By Matt Crook, QUOINE Digital Campaign Manager
We love what we do at QUOINE and nothing makes us happier than sharing our vision with the world. As part of the marketing team, that makes it quite literally my job to get hyped about one of the most exciting projects in the blockchain space. I’m blessed to work in this job alongside others who feel exactly the same way. We are all committed to making QUOINE the best possible company we can. But we can’t do it alone. We need the support of our dedicated and growing community.
I often get asked about our plans for marketing. Alongside our amazing community, we have done a great deal of work to date, much of it laying the foundations for what is to come. We’re now in a position where we feel like we have most of the people in place we need in order to really do everything we’ve been dreaming of to take us to new levels.
We want the as many people as possible to know about us and to see us as leaders within this space. We will continue to commit to our uncompromising approach to security. We want people to talk about us for the excellent experience of using our products. We strive to change the world by addressing crypto’s liquidity issue and opening up this space to those people who have not yet been able to enter the market.
Those are some lofty goals, but we believe we can and will achieve them. Marketing of course plays a crucial role in this.
Meet the team
First of all, it makes sense to tell you a little bit about the marketing team itself. We’re a team of about 10 or so individuals, with a handful of managers.
Katherine Ng, Head of Marketing
Kathy is the boss. She’s basically the glue that holds us all together and makes sure we are all doing amazing work.
Panda, Lead Community Manager
Panda, as many of you will know, is focussed on community management, which includes coordinating our roster of community champions.
Thang “Ryan” Nguyen, Performance Marketing & Strategy Manager
Ryan is our data guru, leading on performance marketing strategy, including our paid ads and Analytics.
Matt Crook, Digital Campaign Manager
And then there’s me. I started off as a CM and gradually took on more tasks before quitting my job and jumping in full time. I oversee most of the content we put out and help develop our campaign strategy and processes.
There are a number of others on the team, some of whom you will have seen in our Telegram groups and elsewhere.
It’s worth bearing in mind that there is a whole other team at QUOINE Japan focused on marketing to the Japanese audience, and while we of course coordinate with them, our approaches are tailored to specific audiences.
The prelude
So what have we been doing so far? Initially, we focussed on organic marketing, building our community in the most natural way possible, letting it grow steadily over time. We did this in order to ensure we had a core, committed, long-term base of community members who were as passionate about this as we were. We didn’t want to attract the kind of people who would be looking for a quick ICO flip or a fast buck. We wanted to connect with people who shared our vision.
As we built this, there was the push to promote the ICO. This was the time in which we were really trying to find our feet. We set up our first paid ads campaigns and we started to create a lot of content to promote the token sale and our project. We wanted to make ourselves as visible as possible in the right places, so we worked on developing our Telegram channel, subreddit and more — places where we could really engage with people on a personal level.
We held our first video AMAs and quickly found them an effective way of introducing key staff to our community and building a rapport. We launched our bounty and referral programmes in order to generate more community-driven content and also to get more people involved.
Our goal was to hold a successful ICO, and we did that, raising $105 million. But there was little time to celebrate as the work was only just getting started.
Chapter 1
With the ICO out of the way, our goals shifted. We started to ramp up marketing of our exchanges, QRYPTOS and QUOINEX. Our focus was now primarily on getting new users to our platforms.
We revamped our ad campaigns and conversions, increased spend, started to test different kinds of messaging and aimed to lay a foundation from which we could scale up. Part of this included work getting to know the different audiences we were targeting and setting benchmarks for costs involved in onboarding new users.
What we could do with marketing though was expand the team. We hired a graphic designer and we had better visual content we could use across our channels. We hosted more AMAs and tried to do as much video content as we could, and we started to do more to promote the projects of our partners who were listing with us. We began to engage more YouTubers and Panda continued his hard work as our Lead Community Manager. There were media requests and we were growing quickly as a business.
We continued to make efforts to educate our community about QASH, the World Book and LIQUID, but at this point, we were still thinking of the organic approach, engaging smaller groups but in a more effective way, building lasting relationships.
This was our evolution phase, assembling the team, and gearing up for taking things to the next chapter.
Chapter 2
This is where we’re at now. We have the bulk of our team in place. The World Book and LIQUID project is well underway. We have an engaged, growing community. We have a vision for where we want to be.
Our strategy now is starting to drill down on LIQUID. We are here to tell the LIQUID story. We aim to instigate more conversations around liquidity and how it will drive the new crypto economy and we would love for you to participate in the discussion on our channels. Our subreddit is really coming into its own now, we have some great debates in our Telegram group and we host regular AMAs and other ways for our community to get involved.
We always love to hear more from our community. That’s why we introduced our QASH rewards programme, so that our community could contribute their ideas and share their passion with others. We will continue with this approach and look at new ways to engage and ramp up the programme. A complete revamp is on the cards.
We are also constantly on the hunt for new community managers, especially those who can support us in languages like Chinese Simplified Mandarin, Hindi, Bahasa Indonesia, Russian, Korean, Spanish and Thai. One important step we are taking is to market to locations in multiple languages, which means we also need to support those languages on our platforms. That piece of work is ongoing.
We want to bring in people to create more diverse pieces of content, like animated videos, short films, product reels, and more. If this sound like something you could help us with, then get in touch at careers.quoine.com.
We continue to look beyond traditional ad platforms and have begun to work with various websites, newsletters, agencies and other outlets that can help us get our message out. You may have seen our ads recently on Coin Market Cap, Trading View and other places. This is just the beginning. We have also put in place strategies and processes so that we are more organised in how we develop and deliver our content.
We’re talking to many, many more influencers, community builders, YouTubers, podcasters, journalists, media outlets, bloggers and more so that we can find ways to work together. We love to hear about potential collab ideas, so feel free to drop us a line to media AT quoine DOT com.
Mike is now on Twitter, we launched an Instagram account and we’re exploring other platforms that could be effective channels for us to reach new audiences. We like the idea of branching out to decentralised social platforms. We’re in touch with folks from Steemit and currently exploring some possible collaborative ideas.
We’re building strong relationships with partners already listed on our exchanges and also with those who will list in the future and those who will host their ICOs with us. We’re on the lookout for exciting, quality projects. Contact us at listings AT quoine DOT com with suggestions. You can expect to see many more collabs and joint campaigns in the near future.
You will also continue to see Mike and other QUOINE staff speaking at high-profile events and conferences.
We are, of course, working towards the launch of the LIQUID platform and all that comes with it. There’s a lot of work going on around the World Book and we also have Jon Myers, our Chief Design Officer, who has been working tirelessly on the UI/UX of LIQUID. When LIQUID is fully launched and we have the long-awaited rebrand in place, we’ll be able to move onto the next phase of our journey and that’s when things will get really exciting.
Looking forward
You can see that we’ve been working hard, but we are only as strong as our community, and it’s all of our QUOINERS who will always be at the heart of everything we do. We want to launch LIQUID and have it be amazing and exceed people’s expectations, but we can’t do that alone.
Our goal is to change the world together I believe we can do it. If you have any ideas for projects or collabs or partnerships, drop me a line any time through media AT quoine DOT com and follow me on Twitter for another way to stay in touch.