Hi everyone!
I’ve been gone for a while but like to check in every once in a while and this conversation caught my attention. Unfortunately I see very good points that have the potential to devolve into unproductive conversation.
Andy, what you are hinting at is a very simple marketing term- working dollars vs. non-working dollars. Working dollars are money spent making sure eyeballs view a pre-created set of content. Non-working dollars are the production and creative costs associated with making the content. Most clients want a 90-10 or 80-20 working to non-working dollar ratio. However, when you aim for a ratio like that, frankly, the quality of the content suffers. I think 60-40 or if you can get hyper-efficient 70-30 is more realistic.
It also is not fair to attack the production costs of the podcasts or the materials created by the growth team. They are producing high quality content and that is the cost to produce it. It is also important to recognize that the growth team does not have control over the ‘last mile’. They can increase awareness of PoolTogether, they can even drive people to pooltogether.com or app.pooltogether.com, but they have no control over what happens after that, nor do they have a way to know if the traffic they are driving is converting at a higher or lower rate than organic traffic.
So IMHO…and it’s just my opinion, you aren’t being fair to the growth team. If you want to challenge them on organic reach, I would recommend finding crypto podcasts that you feel have effective reach and challenging the growth team to match those numbers. They may have to change the format, or the content, but at least they will have a direction to move in to make you and others happy.
Alternatively, I would recommend giving the growth team numbers that you feel should be achieved for the $25,000 quarterly spend. They can then use the working/non-working ratio to put some media dollars behind the content to increase it’s reach.
From my experience, having a content team produce a weekly podcast, create memes and other marketing materials for $100k per year is a bargain…that’s like 1.2 FTEs. But you need to support them. 1.2 FTEs without budget does not go very far. Organic content on it’s own does not go very far. If it did, it would be its own business model.
Hope this helps structure the conversation more productively going forward…even though I’m no longer active day to day, I still very much want to see this protocol reach it’s potential.