Breaking Through the Noise: Marketing in Crypto | Robbie, Maria, Reka, Tomer, Abigail

[Music] um Rea toer Abigail and Robbie and if you all want to give a little brief intro about yourselves do we have one more mic gmgm GM hello hello there we go what's up everyone bright-eyed bushy tailed two days into eth Denver highly caffeinated hope everyone's having a great time we're going to keep this one fun uh we've got a lot of marketing gurus on the stage today um one cool thing about this panel is that it should be applicable across all facets of web 3 uh because what you know we're human we're storytellers uh so we'll we'll kick it off REO why don't you say a little bit about yourself and then we'll kind of go down the line and and we'll get into it hi everybody I'm raika eth uh I'm the head of comms at rzo we're launching boundless and I've been in crypto since few years founded Guild XYZ and now I'm officially a marketer after being a Founder hi everyone I'm to the CEO and co-founder of addressable uh addressable the web 3 targeted marketing platform we use data for everything hello everyone I'm Maria uh I am working for hype the super agency the best marketing agency in the space uh but yeah before I have been involved as a marketer a lot of years in defi so i' I've been a defi marketer hi everyone I'm Abigail I work directly with Founders and go to market teams in crypto just independently I have been in the space since 2021 I started at C then moved over to consensus mesh um and then LED marketing at decrypt so kind of have done a lot in the like VC and media space in crypto awesome thanks everyone so the name of this panel is uh cutting through the noise I'm going to be talking about marketing um before we really get to the core fundamentals here um let's start with the noise so I'd like everyone to uh tell us what the most cringe thing you've seen in web 3 is from a marketing perspective what is the most like if I'm a marketing person and I'm trying to tell a story I don't want to be doing it this way tell us what not to do first I think the binance perfume the if you remember that one that was so far off and like the story what it did though is it did get us talking which is fun that that is that is true of the cringiest things sometimes uh bad press is still good press so I saw the flocky campaign everywhere flocky is a token it was all over a few countries um super weird it's just a meme coin that was was advertised with uh tens of millions of dollars all over Western Europe it's me already I I was thinking about it but I I think that when one inch uh pinted the road the the streets I don't remember where maybe here in Denver and they got like a super huge fine uh that's that's very cringe yeah crypto parties in Miami where people are partying and they're having the time of their lives and it's great but sometimes when you're a marketer you're like maybe maybe we think twice before we do this and post it th those Bitcoin conferences Miami were something something different um okay cool I was going to bring two up um you guys remember uh Katie Perry's uh fingernails that got painted that was just organic she just did that out of her own free will well was that yeah it was like height of bull market 2021 she painted each of her fingernails a different cryptocurrency I didn't she had like xrp on her fingernails does no one else does no one remember that you should be no one like I made it up uh the other one is uh outside I'm sure everyone has seen this one uh the the Dogecoin WAP cyber truck out front yeah are we fans do we do we you think this is a good no why I think it's too purposefully out there in a way that isn't going to actually like translate into gaining customers like it'll get you attention but like what what is the longterm play okay I think that's a nice segue we'll we'll pick up on that thread but yeah please I think the opposite like we talk about it right now yeah you know everybody's listening so maybe it's a good move to have a Dogecoin cybertruck yeah I mean it's first part of the funnel right like you need to grab attention in a way and this is a way like yeah totally then then I agree with you what's next but yeah but at least you grab attention so I think it's a lot of times that's the first step is is people call this an attention economy and in in very many ways all of the companies here are competing in one where shape or form for attention but I I want to double click Abigail like how do we Translate General attention whether it's good bad or ugly how do we translate from attention to customers conversions users whatever it is that kpi that you're trying to optimize for how what you know attention is the input how do we get the desired output yeah I think that's a great question I think the middle part is community and doing community really well so I totally agree like if you're not if you're not on anyone's radar like you're not going anywhere at all right but like if you if you can't then manage to make them feel special and like do do specific activations that like they feel like they can be a part of and there's specific things that you're inviting them to then you're not really going anywhere so that's and I feel like a lot of people here would probably have a lot to say on on the value of community as well but that that would be the missing piece I would I would say I would add uh I I agree but I think that this should be also like an education from the community like it's not just just Community but you need to really like educate the the clients educate about uh how to on board them about that crypto is not just connected to you know illegal and you know trading just just these but it's something more so I think the the community activations should also imply some educational you know piece I completely agree and and I didn't introduce myself for the rollup but we are an education company uh trying to teach the entire industry so that everyone is better off and we have this Collective wisdom about the space everyone is able to learn from one another learn from each other's mistakes and successes um when we talk about community and using that as a mechanism to transform attention into Dollars Revenue customers you know everything that makes a business Rick I wanted to ask you I think you're a little bit special on this panel because you work for a company in particular and then we have kind of some broad coverage as well so when it comes to building Community for risk zero and boundless what are some of the strategies that you have employed that you've seen work and maybe ones that haven't worked generally how how do you think about building community so I think maybe in this sense so I've did uh I've been a founder of Guild XYZ before so I worked with majority of the project in the space to build their Community too and I think a general concept that I would like to give as advice or as a to-do list is they know if you don't care so making Community happen hiring a person to just like make it happen will not work if the court team is not aligned with it I think Community is an extension of the project and the team as it is and you actually have to show up it's not something you can delegate completely it the culture will proliferate and it really really shows and when we say good examples in the space right now they're doing community really well it is because if you actually go into their Discord for example Mega eth we always praise them for how religiously their Community is supporting them see their nft raise where they raised 5,000 eth in 2 days um it's because the court team's currently every single day in the Discord chatting with the you know obviously not answering every single question but they're present they're there and even the events you're hosting or everything else I'm sure you all with when you're working with your companies um they have to feel authentic and otherwise it's just not going to work is there a North star that you have when you think about turning attention into a particular thing what is it that you guys are optimizing for and then I I I I want to get to basically some strategies that are consistent across projects so that everyone is able to to take something away and use it in in their own project I think it depends on stage I we're currently at the stage where awareness is still a thing obviously R zero is a fairly wellknown company they've you know we've been building since 2021 it's very well known but boundless is a project coming out of that ecosystem and building on top of that technology it's fairly new so it's still at the stage where I both have to figure out how to left curve and like right curve the marketing and the attention which means to do build community both in a super ZK aligned very technical serious way but also be silly and preferable and understandable to retail and I think that's a general truth is you have to pay attention of every segment that you might engage and uh who might enjoy your project and your thesis and your values and the change you're bringing to this industry um and optimize for all of them at once but have Cy locality also especially if you're limited in resources because that will help tremendously with being building more mindful Community there yeah and and a very successful nft campaign as well uh that that helped to illustrate the Community Values now I I think the rest of us are in a in a unique position that you know we we have broad coverage over the space not working for one particular project or or one particular sector allows us to draw comparisons and make draw connections amongst all these different groups um and so I I'm curious what are some of those strategies that you have seen consistently successful at in in multiple sectors across our industry is it an nft campaign is it yeah like what what are some of these strategies that everyone can take away and try in their own project the nice part about Community do you understand your super fans and that's the basic uh you know group of people that will use your product and you can actually live amongst them be their friends and find out what they really need and what they really want and then you want to grow outside of community boundaries and this is where I think the strategies start to become more robust because for the first thing you need to be original you need to be putting something new on the table once you got the first uh group of super fans to to believe in you then you want to grow 10x and 100x and you have to capture this Essence and start to convey this unique uniqueness to a much broader audience and build the trust with nons super fans and the strategies to do that are starting to correlate with any product that has reached some maturity and ripeness uh and these strategies include um getting people to to know you through big events campaigns PRS and and a lot of uh uh um familiarity close touch letting people try letting people have it letting people have something for free so a lot of those broader audience strategies are correlating with the web two products that we all know that need to get to 100x people after you cracked the use case for your product and the second thing that is super super critical for all those you know 100x growth Beyond Community boundaries are measur measuring measuring everything because you try a lot of things you try in every country different things you try a personalized personalized message to every group of people you try different types of um uh advertisements you try different types of events and and try different types of uh real life uh uh interactions and measuring all of those lets you understand what works and once there's some for a product you want to make Revenue when you want want to make Revenue you have to actually for every marketer you have to know how much money you put in how much money you get out and all the middle of the funnel you have to actually measure every stage in a very very crystallized way to know what brings people from you know awareness about your brand to consideration and what brings people to actually try it what brings people to open their wallet and and pay and these stages are super critical in any company in any brand not connected to web 3 at all and and I think the maturity of of of the campaigning is also the maturity of web 3 Because when we talk about web 3 marketing we talk about how to create this community to actually believe in you and we barely talk about how to break outside of the community boundaries of those 10,000 people and get to 1 million within two years right so this is where the marketers and we see marketers coming into the industry today from all other Industries well well trained marketers that know how to do that and they bring the classic tactics because it becomes a product that sells for money for real use case and not some hype around new new Alpha and new token and let's all build this together it's not crowdfunding anymore once the community has uh gained from the initial funding like you just said before and um and now it's about just using a product yeah um I I will add on top of of it because sometimes our clients are type they ask us for a um playbooks no your question is is is good but I don't think there are like uh strategies that can really be copy pasted for everyone what but I think that can be used a bit for everyone uh are more principles no so um for example um you need to be very like transparent clear and keep it easy and understand who you are talking to and why should they care that's it this is a rule that can be applied to everyone and the community as as we are we are discussing is always and still incre to I think the the main weapon to to succeed because we saw also recently for example with better chain or you know like Community is still the the main the main channel to grow and on board as well from outside uh but like you how do you build this community by being like really clear transparent and one single message like why why should you why should you care about my project and why should should you use as that's it when what what I saw very very much in defi is that uh a lot of projects try to like push to the market a lot of different features we are so so good we we implemented this super uh good strategy with this super good smart contract and they try to push a lot of different like features uh to to the users and they they the span of attention is is too broad you know they don't know what what to care about just choose one and go for it that's it that's my my take and for the rest unfortunately the tactics are different from client to from Project to to project yeah I agree I think that in some ways it's kind of like a unicorn question that you're asking because Community is so different for every like product out there for every protocol and so it's hard to kind of nail down like the perfect formula that said like I would say most Community efforts boil down to doing things that cannot scale in tandem with things that can scale so what I mean by that is the things that can scale for instance are like automating your messaging right so like you have all these different channels that you're communicating with your community in maybe you're automating some of like when the messaging is going out like at what time it's going out all that kind of stuff or you're running like a campaign and then the things that that can't scale are like inviting people to just hang out like whether that's IRL or doing it digitally so I just started doing a little bit of work with polka dot recently which is very new for me because I'm I'm I've done a lot like in the ethereum ecosystem and there's a dow there called chaos Dow that does a little bit of this so they've they've automated a system where they vote on every single proposal that comes through like the Dow um so either people are like voting on it live or you know it defaults to like whatever people's leanings are and then they also have this thing where they just kind of come hang and I was talking to someone the other day who was like once it went on for 24 hours cuz people were just coming in and out and I was like that's insane I would never spend like more than probably one hour in a Discord hang um but point being like just creating those spaces I think for people to come together is is so important so some sort of mixture I think of like just giving people a voice like I love what you said about listening to people like giving giving them time and space and just like the opportunity to exist um and the space what I'm hearing is start with why and Care yeah I I'm hearing that as as well and it why is is different Case by case on all these projects um and then it's almost about working backwards and and putting yourself in the position of like a super fan I think someone mentioned like building that community of super fans um and then if you find that core community that is the most fundamental like the soul of your community working backwards from that is cutting through the noise um and then you really start to it's infectious it's infectious that energy that resonates outward from that from that core Super Fan um and so kind of thinking through some of these strategies they Case by case we kind of have this broad notion of of attention ultimately we're we're trying to make conversions we're trying to cut through and and include more people into some of these ideas a lot of times you know we call this an attention economy or an idea economy like like what what does it mean to have the most like infectious idea like when when you're thinking about you know the the core tenants of your community how do you make sure and choose those tenants so that they do scale right the process of those is obviously kind of doing things that don't scale so that you can find those but when you when once you do find that True Value how do you broadcast that message to the masses so that you ultimately find people and include them that that also resonate with that with that same philosophy I think that we all have to realize where our users spend their time um their time is spent differently this year than last year and differently than the year before we see people spend their time on social networks following specific people so this is why K's are growing bigger and bigger in the time share that people are are um are listening to we see people people spending more time asking llms questions instead of asking Google so we want to be present as a brand in in in the answers of those llms um and we want to be present in in in the places where people pay attention to discover new things so social networks uh but person personalized and humanized interfaces of social networks and llms there's one hack that we see all the time how to bring the SEO to the llm world how to make the attention of the people be present in in in how to make your brand shine when you ask C GPT what is the best uh um Investment app so you really want to do SEO in those specific interfaces that have never been uh uh worked before so you want to make them train on your data um so you have to push data for training uh that talks about your brand and talks about your specific product um and and I think that in today's world um it's very it's it's very important to to get um to get people's attentions through where they ask their questions spend their time I'll give you one tip in life hack we push a lot of data to Reddit because C GPT train on Reddit um and and this is the way we do SEO um when you push a lot of data to Reddit even Reddit ads are indexed um you make people uh um see your brand when they ask chat GPT that that's the ultimate SEO for C GPT is to get your data a lot of data a lot of content about your brand into the places where llms are training on and uh Reddit is one place um there are some other sources I can share later um and definitely it's very very um surprising to see what's happening this year what's happening next year uh with the attention of people uh uh in the in in the online sphere I I'd like to maybe refine the question a little bit and and ask like a little bit more of a specific question about retaining attention going broad getting attention that's one thing but you know this is a very mercenary industry people are around you know they're they're farming points they're farming tokens once the token drops you get your air drop you go off to the next Community what what what are you know the the tactics to to retain this attention so that you don't just have a user come in and then leave in my opinion the key is to make users feel part of of something no so incentivizing them in a way that it's not may maybe not monetary okay but may maybe like um make them feel heard so we see that 70% of our I don't know users go click there if you want to use that it means that this piece of of my finger is the better let's let's like develop more on the in on this side so you get like feedback uh from from users uh directly and indirectly uh and uh and you make them feel part of of of something which is whether is like the the community commity itself or like the product Direction product strategy you know I I'm developing for you guys you know like this is something that it's not easy to to pass to the users but we we this is what what it's yeah so how how do you do that in an industry dominated by people trying just trying to make money that's such a great question yeah I mean I think it's hard because in crypto like so much of attention is tied to financial incentives right that's like exactly that's entirely pretty much what it is and so to me this is where marketing has to work really closely with product and like you you can work closely on designing mechanisms that do like talken like token Lo lockups um or like like vesting over a certain amount of time like like there are ways where you can actually ensure that the attention is distributed over time because like the the promise of that Financial return is actually spread out over a certain amount of time so like I think that's a very real Contender that like any marketer in this industry has to kind of deal with and then I think another as aspect to it is like just making sure that you're con like consistently putting out content around what you're doing right and that's like everything comes down to that at the end of the day is like are you being loud are you repeating your message and stuff but I think if you're not doing those two things in tandem you'll have a really really hard time like keeping attention once you've had it I think I just have a quick take I mostly agree with all both of you or all three of you um on more on culture I guess and making feel like people belong to something bigger just figure out something that that relates to your company and your own culture that you already have internally and relates to your product and it's it's something that people can incorporate in their lives that's relatable that's um makes them feel something and makes them feel something that you want to feel every day when you think about your product and your project and that will give an Avenue to all of these other Solutions as well that's a good place to start and it Fosters that like culture that you actually want to proliferate over the years awesome attention inclusion and uh culture cool thank you everyone thanks thank you