Amanda Gutterman ~ Marketing Your Ethereum Startup: How to build a brand, grow your audience, and ac

[Music] hi my name is Amanda Gutterman I am chief marketing officer at consensus and I'm here because I'm on a mission to increase the adoption of aetherium and etherium products and the way that I do that is through marketing so how I'm defining marketing today is how to build a brand how to grow your audience and how to acquire users and all of the different activities that you do in your business in order to accomplish those things one thing I've noticed from helping support a lot of etherion projects and from being at youth Denver being at DEFCON is that a lot of the teams in the etherium space are led by first-time technical founders and that is totally awesome but it often means that the people leading aetherium based projects don't necessarily have experience with marketing or training on how to do marketing which is also fine because I found that it's easier to teach an engineer how to do marketing than it is necessarily to teach a marketer how to do engineering so I think folks who are engineers folks who are building blockchain products I think you can really get a lot of value out of marketing and I think even here we've seen a lot of project leaving money on the table by not doing marketing for example just in sessions today I noticed speakers coming onto the stage and not saying this is my name and this is the name of my product you know that's a that's a moment that you can really use to get in people's minds and then something simple like having the name of your product on your sliced having the name of your project up there so that when people are taking photos maybe they haven't taken a photo of your first slide that has the logo and name on there but if you put it on every slide chances are if people take a photo there actually remember the name of your project and so these two things sounds super simple and they sound a lot simpler than the really complex challenges that a lot of our founders are solving in the etherium space but there ways to actually optimize the investment that you're making and to actually get across and be memorable to your audience so this is a cartoon making fun of marketers which is richly deserved and that's a question people ask why do we need marketing and when I joined consensus I was the first marketer in the company and before that there were a lot of technical leaders there were there were starting to be some some business people and we were mostly focused on R&D and when I joined we were catalyzing a transition from a really exploratory R&D focused to actually having some products that had real users and starting to tell our story a lot more publicly and to tell the story of etherium and I was able to build a team and to get that message out further because I was able to convince some of the early consensus folks that marketing was valuable and I part of how I did that was with examples because the dustbin of history is full of amazing technologies that failed to get users and ended up not being adopted and one of those examples is Betamax you can have a superior technology that ends up losing because it loses the adoption game so just because something works and just because something's exciting which I know a lot of the projects are in the etherium space doesn't mean it's actually going to win and marketing is key to winning ironically though marketing has not marketed itself well in the etherium space which has led to a lot of misconceptions a lot of the projects we see that are successful feel whether they're on aetherium whether they're on blockchain or not they can feel like they succeeded without any marketing and that is the mark of amazing marketing especially when you're marketing to audiences that don't like marketing but everything is marketing and well we'll talk about that a little more the other misperception is that marketing is something you do when you don't really have the goods it's for scammy icos it's about telling people inflated expectations and then they're gonna be let down in the end and then the other the other misconception is my my target users are developers developers maybe don't like marketing or a perceived as not liking market I mean no one enjoys being advertised to and admitting that they that they made a buying decision because of an ad but there's a misperception that you can't do any kind of marketing activity because your target user are devs but the reality is that marketing isn't just about ads it's about a wide range of activities that help your business grow and that high quality projects will fail if they don't attract users no matter what the quality of the technology is so whether you're a b2b product product B to C or a B to D looking to reach developers it's all about knowing your audience and marketing to them in a way that they'll appreciate and knowing what that is so this is a quote by a guy called Ryan Holliday who wrote an amazing book and if you are a founder or someone who's looking to develop a marketing skillset this book growth hacker marketing is excellent I highly recommend it and he he's talking about the transition from when marketing used to be mostly physical to mostly digital and he explores that transition and fall and what he says as marketing has always been about the same thing who your customers are and where they are and that that holds up completely in the blockchain space so in this talk I'm going to go over how to figure out who your audience is how to reach them on different channels how to figure out what your key metric for marketing is how to develop messages that resonate with that audience and then I'm going to talk about a few of the particularity zuv blockchain marketing but there really aren't that many because at the end of the day it's about who your customers are and where they are whether you're marketing a blockchain project or pretty much anything else so the first thing to do for your product or your project is to know your audience and a lot of founders claim to know their audience but haven't ever met their audience in person they haven't done true market research you should get to know your audience in person and at scale that can mean conducting live interviews it can mean having them fill out surveys I think in-person interactions with your users is essential to really understanding your market then you can also reach them online which is a lot more scalable but I would definitely recommend in-person as well and you can reach them online with surveys and you can reach them inside your product or inside other products they use so if you already have a product that's getting X amount of users you could have a survey within that product and make it optional or make it not optional and get a ton of data that way so you have all these different opportunities at your fingertips for actually meeting your audience online or offline and getting that user data and you want to use that data to build an audience profile and this sounds a little bit creepy but believe me Facebook and Google know way more about you than this and you're just trying to to serve your customer here and not not do surveillance or get info they don't want to share with you so these are the things you want to ask them where do they live how old are they what do they do for work where do they get their information what do they do for fun what do they care about do they have any strong views are there things that particularly turn them on or off and what you're really trying to determine here is what do people pay attention to because marketing is all about getting a piece of a pie and that pie is finite and that pie is made of people's attention so if you get all this information you can get a pretty good sense where someone is focusing their gaze over the course of their day over the course of their life and those are the places where you can reach them and you can understand what kind of messages to reach them in those places from some of this cultural context that you gather so once you know this kind of information about them you want to figure out the actual channels that you're going to use to reach them and we're actually at one of them right now events is a channel that you can use to reach people video so that's television and also things like YouTube other places people consume videos in product that's something people forget about all the time that if you already have a product that people are using you can use it to advertise something else that you want them to use or a new feature publications so that that comes in two varieties you can either earn media which means getting a a journalist to cover your story and there are very particular ways to do that or you can publish things yourself and oftentimes having a journalist publisher story or some kind of third party validation will actually help your story go further but I would I use recommend doing a mix of generating your own content and also getting the validation of having third parties like journalists value validate your product by covering it environmental this is something people forget about a lot in digital but billboards Subway's these things are real airports it was actually interesting during Def Con I noticed that a couple blockchain projects were advertising in the airport in Prague and I thought that was amazing but if you know that your community are aetherium developers and all of them are landing in Prague in a 24-hour period that's an amazing isolated spot where you can advertise and it probably won't even be that expensive and only a couple companies thought of it searched so that's obviously Google it's also Yahoo and Bing I guess so and duck Duck Duck Go might as well audio so in our space we market a lot in podcasts we find that a lot of our audiences especially developer audiences love podcasts and we're able to reach them there with ads that they enjoy listening to social me and then there's radio I mean they're probably in our space there aren't as many radio listeners but depending on what market you're going after with your blockchain project it could be a radio listening audience so social media a lot of people in the etherium developer community are allergic to paid ads and don't necessarily like that there's a paid ad going up or that at least that's what I thought but there are some situations in which they respond positively to a paid ad so you need to need to be able to understand your audience and how they'd actually feel about that and then organic social media just the social media coming through your feed the channels that people are on figuring out what those are and making sure that you get shared on them email obvious and events events is tricky because it's difficult to measure the ROI that you get out of events so one thing I often recommend when you do an event is to have a very clear conversion point so when you have all these people at an event or when you attend an event what specifically do you want to get out of it and how can you put numbers to that so you can actually check whether you're getting the ROI you wanted from an event because oftentimes things like event sponsorships things like event attendance are costly and for an early-stage startup in particular you want to make sure you're actually getting your money's worth so a lot of times people come to me wanting to do marketing they've already figured out who their audience is they've already figured out how they're gonna reach them but they don't know exactly what they want so you don't just do marketing in a vacuum you don't put out press releases in a vacuum you don't put out paid advertising in a vacuum it all has to coalesce into a campaign around a key metric and your key metric is the thing you really care about it's the reason why you're doing marketing in the first place and in order to actually launch a campaign you have to be very specific about what this thing is and about exactly how you're going to measure it so here are some frequent ones do you want people to join your community that's a that's a really common one getting people to a landing page where they enter their email address or where they are prompted to follow you on facebook follow you on twitter whatever it is minds do you want their email for your e-mail newsletter do you want them to come to your job listing website and apply for a job do you want them to use or download your product visit visit the site download the product now if do you want them to make a purchase so getting really clear and crisp about exactly what you want is completely necessary before you actually mount a marketing campaign once you know what your key metric is that's when the hard part comes in because it's about the actual message and this is a quote from my other favorite marketing guru Seth Godin and he wrote a wonderful book called bise's marketing that I would also recommend to folks who want to learn about marketing and the quote is people do not buy goods and services they buy relations stories and magic and I think in this space we underestimate the degree to which how people feel is important to whether or not they use a product or whether they're willing to interact with the community or not to give you an example meta mask which is in our portfolio at consensus they're part of our mesh they're not a company that's done a ton of paid marketing they're not trying to reach users on paid channels but they have done marketing in terms of this definition because look at that cute fox don't you want to interact with that cute Fox don't you want to interact with the buffer corn I mean these are all parts of marketing they may not be paid ads that are assaulting your eyes but they are concepts that resonate with people and make you feel a certain way and that feeling is going to make you more likely to take the type of action that that product would want you to take Seth Godin in this book gives a couple of great examples one example of this is yo-yos so do you know why yo-yos are banned in a lot of schools and this is something you said in an interview because of what happened last time and what happens is sometimes you get a kid who brings a yo-yo to a school and it's all okay and the kid just you know does his yo-yo everybody ignores him then he goes away but sometimes if it's the right kid who brings the yo-yo to school then the next day you'll have three kids who bring yo-yos to school and the next day you'll have 15 kids to bring yo-yos to school and the next day you'll have you know a thousand kids with yo-yos in school and no one will be doing any schoolwork they'll just be doing yo-yo and so finding the right point finding the right insertion point having the right person incept an idea into a group of people is really essential and you see that with all kinds of products in our world you know I don't know if you've seen these supreme t-shirts there are a lot of teenagers wearing them but it's basically a a marked up t-shirt it costs two three times as much as a normal t-shirt and the reason people are wearing it is because of a feeling that they're getting of in-group out-group inclusion they want to be like a certain person that started a trend in their school maybe and they're willing to undertake a certain set of behaviors in order to achieve a certain type of feeling and that applies everywhere so your message that's what your message does and it should do it credibly and it should do it honestly but when you have your audience profile you have your channel you know how you're gonna reach them you have your key metric you know how you're gonna measure success with your campaign it's all about crafting your message and these are questions you want to ask yourself when you're when you're crafting a message and at the end of the day what you want to do is say whatever thing you need to say that is true that will entice your audience to do the thing you want them to do and that thing is the thing that moves the needle on your key metric so figuring that out figuring out how you're gonna measure it and iterating until you actually have it right that's that's what your message is it's the thing that crosses the chasm between the audience and the channel and actually achieving your key metric so we've gone through audience profiling channels developing a key metric developing a message your call to action is the thing in your message that is the actual conversion point so if you want people to sign up for your email newsletter the call to action is where it says sign up here and it with the link your call to action if you want someone to make a purchase is the Buy button on your screen or whatever it is and every message needs to have a call to action so you can actually make sure it's helping you move the needle on your key metric which is your ultimate goal so once you've done those things you're now in full campaign mode and what you want to do to understand your campaign is to establish a baseline so establishing a baseline let's say you are trying to grow your email newsletter and let's say every day you usually get five new subscriptions from people who are coming to your website that's your baseline five new subscriptions per day so you want to make sure that you're setting a target that is going to move your performance away from your baseline so you're gonna set it you have to understand the baseline and once you have that you can set a target you can collect data on how your campaign is actually doing and there are monitoring tools that are specific to whatever your key metric of choice is and then you're going to iterate an experiment particularly with your message and your choice of channel based on whether it's working are you hitting your target are you doing better than your baseline and you're going to learn that for me data and you're going to repeat that process so one thing you'll notice is that I haven't said the word blockchain very much in this presentation because I think marketing a blockchain project is actually very similar to marketing pretty much anything else in that it's all about audience channels key metrics and messaging but there are some challenges that are particular to blockchain marketing some of which I think are true and some of which I think are false one misperception that I often get from blockchain founders is that marketing my blockchain project is extra difficult because I need to explain how blockchain works to my users a lot of people think that understanding how blockchain works is a prerequisite to being able to use a blockchain product and in some cases with certain kinds of developer tools that's true but generally with consumer with with b2b it just isn't the case most of the time and it isn't actually on you so I'm going to officially absolve you of responsibility for explaining how blockchain works to your users most people don't know how the internet works couldn't describe tcp/ip most people couldn't describe how a light bulb works and that doesn't prevent them from being able to use those things so unless understanding how the blockchain works is a real prerequisite to using your product I wouldn't focus on it or think that you have to do that first it's an unnecessary burden what I would do is explain what it does so how something works is different from what something does and I do encourage blockchain founders to explain what blockchain does how does this make your product better how does this make it usable how does it you know provide functionality that you wouldn't be able to get from somewhere else maybe it's decentralized maybe it's peer-to-peer whatever it is another question I get a lot is should I use the word blockchain and that's been a really front question you've had companies like Long Island iced tea changed their name on their stock to to Long Island blotching and their stock took off last year obviously they are a beverage company not a blockchain company so that wasn't really very accurate and then Kodak you saw them get a lot of attention and you saw their stock price go up last year because they had a cryptocurrency and they were using the word blockchain a lot so people ask me this what I usually say is are you actually using a blockchain don't use the word blockchain if you're not actually using one and then does your audience care do they want to use a project a product that's on a blockchain sometimes they do sometimes that's something that resonates with him with them but maybe maybe they don't a lot of users just care about the value proposition to them do your investors care you might want to put it on an investor deck if you're using a blockchain and your investors care about blockchain if they don't then I guess you probably still want to explain to your investors that you're building on a blockchain and then the other question is are we there yet so maybe someday we're not going to use the word blockchain very much at all because block chains are so ubiquitous we don't say that something is an Internet company every time we hear about a company that's on the web and once blockchain is really everywhere we might hear the word a lot less so just to finish up here are some things that I think are real blockchain challenges and these are things to think about and they are things that I work on a lot with founders that want to market blockchain products solving a problem for users especially early in the space a lot of products focused on building something really cool as opposed to building something that solved an actual problem in the real world so that's it that's been a challenge historically in our space usability is another one can the people in your target audience actually use your product are they technically capable of using your product that's an interesting question and then even if they're capable of using it is there too much friction are there too many steps are they falling out of it because it's not really easy for them to use or because there's a competitor that's easier another one and this is philosophical is blockchain projects not collecting user data and that's you know that's a problem because it's hard it makes it harder than a project that does collect user data to do really great audience profiling but a lot of blockchain products philosophically don't want to do this which makes total sense to me but there and then there are ways to go around it and be able to still understand your audience well but it is a setback and then in blockchain marketing platform bounds so block the word blockchain the word aetherium you can really have a lot of trouble putting a paid campaign behind those on platforms like facebook we also saw MailChimp threatening to get rid of blockchain marketing they actually didn't but so so we're seeing platforms ban Facebook advertised and blockchain advertising out right and so that's a challenge but it's also an opportunity because at the same time you get a bunch of new blockchain based marketing channels that people are going to use because they aren't able to use some of the traditional channels so in a lot of these there are opportunities as well as challenges so that's that's new food for thought thank you so much this is my email address our team really wants to support the etherium ecosystem and if we can help you and if we can lend our blockchain marketing expertise to help with your questions or your project please just shoot me a note thank you so much