📰 Decentralized Marketing - Is It Possible and How Should We Approach It?

[JFWooten4]

Hello, hi! I am making an effort to document more thorough thoughts in comprehensive GitHub or live deployment posts. I think it's good form to link these back to the source of inspiring conversations.

This responds to two choices we have looking forward. It was announced, so to speak in the Discord, where I'll link back a reply. More than being a reference, I just feel better with some space to flesh out these thoughts.¹

From the context, the two matters at hand are whether we:

• Pay thousands of dollars to an advertising agency, and
• Set up an Association-wide OpenAI account for members

Google Ads

I am extremely competent at Google Ads, and that scares me a little.³ I've been in positions interacting with some of these marketing agencies and learning directly from their work. While there is a lot of specialization and nuance in staying up-to-date with the most recent algorithm changes, the core concepts don't really change.

I could dive into the accounts tomorrow and have the ad spend and conversion results up drastically within a month.

Budget

On the matter of ad spend, I think we should scale up slowly. At least at the start, we obviously don't have the resources to accidentally go 20% over the allotment and then have a huge bill. But more importantly, we have already seen the veracity with which they will reject creatives (those are the ads).

I have extensive experience with this across different centralized advertising platforms. The financial education and self-improvement space required a lot of tact to navigate their nuanced policies around claims and advice. Plainly, there are ways to approach this properly over time so that they become comfortable with us.

We can start out lower in numbers to push the boundaries and start getting results with, say, $800/month spend. Then it's a pretty straightforward path to upping until using most of the generous nonprofit credits. It's really just avoiding some hot keywords (like Bob pointed out) and knowing what images can be.

Benefits

The main pro of doing this in-house is that we can both view results and directly change target pages. They would probably set up conversion tracking, but that leaves us with a limited scope of optimization tools. And we might need to do some real work making a custom bot to connect clicks to, say, new Discords.

Realistically, the pages right now are extremely informative but perhaps not the most converting for a brand-new visitor hooked by an ad. There's sort of a difference between the broad general free education work we excel at and bringing in new community members. Because the fact of the matter is that not a ton of people are actively searching for information about the Direct Registration System.⁴

By doing marketing ourselves, we can combine the inbound campaign efforts with follow-ons that keep new users engaged. Plenty of platforms offer at least email marketing follow-ups, which would give us a place to squeeze new visitors into via email boxes. And then we can bring them in ads and improve.

Passion

This connection we share over an important topic is powerful. It yields results which I think exceed those of a distant consultancy. I think we should do what we can to incent member participation and reward our friends even if it costs a little more than brute outsourcing.

I recall an early outreach related to https://github.com/stellar/stellar-docs/issues/797—where I asked if there were any artists who might want to help with a community 3D design. Later on, we saw some exceptional 3D printing from apes which made its way into the kit of outreach tools. 💜 It's a very different approach to a broad public bidding market of labor because we have a shared connection that leads to care and vision embedded in outputs.⁵

I found it thrilling to pore over early public documentation about the preliminary DAO's advertising campaign. This sort of compilation can become a high bar that could really help the community's ability to contribute, learn, and perfect our advertising together.⁶ Can we market directly while keeping trust?

Footnotes

1. And the footnotes are nice. More relevantly, I am looking into how pioneers² use the GitHub inbox. I remember some awesome back and forth with it early on, but lately I've been manually pinging people in the Stellar ecosystem because it can get challenging to have everyone up-to-date when things spread out or decentralize into their appropriate actionable context. ↩

2. Yes, I'm going to use this diction for a while when it feels natural. I am going through a lot right now and it helps me process things lol. I'm also trying to stop writing like a politician now that I have a little bit of breathing room which I intend to use to spur needed action. ↩

3. See, e.g., remarks about our first client from low ad spend in thread. I haven't gotten around to making all the Syndicate exam responses public,⁷ but I cited more of this experience pretty extensively in Response 2. It relates a lot to the early Syndicate work in college and then the years of financial education before that with class. ↩

4. We see this pretty directly in the lackluster initial results targeting narrow DRS keywords. While these are the easiest to convert into clicks cheaply, they will not garner material traffic during our brand-building stage. It's just a fact I've seen over and over in my own campaigns. ↩

5. The centralized bidding hiring does work, but I really don't like its externalities, intermediation, and negativity. It forces goals to compete in an environment with imperfect information, which often just leads to a lazy answer suited by political needs. I've had plenty of work products made this way, but it crucially removes the incentive or ever position of power for independent thought and expansive elaborations on a scoped team agenda. ↩

6. See, e.g., community support garnered in the face of criticism over having a holistic brand represent distributed investors. @BibicJr overcomes these qualms in SS and gets some great backing over full transparency, albeit this may not be as huge a challenge until / if we go over the monthly $10k. Also, if there was a git repo with current campaign keywords and monthly spend, then anyone could permissionlessly think of ways to improve our results. ↩

7. This has two prerequisites: censoring all PII and configuring somewhere to host like the documents repo. I think I'll get around to the latter once we get the SDNY response from vote. Probably would work well along the same hosting lines as the new podcast feed. ↩

[BibicJr]

I'd rather spend money on Open AI than an ad agency (and I'm not even sure I want to spend on Open AI!)

Ad agencies have pretty large mark ups on everything, even for charities. For the size of our efforts currently, I don't see value in paying a lot to an agency. Especially if we have someone in-house to manage the backend stuff as @JFWooten4 says he can.

And it would definitely be great to keep updates going to discord and X for as many aspects of the advertising campaign as possible. I think just highlights on X, but it can be a feed like we have for GitHub on Discord.

The creation of assets to advertise with varies in cost and ease. Still images will be easy as we have done it in-house before (I used photopea, which is a free browser based Photoshop equivalent, highly recommend it!). Even using meme formats are very eye catching these days, and very accessible to generate within the community. Animation or live action stuff is definitely trickier and will cost something. We managed to make the animation on the homepage for ~$400 if I recall correctly. But that was because we scripted and storyboarded it ourselves, and then I did a fair bit of extra editing to it to get it right.

I'm happy to help with photoshopping and editing assets for sure.