[Steemhunt] Steemhunt's marketing strategy

Hi, Hive account@jayplayco here.
Back with a new article about Steemhunt. This time we are going to have a deep look into the marketing strategy from Steemhunt and what we can learn from it if we are also planning an SMT or any other project related to the blockchain Steem.

I started with Steem just a few months ago. During my first days, I stumbled over an Airdrop post of Steemhunt, which was the starting point of my journey with Steemhunt. In our community, there are even hunters who started to join Steemhunt almost from the first days in March 2018. During the last six months, Steemhunt has shown a lot of different approaches to penetrate the audience and get them excited about Steemhunt. This post is a summary of these marketing activities and also a preview for coming ones.

0. Repository

https://github.com/Steemhunt/web

1. The story of Steemhunts marketing

The start was, of course, the launch of Steemhunt itself. Like all kind of other services, Steemhunt started to promote their site at offline events, with article posts from Steemhunt and also pushing news to F&F channels (Family & Friends) on social media. To be honest, the result was not bad but also not overwhelming.

After trying out the conventional marketing methods, the team started to brainstorm how to push the service from the current speed to the fast line. The conclusion was to concentrate on the key elements of Steemhunt, the community. Give the building community most of the reward. The concept of a 50% airdrop was born.

Birth of 50% airdrop

Steemhunt prepared a well-made article for the Steem community. This article was pushed to the trend with bidbots (like spending marketing money for advertisement). Being the first mover with a 50% airdrop helped Steemhunt to boost the growth fast with this measurement. The airdrop included well-balanced marketing activities and also great advantages for delegators who believed in this project.

Delegation: daily airdrop Hunts for delegators.
Resteem: daily airdrop for resteeming hunts
Curation: daily airdrop for curating hunts (upvoting)

Starting with this airdrops, the delegation to Steemhunt began to grow very fast. Whales from the KR community like Hive account@bramd were one of the first movers supporting Steemhunt with their delegation. A lot more support from the KR community followed but also the international community started to delegate to Steemhunt. Including Hive account@freedom’s delegation Steemhunts account grow fast with an account over 200.000 Steempower. This made it also interesting for the Steem community to look into Steemhunt and find out how this system may work.

The daily hunted products started to grow with the delegation from 30 to 100 to over 300 hunts per day after the last delegation from STINC (Steemit Inc.) over one million Steempower.

Weekly airdrop for contributions

Steemhunt’s account became a big whale with Steempower over 1.4 million Steempower. Also, a lot of unwanted side effects started to affect the platform like abusing behavior to manipulate the ranking system to get the reward. This was one of the reasons that the Steemhunt team needed almost two months of their time to pivot the ranking system to the current ABV 2.0 with hunter level.

During that time the “resteem airdrop” was stopped. A lot of Steemians complained that their feed is “polluted” with resteems of hunts and that they needed to unfollow some accounts. Listening, validating and reacting based on the feedback of the community is a strength of the Steemhunt team. They stopped the airdrop and relocated the tokens for contributions for steemhunt articles.

1:1 Steempower airdrop

After introducing and tuning the hunters level and user score, the team concentrated on preparing the most significant part of the airdrop. The mighty 1:1 Steempower airdrop. For one month all Steemians could claim the equal amount of Hunt tokens based on their Steempower. This airdrop ended on the 13th of September 2018 and finished with a claim rate of 18%. More than 6.000 accounts have claimed their tokens. As the max was set as 100 million tokens which equals almost the whole Steempower hold by all available accounts, I think this is a good result.

Social Share Airdrop

After the successful 1:1 Steempower airdrop the team had to think about their strategy to burn the rest of the tokens, remained from the 1:1 Steempower airdrop. They decided to pivot again from that strategy and reconcentrate the airdrop to the hunters. The social share airdrop was born.

This marketing activity is airdropping hunts based on the traffic coming from outside of Steem. It is tracked based on a "ref=account" code at the end of each URL.
I was expecting this feature actually after HF-20 as that would make it easier to let users outside of Steem onboard the system. But Steemhunt decided to be early with this feature and be ready to penetrate the market from point zero. Sharing hunts on different platforms outside of Steem and airdropping Hunt tokens based on the traffic is working great and resulted even in a short problem with Facebook blocking shared hunts. (Too many hunters submitted hunts from Steemhunt). More than 2.000 new users have been generated in a concise amount of time.

Shuffle button lottery airdrop

The latest move was to solve a specific user behavior. The ranking board was randomized to avoid that only the top hunts getting curated. But as Steemhunt is a ranking board a randomized ranking was somehow against the core message of Steemhunt. An additional layer of hunts with the three of the most recent hunts was added, but the community was not satisfied with it. Another shuffle button was introduced, but the problem was that nobody was motivated to use it.

Airdropping and gamification the shuffle button was the genius move to engage the users. Each user is now allowed to shuffle the button and get daily a randomized airdrop of Hunt tokens. The shuffle animation came out great, and it is a joy to press the shuffle button each day and wish for a good drop of tokens.

2. Next Steps

The MAU (monthly active users) is already on a level of over 21.000 and the ambitious but realizable next goal is an MAU of 300.000 users end of this year.

A daily airdrop status is now visible in the wallet part of Steemhunt. The team will tune the airdrop to maximize the rewards for the hunters and get new hunters into the community. Marketing activities like referrals are already planned and with HF-20 we will have a lot of fun seeing the growth of Steemhunt together.

3. Conclusion

It was a pleasure to follow the marketing strategy from Steemhunt until now and I am sure that in the next six months we will see a lot of more unconventional and new kind of strategies to follow and maybe also to adapt on other projects.

"Keep the hunt on"

Thanks for reading!