20 March 2023
15 Min Read
KOLs Marketing is not efficient anymore? Come on, stop сalling random posts at random platforms “KOLs Marketing”
Imagine one of Plato’s classic conversations with his student Aristotle. No, not about reason or soul, but the one that brings light to the current situation with the influencer blockchain marketing and blockchain marketing overall.
You know what, you don’t have to imagine. Let’s hear it:
“Influencer marketing doesn’t work anymore. It’s just null and void. We put it off. ” – said Hilas.
“What did you do to make it work, dude?” – Filonus replied.
“Am I supposed to do something besides partnering with influencers!? I thought it was just enough.”
“No wonder you got nothing. What do you think influencer marketing is? A doodle?
In fact, influencer activities like this multidimensional thing where you need true professionals to handle it – you’ve got to do tests, create strategies, peel the onion, you know?”
“Huh. Sounds like a can of worms. I’ll go get professionals then. Some crypto marketing agency must be helping.”
Hilas went to the crypto marketing team.
“Hey, let’s launch an influencer marketing campaign, what can you offer to me?”
“Well, we will just contact influencers to promote your product. ” (Solus agency breaks in: “To be honest, we did the same a year ago. Yeah, guilty as charged. No more, though. It simply doesn’t work. Why do something that fails to work?”
Hilas to Filonus, a little later:
“What the hell, man?”
We love the crypto industry to the moon and back. But at the moment we have to admit something hurtful: influencer marketing is not as good as what we see in web 2.0.
The reason is simple: in order to grow you need high-class competitors. The competition as it is in web 3.0. is moving with baby-step speed.
It occurred only on the 2022 bear market.
Do you know what is good about bear markets?
It makes brands contemplate on what they do wrong. They soon come to realise that marketing is not just about influencer campaigns or traffic. It is a god damn complex thing with maze-like layers. In order to rely on something more fundamental than luck they realize the importance of being creative.
With influencers you can do wild things and can get delightfully batty results. Just try to recall how crazy the ideas NON-crypto bloggers do.
The crypto influencing marketing evolves, too. So, if you don’t want to get stuck in the influencer marketing of the stone age, don’t stop reading till you finish this article.
Cases we wish to be ours
Before we start telling you about beloved things, one remark is in order: Binance, Coinbase and other big crypto brands will soon be even to giants like Mac and Burger king in the everlasting battle called “Who is more creative?”.
So, before we dive into the next examples, it would have been a mistake not to mention them.
Binance went out of the crypto area to bring more people into it by partnering with new brand ambassador @KhabyLame, the most followed creator on TikTok.
Results
We never know actually, but Binance partnering with non-crypto TikToker with the biggest audience may bring great mass adoption.
Debunk crypto & Web3 myths
Coinbase featured a QR code in its Super Bowl ad – just a bouncing QR code placed in front of a black background.
- One of the best commercials so far;
- Quickly went viral and ensure the cheapest CPC in crypto ever;
A centralized exchange FTX made a commercial with comedian actor Larry David promoting their crypto. The zest of the video is in the fact that every single technology was accepted with a great deal of doubt. Just as it is with the crypto now.
Before this they partnered with a basketball team The Miami Heat. They would put in premium seats that would give $200 in free crypto, upon account activation.
- 100% conversion rate a day after the promotion video;
- Increased their audience base by 11,9%;
- Secured $400 million in additional funding.
Cases we wished to be ours, 2.0. Oh, wait, they are ours!
Have you ever seen your brand name riding all over the world? 1inch Network did
Once upon a time, Roman Tomera, a crypto influencer, put himself a bit of a challenge: to help 1inch coin get to the $30 price. How, exactly?
The out-of-the-box decision was in the fact that he bought a 1inch car number – the one that literally says “1inch” – and would just ride, minding his business. What a way to establish offline promotion, isn’t it?
Later he showed several videos where offline advertising was ensured, his discussion about the token price with the police, and tiktok outcome.
*Tons of other 1inch related posts could be found in Telegram, YouTube and TikTok channels of Roman Tomera
Results
- Even Ukrainian police is aware about 1inch
- 1.5 million views on TikTok
- Million of views ensured by user generated content like ZARSUS (@zarsus) on TikTok
- Whole the audience of Roman Tomera ( more than 300,000 ) become highly aware about 1inch
How to pay for 1 integration and receive 101?
Crypto community wholeheartedly hates advertising, but as much passionately loves new creatives and approaches. Considering that, what if you reposition your ads? Instead of creating click baiting headlines just convey it as a new cool thing, and really make out of it something new and cool.
We left aside aggressive ads that usually fall for banner blindness and turned to native advertising that is in line with the blogger’s tone of voice. It doesn’t sound like another ad for the audience, but more like advice from the blogger they love. Isn’t that better, huh?
- K-factor in approximately 3 times higher than from addy style publication
- Conversion rate is in approx 2 times higher than than from addy style publication
Have you ever needed to resist a FUD attack from Alameda Research?
Not all the brands will fall as victims of FUD raids from Alameda Research. But the nature of crypto space is dynamic, so you can’t be safe from occasional incidents that have to be explained to the community.
Ambassador board (our buzzword!) is your lifebelt. In a Vires.finance case we explained everything, but the main factor that helped to remain trusted by a community and left out of this fight without losing resources was very simple: we had an ambassador board.
If you are working properly with your ambassador board, having stick to the payments in your good times, when the sky turns black upon you they will be there to help. Why? Because their community and themselves will be linked to your brand. Most likely before you ask for the help, they already Chip and Daled by themselves.
- The wave of FUD was destroyed overnight
- Vires Finance fully recovered after attack and regained the trust of the audience
How we 10x ER of KOLs’?
When the bull run stage hits, you have got yourself a pain in the neck: it is usually very hard to differentiate your brand from competitors. The crypto audience simply doesn’t know what project they should focus on. Thus, to attract attention many projects just do entirely crazy things. It is great if you have enough budget for that, but generally the number of such projects is limited.
On one of our partners’ projects called Puzzle Swap, instead of an ordinary advertising campaign with some bloggers, we launched a trading tournament. With the bloggers. Each team had a certain starting amount of deposit. The team that would boost it the most by using Puzzle Swap tools – wins.
The level of engagement in this tournament was much higher for both Puzzle Swap and the bloggers. Win – win
- Announcement of Puzzle Swap become one of the most discussed event among the crypto community
Have you ever seen 40$ CPM for a high quality video? We have 🙂
If you have ever contacted a crypto influencer regarding a price for a YouTube video, you probably stopped for a moment to mull over the possibility of becoming an influencer yourself. The prices are just crazy. This is something we could not make our peace with, so we started making regulations for pricing. 😉
We also combined the benefits of PPC and YouTube ads from bloggers. Which promises a better level of trust, more possibilities to explain a product, and give people a step-by-step guide.
So, what did we get? Influencers make discounts for us, because we buy their ads, but we also promote them with PPC traffic. We also target additional persons we wanted to target initially.
From the new audience we get the same conversion level that we have from the blogger’s audience.
- CPM decreased in 9 times
- CR remains on the same level in %
How did we help local brands become worldwide?
Any founder that launches marketing activities for his brand considers the main task is to become visible for the English speaking community. Maybe it was the rule in the recent past, but now mass adoption is taking a new level: Blockchain technologies are expanding outside of a circle of most developed countries. If some countries have economic problems, Blockchain seems to be a decision. Salut, Salvador;)
So, if the brand is trying to win over the English speaking community (because there’s a popular belief that this audience will bring tons of money) more money will be lost. Just because this brand is ignoring communities that literally adore crypto right now. It is Ukraine, Brazil, Turkey, and Spain.
At some point we realized that as an agency it is our due to help the brands entering such small local markets, scaling them all over the world.
- Boosted level of brand recognition in Asia, Turkey, Spain, Brazil, China, Patistan and other countries
- Self creation of local communities with zero expenses and efforts from the product team
How did we spread the urgent infohook on Saturday while the whole world was chilling?
- The Corite’s NFT sale on Binance
What do we do if it is easier to close the project then explain what it is in simple words?
Quite often we are having a call with a product representative, and the first 15 minutes of that chat are filled with our efforts to understand the product. It’s not like we are not gifted with wit, you know.
It’s just that some products are complex, and the representatives may be so in love with a product, so it is hard for them to limit a definition to simple sentences.
So, here’s a question: how can an audience that is watching your banner for 10 seconds possibly understand your product from that glance? On the other hand, you can’t spend 10 minutes explaining the product to each member of the community. You’ll run out of your life time:)
Our decision was to shutter the concept of traditional video where YouTubers just show a site and read it. Hopefully, such a format will soon disappear entirely. Amen.
When Human.protocol contacted us with exactly this problem, we launched a series of explainers. In these videos we used simple words to describe what the project is about. Not only it brought us a new audience, but also increased the engagement level of the present community.
- ~5,000+ HUMAN App users attracted
- ~15,000 + HUMAN community members attracted
- ER in the social media of HUMAN increased in ~2.5 times
What if you project is known enough in crypto space, but you are not ready to stop growing?
Many brands consider their life goal to bring mass adoption to crypto. And in the meantime, they work mainly with crypto bloggers. Hmmm… well, how exactly is that going to work, if crypto bloggers create content for people involved in crypto? (Filonus asks, apparently).
We did the same thing, until having realized that this is not a thing.
For those brands that have enough support in the crypto world, we recommend to step outside of it to the non-thematic audiences and help them to enter the crypto with the most adequate and plain language.
Just imagine the level of trust this audience will have to you, once you become their crypto parent.
Probably any tool won’t work without a crypto influencer. If you just write a post or launch an ad for a non crypto audience, it will look a bit like a scam.
But imagine this: if some guy who always was sure that the whole idea of crypto is one huge scam, watching his favourite blogger that says “I always thought that crypto is just a scam factory. But this product has changed my views. Now I’m making money on it.”
It’s going to work, agreed?
- CPA decreased in ~3/5 times in average
- CPM decreased in ~5 times in average
- Target audience expanded from a few millions pf crypto users to a few billions of internet users
Ok, but nothing works better then memes
No matter how cool our approaches are, or how great our results, or what we are planning to achieve. Human nature still wants something true and stable. Like memes . Soooo, here are a bunch of memes for you. Enjoy!
- Happy crypto world 🙂
People are sensitive to words and language. As soon as you talk you start breeding a certain feeling in those who listen to you.
Once you know who represents your audience and what kind of language resonates with them, you can develop a variety of tones with one core identity.
If you can keep this core among all of your channels of communication, you’ll get a distinguished, one-of-kind brand’s voice that is easy to recall.
Try experiments until you find how your brand sounds. You don’t have to be like some projects in Blockchain that already have a big audience. Don’t get too serious or informal only because it’s Blockchain – people here also want to be engaged, interested and dazzled. Maybe this is exactly how your brand sounds?