Thinking Out Loud About Marketing Steem

Marketing is something we struggle with here on the SBC for a variety of reasons. Here's a few reasons I see.

• Steem is a decentralized platform and therefore doesn't have a singular vision, market, demographic, application or use case.

• While businesses like Steem Engine or 3Speak obviously have a high upfront cost in capital(financial or labor or both), they can then be directly monetized offsetting or supplementing that cost, with the prospect for future increased value depending on a variety of factors. Marketing on the other hand is more of an investment, with no direct tangible financial return. Marketing isn't really an asset, it's a cost. Like gasoline in a car, or energy in a battery, marketing is an ongoing liability that should in the best case scenario achieve some specified goal,(more users sign up, sales go up, views go up, etc.) but it, in and of itself doesn't directly earn anything. This poses a bit of an issue in a decentralized system. Who pays for it?(SPS?)

• I think it might be challenging to get marketing efforts funded through the SPS because which vision are you going to push? Proper marketing needs to be targeted and specific and I think no matter which vision/direction you choose, you'll get a lot of pushback from people that have THEIR vision that should be the one pushed.
  For example, if I were going to set up a marketing campaign for Steem, I'd go after content creators first. Reason being, I think this is the largest group out of say, developers, investors, crypto enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, etc. Actually content consumers are by far the largest group, but we need the creators to create the content for them to consume. By going after content creators first, we can boost our traffic and with those improved metrics, start targeting the other groups.
  Reading this, you probably though "NO, we need to go after X first, because Y dumbass!" and therein lies the problem.

• Steem is open, so anyone can develop whatever they want on it. This is a strength. People see a problem, they create a solution. A good example of this is Steemworld.org. Most of us probably use and are familiar with this, it's a great tool, but in terms of marketing a product, the way Steem works is counterintuitive to what users are used to. They're used to having an end to end solution packaged into a single product, not individual solutions working in conjunction to a larger whole. This is a totally new concept that IMO can make some of our products harder to sell and understand.

Because of the previous issues, I think the sort of marketing plans that have so far been done and probably will get done until we find some better solutions have to be low commitment, low cost/labor, which ultimately leads to them being ineffective.

Also, because of the last point, the openness and interdependence within the system, the system itself is not built in a way that caters itself to being marketed effectively. I honestly think if we hired a top marketing firm, they'd have a hard time marketing Steem and communicating to potential users what we're about. Most of us can't describe what we're about, because we're about a ton of different things.(see bullet point 1)

_{This post is severely lacking art, here's some}

So if you've read this far and thought I had some answers, I got bad news, I don't. I'm making this post to be a starting point for the conversation. I do have some ideas though.

So let's pretend I'm the Grand Chancellor of Marketing for Steem.

First off, I wouldn't market Steem.(Say whaaaa?) I would only market apps built on Steem, so 3Speak, Steempeak, Steem Engine, Esteem, etc.

Second, I would need to talk to each app developer and develop a brand strategy. Let's use Steempeak as an example. From the outside looking in, without previous knowledge, it looks like a blogging site with some numbers and acronyms on each post. Is this money that the person earned? What is STU? What is PAL? What is a Tribe?

I make my way to the "About" page someone named Asgarth apparently made this because he hated 20 second limit comments? What? Lots of talk about STEEM, what is STEEM?

I have to leave the site to look up what STEEM is and I spend some time researching, now I know what those numbers are and that people are earning cryptocurrency here.

So this little simulation also ties into UX, but that's not what I'm getting at, beyond being the best looking frontend for Steem right now, what is the "Brand" of something like Steempeak?

What's the narrative?
Who is it for?
What does it represent?
What do they want people to feel when they first arrive?

A Mercedes is about luxury, a Ferrari is about speed and prestige, a Kia is about affordability.

I would chat with whatever application owner I wanted to market for and figure out how they wanted to be represented. Currently, I think 3Speak probably has the strongest brand presence of all our apps. Even though it's opened up to other things now, it was originally and I think still primarily about being a safe haven for those that have been censored, demonetized, deplatformed, or basically digitally exiled in some way or another.

That's a message, that's something that can be crafted into a strong narrative and the marketing material starts from there. I think all our app developers need to think about what their message is and figure out what their brand is.

As the title of this post says this is basically me thinking "out loud" so I'm coming up with this as I go really.

Once they maybe make that public, they can put that out there and anyone that wants to make some marketing material can, and they then have guidelines.

So maybe it would make sense to make something like a questionnaire for app developers to fill out, then make public. That could be the beginning. Then whoever wants to make some marketing material for that particular app can create a proposal on the SPS, and the market will decide if it gets made or not. Of course, it could also be funded directly as well, but this is a potential way to do this in a decentralized manner.

I'm spitballing. Like I said, I created this post to be a conversation starter what do you all think?