As a recent new member to the Marketing Vertical DAO council i wanted to give a personal overview of how i believe marketing can be used by the NEAR community to achieve its goals.
Building a L1 crypto platform that is open and inclusive, with core team and community members spread across the globe is not a simple undertaking. To support the key goals of increased developer participation and NEAR user awareness will require a clear and achievable marketing strategy.
Marketing Strategy
The first step in developing a marketing strategy is to understand the Marketing Mix, also known as the 4Ps - product, place, price and promotion - a tried and tested way to analyse the key aspects of a business or commercial activity which has been used successfully for many years.
The beauty of marketing is that you can embrace the best and reject the rest!
I would therefore like to propose a new version of this formula to be used as a structure for NEAR marketing - encompassed in 6 questions:
Who is NEAR? - make it personal and show some faces
What is NEAR? - ecosystem of projects and guilds, project data / metrics
Why NEAR? - comparison with other crypto platforms ie ETH, problem/solution
Where is NEAR? - regional and city nodes, ecosystem map
When is NEAR? - live events, hackathons
How to be part of NEAR? - onboarding and social channels, near forum guides, DAOs and Guilds
One objective of asking these questions is to create a ‘helicopter view’ of Near. By giving a full and easy to understand answer (with links) will provide the foundations to create a comprehensive marketing strategy.
The next step is to access and leverage NEAR network stats and data to get a better understanding of the underlying strengths and weaknesses within the community.
A further key step is to define the Target Market for NEAR and projects built on NEAR. An effective marketing strategy will define specific target groups - for example:
- software developers (building on near)
- content creators (artists creating on near)
- merchants (people that leverage or use dapps on near)
Different groups have different needs and the marketing component needs to be tailored accordingly.
Another way of looking at marketing is to ask - what can i do with NEAR? what is its primary use case? The answer can be divided into three main categories:
- Buy NEAR
- Transact in NEAR
- Hold NEAR
You might think that this is obvious… but each category has a separate set of requirements, and a marketing component to support them.
Marketing Budget
As I understand it, the funding of marketing initiatives is currently transitioning to a decentralized model. In future the Marketing Vertical DAO will be responsible for providing funds to other DAOs and Guilds, to fund marketing activities.
It will be great to see the emergence of DAOs providing specialist marketing services. h/t Swine Guild, Flying Rhino, Swagger DAO
IMO it is important that the Marketing Vertical DAO has clear and transparent funding guidelines to ensure that all stakeholders understand what is required and how the funds are distributed and monitored.
Having worked in a wide range of marketing related activities, as well as running my own businesses for many years, i am now excited to dedicate time to helping NEAR to grow.
