Marketing Update — Metal & Proton
Hello, Metal & Proton communities,
It’s been 78 days since I officially joined the team, and I want to give you some insight into our marketing approach, an update on progress, and a snapshot of the road ahead,
I’ll start by bringing to light something someone from the community mentioned to me, off the back of a conversation we had around our new digital audio series #Web3StartsHere.
‘The path to greatness is not the same one everyone else is on’
They nailed it, and it couldn’t be more fitting for our approach to Marketing. It’s a recurring theme, hearing people tell us to roll out the same marketing tactics seen with other cryptocurrency/blockchain projects in the space, but the thing is, we’re not in existence to be just ‘another project’, we are here to carve out a space of our own, and that requires us to forge our own path to greatness, including marketing.
You won’t see us paying the same influencers that were paid to promote a different project the week before or plan to promote a different project the week after. We seek genuine and organic opportunities that are created off the back of meaningful relationships and help educate those who don’t understand the world that we are so immersed in.
The Lunar Crush Live Episode with Marshall is a perfect example of that organicness, and that simply came from a Twitter DM to a brand we admired, and we’ve made some good friends over at the Social Intelligence platform.
So, what have we been up to over the last 78 days…
Well, we certainly have been pedal to the Metal (pun intended), and a lot of that work, isn’t always necessarily something you’ll see as a community member, so let me give you a sneak peek.
Although I’m the only public-facing member of the marketing team (active on Twitter/TG/LinkedIn), behind the scenes there is a 7 strong team, looking after everything from content creation, community management, social, design, and more. We’re also actively hiring for a Social Media Manager role, so if you or you know anyone that could be a fit, don’t hesitate to reach out.
In the first couple of months, in addition to everything you have seen externally, internally we’ve been refining the way we work with other departments, to ensure we’re well informed and connected on development progress, so we can plan and give our products the launches they deserve. We’ve planned out our activity for the year, we’re regularly exploring ways to disrupt the market, and you’ll see some of these ideas come to light very soon.
Most recently, we’ve been heavily exploring our PR strategy. Public Relations is a beast and a marketing pillar that actually hasn’t changed too much over the last decade as we have seen with other pillars, and it’s a key strand of our marketing framework that is needed to help our brand awareness and growth.
I once read;
Anyone can get an editorial if the story is good enough.
It’s the friend of an editor, who pulls a favor when it’s not.
Your story won’t always be good enough.
Find the friend of an editor
Well, we’ve found them.
I am absolutely delighted to announce we have appointed a leading Global Public Affairs and Strategic Communications firm, to assist us in dialing up our PR and Comms strategy. Soon to be officially announced, they have incredible experience in representing global fintech companies (including some within the crypto space), amongst other world-renowned brands, and they now have Metal & Proton on their books. They will be responsible for leading our strategic communications, generating Tier 1 media coverage, creating thought-leadership opportunities, and much more.
Milestone #1 for Q1 — PR Agency ✅
We’ve been quietly building in the background for a while, developing industry-leading DeFi products that are now ready for the world to use. This means we’re ready to turn on the customer acquisition machine. In addition to our new PR agency, we have also appointed a Digital Media Agency, who will be leading on all of our paid social & media buying, which will be kicking off next week. We’ll be strategically rolling out Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Programmatic ads to support both brands in different capacities.
Milestone #2 for Q1 — Digital Advertising Agency ✅
Now, what else has been going on…
#Web3StartsHere
We recently launched our Digital Audio Series #Web3StartsHere, which is a taste of what’s to come from our content calendar. Setting the bar so high with a former Chairman of the FDIC as Guest #1 was ambitious, and we’ll do our best to keep the same caliber of guests as we roll out more episodes. We initially said monthly, you asked for weekly, so we brought you one sooner with the Chris Maurice from Yellow Card episode. We’re always listening to you.
Content, Content, Content
A big focus for us is to bring fresh content to new and existing audiences, that educates and informs on our product’s work and how anyone can use them. We recently kicked this off with ‘How to Direct Deposit your Paycheck into Metal Pay’ and ‘How to Migrate from Proton wallet to WebAuth’, and our plans are to ramp up the volume and creative approach to these stories, including explainer videos, audio series, content articles and more.
NFT’s
Wow. You really do love NFT drops.
We started on Christmas Day, followed that with Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, and broke Twitter on International Women’s day with the Flower Bouquets. While, there were a few questionable accounts participating in the 10k RTs, upon issuance of the NFTs we found a huge proportion of those accounts were genuine and created accounts on Proton! A huge success in our eyes, and pushed us over that elusive 50K milestone for Twitter.
Our NFT marketplace and ecosystem is the perfect platform for brands to white-label and supercharge their own efforts within the space, and we’re talking to multiple brands on bringing this to life.
Branding & Social
You may have noticed a gradual roll out of improved brand assets across the board, and credit is due to our incredible in-house design team. We’re really tidying up the way we position our brands, driving consistency across everything we publish and allowing our visuals to really hero our products. In addition to this, there is a larger brand architecture project in the works to bring clarity across the umbrella of brands that we have in our business and you’ll see the output of this in the second half of the year.
What else is on the horizon?
Websites
An important project that we’re currently working on, is the refresh of Protonchain.com and Metalpay.com. We’re giving them a creative overhaul and an informative refresh to ensure they’re representative of our industry-leading products.
Twitter Verification
The elusive blue tick. Yes, we’re working on it, and it’s a little harder than you’d think, but we’re chasing it down for Proton, Metal, and Marshall.
Partner Podcasts/LiveStreams/Features
LunarCrush Live, Real Vision, Smart Venture Podcast, yWhales, there’s been a lot since January and it won’t stop there. We’re getting our hands dirty and looking for any opportunity that fits within our marketing vision and opening our arms to any invitations that come our way. There are a few more in the works that have been recorded but not published yet, so stay tuned.
Business Development & Partnerships
With the recent hire of Chris Miller our Head of Strategic Partnerships, we’re hyper-focused on bringing new partners to our ecosystem and finding ways to support businesses that are exploring Web3 and the Metaverse, but don’t have a clear strategy on how to enter. Our recent Billboard in San Francisco brought some solid introductions and some of those conversations are still ongoing.
I personally am leveraging a huge portion of my network to support our partnership growth, and hopefully, we will have some exciting announcements to bring you on this in the near future.
Conferences & Events
You may have seen that Metal is taking a team to Bitcoin 22 in Miami, and alongside the meeting and networking opportunities that we have lined up, we will also have some experiential on-the-ground activity going on, that you’ll see when it’s live. We can’t wait for you to see it.
Additionally, we’re exploring many other opportunities with conferences across the world, including speaking slots for our Senior Team members, sponsorship options where relevant, and other ways to disruptively be involved.
Keep the faith
I wanted to share with you a small marketing update (nb. there’s a lot more going on than just the above), because as a community member myself, I know that the hunger to know what the project you know and love has going on, is real. We’re working tirelessly as a Marketing team, and will continue to do so to achieve all of the ambitious dreams we have as a company.
Sometimes, just because you don’t see any ‘marketing’ doesn’t mean there aren’t any serious flames in the fire.
Peace out.
Will
