Thesis: Influencer Marketing has taken the world of growth, product placement and sales by storm. The ability for influencers to push products to their audience is unparalleled. This is nothing new, but its form and influence (pun intended) over the world of marketing has evolved so much in this digital age.
Influencers were always used to pedal products. Whether it was ads on TV featuring famous Action Movie stars selling deodorant or Mr. Beast telling you to use Shopify to sell your products on his latest YouTube video... Influencers have a great deal of influence over your desire to buy, subscribe or sign-up for something.
Objective: Leverage influencer marketing to promote Hive and its ecosystem of applications by flowing users through LeoInfra's Lite Account protocol, teaching them about self-custody and then about the broader Hive ecosystem. Refer to this post to see an in-depth dive on how the onboarding flow works.
Current State: Nobody talks about Hive on mainstream social media except for Hivers. If you give a quick search of the #hive hashtag on Twitter - for example - then you'll see 99%-100% of the tweets belonging to existing Hive users.
Our objective is not to get non-Hivers to start posting random tweets about Hive. Our objective is to get small, mid and eventually large influencers to move a small percentage of their activities to Hive. We'll start with small and mid-sized influencers on Twitter who have proven track records of deep engagement relative to audience size.
If you're asking how we're going to do this, we have a lot of plans and some of them are discussed below. One of our most exciting ideas is to use our new Threadcast Mode to drive influencers - especially ones who do live broadcasts - to use Threadcasts as a live chat with their audience. We will delegate them some LEO POWER and also be active in their Threadcast to upvote their audience members who are engaging live.
This idea is extremely exciting. Imagine a small influencer who gets an average of 1,000 live viewers on a X livestream or Twitch livestream. Now imagine that we get them to do 1 broadcast per month where they do an exclusive chatroom as a Threadcast Mode on https://leofinance.io. This prompts their entire live audience to create a Hive account and then be active in the Threadcast through our Hive Lite Account Protocol. From there, we push them through our Hive Onboarding Funnel and turn them from Lite account to Full account. Some % of the live audience from the show may stick around to learn more about Hive!
Counterargument: One major counterargument to influencer marketing is that - especially with Crypto influencers - there are a lot of scamsters and people who falsely pump their audience metrics. This can be easily thwarted through proper research. As you'll see with the first handful of influencers that we onboard, we are doing a deep dive on their audience metrics. If we find any hint of audience meddling, we'll cut them from our list of potentials. We are also looking beyond just crypto influencers and more into niche influencers who can carve out a community on Hive and bring their existing members to it.
Imagine a Chess Streamer starting a Web3 Community on Hive. They start by using Threadcasts to get their audience involved 1x per month. Then they launch a Hive-based Community for their existing audience. We help them sponsor giveaways and Threadcast events whenever they go live. They bring their 1,000 closest fans to this Hive-based Web3 Community and now, we've added 1,000 fresh faces to the Hive blockchain. People who are enthusiastic members of a thriving external community.
We will also act quick in cutting influencers from our roster the second we see subpar engagement / results. If we see that their audience isn't living up to the metrics we've researched as well as the metrics the influencer has provided, we'll cut them. That is the key - be willing to cut them quickly when they aren't working.
Another solution to this counterargument is having great referral tracking systems. We need to be able to see deep analytics on what kind of engagement these influencers are actually bringing to Hive through the LEO UI. If these influencers are not:
- onboarding audience members to a Hive account
- posting enough Threads/Posts on the Hive blockchain
- engaging with Threads/Comments/Replies on the Hive blockchain
- etc.
... then again, we will cut them from the roster. Ruthlessly. There are tens of thousands of small & mid-sized influencers out there. We believe - and have researched - a great arbitrage in this marketplace. These small & mid-sized influencers tend to undervalue their sponsorships because they are not approached very frequently.
For most big companies, a small or mid-sized influencer may only be able to bring 100 to 1,000 audience members to actually do anything. A big company doesn't want 100 to 1000 people. They want 10,000 to 100,000 to 1,000,000 people to take action per ad.
One of the benefits for Hive is in how small the blockchain is right now. If we get a small influencer who brings over 100 actively engaged audience members and turns them into Hive monthly active social users, then we've increased the user base of Hive by almost 1%. 1% growth is fantastic. The model works, you just scale it from there. The problem for big companies is scaling small influencers, but as a small ecosystem, their problem is our opportunity.
To wrap up this counterargument in short, we will focus on our referral link programming to give us high-quality, real-time metrics on how well these influencers are performing. We are not signing any long-term agreements with these influencers, and that will give us the ability to cut the ones who are not able to deliver on our minimum CaC (customer acquisition cost) metrics for onboarding.
In-Depth Plan for Influencer Marketing
1). Identify Influencers
The first step will be to research and identify influencers who:
- align with Hive and its values of free speech, democratization of knowledge and immutably storing data on-chain
- have high-quality engagement metrics. No fluff metrics or bs. We will look directly at engagement and real users interacting with the influencer
- have a good personality. We won't work with influencers who are pompous and demand premium rates without explanation
- focus on small and mid-sized influencers first. A big arbitrage exists here because big companies don't want small influencers but they tend to lead to the most efficient CaC
We'll prioritize influencers who have genuine interests in and good content about crypto, blockchain and decentralized platforms. We also will have adjacent influencers who have these values but may not be "crypto influencers" and instead might be some other type of industry influencer that is adjacent to our industry and can onboard real, high-quality human beings from their audience (recall the Chess Streamer example).
2). The Approach
We'll approach (and we've already begun this) influencers who meet the identification qualifications. People who have highly engaged audiences. Influencers who deliver value to their audience. We are already in talks with a few dozen different influencers.
We expect to negotiate deals with them and also do deep dives on their engagement metrics. Again, we are being very thoughtful about who is on the roster. If we accept someone to the roster, it means we researched them to an insanely granular degree and we also won't be afraid to cut them from the roster if they don't live up to the CaC expectations we have for them.
3). Collaboration
Each influencer is a bit unique in their own right. Once you start seeing our research reporting into individual influencers, you will see some nuances in how we approach the collaboration with them.
In this stage, the influencer has been identified, approved and we have worked out a deal with them that provides us with a minimum viable CaC. From here, we create a monthly plan with the influencer. This monthly plan includes a content calendar to schedule events and collaborative content which is aimed at onboarding new Hivers from their Web2 audience and educating them about the opportunity of using Hive.
4). Compensation
Compensating influencers can be tricky. The main trick to it is figuring out a reliable way to analyze their audience for real engagement. A lot of influencers pad and fluff their engagement so that they can get more money for less effort. Our team will analyze influencers deeply and research their actual audience engagement metrics to determine a desirable CaC that an influencer can offer us. If we smell even a hint of metric tampering, they will be cut from our list of potential influencers to onboard.
We give each influencer a CaC amount. If the CaC is desirable to us and aligns with the proposal goals we've outlined (an average $25 CaC), then we'll be happy to onboard the influencer.
If an onboarded influencer does not meet their CaC expectations that we set for them, then they will be cut from the program and a different influencer we select will take their place. Again, ruthlessly analyzing CaC and making adjustments based on it is the key to success here.
5). Monitoring and Reporting
Monitoring and reporting is vital both in the initial stages and throughout this entire influencer marketing campaign. We've said it and will keep reiterating that we will be tracking a ton of key metrics on these influencers. At the top of the list is obviously CaC but on down the list are things like Engagement Rate, Conversion Rate, User Retention and others.
6). Feedback and Iteration
From the influencers as well as the community. We'll be collecting feedback and taking it into account on how to make our monthly content schedules better with all of the influencers.
We need to see what is working and what isn't both from a data perspective (Monitoring and Reporting) but we also need the more interpersonal, subjective information. We need influencers and community members to tell us what is working and what isn't so that we can make the necessary adjustments to our content output and collaboration plans with these influencers. Constant iteration based on feedback is the name of the game.
7). Expansion
Once we've determined that this model works with a few influencers to start, we will expand the plans and reach out to other influencers. Scaling the strategies that work to engage more influencers both within the niches we already have hit as well as expanding beyond those niches and looking for influencers that are in adjacent industries and regions of the world.
By doing this, we take the model that works and scale it up to get a more diverse audience of people seeing the promoted content and collaborative activities we're doing with their favorite influencers. This will lead to a lot more sign ups and a lot more retention as we cast a wider net.
8). Hive Community Engagement
As the influencers stick around with us and gain more familiarity with the LEO platform and the Hive blockchain technology that underpins it, we will get them to engage more. The goal here is to get the influencers themselves to fall in love with the Web3 ecosystem that exists here. But this is a process. It does not happen over night - we need to win them over with deep engagement and incentives to stick around long enough to fall head over heels for Hive like all of us have.
By getting them more involved in Hive-based activities and events, we can get these influencers into a position for offboarding from the paid influencer program. Eventually moving away from having to pay them on a monthly basis to hopefully getting a larger and larger % of their attention and content creation efforts as they see Hive as a viable way to continue building deep experiences and income streams with their audience alongside their normal Web2 activities.
9). Long-Term Relationships
The previous point hits on this but the idea of building a long-term relationship with influencers is extremely important. Again, we are looking to build a network of people who use Hive. If some of these people are influencers who have audiences that are loyal and believe in them, then Hive will thrive in ways that none of us have ever imagined.
Try to imagine if the top 25 influencers on Crypto Twitter all used Hive in conjunction with their Twitter activities. Imagine if they regularly told their audience that they could also engage with them on Web3 (Hive) and actually distribute both money and blockchain-based activities. The value of Hive is indisputable, but they have to learn of that value first. Our relationship with influencers will constantly be cultivated and goes well beyond just paying them for promotions. We are looking to have relationships that are ongoing and mutually beneficial with all of the influencers that we onboard.
This is among one of the many reasons that initial research is so important. We want to find legit influencers who don't pad their data and who are actually good human beings. By doing this, we are able to build a network of content creators who spread the values of Hive far and wide, beyond just a simple payday.
10). Education and Training
Education isn't just meant for the audience members of the influencers that we onboard. We'll be setting up regular calls with the influencers themselves to collaborate on our content creation calendars with them. Additionally, we'll use these calls as an opportunity to create a bond with the influencers (see the previous two points for more details on this). By doing this, we are cultivating that long-term relationship with the influencers and setting up the stage for future collaboration in a way that doesn't just mean X dollars for Y posts.
We are not approaching this with X dollars for Y posts but rather, to build a rolodex of content creators who create both their Web2 content as well as their Web3 content on Hive and share it far and wide.
Start Small and Scale
So it's time to put this plan into action. Beginning on September 1st, the first influencer will be onboarded. We'll be doing a ton of collaborations and showing the detailed reports of how their referral codes are working. We will be closely monitoring the resulting CaCs and other KPIs.
As the month progresses, more influencers will get onboarded and we'll keep a close eye on their metrics as well. Again, from here we continue to scale up and build out our rolodex of content creators who are collaborating with LEO & the Hive ecosystem to grow their Web3 presence and onboard their audience to this blockchain.
If you're looking for an awesome example of what we (broadly) have in mind, look to Barstool Sports. They built a content media empire by onboarding influencers and creating podcasts / other content streams with them. This is what we are aiming to build in the long-run. Threadcast Mode is showing us the possibilities of on-chain, real-time engagement on Hive. A network of influencers who all have their own audiences and who constantly encourage their audience to engage with them on the network (Hive) will lead to engagement levels that we've never seen before on Hive. Strap in.
Want to Help Us Double the Userbase of Hive?
Our DHF Proposal is currently 100% funded which means that it is over the return proposal. This being said, we still want to campaign to keep getting votes to signal support from the community. We have so much in store for the proposal and our aim is to get over 30M HIVE POWER in backing votes. We're at 25.2M currently. The funding has begun and our marketing funnels are being opened up. We're going to deliver deep data dives along the way. Vote now to help us grow Hive, together!
- Vote the Proposal on PeakD ▶️ https://peakd.com/me/proposals/269
- Vote the Proposal on Ecency ▶️ https://ecency.com/me/proposals/269
- Vote the Proposal on Hivesigner ▶️ https://hivesigner.com/sign/update-proposal-votes?proposal_ids=%5B269%5D&approve=true
If you are interested in learning more about our Overall Marketing Strategy you might be interested in:
Previous Marketing Plans:
1- Proposal to Double the Hive Userbase
2- Overview of our Marketing Strategy
3- Traditional Marketing Plan
4- Collaboration Marketing Plan
5- Guerilla Marketing
6- Adoption Campaigns | Engaging, Retaining and Educating Thousands of Newly Onboarded Users
Posts We’re Releasing This Week:
1- Social Media Strategy and Goals
2- Hive Onboarding Course, Revealed
3- Business Model & Roadmap