Hi Everyone - I hope you’re gearing up for a great weekend! Warren and I are really excited about the new media summit we will be attending Feb 26-27th. We hope we see you in person there!
This week:
A current status update for the week
Creating our first lead magnet
Meta Ads Update
What we are working on
Weekly Update
This week we added 180 subscribers, down 40 from last week. Our new Meta ad set will be going out this afternoon, so hopefully that improves these results. We are planning to funnel all of our revenue from sponsorships into additional growth, so we hope to see a bump here soon.
We are also seeing good success with our new sponsorship model (charging per click and running ads until they get all of them). This is giving us more up front $$$ to fund our growth. We had a few more sponsor calls this week that went well, but the companies we talked to weren’t quite ready to work with us yet. We have more next week that we are excited about!
Finally, we spent a ton of time on a lead magnet this week (more on this in the next section).
Our First Lead Magnet
We have talked about creating a lead magnet for some time, and it finally felt right to pull the trigger.
A lead magnet can serve multiple purposes:
We can use it in marketing to reduce our cost per click
We can use it in our welcome email to get higher open rates and more onboarding survey completions
It can help us boost our trust with the community
The lead magnet we decided to go with is a guide of all the free and low cost products and services that are available to Austin founders. There are many programs from the city of Austin, the chamber of commerce, the State of Texas, and even public companies that most founders are unaware of. Our lead magnet puts all of these in one place.
We will be launching it as a “free gift” in our welcome email. We are hoping that this will increase the opens there.
Longer term, we are also thinking about having a discounted paid offering in addition to this free one. That could help us to offset some of our advertising costs.
Excited to report how this goes in a few weeks!
What lead magnets are most appealing to you?
Meta Ads Update (New creative strategy)
I outlined what we are planning to do this week with our creative. Will report with what we find.
This is the test we are running today (from last week’s post):
New POV walking shots (Brewery, Golf Course, Bridge)
Music - Our video has just been subtle ambient noise, but I want to try some with calming music or even upbeat music. I’ve noticed on my ads for my book (unrelated), that the music ads outperformed non-music ads.
New Copy - This will be a small tweak, but I’m going to experiment with more targeting for entrepreneurs, our ad from the last set targeting this group is our best performing right now.
New Headlines - We now have 1600+ subscribers to the newsletter. I think using this social proof language could be a good selling point for new users.
Next Week’s Initiatives
I wasn’t on top of my stuff last week. I didn’t end up creating the sponsorship calendar like I had planned to.
This week we are focusing on:
Sending the lead magnet live
Creating the sponsorship calendar
Thinking about what value we could provide for a paid community
Continuing sponsorship conversations
Thanks for reading. Feel free to respond to this email with any advice or questions!
Until next week,
Ken