ETHWarsaw 2023: Marketing Panel - Marketing & PR in web3

okay hello guys uh we're super happy to have you here today on our marketing and PR Channel um I'm martinka I'm event and office manager at Art block and here are our wonderful guests now I'd like to ask you guys to introduce yourselves and say a few words about what you do yeah thank you uh my name is Adrian L I'm the founder of a web free marketing agency called infinet digital based in London we specialize in four things only go to market strategies Community Building user acquisition and user retention Mar bis lishka I am PR director at seratonin uh web prenative marketing and the product studio uh we do pretty much everything from Community Building to marketing and PR I head up our PR function um and work across portfolio of clients across different sectors hi everyone my name is Karina and I am a consultant I have my own uh webpr company it's called bef Consulting and it's more of a consultancy advisory and we focus on developing growth strategy and I am newly the new head of growth at the defiant which is a media company wonderful uh we're super happy to have you here guys once again and without further Ado uh let's start with the first question so many startups at the very very beginning Focus mostly on technical aspects on creating a product so the marketing function is very often bypassed or put on a bu burner and also in many many cases uh startups cannot simply afford Outsourcing or an agency so how can they kick off uh the marketing and the promotion and how can they become more visible let's start with Adrien uh I think first of all the founders have to have a very good team uh not just the technical side but on the business side not basically on the marketing side they need to learn about the foundations of marketing and not just to spend the money as of like influenc marketing etc etc they also need to hopefully have some time to do some market research on competitors as of what did they do before did they do something that is good or bad and then they can actually save some time and money for their own business as well yeah I would say in web free the you know the what's kind of characteristic for web free is that um the categories of um company investor and a cons consumer collapse into one category that's called communities right so I would say at early stage you really need to be receptive to what's going on in those communities and almost like blow oxygen on those sparks don't assume that all the great ideas will come from you and try to really decentralize that function you know you come to those events you build the trust with the people who love your brand already so make sure that they are your Advocates um and you can do it just by kind of yeah paying attention to what's going on in discords in telegram um how they feel about the brand and kind of give them tools to then carry that message for you um the second thing I would say is just don't underestimate like the you know the power of your own channels and as you building them slowly and you might not have like a large following yet but it's still worth it to put couple of tweets to make sure that whatever you communicate is consistent and well written um you have blogs and you might have announcements and when you have those announcement make sure that you put them on those owned channels because and even if you think okay no one's going to read it cuz we don't have that much traffic to our website I promise that this will pay dividends further down the line where you actually grow your brand and even journalists from my perspective they would go back to your website and be like hey so nothing what's what's going on between like 2017 and 2019 when you said the projects have started like few years ago um so it's it's useful to have those things when people are learing in your website and they can see the track record of what you've been doing um in the past very much agree with what Martina said here and to compliment so I work with a lot of early stage startups sometimes startups that um are in their very first funding ground so very often they don't have the budgets to invest in marketing but they still need to prove some kind of a presence online uh and not only online and build a community and what is very important here to do adding to what Martina said is um as you said a lot of startups usually invest first in the technical side of things and they might have a really amazing product but they don't put a lot of effort into communicating the value of that product and explaining it to maybe you know maybe they speak to developers and they go to hackathons and the developers uh and Engineers understand the product but the BDS and the partners and the other Founders don't really understand the well so this is why it's super important um what Martina said to have these blog posts and explainers and tweets and tutorials and demos and like make this effort from your team and then adding to that again for more early stage startups in the beginning when they don't have a huge marketing team to um invest in a lot of campaigns or DPR and and so on um it's very important to strategize and prioritize uh what should be focused on um it's also very important to to like borrow a lot of use a lot of ideas from traditional marketing and traditional like web2 business model um business strategy and to define the very simple things like the targeting like what is your target where does it hang out what are the channels and make sure that we don't cut out channels and we don't cut out opportunities anything that we can do for cheaper and for faster let's say and more efficient is uh very useful exactly um so now let's stick to the startup context and let's move to some little sins and mistakes startups can make regarding their marketing campaigns and strategy uh what are the key challenges startups have to face marketing wise and what are the most common mistakes and by the way is there any good way to avoid them maybe let's start with Martina sure I think Karina hinted at this a little bit um I would say the the biggest challenge I see when when companies are coming to us is really um narrowing down what are their projects USBS uh so they pretty much they do all those amazing things right and sometimes it's just hard for them to decide what is the core what is the one thing that they really care about and that means um that capturing attention at the early stage it's very difficult uh if you don't have that Focus so I would say uh this is one of the one of the big mistakes that can be easily fixed um and especially when you talk to people at the beginning right the chances are they will remember one or two things about your project but they won't remember three or four or five and a good test for it is actually when you sit in your um at your companies maybe you have all hands meeting ask a couple of people on your team to give you elevator pitch on what we do and you will be surprised how people are conceptualizing and how people for explaining what you do and that would give you a really good feedback in terms of like is this message a little too convoluted it's is for me as a Founder does this feel like the right way to position my company when I hear my product um Team talking about uh what we are building or when I hear um a community manager marketing manager or someone non technical on the team how they explain the project and kind of yeah take that feedback and um uh and and work with that I think this is is one of the the challenges that can be easily solved and you don't need an agency you don't need a marketing like a large marketing team behind you to to be able to to do that yeah I agree with that um I have a big list of mistakes I think startups can do I can sit here all day uh and speak about that but um from my last Point definitely one big mistake that I see with Founders is cutting off channels and opportunities based on their own bias uh or or based on the fact that they don't have experience with a certain Channel um that could be certain social media channels or even PR sometimes Founders just cut out PR um just because they don't understand it uh while they still have a lot of opportunity to grow there um so that is one of the things um another thing is not involving any creativity I mean I know that web is a very small space is a small Niche we don't have that big of a competition uh for different products but we are growing and more and more more Founders bring pretty much the same products and sometimes they don't don't even manage to compete on the price or quality so the last thing that is left to compete is basically the brand and it's very important here to develop a strategy to differentiate your brand and see yourself as okay what else can I provide to my community and how else can I hook pick people in besides the technical aspects once again uh not everybody understands or needs to understand the technical aspects of your product so this is why marketing and branding is really important yeah I think um branding messaging all of the stuff that you actually mentioned absolutely is fundamental for all the companies before they actually spend any money on outage or let's say uh getting the exposure out but the next steps I think what a lot of the founders or let's say startups are really missing out is like finding the right target audience they thought they knew it but at the end when they tried to reach out to the let's say assumed that audience group actually they didn't really catch like the port Market fit and they're not able to really iterate us of like what's the mistakes there like how can we do better is it like the audience that we reach out to is not the right or what is the channels that we we should actually get into right so um iterations is needed and they need to be really agile and flexible and to be open enough to discuss with the team members or the third parties that they're actually working with can I add here something yeah I really love what you touched upon in terms of targeting and the different marketing actions because like marketing to developers and marketing to institutions and then marketing to Traders is three completely different strategies and different tactics and different channels and yeah I see the same mistake as well very often yeah exactly um so if you guys don't mind we can move to another uh question uh let's talk about some PR since it's a marketing and PR panel if we were to distinguish PR marketing and pain paid campaigns they are all buzzwords but sometimes they can seem as a bit foggy in terms of the terms itself so what are the differences between them uh do they require specific individual approach and how can they benefit the company Karina I think Martina is the number one expert here on PR do you want to start go on go for okay um so it's very different I I see it as this so PR uh public relations is all about your brand and um developing sort of the brand presence and um sending a message about who you are marketing is more about reaching more people and building brand awareness um yeah it's marketing is more about exposure so it really depends I'm sorry what was the question the differences between them yeah differences do they require a specific individual approach and how specifically can they um benefit the company yeah so once again it depends very very much on the type of product and the type of Target uh group that they have I personally believe that for example PR is extremely helpful in the case of um institutions or any kind of product that sells to institutions that is um because that's usually you know the target group that reads the news that uh cares about different reports and articles and interviews and so on um marketing is more uh a lot more beneficial in selling to retail uh maybe if you're um like uh a trading app or any kind of or web free social or any kind of product that is um targeting retail yeah um yeah I think well first of all our firm don't do PR we work with PR marketing uh PR uh agency uh but we work with PR I think let's go back to PR p is all about uh credibilities uh making announcement of either you have like key hire or you have like major Milestones that you achieved and I think working with the pr piece with the marketing on the end is really amplifying the messages and reaching out to the right target audience and to boost the confidence of what they are doing and therefore your brand loyalty is actually enhanced through this PR as well as marketing and obviously marketing has a lot of different channels that you can get into as well influencer marketing uh blog plows etc etc uh so we can go deep into it but I don't think we have the time for it but pay ads is the third aspect that you ask right um professionally I don't recommend startups to actually run PID advertisements just because of the tools that we are slightly missing in the web free space even though we have a lot of trackers just like Kook free Etc but if the companies are not uh Revenue generating uh pay ads could be could require a little to bit more money in in order to get get it right Martino yeah I would say this is all really Value Point um when it comes to marketing is almost you know it's it's the umbrella is everything that you do to to build your brand right and then so that's your core and that's um that's where you establish all those things that we chatted about in terms of like what's our message what's our Focus was our asps PR is used to kind of implify that further and you do it by powerful sto storytelling right so when you um the kind of the comfort with marketing is that you can use your own channels um and you're very much in control of that message right so you can write a blog about whatever you wish to write about um and that's great PR is slightly more sophisticated in that approach because you actually need to find something that's you know tells the story about your product or about what you do what you build in a wider context so that people who not necessarily you know care about what um V free includes in your project uh will find uh a piece of information that they reading in the news and happens to be related to your project useful right so it's kind of finding um those wider contexts in terms of what industry cares about and what we are building to kind of meet those um demands and those needs um so again I'm talking about St telling right it's it's crafting the messages uh to find the relevance um so that's I would say that's kind of the the pr in the natural um but yeah like certainly all of uh you know Community Building marketing content strategy paid PR have their space and like timing I would say I very much agree with Asian here um be careful with paid because crypto specifically is known for those intense hype Cycles um and especially like a few years back um during the bull market there was a lot of like influencer marketings uh campaigns and uh you know shiing Pro projects and products uh with the influencers who doesn't really have any skin in the game so they would just talk about whatever you say like you would pay them to talk about um and that hurt a lot of um like you know New Commerce who can't really verify that um um those those informations um so then you know I think that tainted the the reputation of influencer marketing a little bit in uh in a crypto space and I would much rather you guys focus on things like yeah being really strong on your own channels very unified and then if you have resources on PR I'm trying to extend that into uh building relationship with media and um and building credibility this way uh yeah so since we're in a bare Market uh let's disc discuss some changes and challenges marketing has to face regarding the market situation um is it changing how is it changing and do marketers have to develop new tools uh yeah let me start first uh I love this topic actually uh it's very interesting because everyone is experienc it is right now in the bare Market um our strategies for our clients is really looking into the budget thing is of like hey don't spend the money if you spend the money and if we don't get the really good Roi I it's not that we are not doing a good job but actually is the market reaction doesn't take the actions right because most of the time we have the product Market fit but people are stepping back because of the market sentiment so that's one thing um and just because don't spend the money to acquire more users this means that we actually have to make sure that all of our communities are happy with what we're doing right so how do we make sure that they don't create fud because one f is created you will have to put all the water to to let's say put off the fire right so make sure that the community is happy with what you guys are building when they're happy they're going to play or let's say invest and then they will tell their friends through social medias so make sure that this no B approach not just uh applying in this bare Market but also in the boo Market as well I really agree with that with the focus on the community I personally think unless you have an urgent need to right now quickly get some more users or you know in order to get more Revenue but if this is not the case for you I would take this time to actually focus more on uh building brand loyalty with within your community and focusing more on the product development basically kind of like preparing for the bull market when things are going to go better um yeah because you might if you do some paid campaigns maybe you might be spending some money in in the air uh but besides that I I do have some suggestions actually number one I noticed it's pretty easy uh in the bare Market to negotiate with different uh providers social media companies as well so you can do that uh number two something I learned very very very cool from um third web it's a company that offers sdks and different no cold tools and their target audience is not even developers is people who want to develop something but they don't have the skills for that and their head of growth told me about their really I think brilliant strategy in terms of marketing and I think they're very well known um it's about basically providing automating everything to the fullest and providing all of the tutorials all of the demos all of the information um all of the answers to all of the questions already somewhere like on the website and distributing the um basically compressing the effort focused on marketing community and so on within the team and making sure that for example the engineering team also does some kind of community uh facing um actions so in this way they have a really small team but they manage to you know reach a really big audience and sustain that audience and that is a very basically my advice is work smarter not harder in the bare market and prepare for uh the summer to come that's awesome you can't wait for summer um no I agree I think that's uh really good point um the yeah focus on communities that's always good shout like one of the things I would say just don't disappear um right whether that's like your chatting to your communities like pushing announcement to communities or like as I was saying those like using those owned channels right like I know it might feel dis hardening when you putting a Blog and there is not as many views whatever but like leave those breadcrumbs and do it constantly and like it will pay dividends further down the line certainly in the B bull market so I think that's pretty much what you guys were saying as well um but on PR I would say you know be very conscious of like how you want to contribute to the debate right when there is a bare Market there is a lot of um fat and there are a lot of journalists who are looking for you know comments or like stories to kind of fuel a little bit of that unproductive conversation so um always kind always you know when you look at opportunities that might be landing or when you talk to journalists think about like how I want to show up in this story and like what do I want to contribute to this debate and feel free to always kind of steer the conversation and educate and be like do you know what I think the real problem is actually not that the Bitcoin price have dropped but what what's what's important what people don't see is what we are build do you know what I mean so you can be really in uh in um um um in charge of the of the conversation and Ste it in a way that feeds into productive conversations instead of like f fueling those um fat stories that we often in the bull market see um so yeah if you if you still in a position to um have this relationship with journalist when they come uh for stories uh just make sure that you you are educating and and you are steering conversations into the right direction okay uh thank you for all your very insightful uh answers do we still have time for some audience questions if there are any okay we can have one there you gow my question is to Adrian there to you mentioned the tool pocket free if you can repeat the name I don't know if I heard it rightly and the second one is um you mentioned the Right audience some people will know about it but you said that actually you they should iterate to make sure that they find the right one right one can you iterate or or like go deeper into that like uh what's the first one the first one is the name of the tour right uh Kookie free po cookie ciee he's around here I can introduce you introduce you yeah uh cook Fe fre um what's the second someone sorry so regarding the target audience you mentioned that the the founders would think they know the Right audience but they don't so how do they find one that they're the wrong T audience and then how do they make sure that they find the right one at the end um yeah good question so we need to look into the internal first as of like who are our users why are they actually using our product what utilities that are so sticky right like who are they why are they using it who are their friends that they can potentially help us to build a better product or get the feedback coming that's the internal external it depends on the company uh strategies as of like what did they do before as of like there are so many different channels right uh influencer marketing or Twitter whatever or using so those engagement platform which I am highly uh dis encouraged so really find out what went wrong and and how can we really point out those people actually said oh you don't like what we do why and even though is really not nice to hear from them because they disagree with us right but those are the people who actually either care enough or not care enough to give you the comment right so if we can actually get some time from them I think that's a very good point to actually get the Right audience for your product thank you welcome okay uh any other questions okay uh so I think we're heading over our panel uh thank you guys once again thank you uh I hope you enjoyed it thanks [Music] guys