Hive Marketing Budget and Direction
Let's face it, HIVE needs heavy marketing, and it needs it yesterday. If we want to reach the larger market, increase our user base, developers, and investors, we got to reach outside our happy hive.
Their has been a few proposals that were floated asking for funding for this, but for one reason or another, they are not / did not get funded. It maybe the amount asked, or just not a clear path, or the cost vs benefit was not ideal. Whatever the case, we are still here, and the need for marketing is still here.
A few days ago The Man Cave project put up this tweet.
At the time of writing this, 56 votes were cast with a 86.5% saying YES. W can assume the community is behind this idea. So what would this look like?
On average, new companies (*Start ups) Spend 20-25% of their budget on marketing, and more developed companies, 10-15%.
- Disclaimer: the numbers below may be wrong, math is not this authors strong suit, but, lets use them for a case in point.
At the time of writing this, the HIVE DOA :
| DAILY FUNDED | DAILY BUDGET | TOTAL BUDGET: |
|---|---|---|
| 3,838.500 HBD | 6,965.748 HBD | 696,574.807 HBD |
We have about 3,127 HBD a day left in the budget. Let's take 25% of that, this would be about 781.75 HBD a day for the next year (365 days) directed at marketing, or in a year 285,338.75 HBD. Next year we could reduce that to 20%, then 15%, then 10%.
285,338.75 HBD, wow this is a lot, more than most people make in a few years of work, but if we want to see HIVE grow, we have to spend. You can make the argument that we should in fact, take 50% of the DOA and direct it at marketing, PR, and growth... But, lets stick with 25% for now.
What would 285,338.75 HBD x 1 year go towards?
Marketing 101, marketing channels should align with the business objectives. We are an online based platform to build upon and to grow communities on, so focus 90% of the budget on online marketing. The last 10% in print adds and physical places.
The online paths would be:
- Social Marketing
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Content marketing
- Website
- Trade shows (Perhaps not this one too much - Covid :/ )
- and Print
We also have to ask, what is our cost per customer / user / developer acquired? Let's use the standard phrasing for this, Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC.
“He or she who can afford to spend the most to acquire a new customer, wins.” - Dan Kennedy
Let's say that on average it will take our CAC is 25 HBD to acquire 1 new user. Given our budget above, we can set a soft goal for success of 11,413 new active (32 more than now a day) HIVE users based off marketing efforts.
We have to ask the questions then...
- How would an influx of 11,413 new users effect the HIVE ecosystem?
- What percent of them would be developers, investors, or users?
- Do you think 11,413 new active users is worth spending 285,338.75 HBD on?
Looking on the latest HIVE Stats :
https://peakd.com/hive-133987/@arcange/hive-statistics-20201202-en
We have a little over 2000 authors a day, and about 10,000 ish Dapp users.
So, 11,413 new users would x 2 our current community! This is x 2 the content, x 2 the developers, x 2 the dapp users... the value that would bring in, would be well worth the small cost in HBD.
This brings up the idea of spending double that, so, 50% of the DOA on marketing efforts, or getting 22,826 new active users. At these numbers, influences start to join, the change of viral content goes way up, the buying and spending of HIVE goes way up, and we can see our community start to grow, in leaps and bounds.
Look internal or look external for marketing.
We established that a large marketing budget would benefit the community in many ways, but who should market? A HIVE community group, or do we hire someone outside of HIVE.
Both have benefits, but also draw backs. Looking at both sides, hiring outside of HIVE would however provide the best ROI (Return on Investment).
Why?
— We are not selling to HIVE users, we are selling to people that don't know HIVE. Its best then to have fresh eyes see a project and then say, “I see this, its cool, I can sell this”. Its like an artist looking at their own art, they are never happy, but to the viewer, they love it... we are the artists of HIVE, we see too much of it, and may not have the objective outside perspective to best see the way to promote us.
— A company that is hired, wants to keep their job and clients and would not be swayed by internal politics. Hive is great, but also, lets face it, we have too much drama. You do a bad job and someone may just down vote your account. But an outside agency, they don't care about that, they just do the job. Pay them and be done with it.
— Most internal marketing efforts (proposals) would benefit one project more than the over all community. So, lets hire a 3rd party to market for all HIVE, remove any personal gain for projects, and just get it done.
There are a few more reasons as well, but those are the three big ones.
Summary
We need to market HIVE, starting yesterday. We have the budget to do so. Let's just Hire a company outside of HIVE, pay them and be done with it.
The Worst case, we lose 25% of the DOA funds and gain nothing. The Best case, we on board a lot of new people who will help HIVE thrive and reach mass appeal.
- What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments below.
Tagging some EPIC people to weigh in on this :
@lordbutterfly @theycallmedan @starkerz
Over and out.
- D.Buzz
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Hey, I can give you marketing advice for free, I'm a certified marketeer but too autistic to work in that field.
You're right that we need to spend more on marketing. And it's always a struggle to convince nerds you're not wasting money that could be spent on those godly beings called ☁️👼☁️ Developers ☁️👼☁️. When there are no users, there won't be any money to pay developers at all.
BUT I have two objections against hiring an external agency:
Does anyone remember the altcoin Munne (MNE)? The Munne Project was going to use the coin in a mafia game. They raised five figures in an ICO and spent it all to hire Michael Terpin's PR agency. He tweeted about it once and presumably gave them some advice. That was it. And the game was never finished. I (ProkhorZ) warned them beforehand that they'd be treated like muppets.
On a positive note, I think we should focus on recruiting professional users who bring their own audience. We're too small to attract influencers at the moment. I mean we should hire a dev advocate to recruit app developers. We have a convincing story at the technical level.
And this is a harder sell, but as I've said before, we should reach out to organizations that create more information than they know what to do with. We can tell NGOs that we have an uncensored social network. We can tell museums that we have good SEO and they can capture a good chunk of that attention by posting pictures from their collection. And so on.
In the past weeks I saw a lot of organizations and influencers and regular social media users asking for a option to use a social media where is no censorship. We have! But somehow we cant reach these people. We need adds in english, than we will need also in many different languages. And not a picture. A normal video where the average person can see that there is something interesting. Than also video tutorials how to use hive. Hope soon it will happen.
We want to see many marketing proposals as possible.
Second layer application marketing is a win win situation for everyone.
DAO is far from perfect because HIVE is not decentralised enough. Top 20 witness competitions must grow and more people should provide feedbacks to current proposals while encouraging all king of proposals that take HIVE to the next level
I'd like to add that this 25% of dao funds would be 25% of hbd fund in the dao at the time of this post. Every day the fund grows via inflation, benficiary rewards and the liquid hive conversion thays going on.
So the overall percentage would be much lower. The doa would be going broke from spending 25% on marketing and it would thebthe absolutly best thing you can spend the money on.
marketing is a key element. As long we don't have the final Smt solution, we can only market by ourselves.
With Smts people can market their own projects /tokens on hive. That would make onboarding 100x easier.
Steem promote spud program paying tron for sp. Hive should follow some marketing ideas like monthly hivepud giveaway sharing with 5 million hive power delegation, 100k liquid hive. Even should be fixed hive maximum supply of 800 million hive. For each transaction there should be small transactions fees to reduce it's supply.
I think the overall concept of Hive is tough to market and marketing should largely be left to individual front ends, projects, games, communities, & influencers to market their products powered by Hive.
I am very much intrigued by much of what Wax.io is doing and would point to them as an example of other potential avenues. They’re hiring for a business development team which recruits businesses and individuals to launch projects on their chain. I’d much rather spend in a direction like that than broad based generic Hive marketing.
Alternatively a DAO proposal could take the form of a budget which in turn awards grants to various communities & front ends specifically for the purpose of marketing, with increasing releases of funds being tied to verifiable user growth metrics. Again, this puts targeted focus on certain niches and fan bases that will be better understood and catered to by the marketing community, and receive a better onboarding on arrival.
Lastly, I think one of the best marketing boosts would be to release more features for the blockchain level communities, including the monetization options that were in the original specs. The incentive to community owners to grow their community, encourage activity, & encourage their users to hold Hive Power would do as much for grass roots recruiting & promotion as any affiliate marketing plan or centralized ad campaign.
We totally needed to take marketing seriously yesteryear - not yesterday! If this proposal comes I'll fully support it. But I do insist that we look for some aganecy that has real experience working with crypto. I'm wondering if we could just use Brave Ads. @roomservice already had a proposal: https://peakd.com/hive/@roomservice/proposal-hive-ad-campaign-2020-on-brave-browser
@dbuzz I don't think a conventional external agency would understand who we are, what we do and how to market us efficiently. I know nothing about marketing, but please, pay attention to what @edb says, he knows what he's talking about. Looking for an agency that have experience with crypto as @d-zero says would be another option, but I doubt such an agency even exists.