Introducing: The Eevee Content Marketing Strategy

Talking to not just who you are, but who you may become

Calling All Eevees!

How do you market to a general population? That’s one of the major problems we’re trying to solve here at TIKI. There’s a lot of buzz words (some holding more weight than others) than can be assigned to what we’re doing here at TIKI: decentralized, blockchain, web3.0, crypto, FinTech…the list could go on and on.

Well, what if you’re trying to reach people who don’t necessarily know what any of those things really mean? When you’re trying to solve a problem for everyone from the perspective of a start-up, you don’t have enough eggs nor do you have enough baskets to put an egg in every basket for every type of person in the world who might someday use your product.

So you’ve got to pick a few demographics (user personas) to cater your messaging around. We’re talking Jolteons, Flareons, Vaporeons, etc. If you know what I’m talking about, you are welcome for that brief hit of sweet nostalgia. For those who have absolutely no idea what the heck I just said, allow me to explain:

You may have heard of a global phenomenon that rose to prominence in the late 1990s (and still is wildly popular today) called Pokémon. I was absolutely junked on Pokémon as a kid (and will still dabble with playing the old GameBoy games on an emulator every once in a while), and one of the more interesting creatures in the Pokémon world that I was excited to add to my squad was a curious creature called Eeevee.

In the world of Pokémon, creatures can “evolve” into more powerful versions of themselves based on a few methods, the most common being leveling up through battling other Pokémon. Each follows an evolution path that does not vary. For example, one of the most popular Pokémon, Charizard, evolves from a Charmeleon, which evolves from a Charmander. In the original games there’s no variation there. A Charmander can become a Charmeleon, a Charmeleon a Charizard, and nothing else.

But not Eeevee. Eevee is a special one. It can evolve into a whole bunch of different stuff. And it doesn’t level up by battling, it levels up by exposure to a powerful stone (at least in the original iteration of the game). An Eeevee exposed to a Thunder Stone evolves into a Jolteon, a Fire Stone yields a Flareon, and a Water Stone a Vaporeon. Later editions brought about more evolutionary quirks to the Eeevee line, but as long as you understand this initial exposure-based evolutionary model, you may understand why I am talking about this in the first place: Eevee has the potential to evolve into various more intricate forms depending on what it is exposed to.

And that is how we plan on trying to reach the widest audience possible while still staying true to the pillars we were founded on: by trying to reach not just the specific Jolteons, Flareons and Vaporeons, but the Eevees who could in time evolve into one of them.

Let’s break it down a little more specifically: at the highest level of our “funnel” is presently a campaign titled “Your Data, Your Story.” This is meant to be the highest-level, most far-reaching, open-ended content that still feels TIKI. We’ve been testing this quite a bit with our podcast, especially the episodes that don’t prominently feature Mike.

We’ve had a bunch of different guests on, from comedians Alex Giampapa and Liam McGurk, to musicians like Molly Martin, and professional athletes like CJ Sapong. This is the Eeevee-centric content. Maybe not every episode is for everyone, but we figure the longer we keep hosting awesome guests, the more any person can browse through our episodes and find something that interests them. It’s an easy entry-point into the TIKI brand and doesn’t require much prior knowledge at all. Even complicated topics are broken down in a digestible manner, and longer episodes are clipped down to reduce friction.

As we move “down the funnel” the types of content become more specific. These are the types of content that are generated for the Jolteons, Flareons, Vaporeons, etc. They’re a more precise version of the Eevee content. But even a Jolteon can enjoy Eevee content, because you never really forget who you once were. The specific content focuses on things like our core technology, cryptocurrencies, Web 3.0, NFTs, DAOs, etcetera. These take the concept of data and data ownership and drill in for audiences that have a specific thing they’re passionate about that relates to TIKI.

Our widest potential audience are more Eeevee than anything else. After all, there’s something like 5 billion people in the world who use the internet (and therefore can benefit from TIKI) and only a small percentage of those are knowledgeable about things like decentralized systems or Ethereum (to give a few examples). But the beauty of the Eevee-content is that curious Eevees have the potential to evolve with exposure to the more specific types of content we create.

We hope this is how to create engaged users and awesome advocates to help us bring our ideas to the masses---content for everyone and content for specific audiences. A user who is a fan of soccer might come across our podcast with CJ Sapong, learn about cryptocurrencies and blockchain, and check out Mike’s breakdowns of our core technology. Everyone who is interested in anything had that initial moment of exposure to that new thing, and before long, what was once an Eevee evolved.

Or, they just stayed the same. There’s nothing wrong with staying an Eeevee. You’ve got infinite potential.

And just like that, the Eevee content strategy was born. Feel free to steal. I feel like I might be on to something here.