June 29 2022 ~ 15 min.

Author of the article

Alexey, marketing manager

There are two indicators of success for crypto industry projects. The first is the project itself: what is its feature, what funds are behind it, what are the long-term plans. The second is how successful the marketing campaign is. The case with the NFT-collection Bored Ape Yacht Club showed how competent marketing can raise the project "to the moon".

We were approached by a client - a decentralized coin. Its main goal is to save the environment by launching new eco-projects in its system and a more environmentally friendly mining system.

Due to negative experience with previous contractors, the client set a deadline of one month for us to show ourselves. We needed to attract more than 50,000 people to the social network and community of the project and gain wide publicity among the audience of crypto-investors. What we did to achieve the goals – read further in the article.

From the beginning, we faced a problem - the client had fuzzy KPIs, which can measure the result of work. For small agencies, this is a plus, because you can do your job in any way, spend the advertising budget, and on the report to hang noodles on the effectiveness of work, without clear indicators.

We chose another path and decided to hold a six-hour brief for the client, where we learned about all the features of the project, learned about the project plans and jointly set the KPI, which we had to achieve by the end of the month.

As marketers, it is difficult for us to determine the current market situation without analysis. Therefore, in 2 days, together with experts, we analyzed more than 100 projects, analyzed their marketing campaigns, analyzed the features of social networks and how they conduct community marketing.

As a result, we were able to put together a comprehensive marketing strategy in which we decided to use the following tools:

To complete this amount of work on time, we connected 9 specialists: Project and Marketing Managers, SMM Specialist, Influenza Manager, PPC Specialist, two Community Managers, PR Specialist and Web Designer.

Social Media Marketing

The NFT market has greatly changed the strategy of approach to social networks in cryptomarketing. If earlier projects could create low-quality content with stock images, without attracting the audience in their social networks, now the situation has changed greatly.

Now the quality and processing of content is a key factor in promoting social networks. When evaluating the project, investors pay attention not only to the project technology and roadmap, but also to the quality of social networks and the community. Therefore, we have identified several goals for social networks:

Create a unique work visual that will grab the attention of the people in the feed. We painted 3D elements for the project and hired a motion designer to implement the creative materials.

We have established both a business and friendly TOV, through which we convey the eco-values of the project, combining them with the technology possessed by the coin.

Adapted content for each social network. We are located on almost all social networks where our audience is: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram messenger and blog on Medium.

To gain the first audience in the project, we set up targeted advertising for people interested in cryptocurrencies, and put the most interesting publications for promotion.

Another important thing is not to keep the audience dead. We have connected various game mechanics in the content to attract new audiences and subscribe to our communities in Telegram and Discord. To do this, we used Stories on Instagram and threads on Twitter.

An almost unique case for us was the use of TikTok to promote the crypto project. We managed to combine all the complexity of the topic and the attitude of the platform to cryptocurrency with current trends. In one month, we created 22 videos, 4 of which were in trend and received more than 20,000 views.

Subscriptions to our communities have become an indicator of the effectiveness of social networks for us. Even before the start of the large-scale campaign, we managed to attract 400+ people to our chats, which we will talk about later.

Community Marketing

After analyzing your project, people still have a lot of questions. And the answers to them are better to learn from the same people. So they will crawl to search for your chats in Telegram and Discord to chat with like-minded people.

After the launch of social networks, we immediately launched two chats for Russian-speaking and English-speaking users, and a channel in Discord. With the help of robots, we optimized the work and configured them to combat spam. There were also two community managers in our chats who could quickly answer all questions related to the project.

Initially, we received about 50 messages a day and the number of audiences in the chats was 400 people. At the end of our work together, the total number of audiences in the chats exceeded 70,000 people, and our moderators processed up to 3,000 messages per day.

Another tool that has helped to better engage the audience in the project is shill marketing. This is when our "agents" enter the chat and start to speed up the dialogue about the coin. The purpose of this is to tell as much as possible about the project, its features and "sell" values from an informal person.

The shilling tool worked - after the airdrop campaign, more than 70% of users remained holders of the coin.

PPC (Facebook and Google Ads)

PPC tools are not often used to promote crypto projects. Our crypto project is not a classic scam, which promises 1000% profit per day if you buy a project coin. This is a long game and it is important to attract interested people who will not only buy a coin, but also believe in the project.

We did not plan to close the purchase of a coin in one click, so we set several goals:

Drive traffic to your site and gather people in pixels. The site had an active button to go to the exchange where the coin was traded. We connected the event to the button and were able to track conversions, how many people were interested in the project so much that they wanted to register on the stock exchange.

Attracting people to our social networks. Everything is simple here. We gathered the audience on our social networks, and then through Look-a-like we gathered the target audience at a cheaper price.

Attract traffic to the Airdrop campaign. Those people we gathered on the pixel and on social networks, we attracted to participate in our airdrop.

Thanks to PPC tools, we were able to attract 9,800 people to the project's social network and more than 12,000 visits to the project website with an average visit time of 1:12 minutes.

Influence Marketing

In influencer marketing, we interacted with bloggers, or rather with their loyal audience. To do this, we have gathered more than 100 bloggers and personal blogs on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram.

It was important for us to build long-term cooperation with bloggers, not one-time, so that they share the values of our project. That's why we eliminated 80% of bloggers from the huge list of bloggers and left those who were really interested in our project.

We organized advertising for influencers during our airdrop campaign. In this way, the blogger not only told about the project, but also gave the audience an offer through which we can track the effectiveness of the placement.

We managed to interact with the blogger audience on Instagram, which totaled more than 6 million people. And the price for the interaction was $ 0.23, which is a very low figure for a cryptocurrency niche.

For placement in bloggers in Telegram, we have chosen the format of wholesale placement. We came up with a small funnel, where the user had to first get acquainted with the project, then get another mention of the prospects of the project and connect to the project community, and finally take part in our airdrop campaign.

Many entrepreneurs believe that PR is a useless tool used only by high-income companies. We agree that not all companies need PR, but in our case we have invested a huge marketing budget in SMM, Influence and PPC, and there is a high probability that people will go looking for information about the project on the Internet.

To do this, we analyzed the position of our competitors and selected a list of relevant media that our target audience trusts. We managed to place the article in three major media resources, one of which is the TOP-1 media in the field of cryptocurrencies and the TOP-5 in the category of finance.

We also analyzed all mentions of our project, and copywriters wrote more than 15 positive reviews on services for analytics projects such as Coinmarketcap.

The effectiveness of a PR campaign is difficult to track at the moment. But we still see transitions to our site and social network on sewn UTM-tags.

To put it simply, airdrop is the distribution of bonuses in a project for performing certain actions. This is done in order to engage the audience in the project and form a community.

The conditions of our airdrop were not very different from those required by other projects. We asked our users to join the community and subscribe to social networks, as well as download the program, which is used as a wallet to store coins, to send the address to receive the prize.

The campaign results are:

87,000 people took part in the airdrop, of which 23,000 received prizes.

A total of 280,000 people subscribed to our social networks.

We have risen 200 positions in the Coinmarketcap coin rankings.

Our application was downloaded by 48,600 people, which is why it got into the TOP-50 most downloaded programs in the category "Finance" in Ukraine, Europe and Indonesia.

The volume of coin trading has increased 1.5 times since the beginning of cooperation.

If we take into account the total cost of airdrop and the entire marketing campaign we described, the cost of one customer involved was very low.

Our main achievement, which we can be proud of, is the retention of the audience. After conducting such large-scale marketing campaigns and airdrop, there is a high probability that the audience will be eliminated.

This is due to the fact that freeloaders often go to the airdrop to get free coins of the project. But 2 weeks after the campaign and the distribution of coins, our audience decreased by only 10% of the number we recorded at the time of closing the airdrop.

The average involvement in social projects of the project remains in the region of 10-12%, and our moderators process more than 1,000 messages daily.

Our team has not stopped working with the project, and now we are warming up our audience and covering all the news that is happening inside. We have come up with many concepts and special projects that will help improve the results of the project at least 1.5 times.

And if you want to work with us and close one of the targets for your crypto and / or NFT projects – we are waiting for your letter zhigulskiy@vau.agency