Zenon PR & Paid advertising

Marketing ╰ Funding | Submissions
1

Hello alienz,

Several times since I’ve been part of Zenon, I’ve felt both lucky and disappointed due to the low level of awareness in the market about the Network of Momentum. Most of the time I consider myself lucky because I am such an early bird of this ground-breaking technology, but oftentimes, it has been disappointing to see the great things happening here that just remained within the community without expanding enough to a larger public.

Hence, with my growth marketing background, and experience in building and scaling early-stage start-ups, I decided to contribute more actively to the growth of the Network of Momentum with the skills and resources I carry.

I want to apply for A-Z to expand Zenon’s vision and initiatives to a much broader audience. The subject of this project proposal is making some collaborations with well-known publishing entities through banner ads and press releases.

I’ve already talked to a lot of publishing agencies within the crypto space, and sorted them out by analyzing their website traffic, bounce rates, average time spent & other metrics.

I firmly consider that the primary persona of Zenon isn’t an average Joe. They should be great technical minds and business-oriented investors who can understand blockchains in-depth and the uniqueness of NoM.

With this in mind, I’ve made a shortlist with my top-recommended publishers to kick off some PR & paid to advertise on:

  • press release on news.bitcoin.com + posts cross-channel on all social media ($2500 price)

    • published on the main page + social channels (Twitter, Telegram, Facebook) - 2.5M
    • daily traffic → between 100,000 and 300,000 times per day
    • receives from 3k to 20k impressions depending on the content

  • ads banner on news.bitcoin.com

    • $10 CPM (cost per one thousand visitors who see the advertisement)

  • newsletter (costs $4000)

    • 210k subscribers
    • the open rate ranges between 32% - 35%
    • open click rates range between 11% - 14%

Hackernoon media kit - https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f5918f36194df48120ee87a/t/6245eeecc084a91ff08252e8/1648750320882/The+Hacker+Noon+Playbook+2022.pdf

  • niche-marketing ads by tag

    • offers the possibility to target directly blockchain enthusiasts and developers
    • free brand publishing
    • creating an official Zenon page and publishing an article explaining the technology, innovation brought, and current or future initiatives
    • this initiative is free but the article has to be well structured and written in order to be published because 55% of submissions get rejected.

  • Hackernoon billboard

NewsBTC media kit - https://www.newsbtc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/NewsBTC-2021.pdf

  • press release: $200
  • banner ads: varies from $4 to $8 in CPM in terms of banner position and number of impressions.

All these publishing or advertising collaborations require funds and effort to communicate with them, send informative resources and briefs, and write content that will be promoted (ads or articles).

The goals here are straight-forward:

  • bring in more investors, developers, marketers
  • drive awareness of the A-Z
  • get better indexing on Google or others to be found easier organically

I want to request the maximum amount of 5000 ZNN. I am budgeting 4000 $ZNN for the publishing services and 1000 $ZNN for my effort in writing the articles, creating the banner ads content & graphics, optimizing the campaigns, and keeping the communication with account managers.

So far, I am in discussions with the Bitcoin.com account manager, and I can put forward my marketing & tech agency. I wanna put the phases after gathering your feedback to revise my application.

Let me know what your thoughts and feedback are.

4 Likes
2

I am supportive as long as this is phased appropriately. I.e., I would start w/ 1 of the initiatives / subset of funds as a POC, run it, show the outcomes, then the rest of the phases should be a no brainer for pillars.

4 Likes
3

agree with sultan here - also the articles need to be tailored to where we are at as a network. I’d be cautious not to overstate any current capability and make it clear that future goals are just that - goals.

There’s been many discussions on this and some of the community feel that there is little benefit to having uptake whilst we don’t have SCs or NFTs etc. I feel if it’s delivered appropriately we can hopefully attract some keen devs/fresh blood to contribute

Maybe the @Marketing guys can assist as they had privately been working on some plans

1 Like
4

Sounds like a pretty good initiative to me. When allocating the funds do you mean 4000$ worth of znn for publishing and 1000$ worth for writing the articles? Or is it just 4000 and 1000 zennies for each category?

Also Sayan/Leotard wrote a really cool article for hackernoon shilling Zenon a while back (How NOT To Fracture A Layer 1 Chain! | HackerNoon ) but yea we could definitely use an updated article, preferably after we have that AMA with Kainu-sama.

1 Like
5

Hi all, thanks for the feedback & thoughts. Totally agree that we should fund this based on incremental success. I have written an article with my application containing the complete services and the phases.

Pls take a look and let me know what you think: PR & Banner ads for NoM. Hello there, | by John-Z | Medium

7

Are you @mehowbrainz on twitter? If not I suggest you guys try to work together, he has really great and relevant experience building an awareness campaign with solid KPI metrics with Rune/Thorchain. I think he has been in hospital lately but worth it to reach out and chat with him. We definitely NEED this for Zenon, and needs to be done in the best way.

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8

From @John-Z on telegram:

":wave: Shazz, thanks for the feedback.

My intentions are long term with Zenon, I am part of the community for over an year and didnt sell a bit, not even at $70 unfortunately.

So yea, I’m doing this to increase the value of my investment and I am looking to spawn a pillar in the mid long run."

I support this iniative. Also suggest you reach out to mehowbrainz :alien:

1 Like
9

Thanks for the support. I am gonna reach out to @mehowbrainz to ask for help as I am aware he did amazing things with Thorchain.

Later today I’ll have a call with the sales manager from Bitcoin.com.
Let me know if you have some specific questions you want me to ask her.

Cheers

1 Like
10

How does everyone feel about this A Z? In my “real world” job developing real estate, I’ve never had good luck with ad banners, news letters, print advertising, etc…

I have had success with Press Releases from an SEO standpoint, but that is it.

I’m also a strong believer in real content generated by the community and shared on medium or a forum. I also think we are not done enough to really market the project. I personally don’t want to market the project to generate a short term pump.

I think we need more devs working with the community. So any marketing (IMO) should be targeted at attracting devs and new community members who want to engage.

Thoughts?

2 Likes
11

I, personally, am for JohnZ’s marketing proposal. However, I do think we should defer this proposal for a bit.

There’s too much we don’t know right now. Wen smart contract? Wen NFTs? Wen bitcoin interoperability? While we should be promoting NoM we simply don’t have the answers to these questions, something that could be resolved through open communication with the core team. So perhaps it’d be wiser to wait until things become clearer or until after Kaine does his AMA (@Sigli where we at?).

We don’t want to foster a new generation of holders who are mainly here due to schizo theories and who then flame/fud when they get frustrated by the team’s reticence.

12

I agree, marketing at this point should be targeted primarily at devs and not the moonboys. The latter will join automatically once we have the foundation set and enough built.

2 Likes
13

I agree. I think we should push this back until we have something to advertise. Getting devs excited about this project is more important than bag holders.

I guess the flip side is, we might need price to go up for devs to be interested. Hard to say. Maybe the hard core BTC OG type devs are more interested in the tech and decentralization. And price go up might be less important.

2 Likes
14

agree, identifying the right target segments as well as the right language, content, and placement to convert the types of people needed most for the current phase of the network is key @John-Z. Currently, we need as many devs and builders as possible to create substance. Investors will automatically follow if that base is covered.

3 Likes
15

Hi guyz, sorry for my late reply. cc: @cryptocheshire @0x3639

First of all, @DrD3 I understand your concerns and there are indeed a lot of unknown unknowns concerning projects that we expected from the core team: BTC interoperability, NFTs, and so on. However, it’s counterproductive to wait for these projects to be done in order to run ads and gather awareness.

This is the main reason for running such campaigns, to bring new developers and to highlight the infrastructure, the fact that it’s feeless, scalable, and secure. It’s more likely for developers to join a strong network with funds released and not so many products layered yet as it gives them a wide range of products to build.

Maybe I didn’t made my proposal clear enough, but I’m definitely not looking to promote and attract some moonboys. My first phase implies:

  • press release where I am gonna write about the Zenon fair launch, technology, and latest events mainly highlighting the AZ destinated for devs
  • banner ads where we can test a lot of approaches & targets
  • Hackernoon article which target is mainly technical people

I expect to kick off these marketing initiatives in June which I believe is a good timing.

2 Likes
16

Hey as much as I appreciate the time and effort invested into your proposal, I would vote no for the following reasons:

  • The distribution venues (news.bitcoin.com, newsBTC) seem like very broad targeting choices given you’re specifically looking for investors, developers and marketers. IMO it should be much more granular targeting, and I think there’s better vehicles to be chosen.

  • The proposal seems partially completed. It’s missing the funnel and tracking aspects i.e. what happens after the click on a link in the newsletter? How does it track behaviours? What’s the funnel? In its current form, it’s an awareness campaign with no evidence of any follow-through.

  • You’re likely better off using the $4,000 to set yourself some hourly rate for work, and spending time manually distributing messages with hyper-targeting in mind (although I think that the greater marketing community should all be part of this, it’s really just sweat). At THORChain I started off with doing posts on job / freelance boards like Upwork, or venues where I knew people were aligned with the intents I.e. on Upwork people are looking for work, therefore you could post a job offering some consultation offer, get bids, and quietly mention AZ in the post or via DM. AngelList was also another venue I used to drive awareness to the more entrepreneurial audiences: those looking for venture opportunities. On AngelList we ended up finding a developer who wrote a PoC (proof of concept) DEX (asgardex) before getting any funding from TC. He showed off the PoC to me, I linked him to core devs and they offered him a full-time gig nearly instantly. Asgardex was then forked and SKIP was developed ontop of it.

  • There have been already plenty of articles/wikis written by community re: Zenon’s features, and they’re likely already indexed by search engines. I don’t think there’s any point to keep writing more about the same stuff. Instead we should be looking at immediate problems i.e. inspiring devs to join to write various small products useful to build ecosystem / community (like proposed by @0x3639) or build more complex ideas (cross-chain), spending time to place Zenon’s various yield-generating vehicles in directories/aggregators (nodes, pillars, staking) + target operators who already conduct such activities for other networks, building lists of investor groups and finding some automated method to reach out to them (twitter audience lists via followerwonk, and building custom audience lists for granular ad targeting) — although I don’t think we need bag holders atm, we need devs and technical minds who earn their ZNN.

  • We should as a community be inspiring the ecosystem to use the forums way more instead of Telegram, as threads will now be indexed by search engines. Usage leads to discovery via keywords.

I’m a HUGE fan of paid distribution, but without clear funnels, list building/remarketing, tracking — I know from experience that these funds will vanish fast and we’ll have a hard time to justify the value for the spend. I intend to build a Zenon.Org (similar to the THORChain.org I designed and built). It’ll be multi-lang, have sitemaps — and most importantly be designed/developed as a framework where we could build funnels that will be tracked with the use attribute.me. It’ll give the entire community a tool to distribute messages like you proposed, but will be trackable and help you prove whether your distribution and targeting lead to some value to the network i.e. did a user download a wallet? Did a user signup to some ecosystem product (with events integrated in their code). Ecosystem projects will be able to integrate with attribute.me for cross-domain tracking, allowing Zenon.Org + all ecosystem projects to share user sessions. Such implementation already exists between THORChain.org + SKIP.exchange. If you visit Attribute.me, you could generate yourself a Campaign Link for any THORChain.org page, promote it in any press release, advertising etc, and track what users did on THORChain.org and SKIP i.e. did the referring user swap, pool, new wallets etc? How much? The marketer could then verify his stats in the Attribute.me dashboard by searching with his THOR address, and seeing what his referred traffic did on the ecosystem properties. He could quantify his cost to develop/distribute the campaign, to the value triggered i.e. my campaign lead to 4 new wallets being created, at a cost of $400 in distribution spend (+ my costs), it cost the network $100 per new wallet signup.

I intend to develop the new Zenon.Org upon my return from recovery, get it all integrated with Attribute.me + various ecosystem projects i.e. Zenon.tools so that the community could begin to promote all these projects + quantify their value driven via marketing/distribution.

A marketer won’t have to promote Zenon.Org exclusively for all of this to work. If Zenon.tools for example integrates with Attribute.me, a marketer will be able to promote Zenon.tools directly with special Campaign Links and quantify his value.

Food for thought @ marketers: Distribution is only part of the formula, and spends vanish very fast. It’s an experimentation game with measurement deeply integrated.

I’ll soon begin posting in the Marketing forums to share more.

8 Likes
17

Thank you for sharing these thoughts. Super helpful. I voted No on this proposal for many of the reasons you articulated above.

1 Like
18

Would love to get feedback on questions raised here: https://forum2.zenon.org/t/pr-banner-ads-for-nom-funding-request/689/2?u=mehowbrainz

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19

Good day, have you still got any plans to use the AZ funds for some targeted adds? With the many updates coming may be a good time to return to this.

Hope all is well.

B

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20

Hello guys, yes, I waited for the right moment to release the paid article & banner ads. This month seems to be a great moment with the orbital program & decentralized bridge releases. Will get back to you with the final version of the article & ads copy.

5 Likes
21

great news

1 Like