Steemit from an Advertiser's Perspective
By: Commodore Trevor
As a content manager it is my job to keep our content on brand and running smoothly, but I feel like we need a little help on this topic. Thus it is time for a little op-ed on my part. Our team has had some very heated discussion about where we need to best direct our dollars. There is no doubt that as a magazine, Instagram is by far our most successful platform, but as steemit is my pet project I feel compelled to support the platform. Our goal is to build engagement, not just quick cryptocash. Our mission is to bring people together in the outdoors to inspire each other and push our limits. We want people to experience the joy of rafting, the thrill of challenging nature's fury, and to build each other up, but to do that we need to have a solid business solution to help drive that goal. Everything that we do comes from this belief and drives our brand into the future.
On the flip side of our mission several business driven issues and questions have arisen from our recent debate.
- How do we best use cryptocurrency to enhance our business?
- Is offering pay via cryptocurrency a viable business option?
- How can we build a solid advertising presence by leveraging cryptocurrency we have accumulated? Does cryptocurrency make better financial sense than pure advertising dollars?
On the first issue we have found it very difficult to use cryptos to enhance our business. There are very few merchants accepting cryptos for things we need. Expedition supplies, office supplies, fuel, insurance, the list goes on for everything required to run a business, however it is clear that the market is far from being ready to pay for business expenses in crypto currency. This leaves us with few options except advertising and brand awareness to be able to enhance our business using cryptos.
In regards to our second issue there has been a lot of debate on both sides of the opinion of offering product for purchase via cryptocurrency. As we prepare to launch a dedicated e-commerce section of our site it is clear that we could offer this as a possibility for everything from carabiner sales to people buying rafting adventures in exotic destinations. The argument has been that if we could get outfitters to accept cryptos it would cut our costs to send money to other countries dramatically. No credit card fees passed on to the customer, no wire transfer or credit card fees to send money to the outfitter, no foreign currency transaction fees. All of these fees cut out could mean a 10% savings across the board. On the other hand there is the issue that many merchants want their local fiat currency so that they can pay their bills. If we set up a deal and a merchant backed out we could potentially be stuck with a pile of tokens that will not pay any bills for the product that we have purchased from our vendors. So clearly it would not make any sense for us to entertain the idea if our vendors will not accept it as payment.
To our final issue - can we leverage our crypto tokens to build a solid advertising presence? The overwhelming consensus is yes, but how? Within the sphere of steemit and the upvoting system the platform rewards production of lots of quality content via financial incentive. From a business perspective this is a good thing, however we are in the business of building a lifestyle brand not accumulating cryptocurrency. This poses an interesting challenge for us. Since while we are in the business of making money through the aforementioned lifestyle brand vehicle it makes sense to make money here also. The problem is that the money we make here cannot directly pay our bills or provide more direct assistance with anything except our advertising budget. One of the benefits is that we can use cryptos to pay for plugs from other crypto users, but the issue is that it is not mainstream yet.
Many of the users on this platform in particular are familiar with cryptocurrency and are plugged into the crypto world. Our stumbling block is that this doesn't directly translate to cross platform brand recognition. While it is possible for us to contact influencers on this platform who are also influencers in other digital spheres (which we are enthusiastically open to). We have found that influencers in other spheres are not open to our attemps to woo them with the prospect of "some hard to understand digital currency". At the end of the day they want the cold hard cash.
As a final opinion note from a more traditional advertising and brand awareness standpoint there is not an ideal vehicle on this platform to provide us impressions or click through. Since the platform is driven by the whale vote even if we use the promotions feature our promoted coins will largely go to waste since promotions are relegated to their own thread and are not interspersed through the rest of the platform's content like other platforms. One of our contributors felt that our best recourse would be to get in touch with whales and offer to pay them to upvote our content so that we could get more eyes on the brand. She makes a good point as to the system built into the platform, however taking such action feels very against the spirit of this platform.
We are interested in how the community feels about these topics and I am hoping that there are folks who could help us resolve this debate. I love creating content for this platform and helping the community to grow, but for me to continue down this road I am faced with some very compelling questions about how how we are to best allocate our resources. I appreciate any insight that the community is willing to offer on this!
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