# ETHWarsaw 2023: Corina - Branding & Marketing in Web3

- Channel: [ETH Warsaw](https://streameth.org/eth-warsaw)
- Date: 2024-10-07
- Duration: 28:53
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-hckOVsJqv6s
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hckOVsJqv6s

## Description

Presentation - A presentation focusing on branding and marketing in Web3, differences between them, and how to build the successful strategy using these insights.

Follow us for more updates: https://twitter.com/ETHWarsaw

## Transcript

so hello everyone oh my name is Karina also known as cor that e or zerox Karina oh I think there's some issue on the oh okay great so I am newly the new head of growth at the Defiance since last week and I also have my own consulting company it's called behave Consulting and we consult web free startups on developing their growth strategy uh previously I was at maker Dow and I worked with all of these different brands and products so you are here to maybe because you don't fully understand marketing I've met a lot of different Founders who um get a little bit confused about all the different marketing tactics that they have to do uh so I'm here today to explain to you the differences between the tactics and basically what is the best way for you to do do it and by the way I highly recommend that you take pictures of the slides because I'm not going to be reading everything off of the slides um I have way too little time to tell you everything that I want to share um so we're going to start with what is branding and what is marketing and what's the difference between the two very shortly branding is about making your brand memorable but marketing is about making your brand seen so raising awareness branding is about the why marketing is about the how uh branding is about the more long-term goals and marketing is about the short-term go goals marketing is micro branding is about the macro view over things um marketing is about tactics and branding is about the direction so this is very important for us today because one of the first things that I want to this is probably a model that you've heard uh about before it is about starting with why and in in life in General and in business it's very important to define a why for everything that we do and in business especially so the why is basically the purpose of your product or your business model the how is the process and the what is the product or service and I'm going to explain to you why this why is really important for you when you're in an early stage startup especially and even if you have built a product that's been on the market for quite a quite some time but you don't have a why you should really really uh get a start a brainstorming session and start to thinking about your why um we need a why to create a mission statement and uh to create our messaging basically we here are some examples of mission statements and slogans um the thing is that the mission statement really makes your brand memorable this is one of The Branding tactics that we use and this is uh a very fun uh Theory sort of that I found when I was studying marketing and branding the question is how do cult leaders manage to build Cults and the truth is that what they sell is Hope and when we look at the biggest brands in in history and we look at yeah the the most successful products that have managed to reach a lot of people and build really really loyal community these are the type of products that manag to sell hope about the fact that this product is really going to change your life and this is another quote that I really really like it says people will do anything for those who encourage their dreams justify their failures lay their fears confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks at their enemies and here we have an act example and this is all about defining the intrinsic value versus the perceived value of your product so these are two examples with Bitcoin and cardano who here is a fan of Bitcoin who okay okay who here is a fan of cardano yeah I don't think we have a lot of cardano fans in the in the conference but the truth is that they have an incredibly huge community so this is the question why do they have such a big community and such a loyal community that and so many ambassadors like what is going on with cardano and I think this is a pretty good explanation because cardano and Bitcoin managed to encourage people's dreams this is these are some pieces of the ideologies behind um Bitcoin and cardano in Bitcoin for example we have justifi their failures so Bitcoin is all about look Legacy system is centralized and rigged and this is not working we need something something else um the cardano example for throwing rocks at their enemies is like look Bitcoin and ethereum failed with proof of work so this is why we build cardano with proof of stake and confirming people's suspicions and allaying their fears with look uh Bitcoin is decentralized and immune compared to all the other chains and everything else that's going on in this financial Market um cardano had a really good idea of saying look regulation in the US is kind of really weird right now we're just going to go to Africa and build everything there and build a community and I managed to do it really well um so yeah I think this is really in an interesting example of how we can look at the importance of our why and our mission statement and the way we communicate our value to the people and I think it's really important for you regardless of the type of product you have to sit down and create a mission vision and purpose and if you don't have one again just just do a brainstorming session please with your team and think about this um so this is important because eventually you're going to use this Mission Vision and purpose and everything that you do in your Marketing in your BD in your presentations everywhere so as a Founder you do you say it in interviews as uh as a BD when you go to events and you do presentations you say they're um just five your own mission statement for example we are building the LinkedIn of web free or whatever or the Facebook of web free um and just put it everywhere put it in posts in swag in media articles everywhere it's all about making people memorize it um I think this is what you're you must be quite familiar with it's um you have to also understand the crypto culture and your target audience uh the crypto culture is really interesting is not um it's not nearly as serious as the financial culture but it's not fully yeah it's more like dgen but not fully uh we have some super intelligent people around here very interesting so you have to kind of Hit the right spot when in your marketing tactics um basically your channels are Discord and crypto Twitter maybe sometimes LinkedIn especially if your audience uh include some institutional clients um crypto podcasts and YouTube channels cryp media basically that these are the main channels that you might have your audience has a meme culture uh they're in it for the technology most of them uh they're conference goers a lot of them hodlers and stakers and Traders and the web free values these are not all of them obviously but just for the sake of it uh the web pre values are that transparency is crucial um just th it people really appreciate decentralization and distributed like V in power uh plug andplay Tech Integrations I noticed that a lot of products are trying to make things as simple as possible uh with plug andplay uh developers first and it's all about having an inclusive activity in the community all right so let's move on to how to actually build your strategy um first and foremost you really have to Define your values so as a consultant I consult a lot of of um startups and Founders who are really early stage preed or they're in the first round of founding and very often they already have an MVP they have a great product but they don't know how to explain the value of their product besides um to anyone else besides a really te technical person and the truth is that you need to explain it to non-technical people as well because you're going to have to deal with BTS and other Founders and do Partnerships with other people that are non-technical so that's really important and this is all about the first step is all about understanding and defining how does your product make people life people's life easier and why is it important in the ecosystem um the second part is defining your target groups we discussed this earlier today in a marketing panel that a really common mistake that people do is that they just don't Define the right target groups and sometimes they even they have an opportunity for a Target group but they decide to leave it out um even though this is the kind of people they would attract so it's really important to understand your target groups and prioritize them and see also in the future predict how will those Target groups change once you add some new Fe features or once you make some other collaborations the third one is researching your options so look at all the channels and opportunities look at the media look at all the ways that you could use marketing with and where does your group hang out out and where should you be um another problem that I see or another common mistake that I see people doing um in marketing is that they try to be everywhere all over the place all the time and very often these are very small teams with like two marketing people in one BD and they just cannot physically be everywhere so they don't manage to actually achieve a lot because of that and the fourth part is aligning your message this is something with this with the mission statement um pick your battles again yeah make a plan where you just pick two or three channels that are most important for you and free for strategic actions to focus on at first don't try to be everywhere all the time just start small and then the sixth one is make a long-term plan but add short-term actions so strategizing about the brand is really important long term and making sure you build a memorable brand but you also need some short-term games and I personally um I recommend the 8020 rule where you do 20% branding and 80% marketing these are some general strategic actions that usually you can take in crypto regardless of the type of product that you have we have three categories we have the product marketing PR media and we have branding um as I said the product marketing is more about like the short-term games and The Branding is more about like the long-term stuff PR media also falls into more long-term category uh but these are most of the actions in general that you can do all right and just you know get creative another really common thing that I noticed with startups and with Founders is that they think there's a blueprint for absolutely everyone and uh they just try to do what AB everybody else is doing and very often they also have a product that is not extremely Innovative um so they probably don't compete a lot on differentiate don't manage to differentiate themselves so try to like find ways to differentiate Yourself by um maybe having like a creative session once a month where people actually throwing some crazy ideas uh for your marketing strategy and this is an example of generally how you could distribute your energy and your resources um in terms of your growth strategy and this is obviously not set in stone but it's a general perception of like what I would do based on uh the Consulting that I did so far with most startups is investing in strategic Partnerships some branding some developer relations I put 25% here the most because uh usually web free products are Developer focused um speaking and networking conferences media appearances and product marketing also on the content and social media side the thing is that the most important part you need to remember is that you just need to establish yourself as a leader or as an authority and in order to do that basically um you simply need to take certain steps where you don't just share announcements about whatever you doing in um your with your Partnerships or the new updates and the new features the protocol or the product has but also kind of show that you know what you're doing and you're really a leader and you know the space and the ecosystem around you so make some maybe like go to conferences give interviews speak um take speaking engagements and send out a newsletter or like you know write a blog post or something and just show that you as a team or you as a Founder really know what you're doing and you know a little bit more than others maybe and a little bit more than your competition so yeah um basically be helpful don't just post to post but say something important uh engage with your audience stay relevant and up to- dat and answer questions with your own unique perspective so basically add your own touch to everything um you need the person you need to become the person that everyone else is repeating or the protocol or the product that everyone else is repeating and this is good for both personal brand and the business brand all right and here are some general um ideas about how to set goals and how to pick the right tactics for um for your strategy so I personally prefer to start from the goals and I prefer to also distinguish them between uh distinguish The Branding from the marketing sites so the longterm from the shortterm things and these are just a few examples but you can have a list of like a hundred different goals that you want to achieve and I would start with just the exact goals that I want to have for example I'm a very new startup I barely I I just closed around and nobody really knows about me we have maybe two people in our marketing team and we're doing some things with social media but we don't laugh like a lot going on um and let's say I really want to appear in the media and a tactic for that would be establishing good relationships with the media and it doesn't matter where you do it it could be also like here at the conference you ask around who's a journalist around here and you go and talk to this journalist and you get their telegram um and another one would be produce con content as a guest writer and go on podcast I am saying this most of these things actually um again are very like strategic actions uh in case we're a bare market right now and what's happening is that a lot of uh startups they even if they got funding they don't really want to spend a lot of money on different marketing campaigns and something really big and huge Raves and parties at conferences and so on they have to be we all have to be really careful and strategic right now but we also don't want to die and for nobody to hear about us for until summer comes back so this is all about you know doing something strategically because to appear in the media you could also pay like 5,000 to appear agency and they can make sure that you appear in the media but uh if you're just a little bit more strategic about your actions you can save those 5,000 and invest them somewhere else and just do these things basically yourself it's once again it's all about working smarter than harder in this case um and yeah maybe also you want to improve product marketing and development this is very good for um hackathons I mean hackathons are very good for that and developer calls uh and asking for feedback on the product asking for feedback by the way this is not just about me asking people's opinions and getting feedback for my product it's also about um making people feel like their opinion matters and that's super important a very big mostly marketing is about people and understanding people and remember that while you're here even if your job is to code for 24 hours you're still building for people so it's all about selling to people and understanding how people think all right and some final tips from my side um start with why as I said and make your message vision and narrative very clear facilitate creative thinking in your team um look into Outsourcing the work instead of postponing a marketing action sometimes yeah you can hire Freelancers and agencies for example for events um get creative and experiment especially with your online presence for examp I'm going to give you an example from um maker so I was uh working at maker in the growth team last year and I joined maker when uh the foundation dissolved and the DA has just started and because of legal limitations we didn't have access to social media um to like the maker da official Twitter the LinkedIn we didn't have like we didn't have a lot of stuff and people maker was kind of dormant for half a year we were not posting anything we're not in the media no events no nothing so when I joined we we had to like start the strategy from scratch into all of these different um tactics it was like Twitter there was PR strategy and every events and everything else and we had to also get creative so for example we had like um we created the poop collection uh just for the people who have been wood maker for a long time and they had the Vault maker uh just to kind of say thank you to our community and it just so happened that the designer decided to make the pups like the visuals as trees and then we discussed we introduced used like a brainstorming session every week and we were like hey if we have we're giving people these trees why don't we go and plant some actual trees for the the pups that we're giving people so depending on how big is your Vault and how what type of Po you get um you're when you claim it you automatically print um a certain number of trees and we collaborated with one tree planted for that so you know this is a very small thing and it didn't cost us a lot but that is one way to like get more creative and give something that's a little bit of more value because when the person receives this poop is not just the pup it's like oh I kind of contributed to like the outside world as well so that's really cool um yeah so also always involve your community a lot ask for feedback and create incentives be very strategic about what you're sponsoring especially for conferences um Sometimes some events or conferences could be overpriced depending on your specific Target group for example if your product is aimed at developers then maybe you shouldn't go to sponsor a conference for 20,000 that's for um institutions um yeah and focus on doing research on market news uh new products protocols Trends and so on collect analysis uh analytics by the way also about your users uh as much as you can and use the results to retarget them for marketing campaigns and PR and the last one is start distri if you distribute swag then uh do something that make something that everybody wants to wear um AKA make it look cool I've been to maybe 15 conferences already in in crypto and everybody has the same kind of Swag and what happens is that this is free stuff like this is these are just free t-shirts and I'm not going to go home every time with 10 free T-shirts if I get them for free I'm probably going to pick either a t-shirt that represents the brand I'm really loyal to so if you ever went to an a booth it's always like a huge Queue at the a boo because everybody wants to wear a either either I'm going to um pick a swag that like says something really funny and cool and like I'm proud to wear it so yeah um that was me thank you very much and I have five minutes for [Applause] questions yeah Karina thank you very much uh which project uh can you name like your best in marketing perspective or brand perspective so you mentioned that you pick some lovely Brands so can you name them um okay I'm not going to say this necessarily like my personal favorite but in terms of what they achieve uh actually a is one of my personal favorite I absolutely love everything that they've managed to do because everybody knows a but not everybody uses a that is the thing you know it's all about making your brand known I love love love very much one inch because they have this like they unicorn that came out of a hackathon and they used it in their branding and like they have the Unicorn absolutely everywhere in their visuals so everywhere in crypto if I see a uni corn I'm going to know this is one in everywhere not un swap oh actually yeah see for me I think I mean yeah you're right I I never even looked at Unis swop very much but I would say 1 in just does a lot more marketing and it's in my face a lot more parties parties parties that as well yeah that was a very good point yeah if if I see a unicorn I would probably think more about 1 inch than swap it's true yeah thank you thank you very much thank you any other question hi so um what do you think is the difference between doing marketing during the bare market and doing marketing during the boom Market So currently I would say the defi space and crypto in general is kind of yeah losing liquidity not that many users all the protocols are actually just uh exchanging tvl basically users going from one protocol so it's the same users just they're going around the same protocols so um yeah is there a difference between this period and really the boom Market when everyone is super excited about everything yeah there's a very big difference first of all the budgets and second um the thing is in that in the the bull market we have a lot of newcommerce we have a huge wave of people who heard about about bit the fact that Bitcoin pumped in the news and they're like oh my God I wanted to invest in crypto free years ago let me start now so so they start researching and they go to trading platforms and then those trading platforms do some other co- marketing with other platforms and like it starts like it's a flow that's starting a flow of New Commerce and in the bare Market we don't have them maybe we have this like the followers that follow us from the last bull market um but they're not as interested anymore and the bare Market is all about first of all preparing for the bow so preparing the brand and maybe not doing as much marketing tactics because it's not going to work very well and second one uh it's about serving the current audience that's stick with you so far uh in the bare Market that's like still here still interested in crypto and looking at how can you provide more value for those okay thank you a lot so I think that the strategies you have presented here are great for like 100 m and plus companies but what about low caps that mostly live on Telegram and Discord groups H um then I think the focus would be a lot more sorry what did you mean by low caps small companies yeah okay yeah mm yeah then are you asking me how to Market shitcoins you want me to give out all the secrets today um yeah honestly I haven't really worked with these kind of projects a lot um I focus more on project that build like products for the ecosystem but I would assume that the biggest yeah um it's all about community engag M and incentivizing the community a lot maybe creating like referral programs and different programs where you like make these different you know chain link they have these link Marines it's literally it's like Taylor Swift has swifties and Beyonce has the Beehive and the same way chain link has like link Marines and they have I looked at it today they have like a huge leaderboard and depending on I don't know how much link you have maybe or how much you're involved in the community you have a certain status and I have an in insanely engaged Community like chain link is everywhere if you just write link on Twitter right now in a post and you're going to get a bunch of people commenting at your post so I guess it's yeah it's all about uh focusing on your community and creating certain um ways to make them feel like their opinion matters and they matter in your community awesome um okay so I think that the last one great presentation by the way thanks and yeah I was just thinking that uh someone uh before asked how the face of the market influence influences the marketing and does it also can work the other way around namely can marketing influence somehow the face of the market like is it even possible that you know you put so much in effort into marketing and actually you you change a bit the the the face let's say or yeah 100% but I I feel like the influence from the marketing to the market comes from much much bigger companies that have a lot more influence so for example if um like Elon Musk tweets tomorrow that he's going to put Twitter on on the ethereum blockchain or whatever then etherum is going to pump like this right so yeah um I don't know to what extent the like small companies or small businesses can influence the market a lot but it's more of a cumulative effect I would say um that takes more time awesome thank you very much much thank