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Main => General Discussion => Topic started by: xeroc on November 06, 2018, 02:05:00 pm

Title: [eng] Marketing Efforts and Pre-Worker Discussion
Post by: xeroc on November 06, 2018, 02:05:00 pm
Hey there,

I would like to gauge the community about what they believe should be part of BitShares Marketing ..

In my opinion it should consist of:
* a corporate identity/brand
* a landing page that focuses on the use and not the technology
* "public awareness" material

At @bitfest, we've had a presentation from Team Nijhuis from the Netherlands.

Video: https://teamnijhuis.wistia.com/medias/az1dw8ykz3

They have approached us to see if the community has a desire to go
forward with them for marketing. To get a better picture of what they are
trying to achieve and how they intend to do so, they prepared a pdf

PDF: https://de.slideshare.net/FabianSchuh/digital-marketing-bitshares-blockchain

Provided that I personally have only little understanding of "marketing"
and that the community appears to have a much clearer picture in their
mind, I hereby request feedback about the proposal above so we can
incorporate it BEFORE we go public with an actual worker proposal.

So if you ever wanted to express you opinion with respect to
marketing: This is your chance!
Title: Re: [eng] Marketing Efforts and Pre-Worker Discussion
Post by: Thul3 on November 06, 2018, 02:33:17 pm
I really don't want to be always negativ but its really horrible.
Do they even know what bitshares dex is ?
Their marketing will be also low effectiv based on what they have written.
It seems they don't have much experience in effectiv online marketing but are just blowing the money away.
First of all their text is written horrible.There are no real traffic sources provided.They basicly say we need to understand what user we target,what they are looking for and generating leads out of them.
Their keywords are the biggest joke of all.
Cryptocurrency to invest
Bitcoin alternatives
Distributed ledger technology
Block time
Blockchain ledger
Block reward
Distributed ledger vs blockchain
Smart coins wallet
What is block time

Do anybody really belive these kind of keywords will bring DEX new users ? :D
Also i don't like the fact they are based in Netherlands.Don't get me wrong but the cost instantly increased by x2 x3 compared to other countries.
Their solution is very costly.
A single article on cointelegraph is 1 BTC =$7000 which will get you arround 20-50k readers who are basicly already in the crypto sphere for a longer time.How much new registrations will you get?
Their SEO is also only targeting keywords which are not important at all.
If you target major keywords for DEX you will need to count a minimum of $5k per month for the SEO company as the market is very competitiv.You can always see Binance,Bittrex and Poloniex on first page as they invest a lot of money to be there.
Creating social media accounts is peanuts.There is no info written how they are going to make them viral or at least grow quickly.I guess because its not on their agenda.
They want to create blogs for bitshares.The issue on new generated websites is they don't have any traffic and need first to be promoted or ranked on google.

In my personal opinion its not a good offer for this amount of money they are demanding and most important it won't lead to many new registrations
Title: Re: [eng] Marketing Efforts and Pre-Worker Discussion
Post by: Thom on November 06, 2018, 05:44:28 pm
I'll look it over in detail later, but I did watch the video and it didn't offer anything very useful. It was all about what they hope to do but nothing at all that explained their approach or WHY BitShares is largely unknown.

In skimming their pdf I saw a statement to the effect of "there is no website to direct people to". This is false. Although Apasia's work is relatively new, any marketing firm worth is salt would have found it.

I'll provide a more comprehensive review later, but thus far I am not impressed.
Title: Re: [eng] Marketing Efforts and Pre-Worker Discussion
Post by: Thul3 on November 06, 2018, 09:18:15 pm
I just reread it and WTF

Quote
Management Fee Team Nijhuis €1500/mth (18.000 in total) Management Fee BitShares Blockchain Foundation for consulting/sparring €1500/mth (18.000 in total) Performing the created inbound marketing strategy €1500/mth (18.000 in total) Media budget €46.000 Initial cost of €30.000 for developing & maintaining the website, creating social media accounts and developing the inbound marketing strategy will not be part of the estimated budget.

This is like throwing money out with open hands.
These prices are nuts.
Any other marketer could offer the same value for 1/3 of the cost except media budget.
This is clearly an offer to milk the customer and deliver a nightmare.

The only winner will be the so called marketing company who have clearly no clue about real internet marketing.
Seeing his video he just repeated the bla bla of all so called guru marketeres from the past 10 years.

What i would like also to know if its a mistake in his offer or not because he wrote
he wants 30k Euro for developing and maintance of a website.Does he really mean a single website ?And saying Initial cost ?

Also the inbound marketing and social media accounts which has been described in the written offer is clearly not being implemented in these 100k euro .


Any real world marketer would laugh him out about this kind of offer.Sorry but this offer is just ..........


Biggest noob offer with the highest possible price ever.Sorry but i didn't saw in my life such a bad offer and belive me i saw a lot.

Already this is so discrediting him its just horrible

Some potential relevant keywords for BitShares Keyword

Cryptocurrency with most transactions per second
What is block time
Smart coins wallet
Distributed ledger vs blockchain
Block reward
Blockchain ledger
Block time
Distributed ledger technology
etc

Who the fuck is using these kind of keywords ?New people who want to join crypto or inform themself ?
These keywords are a joke.You can get them ranked for peanuts.

Total 80,190 (thats the amount of total searches per month of all his proposed keywords)

Now have a look at this single keyword
"cryptocurrency exchange" .It has already 50k searches per month which would be high targeted.This single keyword would bring way more benefit than all their proposed keywords together.

The proposed keywords are easy to rank so the cost to rank them will be cheap.However the benefit of that traffic will be very low since no average user is going to enter these kind of keywords but only people who already have a good plan about crypto.

Also the proposed news websites are horrible.There are way better bigger more repuated and effetiv one.He just choosed the easy expensiv ones which doesn't require any negotiations.


Also some crap

Quote
Agency for digital marketing founded in 1973
Agencies for digital marketing started to exist first since 1990 in north america.
In europe they were way later.I started myself in 1996 and i can claim i was one of the first in europe and can cleary say there were no agencies for digital marketing in europa at that time at all
Title: Re: [eng] Marketing Efforts and Pre-Worker Discussion
Post by: Digital Lucifer on November 07, 2018, 02:53:05 am
Hello everyone.

First of - it's very nice to see marketing efforts and offers that were recently started by Yuri (OL) and Fabian (@xeroc), it's definitely a must for BitShares to have proper branding and more focused audience.

Unfortunately, reviewing this entire proposal I do have to agree with replies before mine. It's overpriced, with 0 proper diligence on BitShares as a tech and cryptocurrency; focus they've offered is pretty much top of the default "current trends" by AdWords, and our SEO being done for new bitshares.org within just that tiny-miny worker is far more professional and focused than this.

@xeroc - i'm glad you're supporting marketing efforts and brings me joy to know that there is proper support from our top proxies for such efforts, but as a colleague from the blockchain that has experience on this matter, my advice would be to hold on for all marketing efforts until December. To be more clear, read below:

- .org is planned to be live before "Decentralized" in Athens, Greece (12th of November)
- Most of content will have already tweaked SEO on each page; what is not done for the Event from the SEO, will be completed by end of November.
- New .org will contain Google Analytics with proper integration and monitoring for each page. I'm certain that Home Page and few key pages under Technology Menu will fully done before the Event, ready to hit some traffic.
- Local online Thai Newspaper (12 years old) with 10-12k visitors monthly will advertise BitShares website for 3 months, starting the day when we put new .org online. (More traffic)
- Once we have better analytics and data collected we can:
a) Do proper marketing campaigns with targeted key-phrases, localities, offer where there is higher demand, etc. by ourselves through a worker
or b) Then hire professional marketing company with our own request and analytics collected (it's a great filter for 3rd parties while getting/considering their offers).

But at the current stage, this would have sense to be discussed again somewhere around early/mid of December.

Chee®s
Title: Re: [eng] Marketing Efforts and Pre-Worker Discussion
Post by: clockwork on November 07, 2018, 06:42:20 am
Hello everyone,

After going over the PDF, I'm afraid I'll have to agree with everyone before me. This is not a good proposal by any stretch.

It's a shame really because when I heard the guys at BitFest i had higher hopes for this proposal.

However there seems to be a complete lack of understanding/research on BitShares itself and the crypto market in general and offering this proposal without proper research does not bode well for results.

Unlike Thul3, I don't think the management fee is that high. At our company (and previous agencies I worked at), we regularly charge that or more. However the scope of work and deliverables are completely different. We charge that kind of money for  SEO and social media work on VERY competitive sectors (like tourism in greece).

Essentially this proposal is for a website and associated SEO/SEM.

We already have a website with a new one coming up and a worker to manage it. What's more, I would argue that ApAsia's "basic" SEO being done right now (see: https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares.org/issues/3 for example) is on par with the work they're suggesting.

There is no mention of budget for creative work. There is no way in hell copy-content writing and visual;s/creatives for online ads can be included at that price.

The media budget is WAY too low.

Assuming digital only focus and a necessary for growth marketing budget of 12-15% of total annual budget (Let me remind you that across development,infrastructure,website etc. workers we budget close to 2m  USD /year) with at least 50-60%  on media spend , media budget should be at a minimum of 120-150k/year.

Furthermore, I see no real KPIs and evaluation methodology in this proposal. Absolutely NO mention of analytics and tools to evaluate and enhance marketing performance. And absolutely NO strategy on how to KEEP those users if/when we get them.

It's a half-assed, "Let's funnel people to a website through basic SEM and hope some stick around" kind of thing.

To be honest, I can understand why/how this proposal came about as I considered this as an exercise myself  and realized it would cost around 5k USD in manhours  to only come up with the brief/RFP  that a worker proposal should answer.

As I've said before, it's almost to the point where we need a worker proposal just to fund the process of drafting a marketing RFP for a marketing worker to pitch against.

The industry as a whole, and BitShares as a platform/player in the industry itself is  NOT small-town stuff and we'd be doing ourselves a tremendous disservice by treating it as such.

BitShares needs a BIG and SERIOUS marketing proposal and seriously hope someone steps up. Unfortunately I don't have the time to do it and I'm way happier dealing in the dev side of things. I spend way too much time on the marketing side at my day job and can't handle more of that.

That's my 0.02 BTS :)

DISCLAIMER: I have been working in multi-national digital agencies since 2003 across almost all Digital marketing disciplines (web dev, strategy,media planning etc.) and have worked with clients such as Coca Cola, Siemens, IBM, Lufthansa, Aegean Air, Pizza Hut, Vodafone, Microsoft, Vichy, Estee Lauder, Clinique, Heineken and many many more.
You all also know my crypto knowledge and involvement. STILL, with all that combined, I consider BitShares marketing a very demanding undertaking that requires a lot of research work and focus.
Title: Re: [eng] Marketing Efforts and Pre-Worker Discussion
Post by: Thul3 on November 07, 2018, 07:57:40 am
Quote
Unlike Thul3, I don't think the management fee is that high. At our company (and previous agencies I worked at), we regularly charge that or more.

I don't agree on that.Just because big companies are paying this kind of money it doesn't mean there are no way cheaper proprosals which deliver at least the same quality of work.
Most big agencies work with these kind of people to do their job and are charging their customers up to 500% for it which they pay to their partners.
They are basicly accuiring customers and forwarding the work to their partnerships.

I agree that the Media budget is way to low if you want to use it for a 12 months period however i also don't belive that bitshares should go with its marketing to an agency expecially when reading their news website offers.These agancies are basicly needed for complete noobs and they will never bring any good ROI in.
Bitshares has in no way a Budget like Coca-Cola,Microsoft,Lufthansa or any other big company which goal and measureing is totaly diffrent than bitshares.They also calculate in the longrun and are not forced to compete against bigger competitors and thats why they are willing to spend way overpriced ad prices to achive Branding and more important Prestige thinking in public.

Bitshares main goal should be getting massivly new members on DEX who will be trading.
Adding Brand awareness doesn't bring anything if there won't be a nice amount of volume which majority of traders require.

And for this kind of goal there are far more targeted possibilities to gain these traders with way cheaper solutions.
Bitshares should be not focusing on spending money to increase awareness of that brand but focusing on accuring new members generating volume and profit which indirectly means generating a good ROI.Once bitshares will be able to find a marketing solution which will generate a good ROI the growth of bitshares will be quickly as any good ROI can be quickly scaled up.
However the mentioned strategy above is not getting you a good ROI at all and if you take stratagies from big companies you will need to wait a longer time to get your initial investment back since these companies calculate totaly diffrent as they need total diffrent promotion channels.

Quote
To be honest, I can understand why/how this proposal came about as I considered this as an exercise myself  and realized it would cost around 5k USD in manhours  to only come up with the brief/RFP  that a worker proposal should answer.

Completly agree on that but the nonsense bla bla to explain everything like talking to a complete noob is also frustrating since its just nice words without any meaning.
Its just poor time wasting.

Personly with this kind of budget i would spend part of it on unconventional marketing (something like guerilla marketing for the internet) as they do exist and stop going after the herd.


My old mentor always claimed :
People who run after the herd will always eat only their crap/waste.


And watching the prices the herd is paying for so called crypto related websites like cointelegraph,bitcoin.com ads distribution,CMC etc its just insane.The prices of pseudo crypto influencers are the biggest overhyped solutions and still companies with no knowledge about real marketing are willing to pay it.
As example a known youtube channel with average 5k views per clip is demanding $10k.

Bitshares should be also thinking about creating their own news distribution channels as the current one are only informing a handfull of people


Title: Re: [eng] Marketing Efforts and Pre-Worker Discussion
Post by: clockwork on November 07, 2018, 08:36:29 am
Quote
Unlike Thul3, I don't think the management fee is that high. At our company (and previous agencies I worked at), we regularly charge that or more.

I don't agree on that.Just because big companies are paying this kind of money it doesn't mean there are no way cheaper proprosals which deliver at least the same quality of work.

No disagreement. I am simply judging the proposal on an agency basis rather than a freelancer...

Most big agencies work with these kind of people to do their job and are charging their customers up to 500% for it which they pay to their partners.
They are basicly accuiring customers and forwarding the work to their partnerships..

Depends on the agency really. When I was with OgilvyOne, we pretty much did everything in-house. Yes, mark-ups were higher as well as operational costs but it really showed on quality of work produced. There is a huge cost in coordination/management if you need work done on multiple disciplines (SEM, content, design, media planning/buying etc.) that sometimes goes unnoticed. And that's in companies that actually HAVE a dedicated marketing dept.

I agree that the Media budget is way to low if you want to use it for a 12 months period however i also don't belive that bitshares should go with its marketing to an agency expecially when reading their news website offers.These agancies are basicly needed for complete noobs and they will never bring any good ROI in.

I disagree there. I think the decentralized nature of BitShares is exactly why we need an agency (and further more a full-service one) because coordinating and managing a group of freelancers will be a nightmare.

Unless we create a worker to HIRE a CMO full-time , give him a marketing budget and let him deal with everything. But it will be very very hard finding the right person. Agency is not ideal but it is a better/safer solution for us at this stage imho.

Although I agree that "small" agencies are only useful to complete noobs, I am not referring to "small" agencies.

That was my point about doing a disservice to BitShares by treating it as a small company. We're decentralized and it is not immediately obvious, but our available annual budget and revenue is NOT small-time stuff.

Bitshares has in no way a Budget like Coca-Cola,Microsoft,Lufthansa or any other big company which goal and measureing is totaly diffrent than bitshares.They also calculate in the longrun and are not forced to compete against bigger competitors and thats why they are willing to spend way overpriced ad prices to achive Branding and more important Prestige thinking in public.

Agreed, I wasn't comparing BitShares to them. It was simply a bit of my background. I've worked with companies of all sizes with different marketing needs each time.

Bitshares main goal should be getting massivly new members on DEX who will be trading.
Adding Brand awareness doesn't bring anything if there won't be a nice amount of volume which majority of traders require.

And for this kind of goal there are far more targeted possibilities to gain these traders with way cheaper solutions.
Bitshares should be not focusing on spending money to increase awareness of that brand but focusing on accuring new members generating volume and profit which indirectly means generating a good ROI.Once bitshares will be able to find a marketing solution which will generate a good ROI the growth of bitshares will be quickly as any good ROI can be quickly scaled up.

Partly agree. I agree that this should be our goal. But I also think we need to work on both simultaneously. BitShares suffers from a tremendous awareness and image problem that NEEDS to be addressed at the same time as hard-selling the dex to traders.

However the mentioned strategy above is not getting you a good ROI at all and if you take stratagies from big companies you will need to wait a longer time to get your initial investment back since these companies calculate totaly diffrent as they need total diffrent promotion channels.

Again, companies mentioned were just for background. Even then , similar size companies have completely different needs and approaches. And so does BitShares. My point was that BitShares needs an integrated marketing plan addressing many different needs and goals in a coordinated and integrated way. The exact weight and attention to be given to each goal would be part of the marketing proposal. I'm not saying Brand Awareness is more important than userbase growth or anything like that. Simply that we have more than one goals and any marketing proposal should take ALL into account and have a consistent feel across all actions.

Quote
To be honest, I can understand why/how this proposal came about as I considered this as an exercise myself  and realized it would cost around 5k USD in manhours  to only come up with the brief/RFP  that a worker proposal should answer.

Completly agree on that but the nonsense bla bla to explain everything like talking to a complete noob is also frustrating since its just nice words without any meaning.
Its just poor time wasting.

Personly with this kind of budget i would spend part of it on unconventional marketing (something like guerilla marketing for the internet) as they do exist and stop going after the herd.


My old mentor always claimed :
People who run after the herd will always eat only their crap.

Agreed. Again, my point is that we CAN offer a larger budget and we SHOULD offer a larger budget as long as there is a serious plan behind it. I'm a big fan of guerilla marketing but always in combination with other approaches. I would not mind seeing a 300-400k /year marketing proposal or more for BitShares as long as whoever placed it knew what the fuck they were doing.


And watching the prices the herd is paying for so called crypto related websites like cointelegraph,bitcoin.com ads distribution,CMC etc its just insane.The prices of pseudo crypto influencers are the biggest overhyped solutions and still companies with no knowledge about real marketing are willing to pay it.
As example a known youtube channel with average 5k views per clip is demanding $10k.

Bitshares should be also thinking about creating their own news distribution channels as the current one are only informing a handfull of people

Indeed it's becoming a joke. Seems like the instant the word crypto is mentioned prices just go 10x up.

Agreed on the news distribution channels and I meant to mention it before as well.. Our big problem there is that our decentralized nature makes it a bitch to agree on content and what's "official" so to speak.
Title: Re: [eng] Marketing Efforts and Pre-Worker Discussion
Post by: Thul3 on November 07, 2018, 09:41:56 am
Quote
I disagree there. I think the decentralized nature of BitShares is exactly why we need an agency (and further more a full-service one) because coordinating and managing a group of freelancers will be a nightmare.

What i fear is that an agency will only do what majority will be doing and that unique marketing ideas won't be supported anymore with the claim we got an agency who will be responsible for it.

Quote
Again, companies mentioned were just for background. Even then , similar size companies have completely different needs and approaches. And so does BitShares. My point was that BitShares needs an integrated marketing plan addressing many different needs and goals in a coordinated and integrated way. The exact weight and attention to be given to each goal would be part of the marketing proposal. I'm not saying Brand Awareness is more important than userbase growth or anything like that. Simply that we have more than one goals and any marketing proposal should take ALL into account and have a consistent feel across all actions.

My statement was not directed to your reply but to the offer from the news agency


Quote
Agreed. Again, my point is that we CAN offer a larger budget and we SHOULD offer a larger budget as long as there is a serious plan behind it.
My concern is that marketing will be dependent on only one company and will surely limit future marketing ideas heavily.
Title: Re: [eng] Marketing Efforts and Pre-Worker Discussion
Post by: clockwork on November 07, 2018, 10:32:04 am
Quote
I disagree there. I think the decentralized nature of BitShares is exactly why we need an agency (and further more a full-service one) because coordinating and managing a group of freelancers will be a nightmare.

What i fear is that an agency will only do what majority will be doing and that unique marketing ideas won't be supported anymore with the claim we got an agency who will be responsible for it.

Quote
Again, companies mentioned were just for background. Even then , similar size companies have completely different needs and approaches. And so does BitShares. My point was that BitShares needs an integrated marketing plan addressing many different needs and goals in a coordinated and integrated way. The exact weight and attention to be given to each goal would be part of the marketing proposal. I'm not saying Brand Awareness is more important than userbase growth or anything like that. Simply that we have more than one goals and any marketing proposal should take ALL into account and have a consistent feel across all actions.

My statement was not directed to your reply but to the offer from the news agency


Quote
Agreed. Again, my point is that we CAN offer a larger budget and we SHOULD offer a larger budget as long as there is a serious plan behind it.
My concern is that marketing will be dependent on only one company and will surely limit future marketing ideas heavily.

We agree on all counts. Hence my clause of "knows what the fuck they're doing"
Title: Re: [eng] Marketing Efforts and Pre-Worker Discussion
Post by: matle85 on November 07, 2018, 11:48:52 am
Thanks Xeroc for this, regardless of the proposal itself it is really positive to see these things being brought forward / proposed as marketing is absolutely critical to taking BTS to the next level.

I have gone through the documents and was not blown away. I do not feel the fee is particularly high but I also don't think we will get much out of it.

My suggestion is we utilise our different expertise to prepare a Request for Proposal (RfP) document outlining what exactly we want and are looking for. A number of us could work on it as a shared Google document and we could pin down as a community exactly what we are looking for. A reasonable budget could be agreed and then a worker raise including some allowance for a proposal committee to review submissions and select the successful firm.

I don't have a background in marketing but I do work on a lot of large tenders / design competitions so have some ideas on how this could be done & structured to get best possible results. I'd be happy to work on the document with others but we'd need to crowbar some time out of people like clockwork with more of a marketing background.
Title: Re: [eng] Marketing Efforts and Pre-Worker Discussion
Post by: matle85 on November 07, 2018, 11:52:49 am
Note that I'm assuming in my previous post we can get enough people inputting to the RFP for free and then use that as the basis for a good worker proposal.

I'm happy to work on it but others with a marketing background and strong opinions (inc you Thul!) would need to input :)