Hey everyone, here is an update on the efforts made to further Balancer’s marketing for the month of August.
Over the month, our north star has been focused primarily on highlighting the major Balancer deployments on Avalanche and Base. Furthermore, content educating users on the key benefits of the Balancer tech stack as well as highlighting relevant partnerships has also been a central theme.
In light of the recent vulnerability at the end of August, the overall focus for marketing shifted from highlighting the expanding ecosystem to ensuring users were as informed as compliantly possible during this period of adversity.
General Strategy
As outlined in our previous posts, there are 4 major focus areas in our strategy which are as follows:
- Social Media
- Core Growth Pillars
- Brand Development
- Long-Term Initiatives
1. Social Media
Our goal for social media is to highlight why Balancer is leading DeFi protocol and to drive the relevancy of the brand by educating users on core growth pillars, building key relationships in the ecosystem, refining our visual aesthetic/style, creating engaging content, and launching campaigns for emerging chain deployments.
For the month of August, a significant portion of our efforts were focused on curating educational campaigns to highlight the key benefits of Balancer tech for the launches on Avalanche and Base.
Content:
A list of Twitter threads released in August:
A list of articles released in August:
For a list of all Balancer content please see the following content library:
Community Contributors
The contributions from the community contributors have continued to drive value for the Balancer ecosystem with weekly Balancer Reports, Gauge Updates, and the staked ETH animations.
For a list of all community contributor content please see the following content library:
https://www.notion.so/balancer/538e20956a59419da640569b5a14a258?v=b4ca723fff314372a7cbac39b8980450
KPIs:
Twitter followers: The number of followers on Balancer’s Twitter account.
Tweet impressions: The number of times Balancer’s tweets are seen.
Engagement rate: The number of times Balancer’s tweets are liked, retweeted, or replied to.
Profile clicks: The number of times the profile is clicked per day.
Analytics for August (1-31st).
The overall number of followers in August increased by 1.5k with a cumulative total of 149,660. The number of impressions increased by 446%, totaling 2,246,891 throughout the month. Tweet Engagement also saw an increase of 433% with a total of 28,003, whilst the total number of profile clicks was up by 468% with a total of 6,451.
When compared to July, the number of followers increased from 148.2K to 149.7K, the overall number of tweet impressions increased from 429.7K to 2.25M, the number of total engagements also increased from 5.4K to 28K and the number of profile clicks increased from 1.17K to 6.5K.
Part of this increase in activity was due to the fact that during August we successfully launched on 2 chains, however, the more notable reason was due to the vulnerability disclosure. When looking at the charts there is clearly a major spike in activity across the board that occurred on 22/08/23. This major uptick was due to the release of content surrounding the vulnerability. For reference the post announcing the vulnerability received, 1.3M views, 1.3K reposts, and 1.5K likes.
2. Core Growth Pillars
The following narratives have been outlined as highly relevant to Balancer’s success:
- LSTs
- Ve8020
- Boosted Pools
- Building on Balancer
Over the past 3 months, our marketing efforts have centered on educating users about Balancer’s LST technology, the power of Boosted Pools, and the major benefits of the 8020 model.
For August, however, the primary focus in this regard was to showcase how Balancer can effectively bring these core technologies to new chains to bootstrap new ecosystem growth:
- Threads breaking down the benefits of Balancer tech on both Base and Avalanche:
- In-depth articles:
Furthermore, to drive home the core functionalities of Balancer we also focused on curating content to highlight major partnerships and continue to create awareness around the 8020 initiative (see content list above).
3. Brand Development
Working closely with lead designer Pon, we have continued our efforts to explore different avenues to bring the Balancer brand to life.
Major progress has been made with the UX/UI prototypes and we are looking forward to bringing these to the community over the coming weeks.
4. Long-Term Initiatives
As we progress into our service provider role we have outlined 2 long-term marketing goals that we would like to pursue.
- Education (Balancer Media Hub)
- Community Development (Ambassador Program)
Our goal with the Media Hub is to explore more visual forms of content and create educational resources that drive engagement for the Balancer ecosystem. A key part of this initiative will be to create an Ambassador Program that feeds users/content into the Media Hub.
As stated in the previous update, our plan was to focus our attention on fleshing these initiatives out over the month of August, however in the wake of the vulnerability we haven’t made the expected progress.
With that said, these initiatives are still goals we wish to pursue and believe that they will have a significant role to play in terms of driving engagement, community development, and overall brand awareness.
Budget Breakdown
In the interest of both clarity and transparency, we have outlined a budget breakdown for the marketing expenditure for the month of August.
During this period our marketing efforts consisted of 2 FT contributors working at 100% as well as 3 PT contributors working at 25-50%.
As our team is small, our contributors work across several disciplines; Jedi and Naly (FT) work on the overall marketing strategy, content curation, and social media management. Vee (PT) works on brand development and visual design. Skly (PT) specializes in smart contract development and assists with technically focused articles. Jeff (PT) works on BD and partnership coordination.
Additionally, outside of the active contributions this month, the Beethoven X DAO has access to several contributors whose expertise ranges from financial accountants, quantitative analysts, and engineers to DeFi social scientists with PhDs that we will tap into as and when needed, all scoped within the above budget.
Closing Notes
In the unfortunate wake of the vulnerability, August has been somewhat of an outlier. The month started out strong with the launch of Balancer on Avalanche and Base, however in order to give adequate space to comms regarding the vulnerability our usual cadence of content slowed significantly towards the latter half of the month. As things begin to settle, we will resume our efforts to highlight Balancer as a leading player in DeFi and continue to push toward both short-term/long-term marketing goals.