Going beyond awareness

Transcript

Good. No, good afternoon everyone. I'm Maria and yeah uh my talk will not be technical at all but I'm will speak about I will talk about marketing. So basically the title of the talk is going beyond awareness. But to start I want to introduce myself. So who am I? I am Italian as you can hear very well from my accent. I'm in crypto since 2018. started with a then I worked in defy space for five or six years and now I'm with hype agency the marketing agency I also co-ounded spaghetti which is the

Italian ethereum community uh and I started a podcast so after you can follow me on uh on X uh and then I consulted many projects in terms of marketing so that's why I'm entitled I feel entitled I told to talk to you about this. So, uh why I um I decided to give this talk? What's the biggest mistake in crypto marketing in my opinion that we just focus on the first part of the funnel.

This is are some data uh and basically is the landscape. Okay. So you uh we don't know how many crypto projects are out there but we know how many tokens are out there and this give give us a bit of an idea of like the competition and the status of the market. So since 2021 nearly 7 million cryptocurrencies were listed and right now more than 17k uh tokens are listed on Coin Geko. Um the stats are that 92% of them will die uh before one year and of these 80%

the average lifetime is 1.2 years. There's something wrong. Okay, there's something wrong also in terms of not not only in terms of marketing but in terms of how we approach uh the launch and the the go to market and the what what is after. So what's the trend right now? This is the funnel. Okay, you have the awareness phase, then the interest, and then the acquisition, activation, loyalty, and retention. We tend to forget, especially lately, we tend to forget all of these part of the funnel and we tend to focus only on the first two pieces of the funnel.

What you need is a plan which is not which which can't be getting mine share, getting followers, getting users on the wait list. This can't be the plan. What happens right now? Projects get funded because it's a good idea. Then they do a lot of campaigns to raise attention. So for example, Quest, Kao, Cookies, Naps, Yaps, K, a lot of awareness campaigns and then DTG and then B.

How should it be? In my opinion, before doing all of the stuff that we said before, um, you should do some user research, okay? You should listen to the market because I love every founder but you like you don't know what is your product market fit if you don't listen to the market and you don't listen to to the audience. Okay. So you need to be out there and see if your idea is actually marketable. So you can you you in this way you can find your product market fit. Then you do all of your awareness campaign, your TGE, but then you already need a plan to consolidate a culture and

show like provide use cases and some reasons to stay. So education, use cases, like why should I care about your product and should I be there even after I got your tokens and I'm happy with my bags full? Okay. And guys have a product because uh since I work in the agency, we have so many like lead leads that ask us to go to market. But we do what what are we marketing? You don't have a product.

They just have funds. They have this idea and some white paper but they don't have a product. So you need to have a product. This is me. Okay. So why this happens? Maybe I don't know but these are my assumptions. So maybe because we receive like the the projects receive funds too fast. Maybe because we always feel in a rush. So they are on the uh on the Ka leaderboard pretty so we need to do it as well right now.

Maybe is this they already did it so we we need to do it now. No. uh then we focus too much on vanity metrics. This is also due to the fact that for example to be listed exchanges are still looking a lot to the you know uh follower base numbers etc. But uh this shouldn't be your goal you know and then uh not involving marketing on time as I will say also later uh marketing should be involved from day zero guys because you don't want to build something and spend a lot of time in building it and then you find out that this is not marketable this is not a product market fit

so I gave some tips um these are high level uh tips um and then I will also go a bit uh into more details um but yeah first of all have having a product market fit is fundamental so I repeat again use a research listen to the market talk to your community or even like to the broader crypto community and see if your idea is exactly that is like can be appreciated replies to a need that is out there or not etc.

and involve the marketing uh immediately. Then have a plan that makes sense. So in terms of campaign like for every part of the funnel so awareness um then acquisition and then retention everything needs a plan. So the plan can't be let's do a kao campaign. Okay. Then create a culture. This is not easy but it's doable. Then I will also make some examples of project uh project that I appreciate in that sense. And then um give people a reason to stay uh and to promote your product because at the end of the day guys word of mouth is still in in crypto our main weapon marketing

weapon. So these are some specific uh as far as I as I can with this time um specific action points that I would do. Um I don't know if you understand but basically these are related to the first part of the funnel. These are related to the second part of the funnel. So user research this is not fashion anymore but when I used to work at maker user research we had a team doing user research. Okay so not just one guy but multiple like a team now nobody cares you know this is something really important. So hire a user researcher

then marketing strategy and product strategy needs to go in parallel. So possibly you want your marketing people or marketing person from day zero when you are or still thinking about the product and still deciding what to do with your deps. Okay? Because this need to be marketable. Um then mind share campaign are fine. I love K. I love cookie. I love but they need to be well done. Meaning if I ask someone to tweet and get rewarded to do it, I want to like him to tweet them to tweet something that is really meaningful for

me that it's educational, not like just mentioning the product with a meme and he gets you know the money. No. and then if possible talk with for example Kao team or cookie to improve a bit the algorithm meaning I don't want that Maria who uh is tweeting about uh just mentioning the project saying it's so cool get rewarded this should be improved in my opinion it's not on projects but it's on this platform probably to to improve this but that's it and also choose the write ko I don't dislike kos but they need to be actually kos and needs to actually care

about your pro project and product otherwise everything is zero ROI guys you pay these people 8k to tweet something they don't give a about they do probably 10 of these tweets every day so their audience don't give a probably full of boats so please be careful with chaos maybe you want three of them promoters. You give them tokens. So they are actually promoters and is better. Second part of the funnel. My god. Second part of the funnel education in a fun way. Try new channels. Tik Tok.

Um I don't know YouTube is a bit underrated in my opinion. So video stuff are good lately. do ambassador programs and grants to involve the community and possibly if you are targeting also devs if you are I don't know a chain or an infra you want to target gr devs so you do grants you do acathatons uh you create a culture this is something um to be honest very important that is very underrated uh and then show as many use cases as possible after you got the uh the the airdrop what you what can you do with with our product or token. Um, and then go to events because I think events

are super uh impactful to create uh the culture and loyalty. To close, I wanted to give some good examples mixed. So for example, ra a is already a big thing. Uh why did they do a ra because of culture? They want to create a culture and they did it with the l with with ra with like lens all the merch all the events they do they create this like culture around a complex project that is a uh reserve I like them liquid I appreciated a lot how they did the airdrop because it was retroactive so basically they they rewarded the

actual users and they didn't just give money away like that so far they are doing great with uh also creating culture doing short video for form content um with their new CMO who basically every two days publish a video explaining the the project boundless with the berry thing also super complex project they are trying to make it easy to digest for the audience chipped nails so this was a strong use case before even being a pro like a crypto project So use case example mega mega to me is great in also culture um targeting devs with the mafia I mean they are

great. So these are all very good examples of projects that you can copy try to copy uh to apply the the final thing and going beyond awareness. That's it. I'm good. Okay follow me on city if you want. Thanks. Do we have time? Ah, okay. Guys, any questions? It was pretty straightforward. Yeah. I'm curious like from an agency perspective when like a client comes to you and they want to do like TGE in a month, you know, or they have like

unrealistic expectations. I was going to say, do you just refuse like Yeah. Yeah. So the the So maybe it's just hype, but and I only see hype, but basically we just work with projects that we think that can thrive. Yeah. Because otherwise it's not convenient for us, it's not convenient for them. It doesn't make sense. So basically if we believe in the project, we accept them. Yeah. Um also because we uh part of our like retainer is maybe from tokens. So we need to believe in the project. Uh but when they come with this crazy good batch out also when they don't have a product maybe we if there is like a strong idea

and they are almost there maybe we we get them. But to be honest, I had bad uh examples also in this case. We accepted and then they didn't know what to do basically. And then we end up as a marketing agency, we shouldn't do the your product strategy. Okay. But we end up doing their product strategy because again if you don't have idea of the what you're thinking is marketable or not, why are you launching it? how can you sell it? you know uh so that's the point of the relevance of marketing in this uh in this like space when you're setting a

timeline with someone in terms of expectations like okay work with us for x amount of time and then you'll start to see results like what does that or do you even say that or like what is it like a usually we agree on timelines um but uh yeah that we divide in campaigns but recently we shortened a bit a bit the the timing so for example TG in two months It's doable. Okay. So if you already have an idea because when we start with a clients, we already gave them some ideas before signing. So for example, they are interested in this campaign idea, we go for it in two months, we can do it. Yeah. But it everything depends on also how the the the team itself is

made because if they have people that internal people that can help it's another like life for us. If there is one guy it's you know a bit tough. Yeah. Thanks that helps. Hello. Thank you for your talk. Yeah. So I have a question. So um it was interesting to hear your question to hear a little bit of feedback. You're really focusing on projects that have a little bit of a project a product and looking to pro provide something achievable very within a short time frame or conceivable time frame. But I'm

curious, have you worked with any projects that have like a time frame that's a little bit longer and kind of have like a moonshot goal? um like something where they're transforming the whole We love them as an agency. We love them because we build all of the the when you rush things, it's not not not good. It's better when you can build like the culture, the community, blah blah blah. Of course, uh the culture and the community at a certain point they want something you know like they want a project sorry they want a product or they want something tokens whatever. So it's like we before going out to them

maybe we spend a lot of time in preparing very well and then we go out when we are close a bit closer to the lounge basically because otherwise if you start doing awareness one year before then people are like uh Quindy what what's what's the point here like mystery is is nice in our for example Newton they like spent seven months or nine months and nobody knew what they were doing and then they finally launched. But in the meantime, they had like 700k followers who were starting to get pissed, you know, like so sorry, let me add a little bit more context on that

as well. So, for example, um have you ever worked with a project that has like an long-term ambition about going and integrating a major change into the Ethereum uh blockchain system? And essentially, there isn't a specific end user for the product, but it's just going and doing a a massive transformation at the protocol level. I'm just kind of understanding if you've worked on there's always a target. I mean, but uh otherwise you're not doing marketing. Yeah, but I guess the not a specific product for the end user. No, no, no, no. Yeah, it's like of course uh it's you're talking something for example that you're not targeting a retail, right? Yeah. I guess I I just want to understand if um you've worked

with projects that have didn't have a specific product for a chain user, a specific user to use right now, but they want to go and engage a larger group of developers. Yeah. Of course, infra projects a lot of chains are like if you think like yeah the chain you could also talk to retails but all the infra stuff or like super chain I mean you're not talking to the end of users you are talking to devs and for example hype was behind the super fast campaign by optimism so we work with this project uh because devs are your target here you know you what when I say you always a target it it can be retail it can be

institutions it can be defs it can be I don't know B2B I mean but you are always talking with someone otherwise you don't need market otherwise you're I don't know doing uh I don't know who who doesn't have who work for nothing no one you know so yeah when you need marketing and of course We did work with this project. You are targeting devs. So you're using this but also for devs you can create a culture. You can do almost everything I mentioned also for a for technical from a technical perspective. For example, I don't know

like uh scroll to me did a great job with the on boarding um of of devs because they have a really really good UX for devs. Uh and so this is also part of marketing in my opinion because it's the onboarding phase. Um and this is an example of uh creating the right experience for your target. Yeah. Thank you.