Full Transcript for The Empty Restaurant Problem and How to Raise $1.7M from One Webinar | Jason Fishman

Fishman: Absolutely. There are more similarities than differences. And I started DNA, Digital Niche Agency, here in Marina Del Rey, less trafficked area of Los Angeles and beautiful. as a growth marketing firm. I quickly found working with startups and growth stage companies, this conversation around fundraising to be a commonality. Whether we were working on a campaign, that the results were going to be presented to a finance partner. And because the results scaled from there, I was being asked to put together marketing sections of business plans, pitch decks, even participating in the investor meetings and presentations. And at that point, I was introduced to Reg D 506C legislation exemption that allows for solicitation of accredited investors, meaning I can market Shmuel Herschberg: Okay. Jason Fishman: to high net worth, high household income individuals. I came from the advertising space, ad tech, running a mobile advertising network. I said, hey, I I could call a few data partners, pull in all types of net worth and household income data, portfolio size, what people are doing online, started running programmatic ads, banner ads, and saw success. First campaign under 50K spent, over 2.83 million raised, and marketing play. The the founder was featured as a Forbes 30 under 30 for energy. all types of of press inquiries and strategic partnership attention from the awareness of the campaign that went beyond, you know, just bringing in, you know, a few investors to to close it out. We started getting introduced to more issuers, more companies issuing these investment opportunities. We got attention from the reward crowdfunding space and began getting white labeled by Indiegogo and Kickstarter agencies. lot of those working with D to C brands on a product launch, tech hardware, apparel, entertainment, all different types of verticals. You use that. And then they actually brought us to our first Reg C F campaign. I'm gonna throw Shmuel Herschberg: Okay. Jason Fishman: these two more terms at you Reg C F and Regulation A. As of right now, Reg C F regulation crowdfunding graze up to five million dollars and from both retail and accredited investors and the adult Could also raise up to 75 million on a regulation A plus campaign. Public companies can use this for a price round. Companies can use a reggae filing, which is far more in depth than the Reg C, Reg C F and audits to to direct list and go public. So it's much larger valuations that we see with those types of organizations in most cases. but but I found my niche here. As a marketing agency, it's important to have a specialization. And I find everyone's looking to raise capital. in a generalized state. Shmuel Herschberg: So is it is it capital for for more of these crowdfunding Kickstarter type of companies or are is it more B2B, you know, the HVAC company that wants to expand and stuff like that? Jason Fishman: It is across the board and it's for the sale of in most cases, common stock, other

cases preferred stock, debt, safe note, convertible note, revenue shows, different ways to structure it. We work with everything from space mining companies to multifamily real estate, tunnel boring companies, foldable tiny homes, graphene companies, marketing automation platforms. So you could hear a lot of beeta beat. In there. And there's a marketing play. if you picture the marketing funnel and the awareness stage and consideration, intent, conversion, for many of these investment campaigns, repeat conversion and advocacy, it sets the stage to then market the B2B or B2C offering after Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Jason Fishman: the B2I business to investor offering. There's Shmuel Herschberg: Okay. Jason Fishman: this concept of, I didn't coin the term, but investments, user owners. Shmuel Herschberg: Investmenters. Okay. Jason Fishman: W whether it's a credit investor or retail investor, you know, someone takes a a stake, a position in a company, they're they're very likely to be an ambassador and share unofficial and share it with their friends, family, their social audiences, they're an owner. Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah, I want to get into the whole the nuts and bolts of of the marketing aspect of it because you know, you said, you know, there are more similarities. And and I tend to agree with you on that. Jason Fishman: Yes. Shmuel Herschberg: I I I do feel like, you know, it's kind of like a car, right? You know, cars have four wheels and they go places, right? But they're different types of cars for different types of, you know, journeys. And I'd like to hear more about like the journey about how you're how you're attracting your investmenters. and and getting them to convert, like what channels are you using? Like Jason Fishman: Happy to break it all down for you. I would recommend before hopping directly into a channel that an issuer puts together a marketing strategy for this initiative. Sounds basic, Shmuel Herschberg: Okay. Jason Fishman: sounds self-explanatory, maybe something that could be put together by Claude in, a few minutes. but I would tell you the process primes for a strong return, a strong result. Because it's really the top 10% of issuers that do well. The bottom 50% pretty stagnant. a lot of them think just by launching, people are gonna be attracted to their offering. we've seen this in D2C, you launch a Shopify site and expect people to just find you, right? So built a model called the Eight Point Plan. industry overview and competitor marketing audits started out. I would pick and choose channels based on what you see in terms of similar brands going after the types of investors you're ultimately gonna want to attract. You then do target audience. research personas and and map out where those individuals go online, how you could reach them there, both with paid advertising as well as organic content marketing. And then prioritize those channels, determine the creative that's going to go in each channel, look for partners that could help accelerate it, put in projections, impressions, clicks, conversions, how many times an ad piece of content's been seen, how much traffic it's driving over, the results you're looking to see. I could tell you, going back to, the the the the nature of that question, that that meta Facebook advertising is a fundamental channel here. that is surprising to some reg D issuers. Let's say it's a real estate fund and you know they're looking to have a 250K minimum investment. Meta still works really well there. but you know, Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Jason Fishman: you talk to the wrong person in finance, they're gonna think, that's just for you know, kids in college and grandmas and you know, looking at random kittens playing online when no, it's a high impact placement. With click-through rates, cost per click, traffic metrics that are stronger than other channels, and more importantly, conversion behavior that outperforms other channels, but can take it to search, secondary social. and then a I'll I'll end with this a lot of paid email newsletters. Those placements do Shmuel Herschberg: Okay. Jason Fishman: particularly well here, particularly especially if they are two investors. Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Yeah. So what what what y are you would you say that Meta is your is like the number one channel, bread and butter type of thing? Jason Fishman: In many cases. And I could upload custom audiences there. I have a database of over Shmuel Herschberg: Mm-hmm. Jason Fishman: 1.8 million historical reg CF investors through data mining that I'm able to upload and get a good match rate and target specifically. I could also create lookalike models there. I could retarget everyone that's going through the offering page or landing pages. It's a webinar signup page, a page to download the pitch deck. Somewhere B2B, right? I I can upload client lists and customer lists and run ads to them directly as well. So there's so much you could do with it. if there's a podcast appearance by our client, you know, conference appearance, article write-up, let's say they get an investor testimonial. A lot of this is manufactured. I shouldn't just say, you know, what happens if they get an investor testimony? They ask, they get it. You know, maybe a video from an investor speaking about why they they joined the company as a shareholder. We could run that as a video ad on that platform and really set it up for strong performance. again, I I don't run a lot of meta because I love it as a consumer, a user, as much as it outperforms on a dashboard in comparison to other channels. Shmuel Herschberg: That's where yep. Yeah, I l I love that bit that you're just very analytical about where am I getting the best return on the investment. But what what about like touch points and stuff? Are is this something like you know, like a direct to consumer offering where you're just selling some sort of knickknack or something like that and it's just like a one time ad to

purchase, or do you need multiple touch points? Jason Fishman: Great question. I use the number, the range of seven to seventeen touch points. I have clients that I've I've looked at their dashboards, some of the more advanced anal analytics and systems. this investor over 43 touch points. I can see, you know, it's this email, you know, from from the issuer's newsletter, it's this site that dra directed people over. It's then these three different ad channels, so multiple. channels that's what we want an omni channel approach right but definitely multiple touch points at the end of the day Shmuel Herschberg: Is is it linear? Jason Fishman: is it linear like the more touch points the more likely Shmuel Herschberg: In the sense that it it always has to start with a Jason Fishman: no there are trends there are campaigns where we see hey it starts from this email newsletter it starts from Robinhood snack Or Dollar Flight Club, or it's it's it's 1440. It's investor place. some of these newsletters, the investors actually pay to receive recommendations on on deal flow. So they act much quicker. Those pick and choose which issuers they're going to promote and they they charge the investors. Others, it's it's a paid advertising program as a whole. but it doesn't always start at one place. And we want to optimize towards what's working best during that period of time, that weekly report, that month. We want to be mindful of short-term and long-term gains. but want to paint a picture a little more for you here. The average investment on a Reg CF campaign in 2025 was $1,716. That's across all Reg CF campaigns. Shmuel Herschberg: Okay. Jason Fishman: that would be high for e-commerce, direct to consumer for most verticals. but it allows for a strong return on ad spend. So if we're seeing a dollar, two dollars cost per click on average, a traffic campaign, a conversion campaign focused on retargeting and top performing audiences, getting traffic at a lower rate, building the retargeting pool. If it averages together around a dollar, two dollars, maybe it's two fifty, maybe it's eighty-seven cents, including retargeting. if it's a dollar, two dollars, and then a one percent conversion rate. Would love to see two. for an investment campaign for this type of investment, 1% is very effective. I've worked on campaigns where it's 0.7, even 0.3, and still produced. If it's 1%, that puts us at $100, $200 cost per acquisition, cost per purchase. if the average investment is somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000, again, it was $1,716 last year across all campaigns, that sets us up for a strong return on ads, you know, 10x. 20x, 5x, those ranges, it's usually looked at as a good cost of capital. The issuers are setting their Shmuel Herschberg: How does that Jason Fishman: valuations, so it's favorable to them. And again, at the end of the day, it's a platform that's you know taking in their personal info, you know, Social Security, in many cases, ACH, credit card. I mean,

it's it's not an easy conversion, but it's all taking Shmuel Herschberg: Definitely not. Jason Fishman: place online. Many of these deals have thousands of investments, thousands of investors that come through the regulation A campaigns that hit, you know, 50 million. worked on one that oversubscribed at sixty five million dollars in June, tens of thousands of investors. So it's all processed like a a Shopify site would. Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Can you explain to us just a little bit about the ROAS mechanics of these ads? Jason Fishman: Sure. Shmuel Herschberg: So if if if you're talking about say you know a two hundred dollar CPA, you said, and the average investment, you know, seventeen hundred dollars, right? So we're talking roughly, you know, eight X, right, on what they're investing versus but they're actually buying an investment, right? So they're Jason Fishman: Yes. Shmuel Herschberg: not buying. So how how does that work with the with the with the ROAS? Or return on your Jason Fishman: Sure. It's calculated based off the transactional value. So if it's a $1,700 investment, let's do, yeah, $1,700 investment. And it is a $200 cost per acquisition. It would show up on the ad report as $8.5x. Yes, per per your point, you know, the the the client, the issuer, can then recognize that as capital coming in versus revenue. So Return is a broader use of the word here, but but it is the standard. It is how it's calculated. I I would say that is a good return on ad spend. many people in the industry would say it's it's a great return on ad spend. others shoot for a 10x or higher. I've worked with real estate groups where it's a much higher average transactional value, average investment amount, but they want to see six percent or less. There's under other funding sources they can pay 6% for. So they want to see under that level. So I've given you the algorithm for Reg C F. Regulation A plus, the average investment's a bit higher. I would say more two to three thousand. By the way, this is hundreds, thousands of investments. So even if they're getting six figure investments in there, and many campaigns do, it's still gonna average to a low level. we worked on one that oversubscribed at five million dollars in July. Did it in 37 days. the final day there was a webinar, great mid-funnel content piece and with a live audience to convert investors. One investor came in at over $800,000, no offline conversation, tracked from an advertising pixel, strong return on the pixel there, of course. And Reg CF still over 800 investments to hit the full five million, over $6,000 as an average investment. So even with larger investors. blended in there. The the the issuer sets the minimum. It's usually somewhere between $100 and $500, sometimes $1,000. This one's $500. That that other vehicle that I mentioned, Reg D, high level view, same thing. Targeting investors, bring them down marketing funnels. that being said, it has to be accredited, has to be higher net worth or higher household income. The minimum is much more daunting in the sense that it's 25 to 50K in most cases, sometimes 100, sometimes as high as 500 we've worked on as a minimum. I've spoken to issuers where it's as high as two million. So on a hundred K minimum investment, it is typically not occurring directly on the site. Some of those are and designed to transact. Most of them it's it's lead forms. It's very similar to a B2B funnel of hey, lead generation, investor relations team, CEO, somebody on the the client side speaks to that prospect. sales cycle for when that investment, that transaction is completed, a lot of content and follow-ups in between, but 100K minimum, you may see a 260 to 280,000 average transactional value. So if you're paying $2,500, if you're paying $10,000 to acquire that investment, it's still a very low cost of capital. Shmuel Herschberg: Totally. Yeah. So what what is that? you said seventeen to seventeen touch points, right? So is every touch point, leading to a form that says, invest now or are there articles? I think you mentioned webinars, right? What just can you give us a little you know, what what is what is what does that funnel look like? Jason Fishman: the how about now, the Verizon commercials, can you hear me now? that guy, but it says how about now. As a creative that that that stands out to me. no, they have to be engaging. If it just seems like automated follow-up that is bland, these prospects likely have many other investments coming across their desk. At least we have to assume so. But I I could tell you they do. Maybe if they click on a Facebook ad, Facebook's gonna serve them other advertising that is similar in nature. So you have to stand out. I recommend in my content, I run a bunch of workshops. I speak at conferences around this all all the time. And I I emphasize headline worthy announcements on a weekly basis. I mentioned a few things around social proof and third party validation earlier. You know, we're speaking at this conference next week. Check out this podcast episode from last week. look at this write up an entrepreneur that came out today. look at what our clients are saying. Some of the top B2B brands in the world. They're talking about how great we are. One of them invested. It talks about how great, great we are that they invested. one of our clients, Panasonic invested in them. And it it's pulling in from your network on where these investors are coming from. You're able to point at that content. Could talk about a new deal or a new partnership or, you know, new team member, new talent acquisition. the information has to be available to everybody. It can't be, these investors learn these things about your company and future growth. but but I would emphasize that is then distributed across, you know, your your content calendar. Once this content strategy is built, you're determining what's posted when and where. And that is reflected in the advertising meta as well as

other advertising platforms, reward higher volumes of creative, especially when they're engaging audiences. So you could be Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Jason Fishman: launching new creative every week. Two weeks. It's a full functioning marketing campaign. And then you're looking at the analytics, test, optimize, scale. Something I say a lot. you're you're testing to see which audiences are responding best, which creatives and which funnels on an ongoing basis. So if you see, hey, photos of the founder in Times Square with their advertisement around the New York Stock Exchange placement and their ticker symbol being reserved. Is getting a high conversion because it's it's hinting that they're going to go public. you want to run a lot more creative like that. If you run that and it doesn't perform, gotta find something else. you know, if if it's talking about other current events, I've seen brands not that we've worked with, I've I've seen brands we've worked with get quotes from Elon Musk about their product. Those ads perform very well. I've seen other brands that Shmuel Herschberg: Is is that Jason Fishman: we haven't worked with. quote him a and h him just saying something about their industry, not even directly about the brand. If that performs best, you do more of of that. Shmuel Herschberg: Is that legitimate to to use Elon Musk in in these advertisements? Jason Fishman: If it's working, if if it's working and compliance, yes. if he's saying something about your brand, absolutely again, run every piece of creative by compliance, by legal. They're going to have to represent you if there's ever a question mark around Shmuel Herschberg: Okay. Jason Fishman: it. but and where we're not lawyers, I can't, you know, give legal advice, but I could tell you those are two high performing campaigns. Shmuel Herschberg: I'm glad I'm glad you said that. I'm glad you said that. Jason Fishman: I I'm Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Jason Fishman: I could hear my general counsel yelling at me from, his office. Mention you're not a lawyer. Yeah. Shmuel Herschberg: You know, I always talk yeah, I I always talk about like, you know, in advertising and marketing, you know, we always go to the red line, but never go over that red line and make sure you're you're you're say stating from the get-go, hey, you know, we are going to the red line, but we are not touching it. We're not going over that red line, and we're not lawyers. So if you think we're over the red line, it's because that's your that's that's your perspective, but we're we're not over that red line. Jason Fishman: glad we're both aligned on that. And y and yes, I I'd Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Jason Fishman: rather say it than not. Shmuel Herschberg: So you spoke about put putting ads out, right? Testing ads. And I love that because they they talk about how now on meta, right, the targeting is the creative. W what what about if the ads are looking fine, but the landing page is converting badly? What's your first

diagnostic move there? Jason Fishman: Conversion rate is the single most important metric. So that's a very, very common scenario. I would tell you the conversion begins with the advertising creative. So even if I'm seeing, two percent, five percent click-through rates on Meta, I'm not sold on the creative performing quite yet. even if I'm seeing, you know, good CPC cost per click, Which is also dependent on a good CPM, a good cost per thousand impressions bid. There they're still mid-funnel metrics, and I'm happy to pay more for traffic if it's converting, of course. So a lot of focus and attention goes to to that landing page. So the reg CF campaigns, the regulation A plus campaigns, where it's a hundred dollar, five hundred dollar minimum. A lot of issuers will just drive traffic to their offering page. The offering page is basically a vertical pitch deck. what you'd expect in a in a pitch deck. if you haven't seen one, I'm sure all of your listeners have, but if you haven't, it's like a shark tank pitch, but but put into a PDF format that you're scrolling down instead of flipping through. They even include a video that's two and a half, five minutes long, hopefully. that that would reflect more of I'll just go back to it that that shark tank type pitch and Shmuel Herschberg: Okay. Jason Fishman: it's designed to convert investors it should you know emulate what sit down with with you would would consist of especially except it's it's faster paced people have less you know attention less bandwidth online so that that page is designed to convert investors if it's not If we're getting traffic over there and it's just not converting, I then want to launch additional variants for destination URL from the ads, landing pages. Let's do a webinar. A lot easier to get a webinar sign up than it is to get investment. Let's do that you know, pitch deck download. Let's get email addresses. Now we could email these audiences for follow-ups. But Shmuel Herschberg: Okay. Yeah. Jason Fishman: I would say the more social proof, the more third party validation, the better. It's a constant. I feel like you can never have enough. It's the crowd effect at play on these campaigns. There can be things working against you. For example, if you have under $50,000 raised, under $100,000 raised, and you're not getting a good conversion rate, it's easier said than done, but I would do whatever you can to go to your first degree network, perhaps your second degree network, friends of friends, friends of email subscribers, and look to bring in that first hundred K, that first 200K, the first 500K. Even if that sounds ridiculous, a lot easier to get investments from people who know you or know someone you know that's recommending you. They may just want to see Shmuel Herschberg: Mm-hmm. Jason Fishman: you succeed, throw in $500 versus try to convince someone who just saw you online. And then there's social dynamics at play here, the line around the block versus the empty restaurant sensation. That empty restaurant, that site not getting a high enough conversion rate per your question there. The menu could look good, the product, the interior design, the the flow of the site. And if there's not other people there, it just feels off. there's something wrong, and you're just the only one not to realize it. Where if it's a line around the block, you have people wanting to buy your product without even knowing what it is, wanting to invest without even understanding your financials. And I don't say Shmuel Herschberg: Mm-hmm. Jason Fishman: that in any type of irresponsible way, as much as the marketer stating. That that is what you need to run a successful retail campaign. Shmuel Herschberg: You're s you're selling that hope, you're selling that dream, people and people believe in you. Yeah. Jason Fishman: People believe in you and the others believing in you. If I see Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah that. Jason Fishman: a deal with a flying skateboard, I grew up in Southern California, skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, that that would get my attention. If there's $6,000 raised, I'm not investing. If there's Shmuel Herschberg: Totally. Jason Fishman: $66,000 raised, I'm thinking about it more, but I'm not investing. If there's $106,000 raised, my listening is different. 206, even more so. $506,000. Okay. All right. Let me take a look at this seems really cool. Million and six, you craze up to five million on the CF. $4 million and $6,000. I'm putting in funds, regardless if Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Yeah. Jason Fishman: it's the minimum or more. And I I haven't even done my homework on it yet. So that that's what's available with with social dynamics. I I would argue that this is present in D to C as well, too. Whether it's the brand name of Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Jason Fishman: my shirt or the protein shake I'm gonna drink after this or my phone, somebody told me, do this. Some article said Shmuel Herschberg: Definitely. Jason Fishman: everyone's buying this right now. We're just making it around an investment opportunity. Shmuel Herschberg: Definitely definitely. we always talk about imposter syndrome where people are talk fake it till you till you make it, right? But then there's also that belief in yourself. And I just posted something on LinkedIn about this recently. How how that's like one of the most important things. Like you have to believe in your product. You have to believe in your what you're selling, your investment. because if you don't, no one else is gonna believe in in you. Now I wanna talk about the webinar aspect of things. But before we do I Can can you maybe give some like practical nuggets about some audits that you did? Because you were just talking about how you were analyzing ads, analyzing landing pages, and then that's when you mentioned the webinars. But before we go there, like what's your approach to like audits? Like was there anything interesting that you found like in a recent audit that

you could share with the audience? Jason Fishman: Yeah. So I go on to a website called King's Crowd. Yeah, King of the Castle, King, King's Crowd. And I I do so every Monday morning. They do a weekly report on Saturdays to show all of the Reg C F campaigns, as well as the portals, the websites that serve as marketplaces for many of these deals or tools to self-publish on your own site as a brand, as an issuer. I need to know the pulse at all times of what the industry's doing. which investment opportunities are getting the most investments, whether they're mine or among mine, I I need to know. And then from there, beyond how much capital raised and volume of investments, I want to be able to answer the question of how. How are they doing that? That's when I look at my marketing tools. So there are other tools. You don't have to use these, but just to give the the practical numbers around it and and I don't Have a relationship with any of these. This isn't promotional for them. Again, that there's other options. but I first go to their website, I then look at similar web to get a projection of how much traffic that they're getting to their website and from which demographics, which geolocations, what sites. I look at spy foo. There's many other search engine marketing tools outside of it, and get a better sense of if they're advertising on search platforms. what keywords they're ranking for organically, what backlinks and articles are driving traffic to their site. success leaves clues. I want to get an understanding of what's occurring. I go to Facebook Ads Library as well as LinkedIn Ads Library. A lot more ads running on Facebook around these deals. you can simply Google Facebook ads library or ask any LLM or search engine, but it's Facebook.com slash ads slash library. can't spend enough time there. You could look at what any brand is advertising today. You could also look at any keyword or phrase and see which brands are using that in their advertisements. As an example, if I type in accredited investor, I'm gonna be able to look at all of the ads that have the words accredited investor in them, including the legalese around the investment opportunity only being available to accredited investors, the th those rank D type campaigns. And Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Jason Fishman: I wanna look at the the text. I wanna look at the The image and/or video. I want to cut the headline underneath. I want to click on the call to action, look at the funnel, sign up for the email, analyze. beyond just subscribing to their email newsletter, I go onto a website called MILD, like a I don't know, sugar mill, milled. and I could look at email newsletters that feature a brand or phrase. there are some financial email newsletters and newsletters that talk about investments that I naturally subscribe to as well. I want to do a Google News search. There's all different types of you SERP and different types of searches you can find, different social mentions as well.

Too. This is very important. Who's repurposing your content? I write for the Forbes Agency Council. Some of my articles have under a thousand views. Some of my articles have over 40,000. The ones over 40,000 have been repurposed like a hundred plus times. And on X, on all these different platforms. So I I want to see who, because then I could reach out. For our campaigns to get that content driven further. Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Excellent. Jason Fishman: lastly, social media channels, people underestimate organic social. I believe the future is AIs talking to AIs, and part of what they're besizing you or your investment opportunity or your direct-to-consumer opportunity, your business to business opportunity up around are what you're posting online, your content, including your social. just from the perspective investor standpoint, if they get to your Instagram. After it's showing up on the first page of your search results and there's nothing there. Or if they get there and there's all types of authoritative content and references to other brands and thought leaders, there's engagement around it, something else comes across their desk. That comp company looks like a ghost online, there's nothing about them. They're they're likely more comfortable investing in you. So that that's what's available through all these channels. But but I start with those audits, it usually takes me more spots Shmuel Herschberg: Nice. Jason Fishman: to more places. Poor cup of coffee, just search around for a half hour. Shmuel Herschberg: Well, that that's great. That's great. So so it's like you're almost more sleuth than than a marketer. or or or if I'm getting this, what you're saying and and I and and I think I think you are and I believe this is that part of being a marketer is really being a sleuth, being curious, digging around, searching, like there's so much information out there, on on multiple touch points, like first of all in terms of competitors, but then also in terms of like what your competitors are doing and It's just so easy to just find this and just open up your you know, your toolbox and and say like, all right, let's see their ads they're running, let's see their funnels, let's see their emails and so on and so forth. It's yeah, it's it's it's a huge it's it's a huge component. And I'm glad I'm glad you went, you know, into this in details because it's sometimes we we we often forget about this that you know we think, how can we you know, reinvent the wheel when you don't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel, right? You could just see what your competitors are doing and then you go after and just, all right, that's an interesting aspect. That's an interesting angle. Let's try this, let's try that. yeah, and and also like webinars. I know in the D D D to C space, also with like, you know, coaching offers and stuff like that, webinars have definitely made made a a huge comeback, I think, in this year. and I think next year we'll also see more

of more of that pattern continue. What about like in in in the in in the investing market that you're that you're involved in. has web have webinars always been popular? Have they are are they on the rise or or or just were they always there? Jason Fishman: They're gaining more and more popularity. I like that term by the way, sleuth. And you seem to understand the market very well. I really don't think you could be a talented marketer without understanding the market. You talked about reinventing the wheel. It would be like trying to reinvent the wagon without understanding how a wheel works. You know, you really need to have an understanding of who your target audience is, what they're receiving. when they go online and and why they're gonna care about you, why they're gonna put in their hard earned funds with you versus someone else. What whether it's, you know, another business or investment opportunity or you know, purchase, what whatever it is, you you still need to understand what's taking place in the ecosystem. Otherwise you're shooting in the dark. It's you know, illusional Illusions of grandeur of hey, we're we're amazing. So people are just gonna want work with us versus our content's way better than those groups. And we have more Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Jason Fishman: traffic running and from more, th thought leaders that can live in long form content such as webinars. why do I love webinars? Because it's an event. You can market the date. I think of those movie posters when I was a kid. I remember Independence Day came out on July second. Alien movie takeover, but I remember the date. It was in the nineties. How do I still remember the I remember, Shmuel Herschberg: The dates. Yeah. Jason Fishman: dates of you know half the things in my life. How do I still remember that date? It was the marketing leading up to it. I I've run theatrical ads and those three weeks leading up to it, big deal. You could do the same thing with a webinar, two weeks, three weeks up to it, and make it more and more and more of an engaging, interesting event to attend. this is, accomplished in many cases by guests, you know, panel type formats, yeah, new updates, announcements, news. We have founders we work with that treat this like an Apple you know keynote. and Shmuel Herschberg: Keynote launch. Jason Fishman: they they they really have a lot of fun with it. I I'm I'm a tech enthusiast. I I used to log in live in September every year. I'll watch the replays day of still to this day. one more thing. E each piece of it, I I get excited about maybe maybe that's the, marketer in me or, whatever it is, consumer in me. But you get the opportunity to do that around an investment and you can Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah, for sure. Jason Fishman: run advertising to get signups. Maybe it's somewhere between $2 and $10 per signup based on the fills. based on whether it's autofill and how many fields there are or if it's a landing page or you know what you're connecting

to what. that means you can build a pretty substantial list of registrants. I'd tell you only about a third of the registrants will actually show up. Some will be regretful that they didn't and reach out to you and can actually you know become investors or clients or consumer customers, whatever it is, that just because they feel bad about it and and they have a genuine interest in what you're doing. but but they're then in your email drip. You can send them the replay, you can invite them to other things in the future so that they're still valuable. we've worked on webinars with over 2,800 physical attendees. we've worked on many webinars with a few hundred. we've worked on a good amount of webinars where hundreds of thousands of dollars are raised during the hour. have worked on other webinars where over a million dollars is raised, 1.7 million dollars is raised. Within a 24 hour window of that webinar, a bit of a decision-making process after the webinar, right? So it's it's a great way to build awareness and have that awareness audience jump to mid-funnel very quickly. It's a way to get more engagement out of mid-funnel. And I just believe it's it's a captivating form of media where if the founder's there and talking about the opportunity and really getting people excited. versus just an email with the how about now messaging which people do do use. one set up to produce a higher close rate, a higher conversion rate. And then I I should mention you can clip it up and use, you know, 15 second, 30 second clips and advertisements. Shmuel Herschberg: Short form media. Exactly. Do you find that there's higher conversion rates on webinars? live especially live webinars, not not not the recordings. Jason Fishman: I don't have enough data to state it in a concrete fashion, but those have been our findings that the live webinar allows for that, for this type of initiative. there's live QA. I've moderated some of these webinars. My team moderates others. One I could think of, there was over 400 attendees and over a hundred questions. I can't ask a hundred questions. as the moderator, but but I can go through it and and bulk them together and find 10 questions that are pretty similar in nature. And if you ask a question and it gets answered and in a way that assures you more on the investment, you're likely going to participate. Or if it's just a recorded webinar, there are definitely benefits to that, especially the immediacy. And there's arguments to be made if somebody signs up today for a webinar in two weeks. Are they even going to show up? Are they going to care in two weeks? Would they have invested sooner with a different funnel? Even though you can still take them down a different funnel and email them and engage them and run ads to them beforehand. if they know they're attending, does that slow them down? So there, there are there's an aspect of of style and strategy here. but I've found the live events to be large scale sale events. Shmuel Herschberg: And that that's pretty much like the best your your your your best product, let's say, as an advertisement that will allow you to scale. Jason Fishman: Mm-hmm. Exactly. If you see it working, let's say it's a let's say it's a ten dollar sign up, asking for a little more information, maybe some more targeting. and you boost it with, you know, a thousand dollars, hundred signups, thirty of them show up. but then three invest. Even Shmuel Herschberg: And there you go. Jason Fishman: if they're you know. $1,500 investments and that's $4,500 and a 4.5 X return on ad spend. let's Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Yeah. Jason Fishman: say one of those investors participates another time during the closing, 10 to 30% of the investors will participate multiple times in these types of deals. And then it turns into let's say $6,000 total. That's a 6X. That's not bad. Okay. Let's let's spend $2,000, spend $5,000, spend $10,000. Let's get a thousand signups and 300 people attending and You if we maybe get thirty investments off of that. And Shmuel Herschberg: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Jason Fishman: and instead of just getting thirty at the average, some of those come in at six figure level. One comes in at a six figure level, you know, it starts becoming a completely different game. Shmuel Herschberg: For sure, for sure, definitely. you might see higher CPMs, you might see higher CPCs, and but again, if the CPA is there and the ROS is there, it could be that golden ticket. And it sounds like it is. I I just want to finish off maybe with some rapid fire questions. you know, just give a give a quick answer. These will be short and then we'll just wrap it up. What's the one test every brand should run this month? Jason Fishman: If they haven't, I'm gonna go with chat GPT ads. There's pixel conversion tracking. it's a test. There's a five hundred dollar credit, run a test. Shmuel Herschberg: Okay, cool. And what metric do you think you know, founders, you know, totally worship, but you'd say tell them like in the first meeting, that's garbage. I don't want you thinking about that. Jason Fishman: My gut answer, and I hate to say it, and we've referenced it so much, is return on ad spend. it is absolutely important, but to focus on it, it it it it leads to the wrong conversations. good media buying at the impression level from the right audiences sets you up for a good return on ad spend. Good cost per click metrics and click-through rates set you up for a more engaged audience, a higher conversion rate and a higher return on ad spend. you could run. thousand dollars towards retargeting for a a brand with enough of traffic, enough of retargeting pool, maybe get a 30X, but it's not scalable. Shmuel Herschberg: Mm-hmm. Jason Fishman: some of the top performing campaigns shoot for two X, three X metrics because they know if they're spending five million dollars and it turns into 10, 15, that spread is is well worth it and well worth their time. The two X may have been

shut off by someone just thinking about return on ad spend. So it's not that it's not part of the conversation or that I would use the word garbage necessarily, but at the same time, I would direct them towards other indicators. Shmuel Herschberg: Cool. And after Meta, what are the top ad networks? and and this by the way, could be email, could be webinars. what what are the top advertising platforms that people should be looking into? Jason Fishman: Smart email newsletter advertising placements, smart buying around it. You know, s some of these are gonna be, you know, fifty grand a month for a placement. And maybe you receive two X, maybe you're told you need to do more newsletters to see performance, meaning you're not getting a return, few investments, few conversions here and there. There's email ad newsletter networks. we buy from them. I don't have an affiliation, but you know, Beehive, Well Put. There's a few others with thousands of newsletters that you can bid on, many of them in a CPC type format, and then optimize towards the newsletters that are performing best. You're limited by scale, ultimately, but but for most brands, pretty decent volume. but I've seen A lot of good prospecting traffic, a lot of good Shmuel Herschberg: From email. Jason Fishman: results from it, but but good quality. So even if they're being converted from another channel, it's it's a good thing to add. And again, for these types of campaigns it works very well. Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah, and what about ad networks? Jason Fishman: Yeah. a lot of people buy from ad networks. I mean, those are ad networks, but a lot of people buy from them in the wrong way. they have too much trust in the platform and the functionality of it and the case studies versus really customizing the site list, the ad units, and the audiences that are being targeted. And then staying within range and building up enough retargeting pool from those channels to then retarget from those channels. There's then too many discrepancies and not warranted discrepancies, I I would tell you, kind of have a long conversation around attribution, but with view through and click through conversions and actually telling where the performance is coming from, and that person is just focused on ROAS and doesn't care about view through conversions and Only wants to give credit to one traffic source and not understanding that it's gonna be, 17 touch points and probably five different traffic sources. But programmatic ads and buying from the right private marketplaces, buying from the right, tier one site lists and ad units there. take your pick on which one. It doesn't need to be one specific entry point. Shmuel Herschberg: Yeah. Awesome. Cool. And where where where can listeners find you, Jason? Jason Fishman: LinkedIn, Jason Fishman, digital nicheagency dot com, YouTube dot com slash at digital niche agency. Have access to my my educational series or webinar pieces there and podcasts and guest appearances. And yeah, we always welcome conversations. Shmuel Herschberg: What is that what is that what is that educational piece what what does that educational piece go into? What what what do you focus on? Jason Fishman: Every month it's a different topic and we create a different deck and we do our own live hour-long webinar and and with a different team member each month. cycling different team members. My podcast is all external guests. It covers everything from marketing strategy to SEO, GEO, content marketing, specific content channels, advertising, conversion rates, if conversion optimization, if your deal is ready to go live, your campaign's ready to go live, if it's set up to fail and actionable. insights around it. Shmuel Herschberg: Awesome. Awesome. Well thank you. Thank you so much. This has been a really really an eye opening conversation. So thank you for coming on to the to the Built the Scale podcast and sharing your knowledge with us. Really appreciate it. And yeah, looking forward to speaking to you more in the future. Jason Fishman: My pleasure, Shmuel. This has been a great conversation. Thank you for having me on and thank you for everybody for sticking around to this point. Shmuel Herschberg: Thanks for listening to the Built to Scale podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss a conversation about what it really takes to build and scale in today's market. For more information about Built to Scale and how we help companies grow, visit builttoscale.co. If you have suggestions for future guests or topics, send us a note at podcast at builttoscale.co. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time. This is your host, Shmuel Herschberg, and remember to keep building, keep testing, and keep scaling.