Divi Labs CMO Renuke Samarasinghe details the current and upcoming marketing strategy for Divi Labs and Divi Wallet.
Good morning/afternoon/evening to you all. It’s been a few weeks since we last spoke about our marketing strategy and I’ve seen some of you wanted to get an update on this. With our current and ongoing work on the roadmap, it was a good time to start talking about it again. Let’s start with a bit of context and then I can share our approach to help you understand how we intend to tackle this.
I’d like to address something first. When you ask about Marketing strategy, it’s not quite what we talk about internally for the business vs what an individual would look for. I think addressing that and also talking about Divi Labs’ business direction will help us all get on the same page and help drive Divi forwards toward sustainable growth together. You, our community, are a very important part of Divi and I’d like to take the time to make sure that we are all clear on our strategy and approach as it’s important in our mission to grow Divi. As the Divi Labs team, we have a clear task in hand. That is to grow Divi Labs and create value through building technologies and use cases that positively impact the ecosystem. Some projects that promised short-term windfalls have gone under or even worse, pulled the rug on their customers. We don’t want to fall into either of those categories and we won’t. It is also worth mentioning here what Nick shared with you all in the Divi Community Vision blog (and the three Twitter Spaces sessions we did) just a few weeks ago to clearly understand the differences between Divi Labs and Divi Foundation, the four pillars that we will be focusing on and the future of the L1 chain. It will further help you understand the direction and the rationale behind our strategy.
Back to this article; our mission of making crypto easy and accessible remains the same, but we don’t want to stop there. Let me tell you why… “Crypto, as you know”, is going through an unprecedented time not just because of the issues we’ve had in the space (that gift that keeps on giving and keeps dragging us back down every time we make some progress), but also because of all the other global macroeconomic factors that keep hindering the growth of the economy (pandemics, political unrests, Brexit, wars, changes to financial regulations, devaluation of the dollar / Euro / Pound, etc, to name a few main ones). As a result of this, the growth and investments in the crypto space stalled putting us into this long and tough crypto winter. So if we just focus on this area and try to market what we have here, it’s going to be to no avail and our resources, money, and efforts will be lost.
As a company, we had to make some very tough decisions at this time. Some of which was to cut out a lot of the services/tools/personnel that were non-essential, deferring pay/expenses, etc. to help the business get through this tough time and to make sure that we don’t let you down. Whilst we continue to grow and build within our crypto side of the business, that alone was not a viable long-term business plan. Divi Labs at the heart of it is a software development business, and therefore, we decided to drive our Web3 / Blockchain / Vertical SaaS offering to help businesses to generate many opportunities for them as well as us. This was shared in our previous roadmap release at the start of the year.
So why should you care about this I hear you ask…?! At this current point in time, the best way for Divi Labs to grow would be to pursue this business (B2B) angle as it will drive;
And ultimately help better our products & services - and a wider scope, drive more collaborations, better/more utility (imagine being able to buy football tickets, flight tickets, pay for your drinks with Divi), and create a better and more interconnected ecosystem for you, our valued Divi family. This goes full circle and ultimately will benefit you in the longer term. So the market strategy we’ve talked about has a much greater scope than simply the advertising an individual may see.
With that said, let’s focus on how we would do that. I want to first make one point before I share the approach though, as I won’t be sharing our exact marketing strategy as this is not in our best interest to do so as a) our competitive advantage will be lost and b) it is confidential information legally to only be shared with the team/board (people with a Non-Disclosure Agreement with us). However, I’d be very happy to share our approach (and our focus areas) with you and then take any questions on Discord/Twitter. On top of that, I would also like to invite you to join me in our Divi World Metaverse (details to be shared on Twitter and Discord) and also on our Twitter Spaces.
But in a nutshell, our current strategy is to drive awareness and understanding of Divi Wallet, and all other products, and features (Wallet is our main consumer-facing product) whilst ultimately helping drive Divi Wallet utilization (downloads) as efficiently as possible. In addition, we will continue with our marketing efforts in the B2B space to continue to drive awareness and convert some new projects for Divi Labs as that will be our core boost to get Divi to the next level.
I want to clarify a couple of things here. I’ve seen a lot of questions about advertising/marketing, etc. Marketing has a much larger spectrum of focus areas and advertising is just one part of it. This ranges from sponsorships (LaLiga) to paid media advertising (Paid Search, Display, Affiliates) to content marketing (blogs, social, influencers) to websites to CRM and much more. So let’s start by splitting these out a bit more, so it’s clear as to what we are doing in each area. For ease of doing this, I will split it out into two areas; organic marketing and paid marketing. It is very important as a marketing team that we ensure that we are pushing as well as we can across both these areas with a thorough test & measurement framework.
We plan to continue to push what we have been doing within our organic side and then to push the paid marketing side when it fulfills these things; a) market in the green (or showing signs of real growth), b) product readiness (Simplex Buy, etc), and c) the right funding. Below I will explain what these areas are and our approach in those areas. We have had a large focus here in the last 4 - 5 months given the current market conditions as well as our focus on getting our wallet into the best shape it could be. It doesn’t make sense to do paid advertising because of the aforementioned points and the fact that we must ensure that we survive one of the toughest crypto winters to date.
It doesn’t mean that we give up and stay quiet. Quite the contrary… As you all know we have continued to build and then drive communications around those key features wherever and whenever we could. Our DeFi product launch, the DeFi content series, the new Divi Wallet Website, The Divi World Metaverse, the Updated Divi roadmap, multiple new business pitches, upcoming “Let’s Learn Series” are to name some of the main things from the last few months. Let’s look at all the options we have across the two marketing areas and what we would then focus on for the coming months.
Organic Marketing: This is marketing that helps you naturally generate users for your business and help drive your marketing objectives that are not paid for marketing. Below is a non-exhaustive list of these areas and some will be across both organic and paid marketing (as there are both paid-for and organic options for most - eg: Paid social - Facebook or Twitter Ads vs organic social - the content that you post on your Instagram).
Paid Marketing: Literally what it says on the tin. All the other marketing efforts that sit outside of the organic spectrum where you have to pay fall into paid marketing.
So, where and what are we focusing on for the coming months with a small, but great team of individuals I hear you ask.
We will kick this into gear here across all of the relevant areas to help our organic marketing efforts and supercharge our marketing push. I cannot share the full details here, due to the reasons I mentioned earlier, but as soon as we have fulfilled our go-to-market criteria we are ready to go. Just to give you an idea, some of the activations are pretty much a matter of flicking the switch back on with a budget to support those. We also have some opportunities we have already signed up with some of our media partners such as the Coin Telegraph.
I hope this gives you a clear idea of what we are doing, why we are doing it, and most importantly how it will impact you. Our paid marketing (advertising) efforts will kick in as soon as it is the right time (we will of course try to start just before, so we can capitalize on the early mover advantage). Our product wasn’t quite where it should’ve been last time around, so we are feeling more confident in what we can achieve this time around with the right budget and the right market conditions. As I mentioned earlier, I would also like to invite you all to join me in our Divi World Metaverse (details to be shared on Twitter and Discord) and also on our Twitter Spaces to further ask any questions on our marketing & comms approach. As always, thank you for your continued support and interest in Divi. Let’s continue to build something that we can all be proud of and one that can deliver you all a good & sustainable ROI on your investments. Stay safe, be kind to each other, and speak to you all very soon.
