Grassroots THORMarketer Initiative

Pick your target, mark your X and run with it until you succeed.

MehowBrains has been working on a marketing plan for THORChain, and decided to open it for the community-to-lead with a grassroots initiative. He recently published a tweet which highlighted his performance. While he concludes that innovative tools perform the best in marketing campaigns, targeted repetition of educational materials plays its role, especially when you have the right tools to communicate and educate effectively.

The THORChain Community has such tools at their disposal, namely the RUNE Price Simulator and the @THORChainHammer bot. These 2 tools when used effectively can do 80% of the work for you.

Objective

Marketing should not be a spend, but rather an investment with a positive ROI. The effects of the campaign should be visible nearly immediately via various KPI’s — and the objective is to have a direct and immediate impact on RUNE’s price / discovery / engagement.

Research

MehowBrains spent months getting to know the THORChain Community, surveying via polls and discovering their primary needs. He was able to figure out that RUNE buyers were primarily motivated with profits (which makes sense), and hence it helped him develop the theory outlined in the section below:

Theory

1. The average has a difficult time understanding the THORChain technology and needed a clear way to understand its tokenomics.
2. The large majority is profit-seeking.
3. The large majority need an easy-to-use interactive tool to understand the end-benefit of #hodling RUNE.
4. The average is more inclined to trust the THORChain network vaults to store their assets (become LP’s), if they’re hodlers of RUNE. They have an incentive to trust the network of anonymous nodes.
5. If we get #crypto asset hodlers as RUNE hodlers first, we have a better chance at getting them as LP’s later — because they’re incentivized to capture liquidity into the network.
6. The RUNE Price Simulator checks off the majority of the points above — hence why it was developed and should be included in all marketing campaigns. It should however not be the objective of all campaigns. It’s a nice-have as it communicates RUNE’s value effectively. Can be included in most campaigns as it gets the point across efficiently.

Benefits

Promoting the THORChain Community RUNE Price Simulator benefits the initiative in multiple ways:

• Easy to consume thanks to the video/guide and simplicity of the design.
• Incentivizes to buy RUNE.
• Incentivizes to help push THORChain adoption.
• Incentivizes newcomers to discover/study THORChain.
• Incentivizes to get involved as it communicates the value of helping the initiative.
• Helps the THORChain initiative’s treasury funds gain value (can help strengthen the tech, expedite development/growth).

Validation

Although we have no way to prove that someone made a limit buy order for RUNE on Binance DEX / BitMax after they visited RUNE Price Simulator website and clicked-on the nav menu links (we can only prove that they clicked on one of the nav links). However we can prove that the release of the RUNE Price Simulator website sparked an insane price discovery rally on June 6, 2020 (before the THORChain team released their public testnet on June 7, 2020 which magnified the rally). Andrew Kang then released his Liquidity Black Hole Theory which helped push price to ~35c, followed by BitMax’s staking program which helped push the price upwards 39c. MehowBrains also published his visual representation of his performance which clearly shows the impact of the RUNE Price Simulator on the market. In-between we had community help-with newcomer inquiries.

Components of a Marketing Campaign

Target Audiences:

• Think of advertising as an apple tree. You have low hanging fruits and high hanging fruits (somewhere up in the tree). Will you target audiences (fruits) that are far up in the tree? Or will you target the low hanging fruits dangling right in front of you? In marketing you always begin with the low hanging fruits – this means the easy targets, the one most aligned and closest to your objectives.

Goals:

• The hardest part in creating relevant and high converting marketing funnels is: discovering which content / ads is the low hanging fruit. Sometimes you get surprised, and sometimes it’s very obvious. The point being, you need to list and experiment. And it’s for this reason that MehowBrains made the call for the community to write educational content so that it could be leveraged in targeted campaigns. We’re not expert in all fields, so we likely cannot generate high quality content for all the low hanging fruits available to this market. Will need to work with the team and community to produce variety, and the unification of the THORChain Community plays a major role here. Listed below are some goals that come to mind:
• High — Attract THORMarketers to develop marketing plans from this initiative.
• High — Study perceptions: Poll unaware users about benefits of transitioning from cold wallets / exchanges to vaults.
• High — Help ship a quality product: Attract developers to help cover bugs.
• High — Help ship a quality product: Attract developers to help refactor code.
• High — Help ship a quality product: Attract cybersecurity talent for upcoming pen testing for ChaosNet.
• High — Drive adoption: Attract new node operators to buy bags for bonds.
• High — Drive adoption: Attract liquidity providers in order to bootstrap the network.
• High — Drive adoption: Convert CEX advocates to become DEX/DLN advocates.
• High — Drive adoption: Convert cold/wallet users to trust the #THORVaults powered by anonymous #THORNodes.
• High — Drive adoption: Attract traders to participate in developing market structure for RUNE. They’ve got new tools with the recent Binance and FTX listings.
• Medium — Drive adoption: Attract entrepreneurs, businesses and devs to build services. The more swaps, the better for RUNE, nodes and LP’s.
• High — Engage the community: Remind the community to continuously play with the testnets to help ship the product.
• Medium — Engage the community: Remind the community to use the @THORChainHammer bot to generate buzz.
• Medium — Engage the community: Remind the community to use the @THORChainHammer bot to assign themselves roles.
• Medium — Help market the initiative: Create an affiliate campaign and incentivize affiliate marketers to use other channels to drive conversions 2key (2KEY.io).
• Medium — Branding: Create awareness and THORChain presence in the market by pushing thought leadership on a variety of topics.
• + more

Channels:

• Where will you publish/distribute this content? Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Reddit, Google, Facebook, Instagram?
• Or will you also make clever use of other platforms like AngelList, Upwork and market the initiative by creating projects and helping teams get funded?
• Each channel comes with its distribution tools: search, hashtags, mentions, ad group targeting — some are optimized for users aware of #crypto, and others are optimized for newcomers i.e. Facebook exposes you to a wide range of psychographic targeting tools (male, age, relationship status etc).
• The point being, every goal listed above has an obvious channel where the majority of its users hang out. Pick the right channel for the right goal, and more importantly pick the right strategy which is discussed in the next point.

Ads vs. Manual Engagement:

You can chose to publish your content as ads wherever it’s permissible to run #crypto related ads — from experience most networks don’t like spammy ICO style #crypto ads, so be careful how you present the content, it can get you banned. Ads can be clever tweets which drive a thought to a specific audience. They don’t have to look like ads. Any of MehowBrains’ tweets can be converted to ads, and shown to relevant targeted audiences. Why limit yourself to your circle only? What are the chances that your content gets retweeted by your followers and spreads itself to the audience which mattered the most to you? Maybe you wrote an awesome tweet targeted at attracting new node operators, but no one in your circle is even linked to any. Advertising solves that. You can chose to expedite the distribution of your tweet by making it appear in feeds of people that you chose via ad group targeting features. You can literally pick to target followers of X account, or target users who engaged with Y keywords on Twitter + much more. It’s incredibly powerful, but with each channel comes a new ad platform that one must study, test and learn to use. More importantly, one has to also assure himself that whatever work he plans to do, won’t infringe on any policies of the network. It’s a lot of work, and therefore it’s often best to delegate any paid marketing initiatives to professionals. How do you find them? Platforms like Upwork have a breadth of talent ready and willing to do this kind of work alongside you. They’d of course need to work with you if content must be published from your account. Those free RUNE that you receive weekly could be used to create clever content, distributed in the right channels that’ll educate newcomers to THORChain that would’ve never had heard about it if it wasn’t for your contribution. Perhaps your investment in advertising could help the value of RUNE, and as a result help the value your hodlings while strengthening the ecosystem. It worked for MehowBrains, his investment in the RUNE Price Simulator helped RUNE surge in value — and what did it cost, a mere ~$800? Imagine if the RUNE Price Simulator was distributed via ads to fresh eye. And fresh eyes is what THORChain needs next. We’re approaching ChaosNet followed by MainNet and we need to capture the attention of liquidity. A good chunk of the #ETH ecosystem is well aware about Liquidity Providing, but the concept will be newer to #BTC hodlers which need to be educated from A-Z. Pick your audiences, and focus on targeting them, there’s plenty of liquidity that needs to be captured.

If advertising isn’t your thing, no problem. You can make waves by distributing your content manually. There’s a multitude of tools at your disposal to discover which accounts to follow, which accounts to engage-with etc. If you post it on your feed and hope that it’ll get spread far-enough to make a difference, sadly and likely it won’t. So re-think of your strategy, clever promotion isn’t only about the content you produce, it’s the distribution. You may have to retweet your content repetitively over and over into conversations (of course being relevant), but that’s marketing for you. Most of the game is about repetition, just look at MehowBrains stats from June 2020. It’s the same game as targeting via ads: find your targets and make sure your content is shown to the right users. It’s a lot harder to do manually as it requires more care and attention, but definitely doable. Actually you’ve all been doing it by participating in THORChain conversations already — not it’s time to take it to the next level and think from a distribution angle, whichever goal, audience and channel you pick from above. The @THORChainHammer bot was created purposely to help you distribute content easily. I mean how annoying is it to find content you published weeks ago in your feed? You gotta scroll endlessly, or search for keywords you used in the tweet. It’s a PITA. By directorizing your content into such tool, you just need to tweet short and memorable commands as replies, and the bot handles the rest for you. MehowBrains has been using it relentlessly, just look at the quantity of tweets he produced with various commands. At any point you can ask him to add good content into the directory — an alternative idea would be to publish your own bot with its own handle for yourself. MehowBrains plans to open source the bot’s code and let anyone make their own, so what stops you from making a new Twitter handle for a bot, and using it for your own suite of content? Your only job will then be to produce content, assign it to the bot, and look for opportunities to write commands as replies to tweets. Blend that with proper targeting and audience matching, and you can generate quite a bit of traffic to THORChain from fresh eyes, whether it’s #Bitcoin #Ethereum #ERC20 #BNB #BEP2 communities, crypto exchanges, node operators, investors etc. The sky is the limit.

Funding

The THORChain team has expressed that they do fund development initiatives. They understand that quality tools will help the ecosystem grow. Funding can be attributed towards marketing-oriented tools, only if they’re designed properly i.e. targeted, trackable, impactful, innovative — and most importantly: proven. No one invests into marketing without a track record, and memorabilia ventures like t-shirts or mugs doesn’t cut it for fast-pace projects like THORChain. They’re interested in a strategy that will expose the project to a relevant audience, and likely work to convert them as supporters. We would advise to run any paid marketing campaign idea through MehowBrains for vetting first, before proposing to THORChain.

Role Assignment

The @THORChainHammer bot has the capability to directorize all #THORMarketers via its role assignment commands. See the “Community Roles” section of this medium article. It will help the THORChain Community send messages to #THORMarketer assigned participants in the future.

Conclusion

We’re all speculating of a multi-dollar RUNE someday, and it’s great. But it’s speculative. The more support we gain from fellow #crypto communities, the higher the chance we have at making an impact in the industry. Get out of your comfort zones and make that vision a reality. It takes grit, patience, perseverance, responsibility, passion and care. You’ll be disappointed many times, but eventually if you work hard enough you’ll see the rewards of your labour. We repeat, just look at MehowBrains’ performance — he’s tweeted nearly 6,000 times by now. Eventually he found the angle that made an impact. You have the power to do the same. Pick your target, mark your X and run with it until you succeed.