This forum post will serve as an update to the Balancer community about the state of marketing looking ahead to Q1 and Q2. Orb marketing will not be requesting budget from the Balancer DAO for Q1 by cutting expenditures and using savings from 2022.
I give monthly updates on the progress of the different ways that my marketing team continues to scale global utilization of the Balancer Protocol during the monthly Community Halls, but would like to provide an update here and share my Marketing Plan for the remainder of Q1. The reason for posting this in the midst of Q1 is that Balancer Ecosystem goals and roadmap were not solidified until recently. It was not possible to create a marketing strategy before those items were in place.
Strengthen the DAO’s resiliency and sustainability
Reduce the gap between DAO revenues and expenses
In Q1, marketing with help with this goal in the following ways:
- By not requesting funds in Q1 from the DAO. I have personally spent a lot of time working with Orb’s accounting team, contractors, and external PR resources re-negotiating contracts in order to cut costs and use any surplus budget from previous quarters in the most cost-effective manner.
- Increase presence at events at minimal financial cost, i.e. without sponsoring.
- A lot of events would love a Balancer representative to attend or speak at no cost to us. Marketing will increase these opportunities and is actively searching for new ways to get exposure at no cost.
- The first example of this is during ETHDenver, where we have been requested to speak on multiple panels and stages without the need for sponsorship.
- Guerilla marketing tactics (the cow at DevCon, the tweet campaign & truck)
- Being very strategic about what our ETHDenver output will be.
- ETH Denver Strategy
- Spending a bulk of the budget on swag with the ability to track the brand impressions through a QR code printed on the items.
- Unlike last year, we will not just be giving out t-shirts to everyone who shows up to a booth. If people want swag, they have to scan a QR code which links to a prefilled tweet about Balancer and also follow us on Twitter to receive the swag.
- On the first day of the conference, we will have a presence outside of the conference venue. We’ll be able to capture leads, boost twitter engagement and followers, get eyes on Balancer.fi, give out swag, connect with attendees, and will be a fraction of the price of sponsorship.
- Get on stage twice, only one of which we have to “sponsor” for very low cost (under $1000) as a side event with extremely reputable partners - Gnosis Chain, Aave, Alchemix, Push, Superfluid, etc.
- Spending a bulk of the budget on swag with the ability to track the brand impressions through a QR code printed on the items.
- ETH Denver Strategy
Promote Balancer’s further decentralization
- Collaborate with Community contributors: Orb marketing will cooperate with selected contributors to improve marketing community related initiatives (like Discord activities, content creation, video editing, etc…)
- Work with GRC on a monthly blog post/update for the community on legal and regulatory changes
- Organize talks at different universities (universities are great hubs for talent, and there is a lot of opportunity for onboarding new devs to the Balancer ecosystem)
- Explore access to universities where we have alumni that can facilitate introductions (eg: Strathclyde, TUM, MIT, Harvard and other universities that have a blockchain-tech society)
- Start with one event/month, with the opportunity to scale in the future
- Explore access to universities where we have alumni that can facilitate introductions (eg: Strathclyde, TUM, MIT, Harvard and other universities that have a blockchain-tech society)
- Engage with other dev rels and protocol influencers to tap into their developer communities (eg: Twitter spaces, panels, forums, newsletters, talks, etc.).
- This will be approached with an open mind to hearing what other dev rels think are the best ways to reach their audience. Even though the specific activities might not directly be focused on Balancer, tapping into such communities will redirect attention towards Balancer
- Create content for dev oriented platforms such as Dev.to, Hackernoon (syndicate content) to get more builders discover the Balancer ecosystem
- 1-2 blog posts/content per month
Make Balancer easier to use
- Make it easier for developers to integrate with Balancer
- Continue the documentation development and offer support to migrate existing content the content to the platform that is currently in development
- Tutorials (initially written and then video format) - eg: exploring the SDK series, using the Balancer subgraph, etc.
- Start with SDK examples on a rolling basis as the SDK team releases the refactored examples from the Github repo (eg: joinPool, exitPool, etc.)
- Case studies that showcase different products and the success of our partners using them
- Make Balancer easily discoverable in platforms such as Reddit, Ethereum Stack Exchange
- Work together with Integrations to reply to existing questions on Ethereum Stack Exchange
- Amplify news and content under https://www.reddit.com/r/balancer/
- Provide feedback to product and different teams on what is going well, and about the parts that can be improved (this includes feedback from in-person events, questionnaires, hackathons, etc.)
- Externally
- Distribute a quarterly questionnaire to different teams building on Balancer
- Collect feedback during in-person events
- Fortnight 1:1 interviews
- Internally
- Weekly meetings with Integrations and Partnerships
- Externally
- Make it easier for developers to build solutions on top of Balancer
- Define our USP(Unique Selling Point): unique capabilities offered by the Vault design, paired with the great flexibility of the protocol
Increase Balancer’s market share
-
Increase TVL on existing L2 and side chain ecosystems
- Increase amount of content for awareness of Balancer pools on Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism and soon Gnosis Chain
- Interview pool creators on Polygon/Arbitrum for content creation
- This can be a mix between community contributors and the marketing team
- Assign community contributors to focus on one of the side chain/l2s and get deeply familiar with it to be able to feed Orb marketing content to publish
- Weekly series with l2/side chain updates tweet thread
- Co-marketing Twitter campaigns with Polygon
- Bi-monthy TVL updates - Balancer tweets and Polygon quote tweets
-
Co-marketing Twitter campaigns with Arbitrum
- Bi-monthy TVL updates - Balancer tweets and Arbitrum quote tweets
-
Co-marketing Twitter campaigns with Optimism and Beethoven
- Bi-monthy TVL updates
-
“Top 10 Pools of the Month” - Similar to ESPN’s Top 10 Plays of the Week
- Need to track down official # of Pools -
- Good opportunity to loop in additional projects: RocketPool, Lido, Frax, Gearbox
- Each Pool would have it’s own “score card” with type of pool, tech used, data and stats on pool
- Lead: Community
- Look at subgraph data for stats
- Loop in community contributors for design
Scale usage of products in Balancer’s existing product suite
- Ve8020 Promotion
- During ETHDenver, we have a plan to have Alchemix and Balancer on stage for the launch to describe how Alchemix is building their 8020 model on top of Balancer. Intention is to highlight usage of Balancer technology and create awareness
- Content curation - Blog posts and videos highlighting the different teams who are launching ve8020 on Balancer, the value proposition and promotion in the ecosystem
- Product of the week - twitter
- Weekly campaigns highlighting a specific pool type, product, etc.
- S/o teams that are using them
- Show data and/or relevant numbers ex) the Gitcoin LBP hosted by Fjord
- Length of campaign: Ongoing
- Case studies about Polygon - Balancer LPs have grown immensely. Why?
- Look into L2 growth patterns
- Looking into the data try and find where a switch happened with Balancer and Polygon
- A mix of technical content and dev focused, what projects are building using Balancer tech.
- Why Yield-Bearing Tokens
- A data-driven op-ed
- L2 case studies
- Similar to the code/smart contracts articles Beethoven wrote, we can try and get other projects to co-author
Drive increased veBAL Participation
- Onboard strategically aligned entities into veBAL with campaign promotion
- Promote an evenly distributed level of competition
- “veBAL Diaries” - twitter
- Similar idea to 25 Days of Builders, veBAL diaries recap current veBAL participants
- More in-depth than the Builders campaign. Deeper stats, personalized graphics, longer content
- Goal: encourage more teams to participate if they want recognition
- veBAL case studies
- Smaller projects may be more willing to co-author and publish through Balancer’s Medium
- “veBAL Diaries” - twitter
Other Initiatives
- Beers with Balancer- The overall goal is to get more people excited about DeFi, and that Balancer is a key gathering spot for that energy.
- Beers w/ Balancer strives to be a consistent outlet that promotes building in DeFi. The idea is simple: people associate Balancer to building cool things in crypto, some of which are actually on Balancer, some not.
- It will take an informal style in terms of delivery (guests chilling on a video call w/ beers)
- Topics will include (but not be limited to) things that get the audience excited and invigorated about crypto:
- Builders’ personal journeys (highlight their drive/purpose, so that anyone listening can do it too, especially using Balancer’s tech)
- Their thoughts on the DeFi ecosystem, what is exciting to them, what’s coming down the pipeline
- Balancer is all about builders, but that’s not just to code, what types of steps and/or technologies would you really recommend someone to move forward with to find their niche / success / livelihood working in crypto
- Beers w/ Balancer strives to be a consistent outlet that promotes building in DeFi. The idea is simple: people associate Balancer to building cool things in crypto, some of which are actually on Balancer, some not.
- Position Balancer ecosystem members as thought leaders (either as a section in the weekly newsletter report or as standalone mini-articles; present different members of the Balancer ecosystem, how they got into web3, their favorite use case/ feature of Balancer, how they contribute to the Balancer ecosystem, etc.). Explore first with the team if they are open to such an initiative, then if people find this as something of interest, create a set of predefined questions that we run for different contributors
- Use information from the 2023 industry outlook reports to create content (eg: tweets, articles) that fit Balancer products into existing and future trends
As always, this strategy is subject to change based on roadmap decisions and market conditions. If anyone has thoughts, ideas, or ways to contribute, we welcome you to comment below and reach out in discord. Balancer has a packed roadmap in February and March with product launches, campaigns, and events and we look forward to what is coming next.