Welcome! You’ve found your way to our new NEAR Marketing Forum page where we’ll share all things NEAR Foundation Marketing. You’ll want to hit the follow button so you can get alerts on high-level weekly marketing updates on activities, announcements, partnerships, and projects.
We’ve got a small and mighty Marketing team that is eager to collaborate and take in your feedback and ideas. 
Every Tuesday, you can expect a new forum post from our team. 
We’ll do our best to respond in a timely manner.
To kick things off this week, we shared an overview of what the marketing team does at NEAR and in today’s post, we’ll explain what we’re specifically working on this month in more detail as it relates to Brand and Communications.
There’s more for us to discuss in other areas (such as Partnerships, Advertising, and Events) but this will be outlined in future updates. 
Brand
Our team is tasked to keep our Brand reflective of NEAR’s hyper-growth. We’ve been working on this by updating:
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Mission, Vision, Values – We spent the past month fine tuning our Mission and Vision. Now we’re onto updating Values and finalizing OKRs. This is all prep work for ensuring the strategy from top-down maps to everything we do and contribute to.
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Personas & Segmentation – NEAR’s community deserves personalized experiences that speak to their pain points and passions. We’ve spent the past month going deep on data, interviews, and doing research so we can know who our segments are and how we can better meet them where they are at (now and in the future). The goal is to share a high-level overview of this in February.
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Brand & Website Refresh – We see NEAR a lot like a house of brands which means we’re now reflecting on our brand channels such as the NEAR website. Specifically, we’re looking at how the current Brand architecture evolves to meet the demands that come with growing the ecosystem.
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Employment Brand – In order to hire best in class, we must first aim to be best in class. There’s a lot that goes into this statement. It extends beyond technical talent. It means we’re examining what we stand for (our Values), what kind of culture we want to foster (also our Values), and how this translates to the way we recruit and hire.
Communications
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Improved Communications - As we grow as a project, it’s increasingly harder to keep up with all the exciting things happening in NEAR’s ecosystem. Marketing gets the brunt of fielding requests across the ecosystem and the current process is ineffective. We have ~10 different platforms where requests come in. This becomes an even bigger challenge when layered with expectations, miscommunication, and cultural communication differences. We’re working on solving for this now and will have an improved process around communications coming soon.
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Hiring For Gaps – Our team is currently hiring for more crypto-native copywriters, writers (consultants), and also a Sr. Social Media Manager who can help us execute faster on all the things that come with amplifying partnerships, products, storytelling, activities, and more.
We are excited to share that we made a few key hires including a new Technical Content Lead, a Marketing & Events Lead, a SEO strategist (consultant) and we are also testing out a few SMEs specializing in blockchain and cryptocurrency. This is a good start, but we want more! We should have a few new job postings here in the coming week.
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Content Strategy & Processes – Our team is focused on creating meaningful and relevant content, but there’s a few barriers we faced to making this happen in the past month.
1.) We needed personas finalized to know who our segments are.
2.) We needed a clear and cohesive content strategy to speak to these segments.
3.) We needed to get alignment across the NEAR’s cross-functional teams on mapping out what marketing needs they had and then identifying if there was current talent we had for these needs or if we should create new roles with subject matter experts in these respective fields. (Ex. Product Marketing is different than Brand Marketing and require different roles and skill sets.)
4.) We needed to hire more writers and source contributors to execute.
Again, lots more to share in the coming weeks on other areas we are tackling. This can hopefully get the conversation started and inspire more collaboration between the NEAR Foundation and Community.
Thanks for your continued support. 