(Idea discussion) Marketing DAO?

ClearThePath, [21 Jan 2023 at 17:12:33 (21 Jan 2023 at 17:24:13)]:
We need an strategic approach to this. The first question to ask is what is the end goal?

If the end goal is to get more developers on board building projects then the marketing will be different then if the end goal is about getting people investing.

Regardless, we need as many touch points as possible to get people thinking about Nervos. This varies by industry but we want people to ‘constantly’ see and hear about the Nervos ecosystem. This requires a consistent ‘no holds barred’ approach. We need a platform where the cost to do this is as cheap as possible but has maximum visibility. We need to track and monitor.

We also need to allocate a budget to this because that will determine the approach we take.

Running a continuous campaign for 6 months or longer (tweaking it as we do) will ensure a great deal of visibility about the project. You can spend as little as £5-15/day on a Facebook engagement campaign. It’s been a while since I last ran a campaign but I found £5/day applied consistently over long periods of time helped increase the visibility massively. We choose one or several such strategies and once we have tweaked it and set up a system to monitor it, we forget about it. It runs according to the system.

We also need to funnel any user clicks to the exact places we want them to go. For instance if they are investors, they go to this website/video/tutorial etc. If they are developers they are taken somewhere else. At the moment, this is haphazard, there is no structure. Same with search engine results. When people search under specific terms we want them to click on specific videos/articles.

We need to take customers on a user journey from hearing about Nervos to commiting to Nervos. We sit down and discuss each part of the experience and decide as a community how we are going to implement each aspect.

When we have created a plan, we find out the cost that each part of the plan will involve together with the total ‘investment’ needed.

:small_blue_diamond::small_blue_diamond::small_blue_diamond:
One thing to note, if our ecosystem is not ready for example: bad manuals, bad explainer videos, tools and tutorials then our marketing won’t help. We need all of that ready. However, we can start visibility campaigns before they are fully ready as I think they can run for about 2/3 months before we start seeing their fruits.

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And the end result? What is the point of having MarketingDAO? Forgotten in the end. Imagine destroying the good project by spending funds on meaningless “marketing”/“promotion” money grab schemes.

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Appreciate your input @DaGeneral @ClearThePath @Early_eTH_investor

I’m not saying there’s a right opinion, just that it’s important enough to discuss and debate

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Sure. However, I saw many projects’ Marketing group/DAO money-grabbing without any significant achievement since the early days of crypto. Let the devs work on their job first.

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@Early_eTH_investor

Let me add some thoughts. The example you gave of Ethereum’s marketing DAO. By late 2019/early 2020, when that DAO was proposed, Ethereum was already very popular and well known. Vitalik always featured prominently in the crypto community. Even by 2015/16, Ethereum was pretty well known from the sources I’ve read.

Ethereum didn’t have a problem with visibility. Nervos is in a different context, I would say most of the crypto space is still unaware of Nervos. That is the challenge we are trying to overcome. So your example is comparing apples with oranges.

Secondly, I don’t agree that all marketing is useless. Most projects understand the need for outreach, profile-raising, visibility etc. Even Nervos. “Let the devs build” is a big part of the equation imo, but not all of it. Building a strong, growing community will make Nervos a more attractive place for developers too.

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Hey Neon!

While I’d definitely be on board to vote for some sort of community marketing DAO proposal, especially if it was integrated with Nervos Nation, I personally don’t really like the idea of hiring a marketing firm.

I do agree that sometimes you just need to let the experts do their thing, but I also think that it would be very hard in this case to not only get our money’s worth, but also to measure the success of any sort of marketing campaign.

I would prefer to see members of the community come up with their own ideas and put them forward as proposals inside of the Marketing DAO, where we all then vote on which one/s to go with.

But I admit, I don’t have any idea how much it costs to engage one of these companies, so maybe after a proposal is put forward I might change my position.

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Thanks for your input @Yeti, we do have an upcoming Nervos Nation proposal that would see us expanding the educator programme that’s been used so far, plus funding for some new explainer videos

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We should have something like this for the growth. Who We Support | Ethereum Foundation ESP

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That Ethereum grants program seems to be exactly what I think Nervos is trying to achieve here, except here the grants are decided by the community, rather than the Foundation. So I’m not sure exactly what you are trying to point out?

Also, the whole first section of the recent Ethereum grants are all community event type projects, exactly like the one that’s up for discussion at the moment.

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I am just giving a successful example of what can be done right? Somehow you sound butthurted LMAO.

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It’s absolutely insane why we would encourage building a ghost city without any inhabitants. The ecosystem comes as the community gets bigger.
Devs wont want to build without a bustling ecosystem to make a business from.
It’s far easier to convince and galvanise investors in the future of the project and teach them patience than it is to encourage devs to have a business in there which will instantly become a slow drip to failure.
Many other networks like Cardano have done this so far with only NFT’s being the MAIN bridge to crypto, and yet their community is gagging now for real-life usage but they’ll attract big business in the future. Nervos has no community of note to feed these developers…yet!!! We are still a baby

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Around 50k and onwards for some, the way I’ve seen these projects work is most of that is feeding the influencers and paid trending.

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Same thought. Any funding for marketing sounds dumb at this point of the project progression. There’s no proper usecase for the Nervos yet except for money-grabbing NFT bullshit created by uniswap-forked Yokaiswap.

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That’s not what I was saying. The ghost city is advertising to devs to build without any community around. Communities arrive through clever marketing and networking. If we only build bad businesses, we do not build custom to help them shine. Marketing attracts customers and highlights potential.

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Bad documentation and tooling is nothing to do with marketing to grow the community. It does depend on what you think the community is. I do not see the community that we need to grow would be developers, especially as you’ve said if layer1 isn’t ready yet or tooling is missing. Then yes it’s a waste of money. I have viewed this DAO proposal as building a community to rally around future projects being built and other initiatives proposed by others. Not for attracting devs.

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It’s interesting you mention Cardano. For years they were derided as a ghostchain as they had a lot of users, but very few applications. All they could do was stake.

A lot of the community came on board during their 2018 50x run, and decided it was worthwhile to stick around. So they came in initially for financial reasons, and what convinced them to stay was the promise of exciting and innovative tech. Since then they built a strong grassroots movement and social media presence and, like you say, a huge demand for financial services. And developers are receptive to that demand. Incidentally, Cardano outsourced their marketing to McCann (a professional marketing agency) end of 2019. Food for thought.

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Community building takes patience for sure. Many that build projects don’t have this skill set (or so I’ve noticed) yet should always be in mind to have one of these people on their team. I totally get people wanna just code but where will the users be? lol. The ‘spirit’ of customers, user and community appeal to feed these dApps have disappeared in crypto nowadays (I feel It appears to be an afterthought when releasing a project), and people seem to want to build to fail. Cardano did a very good job of convincing people of their future through clever marketing, they managed to build and support some big accounts on that journey, especially on Twitter (Home of crypto…for now). I’m sure all the people with a big history of crypto that are in these high positions understand that and try to prioritise and strategise around that mantra. It’s basic common knowledge for crypto. The only things that have changed slightly are investors tend to not want to do core advertising for free, why should they? They probably think the company/project they’re invested in (in the sandbox stage of decentralisation) should be making those efforts themselves to stay afloat to give investor confidence in their ability to control large amounts of money. Something Cardano also seemed to do well.

Having said that even the myth of ‘We need one killer dApp’ won’t be good enough, especially if the mainstream can’t use the tech yet. People aren’t going to wake up one day and start using blockchain because of a killer dApp, but they are within the layers of communities around blockchain…for now. They’re who we should be marketing too. Whilst others market from other angles.

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You gave an example of the exact thing that is trying to be built here, I was just wondering what your point was? This DAO has only be running for a week, give it a chance :rofl:

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I agree with what you wrote.
Especially the part of “Application growth (Nervos as infrastructure)”.
But for different target audience, the display content is not so clear (Landing page/Front Page/APP/Twitter). And I think the core display content of marketing must be the bright future of “.bit” “Joyid” or “Nervos” but not CKB token price.
It also requires making long-term plan very carefully, rather than doing it on a whim. In the case of insufficient resources, effective exposure is better than random exposure.

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