TL;DR Clarifying personas, continuing market research, improving “top” and “middle” funnels across marketing channels, ramping up awareness campaigns, finalizing Brand Values, amplifying partners and ecosystem updates, onboarding new talent including Yadira Blocker (as new Marketing Events Lead.)
More Details On Our Efforts This Week (Note: Not Prioritized)
1.) Brand Updates 
– This week the Leadership team is meeting to finalize NEAR’s Values so there’s alignment across NEAR’s ecosystem. This is important as we tackle the brand refresh, exploration and visual identity. We have some comps we’re working on now - this includes an updated brand brief, mood board, and ecosystem structure visual. (All of these will be shared in the coming weeks.) We’ve heard a ton of feedback from folks within NEAR’s ecosystem that it’s time to evolve NEAR to be more competitive (visually). We’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comment section below.
2.) Personas & Segmentation 
– Deeper discussions have been happening around NEAR’s personas and addressing their pain points and wants. We want to ensure that every step of the way Developers and Makers feel supported, heard, and know where to find resources, solutions, and like-tribe experiences. This is going to help us be more effective and scale faster.
- Top of Funnel/Marketing Personas (Website, Blog, Social media, Lead-gen)
- Developer Personas (General)
- Developer Relations Personas (DevRel)
- Community & Guild Personas
- Education Personas
- Wallet Personas
- Validator Personas
- Bridge/EVM Personas
- Future Persona Categories
3.) Top of Funnel Improvements 
- Our research shows we have major gaps in a few areas (ex. NEAR.org website flow of information and content discovery.) We’ve got a working group (that includes analysts) that are helping us make informed decisions on where to improve our funnels. This is a major priority for our team so we can get ahead of all the exciting things launching in 2021.
2.) Helping Teams Achieve Success 
- We aim to enable and amplify important programs such as NEAR’s Grants, Guilds, and Education. One way we do this is by helping cross-functional teams share partner and developer stories and experiences. We take this information and implement it into places such as brand campaigns, content strategy, marketing outreach, etc. In short, we use feedback and personal stories to serve the ecosystem and teams better.
2.) Onboarding New Marketing Team Members 
- We are in high-growth mode which means we are always looking for the right people to help us scale. Lucky for us, we found Yadira Blocker, our new Marketing & Events Lead. She’ll be helping us with strategy and execution across industry events, panels, AMAs, Town Halls, and all things experiential marketing.
3.) More Self-Serve Marketing Tools 
- We want to empower folks across NEAR to build and launch faster (and with less hassle.) Besides housing brand assets on the NEAR website, we are now beta testing a new internal Canva portal to help create banners and marketing materials that you can easily customize through self-serve automation.
4.) Awareness Campaigns 
- We’ve got a shared goal across NEAR to help onboard 2,500 developers and support 10 successful apps in 2021. We think this is achievable but it means we need to ramp up awareness campaigns. This is in addition to the partnership and ecosystem announcements we support weekly. Expect to see more from this in the future.
5.) Launching New Marketing Overview Series - We are working on a new video format for internal Marketing updates. Our community is doing an amazing job with shows such as NEAR Without The Noise (by 4NTS Guild) and we want to see even more stories told. Forum updates are helpful to addressing a wider audience but we think short digestible videos on what the marketing team is doing can go a long way too!
More is coming. We’ll be sharing wider when we can. Thanks for your continued support. 