Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:11
No, I love that. And that’s part of actually the 8-Point Plan that you talk about. Let’s talk about strategic partnerships. I love partnerships. I think it benefits both parties. It’s a win-win situation.
So talk about, I don’t know if there’s an example out there where because I could totally see that creating a strategic partnership. Right. They have stake in it and now they collaborate more because of that. Is there a good example you could think of even if you can’t name company names of, you know, someone partnering up and helping each other because of this, and it could have been an investment of like $1,000, who knows? It doesn’t have to be. But now they have a stake in that company and you feel like you do have ownership.
Jason Fishman: 15:55
Yeah. As an example, there’s a company called Crowdscale. Kevin Fulmer writes his own blog, his own email newsletter, puts in an investment maybe closer to the minimum investment in many cases. But he’ll then talk about his investments to his follower base. And that’s really what we’re looking for in many cases on the strategic partnerships.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:17
This is it right here?
Jason Fishman: 16:18
Yes. It’s, you know, administrators of audiences that reflect the target market pool. And if they get content out about the deal, it could mean a volume of investments to follow. There’s a variety of different investor newsletters. Some of them the investors pay to receive the content.
There’s one called InvestorPlace that featured one of our clients. And within the matter of, you know, a week, a couple weeks was over $1 million came in in investments after they were featured. There’s other investor newsletters that you pay to get featured. Some have advertising placements. Robinhood Snacks as an example.
So full spectrum of different publishers would be included in that strategic partner list. But even just someone who has a LinkedIn group, a Facebook group, an in-person event, what have you could be good to reach out to share what you’re doing, see if there’s any ways to collaborate. Could be co-branding partnerships as well too. I’ve seen investors shout out swaps, even reaching out to other issuers and having them talk to their investor base and returning that action. A lot of great things come out of strategic partnerships. It’s actually how I’ve seen campaigns move the fastest.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:32
Yeah, and this is for me, instructive to any company. I don’t care if you’re raising money, if you’re just trying to grow your company with, you know, customers, clients, this all applies. So let’s talk about the 8-Point Plan a little bit.
So you talked about strategic partnerships. Maybe we just start with number one, because that’s probably where you start with the company when you’re like, yeah, Jason, this sounds great.
We want to blow this out of the water on, you know, StartEngine or one of the other platforms. Where do you start?
Jason Fishman: 18:00
You know, I analyze pitch decks for different ad tech opportunities. For accelerators, we work with sometimes the portals. And it’s funny to me how many groups lack a real marketing strategy, whether it’s towards their go to market and growth milestones, whether it’s towards their capital raise, which we’re focusing on here, I’ll hear answers along the lines of, yeah, we’re going to do some social media posts and maybe engage influencers.
As a marketer, that means nothing to me. I need to know the channels, the traffic, the projected conversions. Even better if there’s, you know, some different case studies and metrics from tests that have been run. I get asked, what is the marketing plan look like? And this is my answer to it. This is the model I’ve built. Again, I lead in person and digital workshops around it, and the strategy I’ve designed as a system that takes one month to put together four weeks, two sections a week, eight-point plan, all encompassing.
I’ve done it in four hours during a workshop. I really recommend four weeks, even if you’re doing it at home and have different checklists online from different workshops and webinars I’ve put out. But the first week. Research industry overview and target market profiles. Target market audits here. So I’m always finding it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:25
That’s like the key audience persona development.
Jason Fishman: 19:30
Yea. So the industry overview I’m always finding new stats on a vertical, no matter how well a founder, a CEO, a marketing team understands their vertical, there’s always more stats to pull. It gives my team a better understanding, gives the marketers internally if it’s being done at a client’s office on their own, more to pull from, and we’re going to be able to use those stats in the creative at a later point. But you want to have a pulse on what’s going on in the industry right now.
I’m generally looking at 2 to 3 different verticals. So as an example, we looked at RISE Robotics. Perhaps it’s robotics, you know, as well as hydraulics industry. I then do a third around Reg CF. I want to know the stats. What’s happening in real time. I then want to start to map out the target audiences as I’m looking at applicable information there.
And I like to break them down to the persona level as I mentioned. So who is going to invest in this campaign? Is it a Wefunder investor? Is it someone who is following robotics publishers online and closely? Is it someone who works in the automotive space and uses hydraulics on a daily basis? Someone who’s invested has these types of companies in their portfolio right now?
And I like to put together an image, a fictional name. I want to know what they do on the weekends. I really need to know where they go online as well as who influences them, what makes them move forward. If I could get an understanding of other types of advertising that they have converted from, I can really do a better job at putting together a marketing campaign that’s going to resonate with them.
So in that first week, breaking that down, we’ll meet with the client, show them the slides we’ve put together, have a discussion around that, and then it moves into the competitor audit, which to me often has the most takeaways in the strategy process, the most “aha” moments if you will. So I want to look at those 2 to 3 industries and pull out 2 to 3 different companies that are operating in that space. So for Reg CF as an example, we’ll look for the most applicable Reg CF regulation crowdfunding campaigns. So other robotics campaigns I can tell you about robotics clients that we’ve looked at even introduced us. We’re working on one on StartEngine. It’s the fastest moving reg CF on StartEngine right now called Greenfield Robotics.
So when I’m talking about competitor audit it’s okay. How much traffic do they get to their site? Where is that traffic coming from? What demographics of audiences are going through their site? What are they doing on social media platforms? You can go to Facebook Ads library and see a Facebook ad for any live campaign. You can look up any live Facebook advertising campaign on Facebook Ads library. So I can look at what ads they’re running.
Success leaves clues. Test optimize scale. Something I say a lot. If they’re repeating a channel, it’s telling me they’re scaling it. It’s working for them. So what aspects of the Facebook ad really stand out to me? From the headline to the text to the image or video, the call to action. I want to look at search engine Marketing websites. Get an idea if they’re bidding on search ads.
What their Google ads look like if they’re live. What organic keywords they’re ranking for, how much traffic it’s driving for them. I look at platforms like build that, show me email newsletters, their email newsletter, email newsletters they’re appearing in. Again, financial email newsletters are a big part of the marketing stack for these types of campaigns. A look at who’s talking about them in the news.
I want to understand exactly how they’re obtaining market share, both so I know what I’m competing against. And also going back to that target audience to understand this is what the investors I’m going to be marketing to are seeing directly after our advertisement. This is coming across their desk, so I don’t want to shoot in the dark. I need to know what’s in the marketplace. So that competitor audit is crucial to launching a marketing campaign.
And I can tell you most issuers don’t do that. Maybe they looked at 1 or 2 live deals, but they didn’t analyze their marketing, and they’re kind of just running one channel or another and seeing what’s popping up.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:47
Yeah, it’s really interesting. I just searched StartEngine. I don’t even know what would show up here, but it just gives you a lot of interesting data. Competitor analysis here. I don’t know if these are companies. Is this something that, will you look at the different platforms to see how people are running ads on StartEngine or some other platform like that?
Jason Fishman: 24:08
So there’s a few things you could do when you search StartEngine, this is now showing advertisements that feature the word StartEngine in the ad, right. You could type in Reg CF Reg D. You could click on StartEngine’s page. When you do that drop down, see the ads that StartEngine is running you know from their page.
But we’re looking at a coffee company here, Cartel Roasting. I saw hard cut vodka in there that’s got Dolph Lundgren from Rocky for. It’s his vodka company. So you can see the actual ads that are running to the StartEngine offerings right now.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:43
And so when you talk about competitor analysis, what are the things you do you like to look at. So Facebook ads library and what else?
Jason Fishman: 24:55
So I usually go on a platform called Similarweb to get an idea of the traffic. There may be a sign up on that. Another one I mentioned which you can access for free is Milled, m i l l e d .com and there’s email newsletters. So you could type in StartEngine, see what’s popping up there. But you do this competitor audit and really get an idea of how these other issuers are seeing success.
You can then start mapping out the channels and the creative. So the creative, the ads, the content and then what channels they’re going to go into, both paid and organic, both with advertising and content marketing. So if you type in the keywords there, let’s type in StartEngine and see what pops up. So Blackout Coffee final hours. That’s their email. GoSun, BabyQuip. These are live campaigns. You can see what’s going on in the email newsletters.
I will tell you some of those are featuring their product if I’m looking at BabyQuip, but if we’re looking at Blackout coffee that’s directly around their investment and likely even the letter to audiences around, let’s say, an e-commerce campaign, there’ll be a mention of the StartEngine campaign of the investment opportunity there.
I’ll look at different issuers and often see paid email newsletters, you know, Dollar Flight Club, I’ll see, you know, 1440 different email newsletters that feature the investment opportunity.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:31
Yeah. Jason, this is awesome. This is really cool. So after the competitor audit then next the creative.
Jason Fishman: 26:39
So creative. Less is more in terms of the messaging. There’s a method I follow. A friend of mine, Ryan Foland, three time TEDx speaker, created the 3-1-3 method where you break down what a company does into three sentences. You then do an exercise to move those three sentences combined into one sentence, and then a bigger jump to break that down into three words. Very tough to do that.
But at the same time, I can remember three words. As soon as it becomes four, as soon as it becomes five six, it starts feeling like I need to write it down. But I can remember three things. I can remember three words, and I need the audience that I’m going after to understand what the company does so well that they feel comfortable investing. It can’t go over their head as well as have them repeat to their friends, their family, their first degree network, even if it’s just to justify the investment.
But what I’m really playing for is social sharing. So the crowd effect is really based on these marketing channels, these traffic sources bringing investors in and then them referring other people to the deal. So perhaps you’re seeing a strong return on ad spend. Maybe it’s a 10x return on ad spend, but instead of spending 10% of the total raise on marketing, if half of the investments come from social sharing, come from referrals, it cuts your marketing budget in half and it’s more indicative of a successful crowdfund.
You know, hey, I’m golfing with my brother this weekend. Take a look at this AI company. Take a look at this robotics company I just invested in. It’s really interesting. You know that work you do on your car. Imagine, you know, an AI hydraulic system and different applications and how it’s being used.
B2B, I need to be able to explain to people around me. So if I’m making that easier with messaging, that’s very memorable, very repeatable. If that’s living in the advertisement and that’s crafting the perspective, at least the first impression to a prospective investor on what a company does. I’m going to be in a better place. So you’re finding creative that’s grabbing showcases, social proof, that third party validation and then driving people to the offering from there.
With ads, you then have to determine the creative for the content, the social media posts, the email drip systems, email newsletters. We’re just looking at a few of those. The long form content. I recommend a monthly webinar, an article every other week, one of them just recapping the webinar, a weekly update on the update section of Wefunder or StartEngine or whatever portal you’re on. We just took a look at those two press release podcast appearances, PR, paid press in many cases. It’s typically going to be seven touch points or more before an investor converts.
Target audience likes to search around, do their own due diligence. You want to be intentional about what they see, craft an experience while they’re making their decision making process, and imagine if they’re looking at two deals. One has nothing on their social media pages, they’re non-existent in the news, and the other has a community behind it. And a post goes out and there’s 20 there’s 200 different comments from the audience. It says something very differently to someone who’s evaluating the deal.
So you want to utilize all these channels. I could tell you statistically, a good content marketing funnel produces a higher conversion rate. So you determine the creative that’s going to go into the content calendar, living across each of these channels, creative. That’s going to go into the advertisements and then pinpoint which channels you want to prioritize to run those on.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:15
I don’t know if this is everyone else’s favorite, but obviously my personality, I just want to jump right to the channel recommendations. You know, obviously you just pointed out it’s not going to work unless all these other pieces are in place, right from the analysis to the profile to the, you know, audit to the creative. But you mentioned some of the channel recommendations. What have you found are kind of the 80 over 20. You know, that you start with? And obviously a lot of all of it has an effect. What are the top ones that you like to start with?
Jason Fishman: 30:48
Happy to answer that. I do want to point out that the strategy moves in sequence, so we’re not determining the channels until we have seen what channels work for the industry. Outside of investment crowdfunding, there could be some opportunities to go after investomers there, people who are customers of your business perspective, customers and then want to invest. So we want to tap into those channels if it’s B2B ambassadors. But still, where is that content being consumed?
So we want to really see where the conversations are living before just jumping into channels. If I’m on a call, if I meet a founder at an event tomorrow and they say, hey, what channel should I run? I really want to walk through this strategy process before just, you know, pulling from the hip there from the holster.
That being said, I could tell you, Meta advertising. It’s offered as a service by StartEngine deal maker is a platform that allows for self publishing. A big recommendation from them is both Meta advertising as well as paid publisher appearances. Deal maker. They recommend email newsletters such as Morning Brew. I had mentioned Robinhood Snacks, and 1440, The Flyover. A lot of these email newsletters you’ll see as a constant on the campaigns there.
There’s a few issuers that you could see here EnergyX, Picasso, Miso Robotics. So you can see robotics is a common theme of what we’re looking at today, but it really reflects what you read about in the media. A lot of the top campaigns are what’s moving in the mainstream at the moment. But Meta advertising, those paid email newsletters, podcasts are becoming a bigger and bigger part of the equation. Different types of publishers that go to entrepreneurs as well as investors. Mode mobile I could tell you it was some of their publisher appearances that really moved the needle for them. So your own content channels and then some of these advertising placements.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:51
Yeah, I mean, I know you have a webinar and people can check out DigitalNicheAgency.com, and I’m sure they could sign up for your webinar there, but you kind of do a top 20 campaign and one of them is Mode Mobile if you want to talk about that.
Jason Fishman: 33:08
Mode mobile, first of all, the product is amazing. They have a mobile phone as well as a software, an app that can be used, you know, on any phone, essentially any major phone that allows you to earn, actually earn money from your mobile phone usage. So think of your screen time and how much.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:28
My kids will be millionaires.
Jason Fishman: 33:29
Spent on this, and definitely recommend looking into it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:36
The amount of time my kids spend on this, they’re going to be multi-millionaires.
Jason Fishman: 33:39
Yeah. There you go.
Jason Fishman: 33:41
Get them set up.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:42
Penny by penny. Is this it? ModeMobile.com.
Jason Fishman: 33:45
Yeah. And then if you click on the investment opportunity in the top right, it’s a great offering page. Great example here. We worked on the regulation A+ campaign. So I went over three different types of filings briefly. The Reg D is accredited investors. Reg CF can raise up to 5 million from both retail and accredited regulation A+. You can raise up to 50 million.
So they had a first goal that was completed. It was successfully hit in May of $45 million. They then were able to do an extension, and got over 50 million. They did a $4.8 million reg CF in three weeks in September, and we’re now working on the Reg D. I’ve worked on all three of those. The Reg D’s just to accredited investors. You could see on this offering page a lot of social proof.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:27
A lot of social proof. Yeah, totally.
Jason Fishman: 34:29
1440 and Morning Brew. There’s Raging Bull, Robinhood Snacks, Business Insiders. Okay, everyone’s talking about these guys. If you scroll down, you get to see bonuses. Invest at this level. Here’s how much extra you get. And there’s even a sliding scale. You see, you can see how many shares are coming in.
If you scroll further down, you can see how they’re a number one Deloitte fastest growing software company in North America, as well as the revenue numbers, how many users they have, where you can buy the phone, their growth chart and what they experienced in early 2019, 2020, 2021. The way things progressed from there, talking about the problem and the opportunity here and some different comparables.
This is that vertical pitch deck I was referring to and how you’re able to really make the investment opportunity and potential come to life compliantly. Diversified revenue streams, everything that breaks down why this is a good investment, this is a good thing to partner on. And they have over 50,000 investors at this point, over 50,000 rubles. Owns stock in the company. You have to imagine, I was talking about more value than just the capital itself.
Every time they put out an announcement, a percentage of those 50,000 investors want to share it, whether it’s verbally or on their social media accounts. In some cases, on their blogs, on their newsletters. So this is really a textbook campaign. You can see, you know, more thought leaders talking about how amazing Mode Mobile is. Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple, discussed with Dan Narvaez, you know, how impactful, how big of a deal what they’re doing is, you can pull different quotes from the industry.
So that was a quote from Elon Musk, really about the growth of the industry. Different info from the team here. And reflecting the channels we discussed a lot of newsletter placements, advertising and scaling towards channels that are working, such as meta and very strong creative all the way throughout the funnel.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:33
I’m curious.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:35
Jason. I mean, this is one of the things that’s it’s obviously a very compelling offer as well. How much do the people you work with, do they have their offer dialed in? Are you helping them shape the offer? How does that work?
Jason Fishman: 36:49
So full spectrum of different needs from issuers, the brands that are issuing shares here. This company, much further along in terms of their messaging, their creative. We were really brought on for Meta advertising, advising on different pieces of the funnel here as well to. The meta advertising on the Facebook advertising. Pixel over 29 x return on ad spend from September to May, every $197 spent on ads. An advertisement was tracked on the pixel data on meta so high performing ad campaign over $5,600 average investment high for this space from that advertising traffic. Other groups were working on their style guide.
We’re working on the entire offering page build. Their team built this. We were, you know, advising all the way throughout the campaign. But some groups come to us with, you know, virtually nothing. Others say, hey, run these ads to spec, usually somewhere in between. And we have an in-house creative studio that’s building advertising for every campaign, including this one.
But the needs could change based on how far along a company is if they have an internal marketing team, if they’re working with other agencies, if we’re the only marketing team, the deliverables, what’s showing up in our project management boards differ.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:10
And, you know, so channel recommendations. You mentioned a bunch of strategic partnerships. We talked about how important that can be with this. And then what about projections and activation.
Jason Fishman: 38:25
The only way to measure is with numbers. I as a marketer am very connected to those projections, the analytics, the metrics. I like to build an algorithm. Impressions, clicks, conversions. How many times an ad or a piece of content has been seen, how much traffic it’s driving to an offering page like what we just looked at, and how many conversions are coming out the other end. There could be mid-funnel conversions, a webinar, sign up, some type of email submission.
But at the end of the day, how many investments? What’s the transactional value based on what was spent? What’s the marketing efficiency ratio or the return on advertising spend based on the channels? I could tell you on a Reg CF campaign, you want to shoot for a ten x return on advertising spend. The average investment on a regulation A+ campaigns a bit larger. I’d like to see closer to 20 x return on advertising spend by the end of the day. Reg D you’re talking about maybe 100 K higher average investment amount, so a little more hit or miss on the digital marketing side, but could be 40 x or higher.
CFOs, CEOs, they want to focus on that number, but it’s really the building blocks, the earlier stages of the algorithm that dictate what that calculation really looks like. So you have to be buying advertising at a good CPM, a good cost per thousand impressions. That’s a roman numeral, M, a good click through rate. And based on the media price, a good cost per click and then the traffic, if you’re seeing a 1% 2% conversion rate and then looking at average investment values, what that means. This is important not just to align with your team, with your agency, with your, you know, portal, what have you on what’s possible, what’s available, what’s going to come out the other side.
But if a channel is underperforming, you want to be able to pinpoint where in that algorithm the numbers are dropping off and then be able to focus optimization at that stage. It’s all about managing campaigns to a point of effectiveness versus writing off a channel too early. I could tell you many channels we’ve run for many campaigns haven’t worked right out of the gate, but what we do to optimize and get them to produce is the difference from an issuer that’s able to hit the full goal, and one that is in the 50% of issuers that really don’t produce much. On Reg CF, 50% of the issuers last year produced $114,000 or less. Only 7% hit $1 million or more.
Only five of the 1408 Reg CF hit $5 million or more. So a ton of great success stories. But those metrics aren’t always shared. You go to a website called Kingscrowd.com to look up any of these, and if you’re running a capital raise online or about to use one of these exemptions, one of these vehicles definitely recommend spending a lot of time doing research there and finding the closest comparables in your industry. But the the top issuers that top 10%, those are the ones that get all of the capital and those are the ones that are marketing the most. That’s why that competitor audit is so important.
Here’s some of the top campaigns from this week. Rad Intel we’re working with and their $12 million regulation plus goals hit earlier this year. They’re now playing after large amounts. Fan base is the largest regulation A+ on StartEngine at the moment. So you could go in as an investor, see all the deal terms, and then as a marketer, research further to determine what they’re doing to see those types of numbers come in.
If you go to markets, there’s a weekly funding report. If you go to funding reports right under markets, you could also go on to the advanced search and look at all the Reg CF, all the regulation A+ campaigns to date. The next tab down on markets will show you the market reports. And I don’t believe you need to do a login or anything like that. Yeah. So there’s a weekly report that pops up here quarterly. I look at the annuals quite a bit. So the 2024 insights. But you can look at how much is raised across all of the CFS every week. You know, from each portal, from each issuer.
Again, a lot of misconceptions in the space. So basically on the actuals, you’re going to be able to build a campaign that makes the most use of your time. The time clock is definitely staring at you on these types of rounds.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:47
Jason, first of all, I just want to thank you for sharing your knowledge, your insights. People can check out DigitalNicheAgency.com. Where can people check out the podcast and also, I know you do webinars. People can sign up for those. Where’s the best place to go on your site for those things?
Jason Fishman: 43:06
So if you submit a submission on our site, we’ll make sure to connect you to the next webinar. We do a monthly, so December 30th it’s going to be a 2025 year wrapped, you know, playing off the Spotify concept, but it’ll show our top 20 campaigns from the year, all seven figure eight figure campaigns if you go to YouTube. www.youtube.com/@DigitalNicheAgency, you’ll be able to see all of our webinars to date. podcasts. There’s playlists for the podcasts and webinars, guest appearances, other educational content I’ve put out.
So over 220 episodes of Test. Optimize. Scale., my podcast can be found there, each with different guests. I’ve had members of StartEngine and Wefunder and Mode Mobile and Rad, Intel, and a lot of the issuers we’ve spoken about on the podcast. And you can, you know, reach out to us through the site with any questions. We love talking marketing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:01
Everyone check out DigitalNicheAgency.com. Jason, thanks so much.
Jason Fishman: 44:06
My pleasure.
