Brand Strategy, Visual Identity, and Marketing Roadmap

Announcements Foundation
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Hi everyone,

Most of what I do is ‘in the open’ but lately there has also been a lot going on behind the scenes so I wanted to share an update here and give you a chance to comment / feedback.

First a reflection on the last few months. Some things went well. Others didn’t.

I have a rolling list of ‘stop, start, continue’ that I’ll share for transparency.

Stop:

  • PR agency spend: we had some wins but not enough ROI for continual spend, will shift to focusing around big events / news to optimise ROI.
  • Community hubs: I still believe this will be part of our longer term strategy but we need to do it in a more effective way and with greater accountability.
  • Hype-ish: we drifted too close to the line of hype, over substance. That is not right for the current market and our core target audience for relay growth.
  • General Inconsistency: different target audiences as well as lack of definition around brand personality, tone of voice, and content made effective execution difficult.

Start:

  • Tools for devs: we’ve identified relevant opportunities around tooling and data that could deliver value, boost our credibility, and draw devs into our ecosystem.
  • Content for devs: work together to create more tutorial and starter-kit content that will boost SEO and build our brand with end user devs.
  • Transparency of data: to become the most trusted brand in crypto we need to be transparent about our product performance and other key data metrics.

Continue:

  • Partnerships: Encode has been a helpful platform and we’ve been working on more dev-centric partnerships that will be a real strength going into the new quarter.
  • Narrative building: various posts performed well, the ‘blog->thread-> space’ rhythm feels good, and we’re getting better at explaining our ecosystem simply.
  • Twitter spaces: this is a good forum for us, emobdies the connector role, and we should build on it with a regular cadence plus engaging with others.
  • Experiments: we need to continue optimising for rapid learning, setting up CRO on the new website, improving our analytics, trying new things effectively.

In the meantime, I’ve also been working on a few projects that I want to share.

Brand Strategy:

This draft is based on early discussions with the community, target audience and market research, and then trying to pull it all into a consistent narrative that will help us to cut through. I’ve also included performance data from the last few months as well as a draft of the marketing roadmap. :eyes:

Website Rebuild:

RaidGuild have done a beautiful job IMO on the website design (there’s a sneak peak of the design in the brand strategy). They’ve shown a strong understanding of our target audience and of our project. The goal is to iterate forwards from here.

Visual Identity Refresh:

As we went through the responses from the survey that Raid Guild / we shared with you, input from the website rebuild, audience research and brand strategy work, we wanted to visually signify break with the past and a cleaner visual identity. Have a look here and let us know what you think.

DeveloperDAO Partnership

Developer DAO just announced POKT Network and our Gateways as their preferred RPC (featured in all their tutorials, starter kids, and hackathons, as well as via co-marketing). We’ll kick it off with a community call with their members and an IRL event we’ll co-host with them before DevConnect alongside Phala Network, and API3. This builds on our experience with Encode.

We’re also working on other dev-centric partnerships.

Technical Docs Rebuild

We created new structure and are working to update all of the information - we enlisted help from Patrick Skinner, who has a lot of experience with technical docs and has been proactively working with POKT DAO for a few months. One of his priorities is to create pathways for community contribution. Please help him.

So, there you go.

I’d love to hear what you think.

I can’t promise to adopt suggestions / ideas. Design by committee doesn’t work. But I can 100% promise that it is all valued, listened to, and it all feeds in.

My DMs are open and my calendly is here: Calendly - Adrienne Youngman

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I really like this update it looks awesome from my total ignorance hahaha

The brand strategy draft is very informative and (I think) accurate on the target audiences and goals. I love those in-depth documents (even in the format of slides lol).

The Developer DAO is a big win, we need that, lots of people writing things using Pokt in their tutorials, that’s the best kind of exposure that we can have I think.

I agree that the POKTober felt like something was missing towards the end, but coming from the nightmare that 2023 was I believe it helped to start turning the sentiment of the community. I think that we are still in very delicate state (both in sentiment and economics), but it feels that we have reached an inflection point and with some careful direction we could recover the positive sentiment (which all devs will appreciate).

Keep up the great work and thanks for sharing! :smile:

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Thanks for the update! My thoughts:

  • I didn’t even know we had a PR firm employed! So good we got rid of them if they were poor value for money.

  • Great to see focus and money spent on DevRel. DevRel is slow and takes time, but it’s an important investment to get potential customers familiar with Pocket and start their process to become users and clients.

  • IMO, Pocket marketing has two very different segments to address:

  1. Developers + users of RPCs.
  2. Retail/Institutional investors to buy the $POKT token.

Seems like 1) is moving in the right direction with the latest updates.
2) Can be more hype focus - I don’t think we’ve moved so far away from reality with the latest narrative that we yet need to reign in the hype, it’s good for retail and has been relatively cautious in trying to drum up excitement for holding POKT.

  • If we are saving money on not paying a PR firm, can some of that be allocated to ‘traditional’ marketing? There are now funds available, we should outline a plan and budget to spend on things like:

  • Industry (Decrypt, Cointelegraph etc) Marketing, interviews, updates etc.

  • Twitter ads ( see what DRPC is doing at X, we should be doing the same, especially to coincide with big announcements like the partnerships last week).

  • PR newswire and associated services to push large announcements like partnerships.

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Thank you @Cryptocorn !

Really appreciate the thoughtful input.

I completely agree with the different segments and I’m working on a more granular marketing plan that will definitely hit some of your points.

We’ll definitely continue give media coverage a focus - it’s just how we’ll resource it that’s changing. IMO it’s very wrong that we’re not at the heart of the DePIN / decentralised infra industry narratives and that’s definitely something we need to set straight.

I hadn’t been thinking about Twitter ads specifically but I will be now.

Thank you.

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Thank you @RawthiL !

Your opinion hugely matters. You know this brand, it’s users, and the broader industry. Marketing is just about finding spaces to connect those and build relationships. So I’m really glad that it’s resonating. Thank you.

I’m excited about the DevDAO relationship too. It feels really well aligned.

I also think you’re right in terms of the potential inflexion point and also the importance of nurturing, solidifying, and building on it.

Things rarely move in perfectly straight lines but I do believe we’re heading in the right direction.

Really appreciate your support.

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