Crypto Marketing: Strategy and Fundamentals for Builders | @emilylai8 - Hype

everyone give a warm welcome to Emily hello GM okay so I don't have a lot of time I'm going to fly through the intro part because I want this to be as valuable as possible so about me I'm a marketer CMO at hype I've been full-time in crypto marketing for the last three and a half years learned about Bitcoin in 2013 hype is a Crypton native agency so we've worked with a lot of amazing projects and I'm excited to share some of the things we've learned number one I just want to validate that crypto marketing is difficult and I'll go through some of the reasons why and it feels like we've been early for a really really long time right like the Bitcoin white paper came out in over 16 years ago and also marketing even me as a marketer there's a lot of different channels tactics strategies so hopefully we can simplify this down a little bit the main outcome I want you to take away from this is make getting users easier whether you're an ecosystem a Dap or a protocol so we will combine marketing fundamentals with crypto native projects so current market forces on why crypto marketing is difficult I essentially identified three pillars number one it's really saturated and competitive there's also multiple audiences and it's fully Global and the tech is premature which also creates some reputation wos outside of the hacks that we have seen on the news and all of the other headlines that you've seen in the last 16 years this is a interview I did with a friend who has never been on crypto ever and I essentially onboarded her and live filmed her reaction and you can see her reacting to realizing there's 365 blockchains beyond that outside of these 365 blockchains there's also a ton of infrastructure and middleware that is needed to connect these blockchains together whether it's interop or chain abstraction or wallets and overall especially with this cycle with pump do fun there's 50,000 new tokens made every day and there's 11 million projects and tokens so you can imagine attention is really scarse right like we need to sleep eight hours a day we need to work and when we have so many different projects and places to put our Capital our attention is extremely fragmented outside of that there's also so many categories that are growing I'm sure you've heard of AI uh so this is actually my friend experiencing pump. fun for the first time that was her raw reaction according to Kido there's 44 metas this is anything from defi to St coins the Bitcoin fi so outside of all of the different categories in crypto there's also all of these different narratives within those different categories now the multiple Global audiences not only is this worldwide which means you need to account for cultural nuances languages and breaking down cultural barriers there's so many different audiences you need to Target if you're an ecosystem and if you are a Dap it would be a little bit more Niche but the fact that there's so many different types of people that you're talking to with different incentives means that there is also a fragmentation in messaging and how you coordinate so this is mainly for ecosystems which as you just saw in the previous slides there's at least over 350 of them some of those audiences are if you're an ecosystem you need to attract developers and Builders to build apps to actually tap into retail audiences you also have customers and users so I could be using Celestia for data availability um but that would be different than me as a token Speculator on TIA for example so that would be two separate audiences then you also need liquidity so you need VCS angels k rounds investors you have Tech partners for BD you also have listing Partners if you do want to get listed on a tier one exchange which does help with the retail and token speculators and lastly there's regulators and institutions so the fragmentation of audiences also makes marketing so difficult the tech is also premature right so in 2021 we saw a big boom of n nfts a lot of mainstream and resil audiences came in and realized is like oh wait the blockchain is actually slow or we have to pay these gas fees so we swing between we need more infra and we need more adaps and what this means is that it's actually hard to get net new users here in the space which means we have a growing ecosystem so many so much attention fragmentation and the audience size is not growing as fast as we'd like and also on reputation wow so you can see there's a lot of outside of the crypto Twitter bubble outside of these in real life events there's a lot of noise that other people see who are not in crypto including my friend when they think of crypto they think of Bitcoin they think of coinbase they're not realizing that there's flourishing defi or social F apps so we're just it's just very difficult to onboard and get people involved okay but it's not all doom right like there's a reason why I read the Bitcoin white paper in 20 2013 there's also probably a reason why you're here if you're a builder there's likely a reason why you're building so a lot of marketing is telling that story there's also a growing number of developers which means that hopefully we are getting those getting inching close through those apps that can onboard people and there's also a lot of really interesting use cases I'm sure you've seen this I took this photo in Argentina as well as the one on the left where they're actually transacting with usdt there to hold the dollar uh because they have hyperinflation I saw this in Turkey as well and there's a lot of apps that use cryptography or blockchain technology where you don't even know blockchain is involved and it's abstracted and because that is abstracted they're not targeting people on crypto Twitter so there is a use case for the technology It's just sometimes we don't always see the representation so what is actual marketing strategy we we know that there's difficulties with marketing what do we do about it I'd like to distill it down to why who what and how and ultimately what a marketing strategy is is a plan on how to achieve certain goals it's not a tactic so simply having a meme account page or an intern page or brand mascot is not a marketing strategy that is a tactic that you can utilize in in your marketing strategy But ultimately your marketing strategy is why does it matter who does it matter to and there's multiple audiences as we already discussed what narratives and messages are we communicating and how this plan is executed and coordinated I like to use this framework always start with positioning which is essentially your differentiation and relevance start there with your why then understand who your audiences are understand how to coordinate those narratives of messaging and think through where these people live and that could be a variety of channels different tactics or campaigns you can use so start at the top and go down and number one for crypto marketing coordination is key so this is an interview we did with Charlie he's the CMO of Nilan feel free to take a photo of the flowchart on the on the left and my friend Reika she mentioned that working in marketing is 80% coordination and 20% creative if you look at that flowchart you'll see how Nilan when they're doing a brand awareness campaign they're coordinating across all of their VC Partners their ecosystem projects uh their own team their CEO their Founders they're looking to get as much distribution as possible across a variety of channels whether that's X LinkedIn Twitter podcasts different formats of media and then they're also retweeting things and reposting things to capture the global audience so you can see the very last piece here is let's hit the Western market for the first 12 hours and Eastern Market then Community monitoring and then contents indication so that a lot of crypto marketing is heavy coordination and I don't think we talk about that enough the other important thing is because everything is early Tech and its pre-product Market fit it's so important to do things that don't scale this is from the book Crossing the chasm and ultimately we are still early and that's okay uh we're still very much in this early market and we haven't really penetrated the main stream Market outside of centralized exchanges or stable coins so what that means is it's super important to talk to users validate your ideas and assumptions but to take this to a next step like this is Allan from pump. fun mentioned he cold message over 3,000 people I really like to Showcase this example because it really shows that as a Founder if you're building a Dap or ecosystem it's so important to onboard people talk to them use that feedback and you can actually use it to tell their stories so you can document what users are saying tell their stories and actually use that in your marketing as well this is another friend I recently onboarded last week and I like I like to make sure people exercise Free Will so what I do is I put them on the ethereum.org website and I'm like okay choose a wallet that speaks to you spiritually and she went through the website and you can tell she's like I I actually have no idea what this is like it's like learning a different language and she's like whatever let's go with rainbow but watching this process is really interesting she's she she studied for her bar exam my other friend worked at Tesla like these are smart people and onboarding is really difficult in the space and we don't know this if we don't actually talk to people and see how they experience it and the most important thing is to tell your own stories so if you're a found founder or if you're a team you have to remember that there's different stories that you're telling whether you're connecting to developers and getting them to onboard those stories are going to be very different than talking to listing Partners or talking to Consumers of your app and ways that you can tell this story is remembering that just putting out a marketing campaign or putting out one tactic isn't enough you need to have consistency and you need to show it in different ways so I actually flew by this which is amazing because I thought I had 30 slides um so maybe I go back to this one because I think this is a really this is actually a tangible example I believe neillian is here as well you'll see their trucks everywhere but this is a tangible example of what One Singular marketing campaign looks like right and one marketing campaign is not enough so this only shows you the coordination with within one marketing campaign but marketing and storytelling is a concurrent thing and it's also going to evolve as your company evolves so it depends on the stage you're in so a lot of the work we do at hype is helping our clients and companies get to that next stage we do a lot of campaigns for main Nets test Nets tge and tge is only day Zero in crypto marketing so after you understand who your audiences are and who are the most important to Target within that stage then you can coordinate that strategy okay I actually flew through this um thank you thank you for coming and if you have any questions you can find me on X and also this is uh a little bit about hype