Marketing Proposals | Greycore & Host-to-host

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Introduction:

With the announcement of Greycore and Host-to-Host on the horizon (~1 month) - informal discussions relating to the marketing of both announcements have already begun in the Ren Telegram chats amongst the community and supporters.

This topic is intended to gather and collate community proposals for marketing relating to the Greycore and host<>host capabilities - and act as a centralised, organised discussion to document current responses/ideas.

Shilliam’s ideas:
Personally, I feel that we should plan, and execute agreed marketing strategies BEFORE AND AFTER the announcements, as opposed to waiting for the announcements to be made and then trying to promote them all at once collectively. Creating awareness before the announcement will create a sense of expectation, and inform people of just what the announcements are all about when they are finally revealed. Our marketing will be more effective if people are aware of Greycore and host<>host before the news is revealed.

Greycore and host<>host will be huge pivotal milestones for Ren, and current promotional efforts simply will not suffice - especially given the urgency in the community to increase marketing efforts.

Pre-announcement ideas

  • Possible articles on CoinTelegraph (or similar):
    In the runup to Greycore and H2H: ‘Ren’s next big update: Why Ren’s upcoming Greycore is important for DeFi’ as an example, or articles of a similar nature.

  • Possible Youtuber(s) promotion
    Again this could be via CoinBureau, ChicoCrypto, CryptoLark etc. Here they would also promote the upcoming Greycore and H2H and why it’s bullish for the evolution of interoperability.
    (CryptoLark and CoinBureau both have a history of documenting Ren)

  • Possible Social Media promotion and marketing:
    Including heavily promoted tweets, ad campaigns etc.?

  • Interviews
    Having members of the team, or influential members of the community (Chico etc.) taking part in virtual conferences, conventions or other DeFi-related events with large audiences.

Post-announcement ideas
Similar to the above, but with more aggressive targetting of potential integrators - including community submitted proposals on various forums to increase Ren’s tech of being integrated in some of the major Defi protocol and ecosystems.

Also, a renewed effort to contact third-parties that were hesitant to work with Ren because of the team-multisig security concerns - with a renewed pitch and proposal now that Ren will have reached a semi-decentralised state.

Anything else?

Feel free to submit your own ideas below people :point_down:
If you have any awesome marketing ideas, or know a means of creating a bit of hype and awareness before and after Greycore then list your ideals and proposals below.

Funding
I assume all eventual marketing efforts will be voted for and funded by the new community fund. The team has delayed the release of the community fund by an additional month, this is so the team can increase testing and security efforts after some of the recent hacks.

Target audience
Who are we targeting with such marketing efforts? Who’s attention are we trying to capture? And how do we follow up enquiries/genuine interest from those who are noticing our marketing efforts?

Just some of my ideas people. :point_up: I’m not a marketing expert and don’t have much experience in this field, so if you know anyone in the community with marketing background - then by all means get them to add their suggestions below.

Thanks fRens!!

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CoinBureau

Someone in the community just pointed out that Guy mentioned ‘not buying any additional Ren’ until Greycore was released.

This seems like an obvious opportunity to me.

He should also mention in any future videos that Ren is one of the few remaining interop protocols and bridges to have not been hacked to date.

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Great initiative Shilliam! :raised_hands:

Let’s add @elliotrades @POVCryptoPod and @ThinkingCrypto1 to the list, they all talked about REN in their videos:

Maybe even @IvanOnTech? :C He mentioned REN few times after RenVM mainnet launch.

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Thanks Suddeath :+1:

So far for Youtubers we have:

  • CryptoLark
  • CoinBureau
  • elliotrades
  • POVCryptoPod
  • ThinkingCrypto1
  • IvanOntech

:point_up: all aware of Ren.

Nice collection there.

Does anyone have any suggestions for influential crypto news outlets other than Coin Telegraph?

What about articles on CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko?

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Idea: :bulb: :star:

What if we could get all the projects, integrators, ecosystems and organisations associated with Ren to help promote the Greycore once it goes live?

Such as:

  • Digibyte
  • Binance Smart Chain
  • Badger
  • Curve
  • Poly/MATIC
  • Avalanche
  • DOGE
  • Solana
  • BCH community
  • ZEC community etc.

Even if they just agreed to RT/share the announcement, it would massively boost impressions and our overall reach?

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One suggestion for video content would be guides in how generate yield on the different dapps I imagine for a new user can be quite intimating

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I think we could create a nice looking table comparing ren to its competing bridges.

Value transacted. Chains connected. Time live. Any downtime. Any hacks. Technology used. Future developments. TVL. Market cap. Income produced. Number of nodes. And then some analysis to show how undervalued we are compared to some other projects with regards to TVL and value transacted

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Thank you for open the conversation about this topic. I am not an expert but did some courses on marketing so I will share what I believe may help.

I believe it may be important to define the below:

  1. Objectives, goal: What is the purpose of the marketing effort? What is the metric we are looking to change/improve? Is it price of token? Is it volumen through renvm? Is it social engagement?
    I think in here we need to be clear and honest in our intentions. The more clear and measurable is our goal the better we can define the strategy

2)Target audience: depending on our goal, our target audience may change. Our audience may be people new to crypto or just starting or the more educated tech/invertor savvy or project teams. Defining who is our demographic for the goal we have is paramount. Is it male/female? Is it big or small investor? Etc

3)Content: it should be oriented to our target audience. It should be clear and accesible. The format of the content is also relevant. Video clips? Written articles? A combination of multiples?

4)Activities: I put in this bucket the mediums and strategy we will use for the campaign. Crypto media? Influencers? Interviews?There may be more depending on our target audience. We need to go to the places where our audience live and hang.

  1. Budget: this is important and should not be underestimated. Given that this may come from community fund the amount allocated for this activity should be clearly specified. Is it the whole of the community fund? If only a portion, how much? How is it going to be spent? Are we engaging a marketing service or we will do it ourselves? Who are ourselves? I think this needs to be clear for DNO to vote. There is an opportunity cost if we decide to use the community fund for marketing and not for something else.

  2. Tracking: tracking the success of our campaign is just as important so depending on our goal we should be ready to be able to measure the metric we were looking to change.

These are some ideas. I hope it helps

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As soon as Guy said to wait, I bought as much REN as I possibly could… ha ha.

One additional thought, any way to have exchanges promote the REN project more aggressively, or is a big bucks marketing type campaign? Gemini was pounding Dogecoin relentlessly for a while.

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This is precisely how we should be tackling what’s been proposed so far – I’ve seen so many great ideas come from our community in the past, and nearly all of them lost steam before finding any footing due to lack of foundation/guide rails

Purely imho, based on what’s already been shared on this thread:

  1. We want to see the number of unique users interacting with RenVM increase. This does not mean that we would see a jump in volume nor price initially, but will allow us to answer questions along the lines of “how are new users feeling about/engaging with RenVM”. If we can obtain solid answers to “what’s working well”, “what are the shortcomings”, and “what is the overall sentiment” then we can pivot more toward marketing/feature development to address precisely what less-experienced users want. I firmly believe that if we can just deal with not trying to pump anyones’ bags in favor of broader user adoption, we will achieve our goals of improving volume through RenVM with a solid user base (as opposed to obtaining a few quick pumps from some whales that didn’t know about RenVM previously)

  2. I mentioned this in a different thread, but we absolutely need to understand what motivates users to go to alternative solutions like wbtc. It very well could be that users are just seeing a lot of fud about RenVM not being fully decentralized, or it could be something much easier to solve (like our fee system just isn’t attractive to the majority of our potential users). Imo the team has done an excellent job developing a platform for large holders to easily make large transfers, so now we need to determine what’s holding smaller holders back, as well as what factors contribute to the decision process behind larger holders. I think, now that we have a community fund, we could easily obtain this information by something incredibly basic like an incentivized survey – the broader crypto community can obtain small rewards from a treasury allocation for providing feedback on their experience with RenVM (I don’t know what the best method would be for this – maybe completing a survey enters people in a raffle, or we use signatures to prove a user actually interacted with RenVM)

3/4. Shotgun approach seems great for this – I’d personally expect to see lots of twitter promotions from bigger names like cobie, cryptodog, etc along with videos from coinbureau, etc. I do think that would need to stem from natural promoting via the Ren accounts, and seems like a very natural time to flex our SBF muscles by having him push Ren announcements (this is slightly risky, however, because if he doesn’t then it’ll justify a lot of opinions around Alameda not caring at all about Ren). In the end, we want “legitimate” users first, we don’t want the random swill that watch bitboy-esque crap, so CT seems like our strongest avenue

5/6. This seems nontrivial to estimate until we actually see the community fund. I would think we’d want to have more discussion with e.g. Alameda, coinbureau, one or two CT influencers to get a feel for what kind of incentivization would be necessary. If we have established metrics in place (i.e. literally graphs of daily active users/monthly active users/percentage of users returning to RenVM) then that will at least allow us to gauge how effective various strategies/influencers/updates to the product are at bringing in new users, and we can adjust promotion lifecycles based on success (e.g. start out with a week of incentivized advertising on one or two CT accounts, if that doesn’t seem to have any effect then stop funding, if it’s looking good then extend funding)

Now that we have snapshots and the community fund this all seems very feasible, and I absolutely do not see the core development team taking up any of these tasks, so it’s extremely important that those who want to see an increase in our user base, coin price, volume, whatever take part in these discussions and actively contribute to moving this forward.

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I absolutely agree with this post.

We need to learn where are the gaps we need to fill so we can produce an effective campaign. Surveys are a great example to discover who are our users, what motivates them to use renvm, why others options work for them, etc etc Even if we are targeting projects we need to understand what are their concerns or their vision of ren, etc

I think now we are thinking and proposing on what WE believe is missing but missing for what?

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Objectives, goal:
Increase number of total unique wallets that have interacted with RenVM on each chain supported by RenVM.

Target audience:
Mid-advanced experienced crypto users that hold tokens on chains RenVM supports that want to improve their ROI by finding cross-chain opportunities via RenVM

Content:
Videos - Segments showcasing an different, new cross-chain opportunity and performing an end to end demonstration of how to get in and out using popular crypto wallets. Also any relevant details. Each demonstration involves using RenVM.

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Objectives, goal:
Increase number of total unique integrations that leverage RenVM natively or not.

Target audience:
Crypto projects that users that would benefit from cross chain technology.

Content:
Attend Crypto Events physically or virtually with Ren branded marketing materials outlining benefits to integration with RenVM.

Communicate with different crypto project communities and suggest ways that renvm can be integrated into the project to benefit users and token holders. Offer to mold the idea with them then pay a developer in the community to build a proof of concept.

Create periodic event, showcasing integration case studies and best practices using renvm.

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There is something quite interesting for the small proprietor the opportunity to invest in their own darknode. The chance for the common person to become involved in this relatively new global opportunity of DeFi. It is kinda exciting to get the chance to participate in a up and coming business sector like this.

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We’re not taking into account the nasdaq’s core metric for tech companies: network effect. How is this achieved? Orienting the efforts to the activities that will give benefits to those who use the platform. What would that activity primarily be? LENDING. Farming will not remain forever. It´s a sume zero game at the end of the day.

Marketing, if it does not want to be oriented to generate an increase in price per se, should be focused on stimulating the potential recipient of our product (renASSETS). Once this has been achieved, the parabolic adoption will be unstoppable. We really must convince e.g. AAVE to adopt renBTC as collateral when Greycore. Billions coming using external power and not tiny amount of money and people. Maybe we can think togheter an smart proposal. In parallel media of course, always.

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Great thread and ideas. A few thoughts:

  • video explainers showing how to use the product would help newcomers a lot. Frankly the process is intimidating if you are not sure what you are doing.

  • yield farming explainers would be particularly helpful. We should remember that nobody’s end goal is to use Ren. They will always be doing so as a step towards reaching another goal (i.e. yield farming).

  • IIRC the proposal to add renBTC to Aave stalled due to concerns about centralisation. Once Greycore is launched we should revisit this and other proposals.

  • there are big names in the Greycore. Having some of those groups publish articles explaining why they are taking part in the Greycore, and what it means for DeFi, would likely be quite effective.

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Thank you for taking the initiative.

Lots of great thoughts here.

Nevertheless, the one thing I keep coming back to is: why between the Ren team and the massively capitalized corporate backer is there no cohesive messaging?

Aside from that I’m not sure there is much value in shilling the REN token to speculative traders on CEXs. 110% in favor of driving value via adoption (devs/projects and end-users). However, CEX speculators can still be a good audience if they can be led to quality content that teaches them about the actual value propositions. Which, as Maggie mentioned, need to be better articulated.

IMO first thing to do is get a great marketer on board. If the community fund is off limits maybe we can dig in the cracks of Sam’s couch for some loose change.

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A series of explainer videos :

  • A walkthrough of a simple mint/release
  • A walkthrough of a host to host tx through renbridge, how simple and how fast it is, and how you could finally stop using CEX thanks to this.
  • A graphic, animated visualisation of greycore being added to mainnet, what does it mean for renVM and for consensus
  • An illustration of smart contract calls and execution directly on renVM, à la Chico. We need this because we noticed that almost only the Ren community is aware of this futur feature.
  • A video explainer of a full integration with zeroDAO/renJS for trading with an aggregator (or uniswap) for instance.

We could concatenate these into a RenVM youtube channel for instance, so that all the videos are accessible in one place.

This is ambitious, and we need graphic designers skills for this, I generally find clear videos to be more effective than articles/threads to attract new people. Like @Maggie said, we would need a budget idea for this, especially if we want to hire professionals.

Other ideas :

  • Update (or create) forums proposals to integrate renVM features into other protocols. We have some of old forum discussions in other forums that are still on stand by, I’m thinking of AAVE/Maker/Sushi, we need to update them to show the latest news.

  • Definitely agree with @BlockchainBard to get all the Ren ecosystem projects to promote Greycore. Especially all the future Greycore members.

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About AAVE yes, not until Greycore will be possibility to use renBTC as collateral, but it’s seems they are very Open to use renBTC for lending and borrowing at this stage, before Greycore. The point is wether going on now or to wait until Greycore to make a full proposal with renBTC collateral.

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Agree with both of these (also really like this proposal format!)

Videos - Segments showcasing an different, new cross-chain opportunity and performing an end to end demonstration of how to get in and out using popular crypto wallets

Makes me immediately jump to Solana’s efforts to make understanding POH and TowerBFT easily digestible (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rywOYfGu4EA). Short, well-done videos that are easy for people to understand and share seem like a fantastic way to spread education (rather than leaning on more technical documentation/blogs)

Attend Crypto Events physically or virtually with Ren branded marketing materials outlining benefits to integration with RenVM

Additionally, we should lump the common “leverage the community fund to incentivize integrations” with this (probably a good time to revisit Brainstorm ideas for Darknode Community Fund - #51 by WesleyDunow and start to settle on 1-3 ideas that we want to commit to)