Welcome!

Hello, Dash community!

Pre-proposal topic is here
 
The proposal
We propose to launch digital marketing campaigns for Dash in Russian-speaking internet in March 2018. The goal of these campaigns is to get wide exposure of Dash in Russia among crypto enthusiasts, crypto traders, crypto investors and traditional investors.
 
Why Russia
Russia is the biggest internet market in Europe. Russian is considered to be the second most used language on the web. Russian-speakers are spread all around the world, but in the same time most of Russians have poor level of English and prefer specific Russian sources of information and mediums of communication. Additionally, you all know that Russia has HUGE crypto-community which has to be addressed by us.
 
Also, it’s worth to mention that the landscape of Russian internet is very tough to be understood by foreign marketers as it has it’s own dominating search engines (Yandex and Mail.ru), own social networks (vk.com and ok.ru) dominating social space and many more specific Russian networks and marketing tools.
 
Why we (about us)
My name is Max Popov. I am a part of MGCom (www.mgcom.ru), one of the top digital marketing agencies in Russia (ranking by Tagline https://tagline.ru/performance-context-seo-agencies-rating/) with 300+ in-house digital marketing specialists. We specialize on performance-marketing (SEO, PPC search, PPC social, programmatic). Among our clients are huge international players such as: Google, BBDO, AliExpress, Samsung, Volkswagen, Pfizer, Citroen, KIA, L’Oreal, OBI, Peugeot, ROLF, MediaMarkt, Rive Gauche and many more.
 
I lead the team in the agency which specialisation is digital-marketing for blockchain-projects. Also, I am the holder of Dash master-node which gives me personal engagement in the success of this proposal.
 
Why Digital marketing campaigns
Each year marketing budgets shift from traditional mediums to digital ones, more specifically, to digital performance marketing channels such as paid search, paid social, programmatic and SEO. These sources are more attractive to modern
business as they allow marketers to track ad spend and profits transparently and to tailor their approach effectively and efficiently according to tracking results.
 
What ad platforms we are going to use
To get wide exposure of Dash in Russian market we are planning to launch campaigns among following ad platforms (including specific Russian ones):
1. Yandex.Direct (Yandex is top-1 search engine in Russia having more than 50% of market share)
2. vk.com Ads (marketing platform of top-1 social network in Russia)
3. MyTarget (marketing platform which has the hugest coverage in Russia and incorporates top-2 social network in Russia, mail.ru services and wide partners network)
4. Google Adwords (which has about 40% of search engine market in Russia)
5. Facebook/Instagram Ads (Instagram is top-3 social network in Russia and Facebook is the fastest growing social network in Russia)
 
What landing-pages we are going to use
In terms of LPs we are going to A/B test several marketing approaches among which are:
1. Driving traffic to Russian version of dashinformer.com landing-page. Feedbands kindly agreed to provide us a
possibility to translate this landing-page in Russian. Here is the first version of it www.rs.dashinformer.com
2. Driving traffic to our own version of landing-page which is in the phase of design.
3. Driving traffic to alternative version of our LP which is less straightforward way of addressing the topic. First, users sign-up to get report called "Most perspective crypto-assets or best crypto-currency to invest in 2018". This report contains brief analysis of crypto-market and unobtrusively emphasises benefits of Dash above competitors. The bottom-line of the book is that the author himself heavily invests in Dash. It’s available here: www.ru.capital
 
Our hypothesis is that the way of addressing the topic from investor's point of view (third approach) will return in more result than LPs with straightforward marketing messages.
 
KPI of campaigns
Our goal is to define KPIs as exact as possible. We will try to collaborate with Dash developers to make it possible to track it through until actual acquired funds by users brought by us, which may a be long process (resolvable though).
 
During this first March launch we are going to track views, clicks and number of users directed to official Dash resources (from www.rs.dashinformer.com and www.ru.capital), brochure downloads (on www.ru.capital). These key metrics will allow us to get a general picture of users’ engagement level and will let us develop our campaigns, LPs and KPIs further. 
 
What we have tested
We made a test launch using our own advertising budget and had results based on which we prepared a media-plan for an actual launch.
 
Media-plan is here: https://goo.gl/BmqHEh
Some numbers from there:
- 28,740,000 views by Russian-speakers around the world, which may greatly increase level of Dash’s brand awareness.
- 64600 clicks
- 4000 conversions
 
Budget:
40 Dash - marketing budget on 5-channel split
4 Dash - services fee for specialists' work
5 Dash - proposal fee reimbursement
Total: 49 Dash
 
Remarketing/retargeting
Besides direct benefits community will get tangential, but still valuable, benefit which is remarketing/retargeting pixels’ audience and extra email subscribers. This loyal audience will be constantly ready for further retargeting (e.g. when evolution wallet comes out and so on).
 
Legal situation
Last year we had many rumours that crypto-currencies were going to be banned in Russia, but it didn’t happen. Additionally, now we have news that government is preparing laws for regulation of crypto-currencies, mining and ICOs in Russia. Thus our marketing efforts will not violate Russian legislation.
 
Situation with Facebook and Yandex
Recently Yandex and Facebook banned the ads related to blockchain, crypto-currencies, ICO, mining, binary options and some other topics. It made the moderation of the ads process much more complicated, but still possible. Because of this ban of straightforward blockchain ads our third approach (described several passages above) is the easiest way to pass the moderation on Yandex and Facebook.
 
Further plans
After this first March launch we plan to refine and scale our campaigns, create more content, further A/B-test LPs and creative approach, elaborate KPIs and goal-tracking to give the community better results. Also, among our plans is the execution of campaigns for wider list of markets (German, French, Spanish, English). Approaches to these markets will be described separately.  

Communication
We created a small Telegram-channel for MNO where you can follow updates of this proposal. We will publish more details about marketing approach which we offer. Also, we cross-post in Russian there.
Channel is available here. After budget approval (if it happens) this channel will be used for reporting.
 
Thank you for paying attention to this long-read.
P.S. Looking forward to get Dash back in top-3!
P.P.S. Sorry for my English) 

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Update 2018-02-14

Having read the comments in other marketing related proposals I saw several comments in which the authors of proposals were advised to collaborate with CMO. 

The first thing which I did long before starting a pre-proposal was exactly emailing the in-house team. The answer which I had was following:  

"internal marketing team is focusing on the DASH business relationships to grow the acceptance of DASH from a strategic initiative at a global scale. You would need to go through the standard proposal process for your marketing initiatives".  

Thus we came up with this proposal. 

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Update 2018-02-16 – Verification of reported metrics

Our goal is to provide transparent reporting on metrics of our marketing campaigns (ad spend, clicks, conversions and some other parameters) split by channels. The roadblock which we see is how to ensure that the amount of spent budget is true. It's crucially important because an agency can falsify a report and withold part of a budget what will harm the community.

Providing open access to accounts is not an option because marketing campaign settings are intellectual property of Dash (we are planning to grant ownership to the community) and it would be shortsighted to do so because this information could be used by Dash's competitors. Screenshots of admin panel also is not an option because they can be faked. 

Nevertheless, it is necessary to confirm veracity of reporting. 

We suggest to give access to reliable member from Dash Core to check reliability of our metrics. This procedure will take 10 minutes a month, but will ensure that all figures are true. This controlling member has to be randomly changed once a month to avoid that anyone has any interest in this.