Quickfire Q&A, Katie Evans
Financial Promoter: How would you describe Swarm?
Katie Evans: We have two elements of our business. We build permissioned DeFi infrastructure, which is feeding towards institutionally-led businesses that have compliance needs that cannot enter DeFi in its current form.
The second cohort is building a truly decentralised infrastructure, tokenising assets such as stocks, bonds and commodities and building trading infrastructure to support secondary liquidity of those assets. That is open to everyone and anyone.
We have our own crypto token called SMT. Growing the community behind that crypto asset is one business objective. It provides a bit of a marketing tool itself for the RWA products and trading infrastructure that sit underneath that, acting as one point of entry for people to find out about our project.
FP: The digital assets and financial services communities often have different interpretations of ‘institutional clients’. What is yours?
KE: ‘Institutional’ is anything that isn’t just someone coming off the street, onboarding to our platform, and buying our assets. Organisations, enterprise, institutional capital – it is a huge category. You have institutions that sit in crypto and institutions that sit in traditional finance as well and the way you define them can mean one thing to us and another to someone else in the space. All of them sit on a scale of adoption which I have spent the last year working on. We have had to define the customer landscape ourselves.
FP: How would you describe Swarm’s marketing?
KE: We have taken a different approach to marketing in that we have gone down a PR route. For the first two years, my role was building up a brand presence for journalists. That worked well, especially on LinkedIn. Establishing credibility by having FT and WSJ coverage was great and, for a DeFi start up is relatively unheard of. We spent two years talking about our vision and why that matters through PR, speaking opportunities at events and doing our organic activity. Now we are in business development mode, focussed on generating revenue, so having a presence at events becomes more important from a networking perspective.
FP: How would you describe your approach to PR?
KE: It is not just about creating profile pieces on us. It is about positioning us as a thought leader, providing commentary on topics of interest. We send out weekly commentaries to journalists that are focussed on what
is happening in the industry and that is how we’ve been successful at getting tier one financial media. Journalists know they can come to us and get a quote on something and turn that around quickly. I have been really lucky in that the cofounders, from the offset, believed in the PR strategy.
FP: What is your approach to content?
KE: It is very obvious, but we repurpose content in myriad ways. Initially it is sent to journalists and then we create individual social media posts and repurpose industry news and commentary for our client newsletters. We say write once and publish everywhere.
FP: How do you navigate style, tone and brand guidelines?
KE: One of the main things we get feedback on is the consistency of message. We steer clear of jargon like “democratising finance” – that’s banned. Let’s talk about the utility of what we are doing here. Not some workshop idea. Keep it simple.
I believe it’s important to have good writing. That goes a long way. That also goes for any contractors
that work with – that is the first thing we look at. I don’t have any hidden tricks. The basics work. You just
have to get the basics write.
FP: What’s next for the brand?
KE: You can expect to see a lot of movement around the decentralised infrastructure we are building and
our token SMT. We hope to announce some big partnerships this year on the permissioned side. People are now seriously looking at this tech.
Larry Fink came out with a quote in Jan that said today bitcoin ETF today and tomorrow tokenisation of everything. It has given us the credibility that we need as an industry and everyone is waking up to this notion of tokenisation that we have been beating the same drum over for the past few years.
Katie Evans is the chief business development and communications officer at Swarm.