Down the Marketing Rabbit Hole: Pt2
This is the third part in a series about marketing in the crypto world. You can find the other two articles here:
Marketing: The reality that crypto projects don’t want you to know.
Thank you Polkadot!
Right in the middle of writing this series, Polkadot, a top 20 coin, leaked out their THIRTY SEVEN MILLION DOLLAR marketing scheme. You can find the receipts for each thing here, but let’s just say, it’s like they read my articles and went all in!
Paying hundreds of thousands to get an F12 car painted with Polkadot logos and to have cabs in Berlin have polkadot stickers on the car doors is pretty over the top and cringe though.
A half million dollars for the smarmiest of crypto influencers is something special.
And they read my second article in this series perfectly! Good work Polkadot!
You can see that “InboundJunction” is one of these marketing firms the previous articles mentioned. You just pay them, and they disseminate your projects messaging through their network of influencers, crypto news outlets and invesment platforms.
Dang, $200k for get branding on to a small private fleet of jets!
Anyway, you should go to this link, to dive into the rest for your self. When given a 37 million dollar budget, it’s amazing what you will pay for.
And for a project that isnt a meme coin, one that is supposed to be building utility for businesses, it seems that you would move forward by actually developing more stuff for that money. But did the marketing work?
Well, X user @dotlake_xyz, summarized the results. The synopsis is:
- 33% increase in monthly signed transactions (25% of that from a gaming relationship with Mythos)
- unique accounts stayed about the same, even with Mythos bringing in 800K users.
- staking rate rose to 58% (it was 45% a year go)
- 66% month of month increase in DAO proposals
These are the metrics that really matter regarding a project in terms of its longevity. As we see from the memecoin game of hot potato, you can only hype something that does nothing for a small amount of time.
What I will say before we move ahead, is that while it seems the marketing helped Polkadot stay relevant, I would have expected similar results for far, far, less money.
On to more about Crypto Marketing!
Followers and commenting
As you can see from the Polkadot fiasco, you can spend more to get more. The goal here is to activate Twitter to make it look like everyone is interested in your project. Once you pay for reply guys to follow and engage with your posts, the algorithms notice this, and start pushing it for you if you do it right.
It's amazing how much easier it is to get big numbers for the things that you post simply by paying for them! In this scenario, as an example, you can pay 4000 dollars to get 10,000 comments. with that you could really pick and choose some posts to skyrocket. Imagine paying 100,000 dollars!
Micro and major influencers
Better than paying thousands of comments from random people (the marketing agencies promises they are not bots!), wouldn’t it be better to have people who are followed by tens of thousands or millions of people to give you a shout out? Well, you can pay for that too!
On both X and YouTube, you can pay to get your project mentioned by a lot of minor influencers or a few major ones. Do that every month, and you have some major mouthpiece talking about your project constantly!
Yes, all of those influencers you see in twitter are paid to speak about things. You believe they are earnest, and that’s why they get paid.
Here is the funny part about our brains, even when you know something is a placebo, it still works. The same is true here. Even though you know everyone you see on twitter who is promoting some crypto project is getting paid to do that, you will still think they are being honest, that they think its a good play, etc. It’s not just crypto, tech reviews, product reviews, etc are all following the same paradigm. Its done this way, because it works.
