Recently, @lordbutterfly asked us to provide some suggestions for how to invest the renewed @valueplan marketing budget so as to grow Hive using direct digital marketing techniques. We were also asked to suggest ways to optimise the existing Rally car project, so that’s what’s in this post!
The goal here is to grow Hive through getting more ‘bang for the buck’ from the marketing budget. This requires us to introduce reliable tracking metrics that expose the performance of each marketing system/activity. Perfect tracking is a difficult challenge with decentralised networks, however, there are some clear opportunities which anyone can understand to be useful when onboarding new users onto Hive.
Important Note: The DeSo project is a direct competitor to Hive, is growing and continues to claim to be the only decentralised social network. It uses DPOS and is almost a mirror of Hive, except that they have significantly optimised their onboarding and growth systems.
See the whitepaper for their ‘Focus’ network here. Deso already claims $80M in reserved token sales and currently has 104k followers on X. They claim to be truly decentralised, yet are backed by Sequoia capital and others. In general, supporters of DeSo do not even know about Hive or Steem.
Aims of Improved Marketing for Hive:
- Increase brand awareness.
- Drive traffic to Hive sites.
- Increase levels of onboarding of valuable new users.
- Improved retention of exsiting users
- Attract/onboard talented and motivated developers.
- Attract investors for the Hive token and HBD.
1. Optimised Onboarding Process, ‘Traffic Funnel’ & Hive.io Website
We currently have no mechanism in place to capture, shape and analyse traffic that comes into Hive’s main website(s). We need at least one high quality, regularly maintained/updated and engaging landing page and website that is independent of the decentralised dApps which will remain present throughout the life of Hive. Search Engine Optimisation and long term traffic growth requires a fixed domain to be continually used and improved upon - otherwise effort to build presence online dissipates over time.
Empowering users to onboard their own communities is paramount to improving retention long term.
Hive.io was a fine start for Hive during an emergency fork situation, but it has not been developed since - some of its content is out of date and it is in no way an exciting or educational place to drive prospective Hive users towards - yet it is the best we have!
This site needs to be informative and attention grabbing when compared to Hive’s competitors - demonstrating why Hive is attractive to each of the target audiences (currently mainly social network users, crypto fans, developers and investors).
The onboarding system for Hive has been broken for a long time. We need to support the improvement of this process urgently. Reliance on the various Hive dApps to provide reliable onboarding systems has not produced optimal outcomes so far - though several of them are actively focused on improving this situation.
Even if the dApps do solve their own issues, it is still not ideal for there to be no ‘core’ onboarding platform. dApps may come and go and it is not a particularly difficult challenge for Hive to have its own reliable onboarding system in the same way that the DHF funds the development of Hive Keychain.
Suggested features for the updated onboarding system:
- Free ‘Lite’ Accounts: Aim to provide free accounts where possible. This would be made foolproof by adopting a ‘lite account’ (account incubation) approach, that enables anyone to create an account easily using an existing Web 2 login.
They can then interact with Hive using an account that has been allocated to them by the onboarding system, but they do not have access to the actual Hive keys. Once they earn enough rewards through posting, they have the option to activate their own Hive account that has enough Hive Power already loaded to ensure they can continue posting. This can ideally be gamified and made interesting, rather than mechanical and drab. - Support transfer of account creation tokens: We face a situation where some dApps have been unable to onboard new users for free due to a lack of account creation tokens that they can access. Many accounts hold large numbers of unused ACTs but they cannot transfer them in order for them to be useful.
Adding an ACT transfer feature to the core blockchain code would overcome this problem and add robustness to the overall onboarding process.
- Integrated onboarding tools/tracking/rewards: We need to fuel growth and ‘network effect’ by empowering Hive users to easily onboard their friends/contacts. In addition to a reliable onboarding process and engaging marketing materials, it will help to offer rewards to users who onboard valuable users.
This will require new software that can track the behaviour of new accounts and allot rewards to evangelists and marketers of Hive based on their performance. This could even take the form of a Layer 2 solution that uses smart contracts to track/reward growth activities.
The most basic solution would be to track a ‘referrer’ variable added to the end of URLs which point to the onboarding system, allowing referrals to be tracked. This already exists on Peakd.com:
- Optimisation for easy sharing and mobile devices: We need to be able to onboard new people as easily as giving someone a business card. The system should include a mobile friendly version that includes a QR code to enable people to connect and onboard rapidly.
- Support for new users: We currently do not have any kind of automated process to help new users to navigate Hive and to grow. Individual dApps would do well to build in ‘walkthrough’ systems, but a centralised onboarding system could provide people with a generic Hive exploration tool that includes a checklist of things to do for new users, plus could promote dApps based on the user’s own interests.
2. Quality Video Content Distribution on External Social/Video Sites
Whether we like to admit it or not, Jerry Banfield was instrumental in the growth of Steem into a multi Billion dollar project. His videos generated high levels of views on Web 2.0 sites and he was funneling rewards back into Web 2 in order to get even more views. His content was generally fairly low quality and not especially accurate a lot of the time, but regardless, he drove a lot of growth to Steem.
Just exposing people to the concepts behind the system in a non pushy, engaging way can be enough to attract them to sign up.
Hive needs intelligent, engaging, fun and well informed promoters to produce regular videos that both educate about Hive and also entertain the public. The videos can then be published both on Hive and also on external social/video sites. Creators should be rewarded via both direct payments and also commissions that are measured through link tracking that runs via the enhanced onboarding system.
Drawing from within the Hive community may be preferable to hiring external people since this eliminates the need to extensively educate them on Hive beforehand.
Create Video Content That:
Introduces and advertises Hive, its features and its community to the wider world. People outside of Hive rarely know anything about Hive and don’t understand why they would benefit from using it - so we need to urgently correct this and constantly improve/optimise the process.
Covers general crypto/tech/world news stories, but which lead people towards Hive in (ideally) subtle and non-annoying ways! These may then be shared on the merit of their own topics/messages but will contain links to Hive sites, which will provide free backlinks to Hive, drive traffic and also potentially improve SEO rankings.
Producing quality videos which are engaging, informative and educational is hugely needed for Hive’s growth.
Support of the right presenters, that speak to different target demographics, with correct messaging and promotion could solve several of Hive’s problems.
Careful management of paid advertising on external sites can be used to draw attention to the video content. This can also include paid promotion by existing larger web 2.0 ‘influencers’.
Bonus: Use Web 2.0 Paid Advertising to A/B Test Marketing Material
Opportunity exists here to run carefully managed and optimised ad campaigns in suitable web 2.0 locations in order to promote marketing videos.
Advertising strategies can be adopted that are already highly optimised by advertisers who have spent many billions of dollars refining their process over the years. Part of that involves running A/B split testing as part of a scientific process to identify which marketing language, images and designs convert users the best.
Split testing involves simultaneously running multiple versions of the same advertising but with altered images and text. This allows the performance of each option to be compared and to thus then discover which options produce the best results.
This is an essential tool for improving conversion rates. Not only will this draw attention to Hive, but it will also enable the optimisation of all marketing language used throughout all web assets and marketing materials.
3. Influencers, Evangelists & A Web 2 Social Airdrop?
Social systems require social marketing strategy and this means leveraging existing social groups outside of Hive. Rather than blindly throwing money at ‘celebrity influencers’ in the hope that they will do a good job of promoting Hive, it is possibly more desirable to motivate all users to promote Hive in a more decentralised way (as mentioned in point #1 - onboarding).
One of the novel marketing strategies advertised by Hive’s new competitor, DeSo, is a system that offers airdrops to existing web 2 users based on the calculated value of their followings on web 2 sites. They repeatedly aim to exploit the hype that can be generated on Web 2 by motivating existing Web 2 users through financial means.
While it remains to be seen if this is effective, they appear to have thought their approach out quite well and (provided that their services are high quality) it is reasonable to expect them to achieve a valuable level of onboarding from Web 2 users as a result. Perhaps some type of Layer 2 token could be employed for this on Hive that doesn't cost much to the network but is seen as valuable - possibly offering more reach on Hive to users with higher scores?
The DeSo airdrop tokens are locked for a number of years to ensure that there is no rapid devaluation of the token. Clearly this is a controversial strategy for growth for existing holders of Hive, but is certainly worth discussing.
At the very least, we need to develop systems that interact more deeply with web 2 networks in order to help every Hive user to promote Hive more effectively.
4. Optimisation of The Rally Car Project
Hive’s @valueplan has already invested significant amounts of resources into the Rally car project. A few options for optimising the benefit/return of this investment include:
Gaming: Look at getting skins made for rally racing games, so that Hive appears in rally sims. There is crossover between the two realms and it’s much cheaper to sponsor live streaming gamers. The traffic driven from live streamers is much more trackable too.
Communication: Improve the messaging in and outside the car, so that there is a catchy tagline and improved awareness of what Hive is, just by looking at the car. The car should sell, not just present a logo. (Note: This was already agreed with @lordbutterfly in private chat).
Promotion: Create articles and press releases to promote the story as an example of Hive making dreams come true. Potentially have promo videos made for the same purpose. Not everyone is interested in rally cars and racing, but we can all appreciate the value of changing people’s lives and bringing them fulfillment.
Conclusion
The possibilities for marketing Hive extend into many directions and identifying which is best will require some experimentation and careful measurement. We cannot know which approaches are most effective without the ability to capture data relating to each one, so there is a need to focus on predominantly online and digital strategies which support tracking by default.
No doubt there are numerous other possible strategies we could employ here, but the ones we have listed are known to be effective, can be tracked and are therefore straightforward to optimise over time. Additionally, they are flexible enough to be able to target a wide variety of demographics and audiences.
Thanks for reading and if you have any questions or comments, please let us know down below!
To our mutual success,
The @strategizer team!
Reminder: The @strategizer DHF proposal for market research funding is still active and as yet is not funded. Please consider reading/voting on it if you like this post.