This proposal aims to continue Balancer marketing within Orb Collective Service Provider (SP) 3. The Orb marketing team aims to accelerate the growth and awareness of Balancer Protocol.
In my Q3 Budget proposal, I highlighted the different ways that my marketing team will continue to scale global utilization of the Balancer Protocol. I give monthly updates on the progress of these points during the monthly Community Halls, but would like to provide a quarterly update here and share my Q4 Marketing Plan.
We are still in the middle of a bear cycle and therefore have cut many costs in order to be as lean as possible and help the Balancer Treasury weather the current market. After cutting the budget by nearly half, my team reduced the request for Q4 to $48,900.00, as visualized in the breakdown at the end of this proposal. A review will be presented monthly with the entire Orb team, and any unallocated budget will be rolled over and used to offset the budget request for Q1 2023.
- Developer marketing
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In Q3, our developer relations made incredible strides in increasing awareness and providing resources for devs.
- Developer Trivia Questions (example can be found here) on @balancer Twitter which currently receive an average of 10k impressions per tweet (average impressions for other tweets are around 7k per tweet).
- Developer Knowledge Center- created to assist developers coming to Balancer in navigating our documentation, breaking down complex concepts, and creating more awareness of Balancer code.
- Build on Balancer Podcast - created to shine a spotlight on partners and members of the Balancer ecosystem to discuss how teams use Balancer’s code in new and innovative ways.
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For Q4, the main focus will be a major upgrade to the current Balancer documentation and continuing to improve upon and increase awareness of the initiatives that started in Q3.
- Developer documentation upgrade- this will be a massive undertaking by our team, lead by Developer Relations Manager Bianca Buzea, to update legacy documentation and prepare the documentation for the next big product launch, Managed Pools.
- Developer Trivia- we started this with the intent to increase the developer content on the Balancer Twitter account. Now that this initiative has gained traction, our team will be more strategic about how we distribute this, focus the material on certain key topics that are important to our developer community, and follow up the trivia with more impactful and informative threads.
- Developer Knowledge Center- Our goal is to double the amount of developer content in the Knowledge Center in Q4. Currently, there are no frontend resources to assist us in migrating the Knowledge Center from Notion to the Balancer Website. Therefore, we installed analytics which will begin to track visits and reads similar to Medium which will be shared in monthly Community Halls.
- Build on Balancer Podcast- our goal for the podcast is to release two episodes per month and to record two per month. After initial analytics come in then we can set some solid OKRs for the podcast to benchmark against.
- Digital marketing
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In Q3, our content, social media marketing, and partnership marketing remained strong.
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Content- we published a total of 6 blog posts, 2 per month, resulting in 17k views over the quarter.
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Twitter- we completed the migration of followers from the handle @balancerlabs to the community run @balancer. During this process, there was minimal disruption except for the loss of our verification status. We are currently working with a contact on the Twitter verification team to regain verified status. Balancer Labs will be taking over management of their handle and @balancer will continue to be run by Orb marketing with input from the Balancer ecosystem. Twitter Analytics only reports stats on a revolving 28 day basis. Therefore, we share growth analytics monthly in the Community Hall, but we are researching tools that will allow for quarterly reporting.
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Video- MetaStable Pools explainer video, to be published next week.
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Partnerships- coordinated marketing efforts and launched campaigns with Beethoven, Optimism, RocketPool, Arbitrum, and Lido.
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In Q4, we have set targets for our digital marketing that are highly focused on the Managed Pools launch. There will be other education, awareness, and partner campaigns going out as always, but the main goal for our team is the successful launch of Managed Pools.
- Partnership and Product Marketing- the main initiative in Q4 will be coordinated around the launch of Managed Pools, which has been a months-long effort by Balancer developers. The marketing of this launch will be an extensive campaign and will cover partnership marketing (with a well-known partner in our industry), Twitter campaign, videos, blog posts, a coordinated PR campaign, and developer marketing which includes making sure the docs are ready for other partners to build their Managed Pools and highlighting use cases.
- Content - we will publish a minimum of 6 blog posts and target to double the amount of views in Q4 compared to Q3.
- Twitter- we would like to set some solid OKRs to track our growth progress in Q4.
- Current # of followers = 130.3k
- Continue ~5% monthly growth rate
- Target ~150k followers by January 1, 2023
- Video- we currently have planned two videos in Q4, focused on Managed Pools and use cases.
- Events
- Q3 has been focused on preparing for DevCon, which took up most of our Q3 marketing budget request. At the time of the request in July, almost no information had been released by the DevCon organizers, and since then we have learned a lot more about the sponsorship. DevCon is not giving any branding to sponsors, we were denied all requests to speak at the conference, and there will not be any booths or tables to hand out swag or meet attendees. Therefore, we decided that the price tag of sponsoring the conference was way too high for such little return.
Instead, we will be sponsoring the DeFi Retreat where we will be offering attendees access to a venue 2 minutes from the conference. Guests can meet members of the Balancer Ecosystem, use the free wifi, and have complimentary food and beverages. We also will be hosting a party, Carnaval de Balancer, which sold out the first batch of tickets in 1 day on a beautiful rooftop in Bogota. Finally, we will be co-sponsoring a brunch with 1inch and StableNode which will focus on offering support and community building with female developers in Latin America.
With all of these events, we were still able to come in under budget and therefore require no extra budget for events or swag in Q4.
- Communications & PR
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In Q3, we had a solid amount of press coverage, especially considering we did not have any newsworthy product launches and that most of the industry press was focused on The Merge. I also worked with the MarketAcross team to update the Balancer Ecosystem’s Crisis PR Plan with different scenarios on how we will handle communicating with the public if there is ever a hack, regulatory inquiry, compliance strong-arming, etc. to be over prepared if these situations ever arise.
- Sharing here some Balancer press from Q3:
- Balancer Legal Advisor Beth Haddock featured in TechCrunch
- Orb’s Jeremy Musighi on the BlockHash podcast to talk about Balancer
- Jeremy Musighi quoted in CoinTelegraph talking about blockchain technology
- Balancer in AltCoin Buzz
- Sharing here some Balancer press from Q3:
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In Q4, all of our PR efforts will be focused on making Managed Pools as widely read as possible in crypto and fintech press. Managed Pools has a unique and wide-reaching value proposition that pitching the correct publications will amplify. We will share the coverage book with the community after that campaign concludes.
