Marketing Update: Babylon & Beyond | The Radix Blog | Radix DLT

Marketing is a continuous journey, not a destination. There’s no single moment that answers the ‘when’ of marketing – it’s an ongoing effort to boost awareness, mindshare, and ultimately conversions. 

You never stop marketing. And that’s a good thing. 

With the successful rollout of the Babylon Upgrade, the focus of the marketing team is now significantly shifting from primarily marketing the Radix technology, to marketing the Radix platform. 

Our goal here is to continually enforce the message that Radix is the best place to put your crypto to work. This aligns both with Piers’ three phase plan, and our overall focus on healthy TVL growth.

This goal is not just a marketing goal, it aligns product, economic incentives, onboarding, partnerships and other areas of ecosystem expansion. Much like the phases in Piers’ The Road Post Babylon post, we are continually working on an integrated strategy to ensure ecosystem teams and external projects link up with liquidity incentives, product launches and marketing strategies to build momentum and growth at each stage for the Radix platform.

Marketing the Babylon Upgrade (Aug-Oct 2023)

Prior to the launch of Babyon, I set three primary objectives for the Babylon upgrade:

  1. Update all messaging/collateral to focus on the emerging ecosystem and the tools that Radix has to help ensure developer success.
  2. Support the innovators in the Radix developer ecosystem and their go-to-market for their first users and their awareness in the wider crypto ecosystem.
  3. Increase awareness around the Babylon upgrade and start of a new ecosystem within crypto opinion leaders/enthusiasts and re-engage existing followers.

As with all marketing, there is often a delay between delivering campaigns and when you see top line results. Because of this, the goal with the marketing prior and immediately after the Babylon launch was to build a strong foundation to grow from. So let’s look at what the team delivered towards each objective.

Up first; messaging and collateral refresh. This was focused around redesigning the main Radix homepage and navigation, a full update of the content on learn.radixdlt.com, and creating pillar campaigns like #RunsOnRadix and #WeGotThat. 

The website and navigation redesign were successful and received positive feedback. All work here was around streamlining the funnel for the three main ways people can engage with Radix (use, build, learn), as well as providing a cohesive narrative around the benefits of the Radix full-stack. 

The Babylon upgrade brought significant changes, requiring extensive updates on learn.radixdlt.com. While updating a knowledge base might not seem the most exciting, the 52 new and 61 updated articles create valuable, evergreen content for newcomers and brand advocates alike. 

The RunsOnRadix program is thriving with over 40 active projects and 25 pieces of content produced from August to October. This is another “evergreen” campaign and will feature prominently moving forward, especially as it’s been encouraging to see increased traction across this content, with the 5 articles released in Oct generating 130k+ impressions alone. 

Continuing on the pure number side of the marketing, #WeGotThat generated a lot of reach on Twitter with around 10m organic impressions across all content. As Radix has a lot of USPs, these bite-sized chunks took a lot of work to produce, but it’s worth it as it provides a good amount of content for Radvocates to reuse going forward around the many benefits of the Radix full-stack.

Our second goal was all around supporting the first dApps going live on Radix. 

The headline here is the Babylon booster program. At the time of writing, the first 6 projects approved for the booster program have already claimed their grant, with the others expected in the next few weeks. Behind the scenes, the dev ecosystem and marketing teams have been working with these projects to support and amplify their launches within the community. 

Another focus was to highlight ecosystem success stories. As a platform marketing team, the priority is amplifying the amazing things that are happening in the ecosystem. You can see that through things like the Runs on Radix blog and video series, and the ecosystem success posts on the community/social channels. The pace of these stories is accelerating as the ecosystem comes online – there were 6 in Sept, and 27 in Oct, with November shaping up to be higher still. 

Refreshing messaging/materials and amplifying project launches served our final goal: to heighten awareness among enthusiasts and thought leaders, and to re-engage our existing followers. 

Achieving good results here benefited from the work done over the summer to refine the targeting of these demographics that allowed for both an increase in engagement rate and a decrease in cost per impression due to relevancy. 

The numbers here speak for themselves; 

For us, the completion of the Babylon Upgrade was not just a milestone, but the exciting start of a new chapter where the ecosystem becomes the focus!

Post Babylon – Kickstarting an Ecosystem (Q4 2023+)

With Babylon now out successfully, we updated the 3 primary objectives:

  1. Consistently amplify ecosystem successes and news to both existing users and the wider industry.
  2. Focus on driving up key use and credibility building metrics such as TVL, Transactions and Wallet use.
  3. Scale awareness and brand perception campaigns to broader audiences in line with growth of objectives 1 and 2.

So how is this going? As Piers outlined in the Road Post Babylon blog, the three key focuses in “Phase 1” for the RDX Works teams are critical fixes, community testing & TVL building. 

The TLDR: We’re making good progress in these areas, with TVL recently topping $25m+

Updates to the Radix Wallet, Dashboard, Connector and other products are coming out fast. Job number 1 here is to make sure everyone already in the Radix community knows about these fixes and can see the rate of progression and iteration going on. As feedback is improving on the wallet experience, we are scaling campaigns focused on driving new people (outside of the Radix community) to download and try the wallet, as well as campaigns to nudge people towards the wider Radix ecosystem. 

A highlight of this phase is enhancing community engagement and kickstarting TVL growth. On the community engagement side, the work we started pre-babylon with RunsOnRadix and the Babylon booster program has started to really pay off with new dApps getting pushed via every channel in our arsenal, as well as getting the integrations in place for third parties, such as DeFiLlama, to start showcasing Radix to their users. 

Initially all activity focused on ensuring that the most engaged parts of the community know what’s going on and are nudged to start playing with the new toys (and importantly giving feedback to builders). As these first seeds of use start delivering ecosystem success stories, activity can continue to ramp up around how we amplify them to the broader community, crypto enthusiasts, and beyond. 

Naturally, this approach of amplifying success applies to building TVL too. Each new milestone crossed, be that of the ecosystem as a whole or a specific dApp, gets promoted in the same priority order – remarketing to existing community > thought leaders and crypto enthusiasts > wider industry.

A common misconception is to see marketing campaigns in black and white terms. In reality, they are dynamic, with all activities scaling with the evolving ecosystem. With increasing evidence of ecosystem usage, our messages gain greater credibility. With more credibility, it becomes more likely those with less existing affinity for Radix convert. 

On the whole, the uptake from the community has been brilliant. Radix is smashing through the early TVL and usage numbers and at the time of writing, just 8 weeks since the Babylon upgrade, DeFiLlama is already showing Radix with $20+ million of TVL and radixcharts.com is showing an ever growing number of transactions and on-chain activity. 

With the critical fixes coming out quickly, and credibility gaining momentum by the day, campaigns are now starting to ramp up to get more crypto enthusiasts in and, importantly, getting the external key assets into the ecosystem. While we are still just in Phase 1, the next steps take firmly into phase 2.

Phase 2 is all about moving the marketing (and ecosystem) to a place for early adopters, not just innovators and the existing community. Everything that has been happening in Phase 1 will need to continue, especially for the new dApps coming on-chain that will still need that early support, but we need to give new reasons for more people to start using the network. 

The essential part here is creating real desire for users to come and use the early ecosystem. While LSU liquidity is great for TVL growth, it is just the first part of what is necessary. Wrapped token liquidity coming to the network is key as it provides users beyond the core community with “real” opportunities to engage with the dApps on the network through activities such as CeFi <> DeFi arbitrage. These activities drive up real yield for liquidity providers and also drives up demand for things like lending dApps and auxiliary services like dashboards and aggregators.

So how do we kickstart this activity? As before, it starts with a solid foundation with marketing basics; increase the awareness of Radix, and the reach of persuasive content. All the normal marketing channels can contribute to this, but ultimately success leads to success – we need to get the first assets on. 

The good news here is that activity is already underway to incentivize wrapped assets to be deployed into the Radix ecosystem. The first element of this involves incentives for larger/sophisticated capital providers to both bridge and deploy their assets and then become active participants in the Radix DeFi ecosystem. Good progress is being made here. 

Following this, the first ($10 million) liquidity incentives program will be launched in Q1, focusing on on-chain asset growth and specifically tied to providing liquidity for wrapped assets on Radix. Planning for this is already happening, and the intention is to include major DEXs on Radix in these programs to support their success and user acquisition.  

The planned liquidity incentives are a great way to directly market opportunities in the Radix ecosystem and also drive growth of on-chain traded volume/activity which also reinforces the narrative of success that can be amplified further. This isn’t just about convincing users either, as on-chain activity can unlock more opportunities for builders (and existing dapps/services) to tap into.

By the end of Phase 2 the goal of the Radix TVL and associated on-chain activity is to be in the top 30 on DeFiLlama that will deliver even more awareness and credibility in the wider industry. As detailed above, this TVL target critically includes getting wrapped tokens on the Radix network.

Looking to Phase 3, everything that has already been happening with marketing will continue and get expanded. I also expect that with this phase new campaigns focusing on the track record of the ecosystem, case-studies of builders, and of course partnerships with more recognizable names will start to more consistently be pushed out.

To get Radix into the top 20 for TVL and ecosystem activity during Phase 3, we need to hit two main goals from marketing activity; effectively onboarding the broader “crypto activated” users, and make sure there are highly desirable activities to attract cross-chain enthusiasts and sophisticated/institutional capital to engage with. 

To achieve these goals we need to continue to support the builders in the Radix ecosystem, but also take action directly. Building the marketing machine to support the ecosystem is already happening and delivering results, and work has already started (and in one case, months before Babylon) on creating new products and associated go-to-market campaigns to meet these goals. 

The team is focused on making sure those new products are fully aligned with what is emerging and exciting in the wider DeFi space, and will put real time, engineering resources and support to make sure the best of breed also is launched on Radix.

While I am sure many reading this will have a spark of curiosity about this, as these new products are both in early stages and top secret, I will have to leave it there for now!

Closing Thoughts: Balancing Urgency and Patience

To quote Piers: “Ecosystems don’t just happen; they take hard work, and they require a community of users, builders, and hustlers behind them.” 

I agree, but also know determined, structured, and strategic action is needed from our marketing/ecosystem team to grow and amplify the successes of the ecosystem to get to the point Radix can change the world. 

In the dynamic world of DeFi & Web3, results don’t always come overnight, but they do come. Our marketing team is actively pushing forward, knowing that every initiative, big or small, is a building block for Radix’s future. We’re setting the stage now to support significant future milestones, even if it takes time to see the fruits of our labor. Your trust and support mean everything as we continue to make steady progress towards our ambitious goals.