first degree network, second degree network and with these digital marketing tools, with the allocation of AI to be able to figure out exactly who you're going to reach out to on LinkedIn and on email, be able to do it at mass and just have your calendar full of calls or be able to drive traffic to an offering page that speaks to thousands, in many cases millions of people. And even if they're coming through with smaller investments, there's, there's a real strength in numbers. Worked with an AI company, Rad intel, they maxed out, oversubscribed the round of 65 million last month and from over 20,000 investors. So different than the traditional, hey two, three investors, maybe a small group, maybe some family offices, investment banks in there and wanting their own terms, wanting their own deal. Everyone's coming in with the same type of contract for their shares or how the investment is structured. Some of these are dead or safe notes, convertible notes. And every time an announcement comes out, you have an army of ambassadors of shareholders getting it out there and getting through some of the clutter. I am around that over saturation of content and messaging and news articles and everything you're talking about. Mookie. It's tough to tell where things are going, whose years ahead, who's years behind. We rely so much more these days on trusted sources, friends, family, thought leaders, key opinion leaders that we think we have a direct relationship with. So the more of those signals you're able to provide your target audience, the better your positioning and the stronger messaging you need to also engage. These days
- [06:57]
A
rising tide is at lifting all boats. So if your targets are the smaller entrepreneurships, these smaller startups, with all the billions that are flying around now, is there greater enthusiasm for your target audience than before? How has the landscape changed over the last couple years in terms of just investment overall?
- [07:23]
B
Sure, it's, it's broad in the sense that we'll work on campaigns that target only accredited investors. The minimum investments will be 25k, 50k, 100k. I've worked on, on real estate deals or it's 500k. Some of those have slowed down, others because of the reach that you're able to have with advertising, with mass outreach and targeted but mass systematic, you're still able to effectively raise. I'll tell you the ask is much different. If you have a minimum, that's a few hundred dollars, few, you know, a thousand dollars doesn't matter as much what's happening with current events that day. It doesn't matter the exact numbers that you're seeing in the public markets. If they believe you're going to grow and you're primed in a space that keeps evolving to take on more market share, maybe they're looking at a seven year, ten year exit strategy. They may still say yes to a few hundred dollars. A few thousand dollars. And if you're able to use these new tech, modern tools to be able to bring them in and at a cost per acquisition of investor, at a return on advertising spend or marketing efficiency ratio, that makes sense for your cost of capital, somewhat systematic to be able to, to scale it up. So while I I can tell you different trends, different verticals that have done well, others that have slowed down. There are always outliers, even ones that have done best. You know, there's. They're outliers. Maybe it's a larger percentage of those that are successfully raising, but there's still plenty that are knocking on doors and marketing without results. I don't want to make it sound too easy at that. Part of the challenge is why so much, you know, excitement in it. But there are way to describe the market right now. Many groups who are unsuccessful, groups that are hitting stronger results than ever before and more of those at that.
- [09:22]
A
I find I'm assuming there, there is a rush of capital and there's enthusiasm cross vertical. And to your point, some might be doing better than others. What kind of techniques and specific strategies are you plugging into to get folks excited about? I'm Mookie Spitz and I've got a new Alopecia product that I'm excited about. I might not be the best representative for that brand, but I'm excited about this new opportunity. I'm looking for money, I'm looking for investors. I've got a decent value proposal. I come over to you, Mr. Fishman, help me out. What does that look like? What kind of options do I have that I might not have had before? And what's unique about your strategic approach to getting me noticed? Cutting through the clutter even within the investment space and ultimately building credibility to the point where potential investors will choose me over others that trust me over the other bald guy.
- [10:30]
B
Well, I'd tell you it all starts with strategy. You talk about, you know, specific strategies, maybe specific tactics. But it amazes me how many groups try to run one of these fundraising campaigns even if it's offline, but with no formal plan other than the results in mind. I built a model called the eight point plan. Relies heavily on competitor marketing audits. You need to know what's going to come across the desk of the prospective investors, prospective audiences, your target targeting. I want to know exactly what these other groups are. They're called issuers in this space. What these other groups issuing investment opportunities are running on meta ads, LinkedIn ads, who's talking about them in the news, what are they posting on their social channels, what are their email funnels look like, what's their offering page consist of? What about the pitch video? You need to build a campaign, not just a company and product. You need to build a campaign that is stronger. Then what is going to be getting their attention while they're in their decision making process because it's probably going to be 7, 17, maybe 43 different touch points before they convert. I could tell you the background of each of those numbers, but before they actually move forward and invest. So success leaves clues. You're pulling from those findings, those learnings from these other campaigns, channels, audiences, messaging. You then map out your plan. These are the audiences we want to reach. Plural is emphasized there because four, ten different audiences you want to map out. Here are the touch points of those audiences, the channels that we can utilize, both paid advertising and organic content marketing. Here's what we're going to do within each channel and here's what channels we're going to prioritize next. We're building out the creative messaging visuals that's going to go into each channel. Initial content calendar, what's going to be posted, when and where the first ads that are going to launch. That leads into your funnel development. So the offering page, the checkout process where people can go to search more. You're going to want to have variants for all of these audiences, creatives and funnels. You're going to want to be able to pinpoint the key drivers later and where performance is falling off in the algorithm. At a, at a, you know, during the live campaign points, if you look at strategic partners, who can you reach out to? It's a large pool, responsive audience of who you're looking to target. Projections, impressions, clicks, conversions, how many times an ad or piece of content has been seen, how much traffic is driving to your funnel, how many conversions, how many investments are coming out the other side. And you want to be able to summarize all this. You want to be able to do it in a page, two pages, executive summary style. The plan is all about the process and that reflects what occurred during that process. If you bring it on a marketer, showing your cfo, showing your finance partner able to articulate exactly what's happening there. And all of these marketing channels you're putting out, all of these tactics are merely tests. We have assumptions going in. I could tell you, mookie, hey, other hair products, this is what's worked well for them. We've worked on similar campaigns that have done great. Here's what we want to do for you. But until it's validated with the data, until we're able to look at the reports and say, hey, you're getting a 12x return on ad spend from wives of balding men, you're getting, you know, this type of return from investors that are over 65. And in these geographical cities, we could be, you know, first of all, we're shooting in the dark. We could be going too narrow. You want to cast a wider net, calculated so you can use the findings to make data driven decisions and then ramp up what's working from there. I would tell you, the more third party validation, the more social proof you're able to showcase, the better. Maybe you have a celebrity with beautiful feathering hair and saying, this is, this is what did it for them. Maybe you have, you know, going back to business, women and being able to say, hey, their husband took this. It's changed their life. Just trying to build on the product, trying to picture what the statements would consist of. But that notoriety goes a long way. Again, we don't believe what we see online. We're skeptical on new products, investment opportunities, even more so. So the more familiar faces, the more people can reach with an existing pool, the better. You do want to bring a pool of your first degree network people who say, mookie's awesome. I catch every podcast episode. I've done work with them. Here's what we do on the weekends together. Been over for, you know, dinner. I believe in Mookie. I don't know if I could put in $100,000, but it looks like his minimum is 250. Why don't I put in a thousand? You get decent amount of people to do that. Let's say it's an average of 2,000, 3,000 each. You're able to bring in 50 people. You bring in 100k, 150k and you point at that in the campaign. We already have 50 investors. We already have a hundred investors. 150, I should say 200k. 300k already raised. That, that says something. Why would 200 people do this? You know, why would a hundred people do this? So all of that fits in to some of the signals, some of what your target audience is going to be thinking about during their consideration process. And then as you're running new marketing channels, hey, we're running meta ads. It's working. We're whitelisting meta ads. We're running it from Forbes from their Facebook account. There's ways to do this. You got to get approvals, everything. We're getting 7x return on ad spend. What's all the costs? Everything put in there. It's the marketing efficiency ratio. Scaling aggressively. You are probably going to need a thousand. Excuse, 100,000 visits per thousand investments on one of these retail campaigns. It's a 1% conversion rate. Google says an average conversion rate is 2.35%. In my last search, you could think 2,000 investors. I would project conservatively. Even 0, 5.7% could be very effective on these campaigns. You get a thousand investments on a hundred thousand visits, you're in a good place if those come through at a 2000, $3000 average investment amount, I'm going to 2 million, 3 million. You have to scale aggressively to hit that traffic. You want to scale even more so from there, the founders, the CEOs that are most successful for this, that's how they think. This is working for me, doing a lot more of it. Let's keep it going and stay, you know, fingers on the pulse of the data. But I need to buy as many of these investments as I can.
- [17:22]
A
Sounds like you're operating in an interesting space. So contrary to an institutional investor. Right. You're looking for what would be considered the consumer investor. So it's an interesting combination of proven digital marketing techniques, technologies, methodologies. Sounds like you're full service all the way from audience analytics and segmentation to creative strategy, brand strategy for the company, tactical recommendations through the mix and then putting together the media plan and measuring it. Right. This is classic marketing stuff, but it's also tweaked a little differently to your point, which is you're looking for consumers, but this would be individual investors and connecting them up with your, with your clients. So how is that a little different than let's say just brand marketing? It seems spicy in certain ways. Can you share a little bit of the secret sauce on how you give it a slightly different approach than a more conventional or traditional full service digital marketing agents?
- [18:36]
B
Absolutely. Premium audiences, higher value transactions, longer sales cycles, funnels if you will, and you're buying, you're selling opportunity. Hope that this high risk, high return investment can have liquidity event seven years, 10 years down the line, two to five years, extremely quick. That would be on the very fast side. The regulation D investments, those are the accredited ones. The higher net worth, some of those are positioned towards groups, different types of institutionals. Some of the institutions find ways to participate in the regulation A plus deals. REG CF that deal that hit 5 million last week, Avidane Graphene. It was $843,000 investment. One investment last day coming from ads. All of you media buyers out there or anyone connected to advertising data, imagine the return on ads to end on that. So very good day. Right. So from the high level view, Mookie, there is more similar than different. I'm targeting premium audiences I'm bringing them down marketing funnels. I'm measuring the results. I'm doing more of what's working.
- [20:00]
A
It sounds like a longer cycle though. And one of the one of the many focuses of this podcast is consultative selling.
- [20:08]
B
Okay.
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A
And it seems perfect for that because it's less transactional. And to your point, you're selling on emotional benefits, many of which are downstream. So how does that impact even some of your creative and some of your messaging to trigger that sense of opportunity and hope rather than just a transactional conversion of what ostensibly would be a commodity?
- [20:38]
B
Yeah, we want to pull someone from an advertisement article organic outreach message in many cases to the offering page directly. Likely testing different funnels that include a webinar signup consultative landing page where they could get a digital asset for the higher net worth investor campaigns to just set up a call and be able to book a time to speak with the CEO or someone on the investor relations side that messaging you have to capture attention in as few words as possible. Meta is actually a fundamental ad channel for these campaigns. Over a billion daily active users. I have lists that I've built of historical investment crowdfunding investors and real estate investors and all of these different verticals that I could upload as custom audience run ads directly to them. Those ads have text above the image or video, a headline underneath. I like to have it as a blend talking about the uniqueness of the company and their potential impact. Have to be careful on forward looking statements. Of course this is all regulated a headline than speaking about the investment opportunity. And there is a level of compliance in terms of what you can say, what you can't say, what's tombstone, what's non tombstone information, what talks about the terms, what is more of marketing language and speak. But again have to be, you know, not looking at anything that could be considered false advertising. The more social proof you're able to put into the advertisements if that spokesperson is in the ad, the better. We talked about whitelisting advertising and running from publishers. Pages also can look very strong of, you know, learn more about the company that is taking the hair care world by storm. There's even better way to say that. Learn more about how men are regrowing their hair and how you can become an owner of this company.
- [22:47]
A
Right.
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B
So we want to have variants for the messaging. We want to be modeling it off what you know, some other companies are working on. But there's something I subscribe to. A friend of mine put this together four time TEDx speaker Ryan Foll on the 313 method where you break what you do down into three sentences, then you do an exercise to combine it into one sentence and then a bigger jump into three words. People can remember three words. They can remember three things. It's far more powerful.
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A
Like the name of your podcast.
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B
I will tell you about the sailing trip where we came up with the podcast name. It was something I was already saying a lot, but. But it's true. As soon as it becomes four, you start feeling like I need to grab a pen, I need to make a list. And someone is not going to invest in something they don't understand. They're certainly not going to market to their peers on your behalf if they don't get it. Imagine talking about an AI investment.
- [23:41]
A
Attention getting in the attention economy. My specialty is life science and healthcare for the most part, which is arguably even more regulated than financial, although financial services and investment is a close second, no doubt. So I'm sensitive to that. But that's a lead into my next question, which is prioritization. So what you've illustrated so far are very much the emotional benefits of standing next to a man with a nice bouffant of hair or the swagger that it gives me having this fountain of follicles. The flip side of that is just return on my investment. So you're targeting folks who really want return, who are looking for financial opportunities. So how do you strike that balance? I'm assuming you're able to do a lot of AB testing with your ads. You were talking about that earlier. How does it shake out in terms of what's appealing to audiences and what really works?
- [24:46]
B
Yeah, it's a great question. It goes back to the reporting where we have assumptions going in, but we need the data to see where we're getting audiences for the best rate because of the engagement that's following using these advertising platforms, algorithms, the click through rates and that initial interest and then most importantly the conversion rates, cost per acquisition, the return on ad spend. If you hit the nail on the head, these companies are not marketing their capital raise for fun, they're not marketing their capital raise for branding. It is definitely a direct response campaign. That cost of capital is very important to them. Even though they're able to set their own terms, they have to do an audit but can set their own valuation, share price, everything about it. A lot of benefits to using these vehicles on the finance side. But if it's not producing, if it's not bringing capital, it's a waste of time. Money. You know, you list all of the different assets, all different resources. So it's very much about what is this producing. I can have a client love an advertising creative, but if it's not producing a favorable return on ads, then for them it's only a matter of time before they shut it off. I would say numbers. The more we're able to speak to magnitude speak to the actual measurements only measures with numbers around the industry around the growth, depending on the type of campaign around company growth and sales. Some you can only talk about the industry size and growth, but I think that definitely puts it into context and sounds less salesy. It's speaking more to the actual nuts and bolts here. That showing up in messaging goes a long way, but we want to be able to identify from the variance what's producing best, do more of what's working from the daily pacing and then make recommendations to scale. That's why I love advertising so much. I mean, we'll have groups start at entry level, ad spends below what Meta would recommend in many cases, but then systematically scale and get to much higher levels. They can be spending six figures, seven figures per month, but if they're raising $75 million and they spend a million dollars that month and it raises somewhere between 3 and 10 million, that new capital coming in is looked at as very favorable. I want it to be 10x or higher. Can talk to you about many that are 20x 30x higher type results, but when it's the right expectations, it's all contingent upon that conversion rate. And what's converting tells us a story about what we need to build next in terms of creative and who we need to shift the targeting to, perhaps while looking at new segments to try out.
- [27:38]
A
You mentioned Meta, and Meta has its unique targeting opportunities as you were also mentioning. So if I'm looking to invest, I very well might be drawn to a company that I have an emotional connection to, either explicitly or implicitly. So if I see a company specializing in alopecia as a potential investor, I'll take notice. Maybe for completely random personal reasons, but what I'm getting at is that convergence between my identity as a potential investor, or even an active one, and particular kinds of companies and opportunities that are available to me. Can you tell me a little bit about the congruence between these two? I'm assuming that's a part of your strategy. Do you see that kind of synergy taking place? So when you're targeting folks, let's say they're wine drinkers and then there's an opportunity for a winery or A bistro franchise. There's gotta be an emotional underpinning, especially from the consumer investment community for that kind of interest.
- [28:57]
B
Absolutely. Enthusiasts, those with an affinity for vertical, we absolutely want to include. If your brand is already doing business, it's not pre revenue. You have customers. We want to market to your customers. Maybe they love the product so much that they want to become a shareholder. They want to be along for the ride, for your growth. We want to target those who will say, have an affinity for the space.
- [29:25]
A
I'm walking in with my own CRM.
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B
Yeah. Yeah. Well, especially for that first part of the crowd. Yeah, it's very important. It's the empty restaurant versus the spot with a line around the block. One you're not comfortable being there. The other you may not know what their product is and you're in line. Social dynamics. So beyond your customers, those with infinity for the vertical, they get it. Maybe they're using other products. Maybe they're starting to research other products. They definitely have an interest in what you're doing and can respect how you've designed your product company and raise. You have strategics as well. I definitely see folks who work in that industry. Yo, you know, I'm at this clinic here in Los Angeles. I wish more of my customers were using this. I'm investing in these guys for sure. Absolutely. This is a standout. They are going to grow. Whole nother audience. I talked about friends and family who have an affinity for the product. So you know, the wife of someone who is balding, perhaps. You have this whole category of reg CF investors. My database. I have some investors with over a hundred deals in their portfolio. Given some of them are a few hundred dollars. I serve on a professional association committee. There's an investor on there, he invested in a deal every day. I think it was in 2024. I think 23 into 2024. There are many very active investors in this space. And if they see what you're doing, they see your traction, they see your momentum, they're a good person to reach out to, especially, you know, personified. And then looking at like a whole audience behind it. I talked about thought leaders a bit. I look at investor reviews during the checkout process. Why did you invest? I saw this gentleman speak about it. I read this newsletter. They said it. I get it. I couldn't pass up the opportunity. So you can look towards other types of investors who look at other deals and then maybe they have a connection in one of those other categories. They have an affinity towards it. But I see a Lot of success from the historical investors because it's less of an educational process in terms of why they would put in their personal information and financial information on a website they've never been onto. And higher conversion rates.
- [31:51]
A
I'm hearing a lot of cross pollination that you're doing. So on the one hand, you've got my alopecia company here at Bald Ambition and you're helping me round up my own investors. Right. And I'm tacitly assuming that you're going out there cold with my own media plan. Right. And I'm, you're, you're scooping for me, you're getting me some prospects, you're getting me some investor capital. At the same time, you've got your own database and you might have other clients who they might not be focused on alopecia per se, but you know, maybe, maybe a tanning bed for my, for my. Nice smooth of chess. It's relational, obviously. Right. And when you're talking about certain verticals, you've got companies that are related to each other not only in terms of what they do, but potential audience interests. How does that shake out? Because you've got an economy of scale going on here in a very interesting way where it sounds like you're, you're building an investor community in a sense.
- [32:59]
B
Absolutely.
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A
And you're cross pollinating. So if you take me on as a client, how does that work? How can I simultaneously benefit from some of your success with related companies and their investors and the new pool of prospects that I bring to you through my bald headedness?
- [33:23]
B
I love the analogy and the tanning bit. It's hilarious.
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A
It's holding on so far.
- [33:32]
B
I think there may be a business plan to follow this podcast. No, I would tell you that it goes back to those A B tests and really gravitating, making the data driven decisions based on where we're seeing performance. Do we have audiences that convert very well in these campaigns? Are there more audiences available through third party audience data providers? Yes, yes. But if there's not that first tranche of capital, it's the empty pool at a pool party. You want to be the first to jump in. Probably not. Maybe after being in your tanning bed you do, but. But probably not. It takes someone pretty look over the
- [34:10]
A
fence and see what's going on here.
- [34:12]
B
Yeah, yeah. It has to be inviting. If you're saying you're going to change the, you know, sunbathing, tanning, you know, world, but you have $7,000 raised. Doesn't inspire much confidence the same deal with $107,000 raised looks much better. 507,000amillion and 7,000. 24 million and 7,000 again. The attractiveness becomes stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger. So who's most likely to invest in you? People with a personal connection. If you have a small minimum amount, they may not even be looking at a final financial upside as much as they want to support back of their mind, hey, this company does really well. They sell to can't even think of the company, a hotel chain. They're available in every spot globally. I want to be able to go on that ride with Mookie. I want to be able to earn in that. I want to be at the success, you know, the celebration party when he exits. So they'll perhaps put even a few more chips. But you go after that first screen network first. You then start targeting all these audiences. You don't put too many eggs in one basket because you need to see what's actually working, not what we think as experts in the space who have worked on hundreds of these deals, or what you think as the company owner and it's your baby. You've put so many hours into this. You've tested so many other skincare products. You want to be able to let the data show you what's producing. Is there crossover? Do we combine different audience sets and data sets that are available to us and that we've built for the use of our campaigns? Yes, because if we can find one outlier that we can do more of this with, it's going to grow and grow and grow and grow. And then there is inherent marketing value here. The first campaign I worked on was a solar company, Reg D. So higher investments. They hit $2.83 million less than six figures in marketing. Spend, ad spend. It put us on the map. We started getting introductions to more of these platforms and groups and all different types of crowdfunding. The founder was featured as a Forbes 30 under 30 for energy. The founders started getting all these different partnership inquiries and press, and all these things going on catapulted them to new levels. They did larger and larger and larger rounds from there. We've worked with groups on six, eight different rounds at this point. The one we completed last week was our fourth round with them. They've raised over 16 million using these vehicles. And they're getting press opportunities, partnership opportunities, B2B, client opportunities. Right and left from this, you are getting the marketing value of the campaign as added value. You know, those costs are absorbed by your Return costs, you're building retargeting pools with the traffic. As mentioned, your email list, your social, social audience, depending how the campaign's designed, could be, you know, tens of thousands of people more. So it's, it's all leading to your larger awareness and larger marketing strategy.
- [37:26]
A
And when we're looking at trending, the ubiquitous yet still confusing AI opportunity is there. And the reason I bring it up too is going back to Meta. For the third time, people are expressing frustration with Facebook and Meta products. It's starting to seem a little bit old school. And when you look at the engagement stats, more and more people are turning to their chatbots not only for general stuff like help me for this recipe but for investment advice. I've had several guests who are using AI for stock portfolios, integrating it into their investment engines. As far as equity goes, how do you see that shaking out and how is your own strategy evolving from this omnichannel? Proven expertise for the audiences that you know and love to more and more folks, frankly talking to Claude or Claudia or whomever it happens to be for investment advice, you know, I've got, I've got 50 GS here and I want a company that's XYZ and help me, help me find something juicy out there and give me the answer in a nanosecond. It's worth my 20 bucks a month.
- [38:50]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. They have to keep their subscription going, have to give you some good answers and they'll keep on up with more questions to keep you engaged.
- [38:59]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [39:00]
B
I think it's fantastic that retail investors, B2B brands, customers, prospects are using these tools to get perspective. They're probably going to tell them to do things that are more conservative, have a well balanced portfolio, have this live in, you know, 10% of their portfolio is high risk, high return type sections. And I think that is very important for a retail investor to hear. The whole concept of accredited investor and retail investor uses terms along the lines of smart money, dumb money, ability to take losses, you know, things along those lines. You think if you have a million dollars net worth outside of your primary home or more, one of the ways you could be an accredited investor, you're getting pitched right and left. You've had some financial literacy, work with the wealth manager, you work with someone perhaps. So it's a different conversation. I think it's great that AI tools are looking into this and I'm constantly putting in different URLs of offering pages. Groups we work with, groups we don't. What do you think of this investment opportunity, what can they improve about their page? You know, how legitimate is what they are doing? I could tell you there's a whole strategy around Geo Generative engine optimization and what you need to put on your site, what you need to put into your content, how you can even use AI to figure out those things and prompts that you could put in different agents to monitor so that you are showing up when being asked. If someone puts in, I don't know how much it's being, you know, input a day, but you know, what is the best, you know, balding solution company to invest in right now that you should show up? Right?
- [40:49]
A
The long tail of prompting, like how do you prompt jockey a great investment?
- [40:56]
B
The jury's still out. The AI jury, it, it's still being figured out. And why we use advertising to supplement this is you can, you can be very intentional about how much traffic is there. To make the analogy of SEO, search engine optimization and paid search, SEO can take months, it could take years before you're effectively ranking for the keywords that would bring you quality traffic while, you know, winning successfully those placements. The more quality for your vertical those audiences appear to be, the more aggressive it's going to be to earn those placements. So similar with Geo, but Geo, you have a whole new playing field. If you are, you know, the first, first, you know, hair care, hair restoration company that, that's doing this, you could actually be, you know, pretty far up there, especially around investment opportunity. So, so that's what the real opportunity is around it. ChatGPT offers advertising now. Some advertisers are able to use a tracking pixel. Some do not have it added to their ad account yet. It's an evolving product. Can you run more of a awareness campaign? Yes. Is it going to produce conversions? Do ChatGPT users want to click on an ad and then actually make an investment afterwards? Because there's all types of great advertising.
- [42:27]
A
Oh yeah. It's a wide open playing field and it's changing and emerging like not even day to day, but hour to hour. So it's a big question mark. But the trend is clearly there.
- [42:41]
B
Yes.
- [42:41]
A
To the point where most, if not all engagement will be through the bots eventually. Are we there yet? Absolutely not. Are we headed in that direction? Absolutely. So we're in this purgatory of between the bots and the old school way of doing things and everyone's adjusting. So it's good to be a little bit ahead of the curve.
- [43:04]
B
Bots talking to bots talking to Bots is the future, right?
- [43:08]
A
Yeah, yeah. Remember when my people would talk to your people?
- [43:12]
B
Yeah.
- [43:12]
A
Now, now it's my bots talking to your bot. And every once in a while we check in just to say hi.
- [43:19]
B
Yeah, yeah. I've heard of conversations, my wife's a lawyer, where she feels she's talking to someone who's just talking to AI on the other side. And then I've seen conversations and I think play out with entrepreneurs where it's just their AI responses around legal, around serious topics talking to each other. But, but I would tell you, user behavior changes over time as well. When we first started running on ads on Instagram, which was only available at a certain spend level and you couldn't just buy it on the platform for a while, the conversion behavior was not the same. It is stronger today. People buy things, people invest with time off Instagram ads as they became more comfortable clicking on ads, going there, you know, I see a difference from a LinkedIn advertisement. Love LinkedIn for outreach page and a meta advertisement. And for these investment campaigns, the meta advertisements often over perform at the end of the day, I'm looking at spreadsheets and saying click through rate conversion rate, cost per acquisition, return on ads and what's strongest. Let's do more of that. Oh, but this platform is really neat. Oh, this site's great. Okay, you want me to pitch that
- [44:25]
A
to the client new thing too? Because the whole idea of putting your primary advertising on social media, think about how insane that sounds to someone five, let alone 10 years ago for you to come here and say, well, meta is really strong. It's a great, great, great platform. For me, you're like, you know, hot tub time machine is like, really? And the answer is, yeah. And to the other great point you're making, there's a lag time where people are freaked out now that the bots are going to take over the world. But that's that that also might be true, but it's going to take some time. People are going to need to adjust. The technology is always ahead of human behavior and human behavior is always sluggish, sometimes generational to catch up to this stuff. So though we have that to guide us as well.
- [45:16]
B
I would have pictured many marketing channels, I would have pictured many different things to accelerate business, even these fundraising tools to gain more of a public spotlight much quicker. They went live in 2016, 2020, the days of the emergence of the Robinhood investors, when it really picked up successful campaigns before that, but it was a different landscape afterwards. So we don't know as professionals when things are actually going to happen. We may know of great solutions that people are not taking full advantage of. We may think something sounds great on paper. You're running an ad to someone, you know, asking their bot about you, it's going to be great. And then, you know, they don't click or once they get there, they're not actually performing, they're not, you know, moving forward. So it is left to test out, optimize, improve and scale what's working from there. But you know, we can't be too theoretical. We can't say, well, you know, this is going to be a huge ad channel to a client that has a round closing in six weeks. We have to, you know, reallocate towards something that's working again. The click through rate and conversion rate on Meta are favorable, fundamental if nothing else in comparison to any other channel for these types of campaigns. Tested many other platforms. I'd love to give the money elsewhere. I saw Meta ads pick up after the 2016 election and a lot of articles around how Cambridge Analytica and these different companies were running high volumes of creatives and seeing performance. I saw podcasts, podcasting really be the focal point of the 2024 election. And I see podcasts used in all different formats and different podcast ad platforms with audio pixing, pixel tracking and you can measure return on ad spend and things along those lines from host red ads, ads. So there are many different ways to, you know, perceive what's working right now, what's going to work in the future, do more of what's producing. But you put together your strategy, your test your channels accordingly, you do more of what's working. I would absolutely recommend every business to be looking at Geo and how to show up in AI results right now would be testing different ad channels. I don't know if I'd prioritize an AI ad platform at the top, top today. But you do have opportunity being at the forefront. You want to be able to use what's coming next. You can look at what the costs were on Meta 10 years ago and what the costs are today to reach people and the impressions and return on ad spend. I can tell you, working with some of the financial publishers that charge to be in an email newsletter, their rates go up exponentially as they're running on successful capital raises and campaigns. So is there, there's absolutely something to be said about being early?
- [48:17]
A
Absolutely. And part of it is whether it's SEO or geo, the foundational strategy which you laid out, which is the traditional approach from audience to brand tactic to omnichannel planning to measurement stays there. But one of the best practices, I think, that really, really resonate, and I've had other guests talk about this too, is get yourself out there in multiple modalities and don't limit yourself in terms of one particular approach. So to be specific about it, I've got a webinar on balding, for example, from an educational point of view for my company, let's just say, and then I have an opportunity to do a TEDx talk, or I have an opportunity to really launch a different kind of campaign, a white paper, old school. So I'm assuming the broader that you go, at least in concept, is better for even the traditional SEO. And this new school geo. So has that evolved a little bit in terms of your recommendations to clients too, adding, let's say, personal testimonial content, more video content? Is there tweaking that's going on with content that integrates some of the tools of the trade in ways that are exciting and innovative and differentiating most of all. Yeah, how do we stand out? How do we get noticed by the spiders and now the bots?
- [50:00]
B
When I first got involved in the digital marketing world around 2008, 2009, you spoke to an SEO agency at that time, you'd hear about a lot of tricks, right? Hey, do this, you're going to show up at the top of Google. And those ended up backfiring over time. There were these updates, the Panda update, the Penguin update. I Remember one in 2012, and businesses were shutting down because they're no longer getting that organic search traffic.
- [50:30]
A
People were tweaking based on the advice for tweaking. And then people were tweaking in response to the tweaking. And then it's not good.
- [50:38]
B
But what really stood out to me is there was a statement, I knew a guy was a professor and he taught this stuff and hosted an SEO meetup monthly. And he'd have some of the originators of SEO there speaking. I heard something along the lines of Google will never penalize good, engaging content, quality, authoritative. And that said something to me, maybe butchering that a little bit, but it said something to me of if I'm doing what these platforms want and I do it over time, and I'm not looking at shortcuts, I'm looking at where my time can be best spent, but I'm looking to, you know, rank for what they're actually reading. I'm going to be in a good place. There are a Lot of overlapping principles from SEO and geo, and I think we're all figuring out geo. So I don't want to make this sound like, you know, an exact science, but I was taught about SEO as on site and off site optimization. What you're putting in to your meta tags, your title tags, your content, everything that the crawlers are going to read to be assessed by search engines. And then what you're doing off site, who's talking about you, how authoritative are those sites, the domain authority, how much engagement, how much much sharing? Those do translate over to geo, as you mentioned, different types of testimonials. You hear a lot in any GEO conversation about Google reviews, even the reviewer and what that means, which I find to be very fascinating. You hear a lot of, a lot about review sites such as Reddit, Reddit being anonymous. Reddit is a place where anonymous users trash brands. They say negative things about them, and
- [52:25]
A
the bots love it because it's an easy scrape and there's a lot of human content there.
- [52:31]
B
It is also a place where people give, you know, very heartfelt, authentic reviews and praise of companies. And that, and that goes a long way. There's these companies out there that own, you know, a thousand Reddit pages and they've been aged and tested and they'll say positive things. There's ones that, that'll bury negative content and with positive, different types of notes coming out. You want to be careful with that as well too. That kind of stuff sounds like a panda update coming for me. But you talked about video, YouTube channels, podcasts. If you're putting out good, engaging content, you want to find the best ways to be prioritized by LLMs, by search engines. But know that things are changing and that direction may have to shift at a certain point. You want to be asking the right questions to do so. And yeah, similar to these investment campaigns, the more social proof and validators, the better. And more people saying good things about you online, the better. From the outside perspective. You need to be able to show those that are trying to assess, even if they're artificial, that you are the best thing for an audience to look at.
- [53:45]
A
That's a great way to put a bow on it, which is if you've got a good company, a good product, a good service, and you're true to your mission and you do provide real benefit, your mission ultimately is just to translate that value proposition in a way that the right audience can see it, engage with it, and participate in the development of that business. It's no more complicated than that. So stay true to what you do. And offer something great to society. And Jason at DNA is really a facilitator to empower the great product or service that you're offering to the world and connecting you with the right audience in the right way, that's contemporary, that's evolving, that could benefit your company, but also benefit the investors. So if you're real, then you're going to succeed and everyone ends up with a net positive experience because you're good at what you do. The companies you represent are creating real products and services that provide real benefit and you're just connecting the dots ultimately and using the tools of the trade to do that in a way that's efficient and that's demonstrably effective with the measurement capabilities that you bring to bear. Too
- [55:11]
B
perfectly stated.
- [55:14]
A
Thank you. I. I appreciate you sharing your. Your value prop. I love the focus on the what we might consider the consumer investor. How do you. How do you refer to retail investor?
- [55:27]
B
There's a term investomer.
- [55:29]
A
Investomer. I love that. Investomer is really, really good. And we're dealing with a culture now too where there is a lot of equity there and there is a tremendous amount of opportunity that's available to people. It's great agencies like yours that really enables the companies to maximize their reach and it enables the investor to have options like show me what's hot, what's not and connect with people that way. I'll leave a link in the description to you and the organization. And how does that play out? I know there's a little click on the website to engage in. Is it a discovery call chat about where you're at? What do you hope to accomplish? And let me look under the hood a little bit and see what we can do for you.
- [56:22]
B
We welcome a warm marketing chat anytime. So yes, definitely don't be bashful. Hop onto the site. Also a lot of great content on there. So over 70 episodes.
- [56:34]
A
You're a good, good host.
- [56:36]
B
Thank you.
- [56:37]
A
Podcast on podcast. Have a lot of fun doing like comment share everybody. Welcome to Bald Ambition once again. All the info Jason's agency in the description below and check him out. Investomer friendly. Thank you so much Jason for making time.
- [57:01]
B
Thank you Mookie. Thanks everyone.