Hey Greg, great points and thanks for the comment. I’ll try and respond 1 by 1.
What activities do you believe are most effective and worth doubling down on? There seem to be a lot in this proposal.
We believe a mix of social, content, and paid strategies along with targetted geographical expansion are the main pillars of our strategy. In the periphery, we prioritize developing the infrastructure for more robust growth tactics in future quarters by setting up a CMS for hosting our editorial content (SEO) and capturing Emails on-site and via landing pages (to establish an owned channel). We believe this proposal focuses on those 4-5 activities.
$475 is ~2.4x the next-highest budget request, which is also growth related (BDWG, $192K), and ~4.2x yet another growth related budget (IBWG, $111K).
Further, it appears the GWG wallet still contains ~$208,000 as of writing.
Yes we mentioned we have a surplus, this would be counted towards the total. I think it speaks to the judiciousness employed by this group. When comparing budget size I would argue that GWG is the only WG that deploys meaningful capital into paid programs so I perceive the difference as natural.
Any non-contributor portion of the budget in GWG is directly spent on some metric we value, and in a systematic process to determine relative cost-effectiveness.
Lastly, I would say the MVI budget is far larger than growth’s on a per revenue basis. We are supporting products generating $Xm in ARR whereas the MVI is generating 5 figure ARR and requests 1/2-1/3 of the budget.
What channels are working? I know the Coop as a whole is working across a number of channels, though I’d suspect we are only getting results from a few.
On Impact - similar to my comment in the PoC proposal
- What specific impact is this group working towards? for example,
- How many impressions today? What is goal?
- How many followers on Medium today? What is the goal?
We see the same channels working; social (Twitter) and content; and continually evaluate paid opportunities to prioritize the best spend. I mention in the post that our impact is measured by:
Social: Product value contextual impressions (will get you a harder goal but trying to segment data to make this in an informed manner because nuance of ‘product-value’ impressions is important)
Content: Product value contextual reads, words, posts (last month: 5,000 words, 8,000 views, 6 posts June, 8 in July so far)
Paid: Product value contextual impressions, emails captured
APAC: Geographies stood up (x/3), Impressions, words, reads
What goes into this? How is this different than what the IB is doing and the BDWG?
Who is being sold to?
This simply refers to the wallet promotions and referral programs which are contingency sales programs - these are digital marketing related and not necessarily human-to-human sales as the other groups focus on. I think we’re all in agreement to knock this request off the budget and request again if necessary.
What is the current status of this? What is working? What is not working?
APAC expansion has certainly not gone as smoothly and quickly as I’d like but we are overhauling the previous strategy and are employing different tactics to quickly spin up presence in the highest impact geographies.
Is this not covered by the CDWG stipend?
I’d argue Dev goes above and beyond and find his contributions to this group far exceed the value spent. For more concrete justification, Dev is handling the implementation of marketing tech to our website (CMS, Email platform, landing page infra) which I see as not core to design.
What is “micro content”?
This simply refers to social-optimized content e.g. banners, gifs, graphics, and short videos for Twitter.
Marketing Promotions
What promotions are being targeted that require $75,000?
$25k/mo is budgeted for targetted ad spend as well as light copy testing. In the past, we’ve executed campaigns with Coingecko, The DeFiant, and Decrypt and have further engagements lined up with the DeFiant (podcast & newsletter) as well as Coingecko - Additionally, we are constantly monitoring new channels and opportunities for inefficiencies in relative pricing/ROI.
We typically pay <$12 CPM in highly targeted publishers and have been slowly ramping activity since our first spot on the DeFIant in Apr-May.
Impression Mining
How many impressions has this program generated so far?
How much per month are you spending on this program?Why does this budget need to increase over time?
I’d assume there are diminishing returns to paying for impressions and that there is some place where effectiveness plateaus.
June figure incoming but May generated ~1.1m impressions for ~$11,000. We’ve recently moved the CPM to $8.
Impression mining is a contingency-based program that is designed off of an analysis of an attractive per impression rate (would be happy to revisit this based on someone else’s analysis). It is meant to be reasonably scaleable, I’m not sure I understand where the idea it would plateau or offer diminishing returns comes into play (is this a question of duplicating reach?).
The budget increases to account for scaling up program participants - but it is important to remember that the budget is only deployed contingent on the impressions occurring.
Noticing a $15,000 budget here. What goes into this?
The SaaS budget is probably inflated. I meant to account for new subscriptions as we start to take them on under the purview of our group (whereas we haven’t before so don’t have a good estimate) including:
Contentful
GetResponse
Ahrefs
SocialSprout