Given some of what’s been proposed, I wanted to give my perspective on what I’ve seen, and what I think Marketing can be moving forward.
I’m seeing talk that considers Marketing in much the same structure as it is now, and I think it would be a mistake not to take this opportunity for where we are in the market cycle, product development, and communicating about issues not to consider rethinking how marketing is done at a larger scale.
I believe that a centralized marketing team is at the root of the main issues being brought up: over spend, slow turn around, lack of coordination. With the overspend issue being addressed well enough by Ryan in my opinion, I will focus on the other two, though I will touch on how this plan is less expensive for API3.
It’s my position that marketing acting as the voice of the project is unnecessary for 2 reasons. BD and Ecosystem know their target group and the nuances they are trying to communicate better than Marketing, and have direct relationships with important leaders within their customer space.
The only team that directly needs comms support in any real capacity is the Technical team, and I believe that there is a lot of internal content that the marketing team could be doing a better job of translating into lay speak and transmitting to an external audience. In particular the Call Updates channel could easily be turned into newsletter topics, or inspire particular posts if the technology warrants a more specific explanation.
The way that I see Marketing facilitating unified messaging is by taking this next cycle to codify the foundational elements of API3’s branding, with a focus on delivering templated assets that are easy for the different teams to use, per what Heikki said at the last marketing meeting. These would facilitate the decentralization of the marketing effort, and even obsolete the role of marketing manager in its historical context.
Coordination is hampered by a marketing lead who acts as a middleman between the the teams who need content and the creators who can deliver.
Creative work, where possible, would be done by the teams who know how to communicate their message to their target audience. This will change the responsibilities of design and copywriting within the Marketing team primarily to editing. With designers focussed on novel assets that are not covered by templates, and copywriters doing the same, three things will be reduced: turnaround time, time coordinating, and overall hours needed to be paid to the members of the Marketing team.
Tamara and I have discussed the need for proper brand direction before being able to tackle a website design system needed for effective collaboration with Leandro/Entrecasa. These assets will empower API3 to work more efficiently with contractors on any scale, from web development teams down to contracted writers.
I do not want to see Marketing as a middleman, either for creation (where the divisions have a clear vision of what they need), or for getting posts to where they need to go. Each team understands where their target market hangs out and the best way of communicating over those channels. Time spent coordinating needs would be better spent composing the assets desired to communicate the deliverable, with a final pass done by a designer or copywriter.
I agree with Ugur’s take on Ecosystem, both in terms of definition of responsibilities and output. From speaking with Ben, I believe the ideas I’m putting forth are in line with some of his on open-sourcing marketing and removing points of friction.
The suggested brand guidelines and templates will take another cycle of work from Can and I to complete, but after that will greatly reduce the need for designers and a marketing manager, leading to a longer lasting benefit than I think other proposals will bring, and add to the agility of API3 making it more capable for the next cycle.
I will clarify the deliverables, as well as what a success would mean for the next proposal cycle, and take into account any feedback in our upcoming proposal.
Unmentioned so far is this conversation is the community management portion of Marketing’s responsibilities. Marcus has good ideas of how to strengthen this initiative, but a greater sense of what the DAO is thinking (which Dave touched on last week) would be appreciated. I would like to discuss this topic in greater detail in this week’s marketing meeting.