PR & Banner ads for NoM Funding Request

0x3639 · June 10, 2022, 11:41am

@John-Z received approval to proceed with PR & Banner ads per his approved A Z Project (23 Yes / 6 No) (PR & Banner ads for NoM. Hello there, | by John-Z | Medium). He has requested funding for the first phase. The funding request is below:

“An MVP type of collaboration by testing out the main services: Bitcoin.com press release, some banner ads on Bitcoin.com, and a niche marketing ad on Hackernoon which is free but has to be well-done writing (here I will share with you the drafts to gather more feedback) => requesting 2000 $ZNN for this phase ($2500 on the press release, $2000 on the banner ads, and $700–$1000 for writing the article which will take around 14 days). I expect from this phase to gather some Twitter new followers and some new community members (~probably dozens/hundreds).”

I see several No votes are rolling in. I’m wondering why? If we approved the A Z and he is requesting funding per the approved A Z why vote no? I voted No on the original proposal, but now that the community has approved the project I feel like I have an obligation to vote yes because he is requesting funds per an approved A Z.

Thoughts?

mehowbrainz · June 10, 2022, 12:05pm

How did he determine that Bitcoin.com is the target audience sought?
Did he consider other channels i.e. brave browser notification ads etc? Which were considered? Or did he pick the first and most obvious publication site? What’s the research that determined choices for the plan?
Where are the banners on the site? Above/below the fold? ROS or homepage?
Which format are the banner ads?
How are the banner ads paced throughout the campaign?
What will be the ad copy for the banner ads?
What’s the CPC/CPM cost of the banner ads?
What’s the objective of the funnel? Is it to gain followers? What’s the funnel for the banner ads? Example of an objective for the network.
Where will clicks to press release / banners be directed?
Is retargeting used? Which lists is he building and where?
How will clicks to the banner ads and links in the press release be tracked? UTM/GA?
What’s the KPI’s measured? And how are they measured?

IMO there’s better vehicles / methods for deploying $5,000 worth of experimentation. Crypto is referral-based (you trusted my tweet re: Zenon @0x3639), influencer marketing might be a better vehicle if you wanna just dump cash. Otherwise, I’ve had success experimenting Twitter Ads for THORChain where I was able to gather engagements for as lows as $0.001-$0.005 per engagement using some hacks, and were funnelled/measured. The banner ads portion of his proposal is missing a ton of details. The press release is okay since it could get picked up by various publications, but still would love to get answers to questions above.

cryptocheshire · June 12, 2022, 6:54am

I’d rather the funds went to mehowz since he has a proven track record & deep expertise in performance marketing.

crypto_culture · June 12, 2022, 1:34pm

imo the proposal is not okay for many obvious reasons:

No justification or logic for phases 2 and 3, still phase 1 have some good points.
Banner Ads without retargeting or any form of tracking can’t be measured so it’s just a waste without proper cookies/analytics on the landing page.
I usually have a split of 50% awareness for cold audiences and 50% retargeting.
Twitter ads proved so far to be the most effective for awareness - we should focus on a solution here (i have a lot of experience to share - my account is currently suspended for promoting Zenon with Twitter ads, but I’m working with Twitter support on a legal framework that could allow ads for Zenon on Twitter using crypro_culture account)
Articles, Press releases, and sponsored stories - any PR proposal should be integrated into a larger project involving journalists, and promotions (e.g. learn and earn type).
The creatives materials (banners, videos, ads, landing pages) should be done by artists/designers from our community, bc they understand znn art.
So, first, let’s use the #znnaliens amazing talent

find here a some contacts for znn artists

crypto_culture · June 12, 2022, 2:13pm

Still, this guy could bring value to our community so maybe the best solution is probably to test a bit and also offer support if needed.

We should generate fast better proposals so the budgets are better allocated and fit in an integrated communication plan.

crypto_culture · June 12, 2022, 2:48pm

The plan should focus on a key message that will be spread across all channels for max impact

The objective: raise awareness on #accelerator-z and Zenon technology
The funnel should focus on 2 key audiences - developers/web3 builders and retail/institutional investors.
The best solution will be to split the budgets into different activities/channels that sustain the objectives
From my perspective, we should focus on :
Twitter Ads & Engage journalists/influencers in order to generate original content.

The Context - Crypto advertising regulations:
Create a project that is not specific to ZNN coin or zenon_network in order to bypass the crypto ads regulations that prohibit/restrict ads for anon projects.

The idea:
Create an IRL event for “BTC scaling solutions” called Momentum 2022, this event could take place in September in Lisbon or Dubai
By creating this platform of communication we can start advertising for this event powered by Zenon Accelerator, so we can generate excitement and original content by engaging journalists/influencers to write about this event
The event should have a free pre-registration.
Nice to have - ZTS tickets for registration or activities on location.

The plan:
I have an experience of over 15 years of IRL events for large corporations. But I need help from the community to be able to submit such a project

Basically, we need :

Event landing page
Event Social media accounts + ads manager for all platforms + creative manager for the visuals.
Event partnership manager - maybe we could have ThorChain and other related projects as partners alongside Accelerator Z
Event manager on-location - event location, event activities, schedule, broadcast, and logistics
Press coordinator - engage with influencers/ press to cover the event

I can do most of them alone, but to get the best results we need to join our forces and build something cool that could bring value to Zenon many years from now.

John-Z · June 12, 2022, 4:29pm

Hi @mehowbrainz ,

You raised a lot of questions, so I’ll respond in line to all of them even though I can admit I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll try to highlight the reasons for applying with this project along with my analysis, previous efforts and learnings doing product marketing for over 3 years.

Q: How did he determine that Bitcoin.com is the target audience sought? Did he consider other channels i.e. brave browser notification ads etc? Which were considered? Or did he pick the first and most obvious publication site? What’s the research that determined choices for the plan?

3 months ago, I’ve created some email outbound campaigns targeting blockchain journalists & introducing Zenon by sending articles, updates, and asking for thoughts. I was hoping to receive some responses and to see if someone would be open to writing about Zenon. The result was none even after 3 follow-ups to each.

After that, I tested with some minimum budgets from my own funds to discover & play with some other decentralized marketing platforms of Bitmedia & DragonX. Result: again, nothing significant, no pump in price or community through the Telegram or Twitter.

Bitcoin.com is one of the most popular websites for crypto news. It has roughly 3,000,000 users per month. Other top websites are Cointelegraph (which I remember we’ve tried), Decrypt or Coindesk which I’ve contacted but the price quotas were at least 5x more expensive than Bitcoin.com (Decrypt → $16k, CoinDesk → $12k). I have also checked out Brave to see if it’s possible to run banner ads, but they required KYC and the minimum budget required was $10k.

Here is an image with the crypto publications I’ve analyzed:

Using similarweb. com, I’ve researched more than 40 crypto-related publishing websites where we can create press releases, auditing them by means of real monthly visitors, bounce rate, page/visit, average visit duration & demographics about their visitors: country, age, topics they are interested in (pretty rudimentary, but good for a start).

Returning to my final shortlists (Bitcoin. com & Hackernoon.com), here’s some data about their audience demographics:

———————————

Q: Where are the banners on the site? Above/below the fold? ROS or homepage? &Which format are the banner ads? & How are the banner ads paced throughout the campaign?

As mentioned in the Medium article, the banner ads will run on news.bitcoin.com and they will be placed on the homepage. You can see in the images below. They are CPM and the cost per thousand impressions is 10$. The only targeting filters you can set on Bitcoin.com are by country, gender & age range.

As mentioned again in the 1st phase, I will start with $2000 with banner ads to make different tests highlighting the Accelerator, generic value propositions, or even buy enforcement. All these will run as micro-tests to see what messaging & funnel are better converting within the first phase.

Do you really believe that paying 2000$ for some banner ads is a cash dump? I would call it an experiment with the potential of growing in community/price while discovering a really functional channel that doesn’t ban us for trying paid advertising.

—————————————

Q: What’s the objective of the funnel? Is it to gain followers? What’s the funnel for the banner ads? Where will clicks on press releases/banners be directed? & Is retargeting used? Which lists is he building and where? & How will clicks to the banner ads and links in the press release be tracked? UTM/GA? & What are the KPIs measured? And how are they measured?

The main objective of these campaigns is clearly awareness.

There will be multiple funnels to be tested out. But first of all, before running any of these campaigns, I am working to add some analytics plug-ins to the website in order to start tracking the website traffic (GA, Campaign URL Builder, Hotjar). https://forum2.zenon.org/t/add-cta-links-on-accelerator-z-website-page/624/14

KPIs are the number of visitors, the number of people who landed on Pancake Swap, the number of new members in TG / Discord, and the number of new followers on Twitter.

Here are some images regarding the funnels:

——————————————

All in all, I totally agree that there are other cheaper and more effective ways of marketing. I have deep experience in running paid advertising cross-channel for multiple products. Indeed, for a classic and unregulated product, you can easily achieve $0.001-$0.005 per engagement & a CAC even around $2-3 depending on several factors, but did you manage to run ads on Zenon and have similar results?

I’ve tried to advertise this post on Twitter (https://twitter.com/johnthzone/status/1525901272737619970), but it was declared ineligible because Twitter, Reddit, and Google are identifying and banning any sort of paid advertising of decentralized technologies as they classify them as sensitive.

If you can still run Twitter ads without being ineligible, we should definitely start doing it. Until then, I think we should look for alternative strategies and platforms that are crypto-related and there’s a good chance we can find new developers & investors.

Maybe my phases weren’t clear enough. I would first request 2000 ZNN to pay a press release on Bitcoin.com, spend 2000$ on banner ads, and 500-700 ZNN for my whole effort in writing the articles. Furthermore, I myself stated that the 2nd phase is highly dependent on the first one, if nothing brings value, sure, let’s drop it and focus on something else.

In conclusion, thanks for the questions they made me provide the whole overview and background work before running to this proposal. The questions are valid, but they don’t invalidate the project.

mehowbrainz · June 12, 2022, 4:52pm

Now we’re getting somewhere, I’ll reply by tomorrow with thoughts. Enjoying the brainstorming.

John-Z · June 12, 2022, 4:52pm

Thanks for the feedback. I made it more clear to anyone who’s curious to understand the reasoning and the research behind my project. However, let me clarify your points:

2nd phase is dependent on 1st phase and I designed it flexible enough to make changes and test new approaches… The budget allocation for the 2nd phase is 1000 znn goes to what has shown a good track record in the previous phase, and the other 1000 znn goes to new experiments to be validated. We should continuously do what was validated to work, but not limit ourselves just on that. Continuously experimenting with data is the only key to growing sustainably.
Adding cookies & analytics in the website is WIP. Without them, I would not start any campaign.
why? and how would you apply this approach to my proposal? IMO, retargeting is too early to talk about until we don’t validate a channel that’s working and don’t solve the tracking data challenge we encounter.
do twitter ads, it has nothing to do with my proposal. I’ve done that and was ineligible.
don’t really understand what you mean. a
I also have some design skills. I’ll send my proposals of copy & design for validation before kicking off. if you don’t like them, I can work on artworks with someone from the community and obviously incentivize them accordingly.

crypto_culture · June 13, 2022, 12:26pm

Thanks for the updates and answers.

I’m not fully against your proposal and your rationale, but you still have semi-valid research only for phase1 and some logical issues with the proposal, but if pillars are favorable with this approach I will follow your example in order to secure better funding for my ideas.

If you add cookies to the website you/we can use different Display Advertising Networks to track users - eg.(The Top 10 Display Ad Networks Online | WebFX).

In order to get more exposure is better to have an integrated campaign (which combines multiple channels such as content, email, display advertising, and social media in order to promote a consistent message to a specific audience).
So your proposal should have a clear timeline (e.g. exact date of publishing, creative approach), so for example, if I would submit a proposal to az it would be better to align the messages and timing with your campaign.

Still, good to have new marketers in the community, so good luck, and keep up the good work!

mehowbrainz · June 18, 2022, 12:08am

I was recently at a new car reveal event, exclusive to people who pre-registered. I was surprised to see 100+ people show up. There was free food/drinks, and they gave you a gift on departure.

I was surprised at the value: the brand representatives gave a live presentation/QA. People got to see the car up close, inside and out via a short 1 min guided tour for all guests willing to wait the line. There were a bunch of journalists who then spoke privately with the reps. I left the event thinking to myself “yup exclusive events work, no wonder many clever marketers do limited seat events and funnel people from there”.

From a crypto perspective, like @crypto_culture highlights I also believe that this one-on-one approach is the way to go, both for the influencers and journalists. We need proper distribution, and they need the right resources / contacts to write the right story.

However I wouldn’t do an in-person event for a small market cap crypto (to lower costs and to have a trackable system via the digital route). I’d build it out as webinars and use clever funnels/distribution via ads to drive event signups. A pro marketer would pre-record the whole thing to automate as much possible + more. It’s a balance of knowing when do people need live answers / hand holding.

Such webinar funnels can be organized for a variety of network objectives: educate basics re: NoM, find pillar/node operators, find delegators/stakers/LPs and more.

As far as Twitter Ads not working in crypto: only if you haven’t yet figured out that you can bypass flagging systems by excluding common crypto keywords in your ad copy text i.e. BTC, ETH etc. Instead, sell a story in your ad copy, and use text embedded in images/videos to communicate your message. You can also promote polls (which tend to work really well from an engagement POV because people seem to always wanna click on something)… the higher the engagement rate to your Twitter Ad, the less you pay per engagement. Tricks you learn when you think outside of the box, comes with trial and error.

Now that I’m back working, I’ll be building the right funnels/content/tracking systems first, and then exploring distribution options to drive engagement i.e. ads, attribute.me tech + community… all tied under the upcoming Zenon.ORG brand. In research mode atm.

Stay tuned.

0x3639 · June 18, 2022, 4:05pm

#bullish

I think the twitter spaces and webinars are very useful to discuss a proejct. For new projects that I’m researching I join them religiously. @georgezgeorgez and I were discussing holding a twitter spaces. I think George and I would join.