7 March 2023
14 Min Read
A few ways to introduce a new crypto product to the world
At the time of writing, the capitalization of the cryptocurrency market is $2,01 billion (after a 16,6% drop). It seems that cryptocurrency adoption has skyrocketed in the last 12 months, jumping over 880%.
How does this apply to our case study?
The rapid pace of cryptocurrency sector development has forced more than one owner of entrepreneurship skills to start a crypto project. Thus dozens of blockchain-based projects are trying their luck by entering the cryptocurrency market in order to offer one more “The best platform to stake and farm crypto”.
So the level of competition is high and won’t get lower anymore. Thus our main aim was to prove to the audience that Waves exchange is not “just one more staking”, but “THE one staking, exactly the one where you need to stake”
The client
The hero of our case is 
– a hybrid crypto assets exchange that allows users to transfer, trade, issue and stake cryptos.
Waves Exchange was established in 2017 and managed to remain one of the most popular “places to stake” on the highly competitive market with 600+ crypto exchanges. Currently, Waves exchange has more than 50,000 users and its 24 hours volume is $2,070,518.71.
Actually, some products of Waves exchange don’t need any promotion, so we are focused on:
LP staking – first DeFi interchain product on the Waves blockchain
Lambo Invest – new algotrading program with 63,7%/10% profit-risk ratio
LP staking - first DeFi interchain product on the Waves blockchain
Lambo Invest - new algotrading program with 63,7%/10% profit-risk ratio
The Audience
Potentially the target audience can include virtually anyone who has cryptocurrency/is thinking about its buying. But we define the main TA of our marketing campaign to be:
Stand out among hundreds of exchanges
Increase number of “high value” stakers
Introduce a new product to the crypto world and work out the objections related to risks of algorithmic trading
Constant bans of crypto-related products by Facebook and Google
Attracting new audience not acquainted with crypto yet
Solutions
Telegram
Youtube
How we did it?
Market research and all that stuff
If you are surrounded by competitors, the best you can do is quite a trick: gather all the ads that have been made by your competitors, analyze these, and find a way to do something completely different.
No mystery here: that’s exactly what we did. We discovered how the major crypto exchanges used to promote and…did the opposite.
In fact, it wasn’t even hard — for most of it, projects use the same direct approach in advertising. So yeah, as you’ve probably guessed, native advertising has become our solution. Take a glance below, there are some examples.
Example of our posts with native approach
What about the results?
Surely, we spend a lot of resources in order to create native posts in such a way that they look identical to regular content.
But the level of exposure confirmed that we are moving in the right direction.
Here are the stats from Telemetr:
Let’s take the channel of Cryptokach as an example:
But it would`t be rational to make consequences based on the single channel, so chat we took 40 posts( 20 native and 20 advertising ) and count number of comments and reposts
Then we took the next step and talked with the audience. Based on several brainstorms, we defined high net worth individuals and experienced investors to be our most valuable audience.
The question we kept in mind was extremely straightforward: “What do you want to know in order to invest in one more project?” Once we got the results, a huge part of the triggers that we created during brainstorms turned out to be useless.
A huge part, except for trust in the form of a human to human and….profitability for sure
Then we aggregated all the data from peer-to-peer communication, previous Waves exchange stats, and stats based on today’s market trends and described a few most targeted segments as detailed as possible
It leads us to several hypotheses:
Repeated posts on channels/groups with an excellent level of trust. Both Telegram and YouTube.
In the very beginning, we launched a test media plan in order to find those influencers, who both reflect the values of the projects and show good performance.
Then we dived into analytics and chose a few influencers with which we are going to establish long-term collaborations.
How efficient is it to show the same project to the same audience several times?
Let’s look at the example.
Meet Roman Tomera, one of the most popular YouTube vloggers, author of Telegram channel and skillful cryptocurrency investor.
Firstly, we analyzed his main performance metric and audience composition using Modash and Social Blade tools.
Telegram Stats of Roman Tomera
Then after checking the conversion rate from the first publications we decide to repeat, and then again and again. Thus Roman Tomera invested both in LP and Lambo staking his own assets and had already posted 15+ publications about Waves Exchange while showing the real dynamic of his fund’s growth.
Telegram:
LP staking with 36% APY 1st post – Link
200% LP staking experiment 2nd – Link
+364% profit on LP staking 3rd post – Link
63.7% APY with Lambo staking 4th post – Link
+ 23.7$% Daily with Lambo staking 5th post – Link
Staking dumps, Lambo still shows 63.7% 6th – Link
And here is the example of Vosk Coin video chain
YouTube
What is 1inch? 1st video – Link
1inch coin analysis – Link
Why I choose DEX over CEX and why 1inch? – Link
Why 1inch is not exchange, but aggregator? 4th video – Link
1inch gas compensation 5th video – Link
What about the results here?
While analyzing metrics, we discovered that each subsequent post attracted more attention and aroused more interest, which was numerically expressed in ER rate and number of reposts.
But the number of first clicks ( new users ) decreased with the release of each subsequent post (that is quite reasoned), while we were observing an increase of staking value and number of stakers by last click all the time.
Life hack
Investment decisions need time, especially when we are talking about a significant amount of assets. But we are all human beings and we tend to forget and procrastinate. So if you are aiming not only at attracting more traffic, long term collaborations will bloggers and telegram admins seems to be your solution.
If the percentage of staking is on fire - ad creatives on Facebook will be working as hell
If you have ever faced setting up a Facebook advertising campaign for a crypto-related project, you know how disappointing banned ads could be.
In order to avoid bans, we developed a separate landing page and used it as the main destination.
Educational posts about cryptocurrencies for the IT audience
Crypto’s audience is limited and no matter how efficient your advertising campaign will be, you really limit the borders of the project’s influence. Especially, if your project is really known among the crypto audience even without advertising.
Based on previous cases, we’ve already known how perspective could be interaction with the IT audience.
So we decide to grow a new generation of cryptocurrency believers that are going to consider Waves exchange to be the best intro point to the crypto space.
It resulted in:
1. Significantly lower CPM, because the price for advertising in non-crypto channels is much lower.
2. Crazy CR, cause unlike crypto, IT audience isn’t blind to such sort of ads.
3. Thousands of IT specialists for whom Waves exchange become a push to enter the crypto
Deep Integrations
As we’ve already mentioned, we weren’t aimed to target “crypto hamsters” and retail investors. Considering our main target, we could not allow ourselves to make clickbait posts with promises to earn $100 in one second.
We were aiming to interact with the audience that might express willingness to join the project only after receiving a clear understanding of its algorithms, risks, profits, benefits, etc.
Thus we made a deep dive into the Waves exchange manifestation in order to create pieces of content with real value.
Life hack
1. Most of the projects use a direct approach for the sake of advertising. They don’t even know the purpose of it. On the other hand, we’ve found out that several tools proved to be perfect, including deep analytics and retrospective analysis. Based on these we omit making advertising for the sake of it – we’ve had a clear purpose and exact data.
2. If you are aiming to attract an English-speaking audience with Telegram, you must be aware of the fact that ~50% of the subscribers of the most popular English channels are bots. But the active and ready to stake audience still exists. TGstat will help you to find it.
3. Russian Telegram could be proud of a really strong crypto community, but many a good cow hath an evil calf, so there are dozens of channels that are created just for the sake of selling advertising, and bots seem to be their main fans. You don’t need a fortune teller to understand who is who. Using Telemetr in the right way is more than enough.
Fundamental integration examples:
How to present a new crypto product when hundreds of them appear every day?
The important note: during our collaboration with Waves.Exchange, they released a new product called Lambo investments. The main feature here was that the balance of risk-profit was compelling: 10% to 63,7%. Yes, incredibly unique. And you know the story – once something unique pops up, many people tend to get cautious.
At first, our goal was to work out all the triggers and pains in order to present this product properly and convince the audience that the product is not some empty-promising bubble.
So, what do we recommend?
At least it is not necessary to create identical advertising posts like "Binance released something" on all Telegram channels. Yeah, people will have no choice but remember yours, but its plainness will make the audience bored and they will simply ignore one more ad.
Make the most of people's trust
a) to the brand
b) to the ambassadors
c) or better to make some sort of combo and use the audience's trust in the brand ambassadors.
Once you get feedback, take all the comments, denials and so on, and start to answer them in the next posts series. The most popular comments were focused on the impossibility of such a high level of profitability along with its stable position. Therefore, we posted on the authoritative channel the next thing: "Many people reckoned the project was a scam. However, many of those around me already invested in the product and the guys from Waves exchange explained how it works".
The next steps
Our collaboration with Waves is quite far from the ending, so we never cease brainstorming and forging new ideas. Here are some of our next steps:
Not just limiting ourselves with repeated posts, but also making ambassadors boards of those who are going to take the image and essence of Waves exchange to the masses
We're planning on testing new audience segments and using new tools and approaches
Launching an account-based marketing campaign aimed on the "fat" clients who can invest 50k+ in Lambo investments.
We’ve always admired the native approach. However, in this case, we used it to break away from competitors. But, surprise! Suddenly, it worked in a completely new way for us – it brought us an outcome we didn’t expect. If some channel not only posts something about the staking, but the author of this channel really invests in the product and updates his achievements – such an approach works exclusively well.
If your product is rather common and its mission doesn't bring big changes to the world of cryptocurrencies, keep in mind that most of the triggers you are planning on using are already familiar to the audience; they don't work anymore. So, you have to grow your own audience, convincing them carefully, step-by-step that your product is amazing. Or just worth attention.
It is critical to grow your audience. But this approach takes time. Yes, you can publish 10 posts and get some results (these will be reflected in the clicks, registrations and so on). It takes time before people invest in your product.
If all the triggers don't work anymore for your audience, they can be working for other audiences - IT, general invest, or business audience, for example. In this case, the direct approach could fail. You have to educate them about cryptocurrencies based on your product. What do you get? An educated audience that comes to understand cryptocurrencies due to your product. Thus, your product will be their starting point, reference, if you will.
Analytics are vital. Especially properly configured analytics. If we are talking about the matter of growing the audience, you need more than just some numbers about stakings after yesterday's publication. You have to go deeper and on September 1, 2021, you must know what happened with the guy who clicked on your post in December 2020.
Testimonials
“We supposed that it’s grueling to establish contact with our target audience. Our opinion has not changed 🙂 But this fact did not become a problem for the Solus team
You can check out full review from Waves exchange on Clutch
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